True Romance

Awe inspiring. From Longmire Does Romance Novels.

A Whole Novel In One Month?

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

If you think that sounds crazy, you're right. It is. But so am I. I'm also susceptible to dares of the 'what are you, a yellow-bellied coward?' type. When Stephen Blackmoore challenged me to join this insane collection of writing maniacs, I raged internally against the idea for a couple of days, but then he put up a bottle of 12 yr old Springbank.

I couldn't say no to that.

Since I'm only five thousand words into a novel, I've decided to make it my project for this wild gig. But don't worry, I won't include what I've already written.

If you're interested in tracking my progress through November, here's my NaNoWriMo profile. I'll probably throw up a word counter on this blog too, but hey, if I link to the profile it makes this whole damn ballgame real.

NaNoWriMo. It's so crazy, it just might work.

Twanging In The Gutters

Thanks to Tribe, the snazziest suit-wearer in the crime fiction world, we can now enjoy the fruits of his latest project: Twanging In The Gutters.

For the last two weeks of October, Flashing In The Gutters will only be publishing stories that have something to do with a country song. With authors like Lori G. Armstrong, Patrick Shawn Bagley, Patricia Abbott, Stephen Blackmoore, Margaret B. Davidson, and myself, you're sure to be in for a helluva party.

So grab a big old bottle of corn liquor, take your laptop out on the porch and suck down a gallon of all them tasty words.

My story, JESSE'S LUCKY KNIFE, is based on the song called The Dying Crapshooter's Blues by Blind Willie McTell (as pictured above). It's more of a country blues song than plain country, but hell, life is chaos out on the range.

Hope y'all enjoy it now, cuss n' tarnation dang nab it.

Catch Up

Haven't been posting much here of late. Looking back over the last few months, the frequency of my posts has been erratic, with plenty of week-long breaks. I'm well overdue for a decent ramble.

So. What have I been doing?

The new job is taking up a fair amount of mental processing power. I'm still on a learning curve but enjoying it greatly and muchly. It's good to stretch my programming muscles again. I'm afraid that's all I can really go into here. It is the gambling industry after all, and if I tell you much more I shall have to kill you.

My passion for computer games has been resurrected thanks to the Xbox 360. I've been racing exotic cars, riding horses across medieval lands and, most importantly, killing zombies. Truckloads of them. Entire shopping malls full of them. Lots of good, clean, bloody gruesome fun. Which might explain the following.

I seem to be continually exposed of late to the ominous and looming presence of those little people called 'children'. Went to my first first birthday (two firsts in a row, what an achievement!) and spent it lazing around with a bunch of adults that were, well, tired a lot. The kids weren't, and they pranced and frollicked around in the sun, finding entertainment in the shape of balls, cupcakes, grass, each other. And I swear to my dying day that the birthday boy is an actual zombie. The eyes, the shambling, the strangely high pitched groans ...

Work, the threat of kids, computer games. None of these has been enough to stop me writing. Lunchtime is proving to be nicely productive and I'm finding my second novel taking shape slowly but surely under my calloused fingers. I hit five thousand words yesterday and that's not including the few thousand worth of notes. But I promised not to do a wordcount report this time, so I'll leave it at that.

I've also polished off a story called BUDDHA BEHIND BARS which is probably the most spiritual piece of crime fiction I've ever attempted, based on a snippet of a paragraph from a book called DESTRUCTIVE EMOTIONS. The book is an account of a series of talks between the Dalai Lama, philosophers, neuropsychologists, and a swath of other brainy types. It's a serious attempt by some of the world's greatest minds to come up with ways of improving life, and from what I have read, it seems that it was a success. The plan is to send this one off to Murdaland, if they'll have me, indeed if they'll have anyone (where did the submission guidelines page go?).

Another piece of flash fiction is percolating in my hard drive, waiting for the right moment to fire it off to Tribe's Flashing In The Gutters Country Extravaganza. We'll see how that one goes, then.

Me eyes is gettin' tired now and I must be off to sleepy-na-na-land.

Please do enjoy my latest post of rambling goodness. May I wake up tomorrow morning and not be embarrassed at the crapness of it.

G'night!

EDIT: A murder of crows told me that the Murdaland website is on the verge of an update, which will include the submission guidelines. May I never be accused of slander.

Inside The Mind

Everyone on the 'upper' side of the crime blogosphere has been drinking, spanking, and snorkeling their merry way through Bouchercon, so I haven't had much to say lately, other than to repeat under my breath, over and over again, "Why couldn't I go to Bouchercon? Why, why, why?"

This obsessional trait does not bode well for my future sanity, especially in terms of the potential for violent, explosive crime. I say this because of a recent posting in an Australian newspaper's crime blog that goes by the catchy name of Gotcha. It's an excellent true crime blog run by Gary Hughes, a long time crime journo based in Melbourne, where most of the action is in Oz.

But back to my worries.

The post in question includes a list of attributes of serial killers put together by a Professor Paul Mullen, who is the director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health. The list is referenced in relation to the latest headline serial killer, Charles Carl Roberts, the man responsible for the Amish school massacre.

But the really worrying thing is how many writers this list describes.

Here it is then:

• Male.
• Under 40 years of age.
• Socially isolated without intimate or close relationships.
• Unemployed, or in casual or marginal work.
• Bullied and/or isolated as a child.
• Fascinated with weapons and usually a collector of guns.
• Have no history antisocial, criminal, and specifically interpersonal violence.
• Have no prior contact with the mental health services or a diagnosis of serious mental disorder.
• Make no threats, or overt or covert statements that they intend to commit a massacre.
• Have no significant history of substance abuse.
• Show rigidity and/or marked obsessional traits.
• Are suspicious and may have think they have been persecuted.
• Have a tendency to resentment with intrusive ruminations about previous experiences of humiliation and injury.
• Prone to daydreaming, particularly about acts of individual, and usually murderous, heroism and of revenge against a rejecting and uncaring world.
• Have narcissistic and grandiose traits, which emerge in a profound sense of entitlement and over-weaning self-righteousness.
• Intend to kill as many people as possible then to die among their victims.
• Adopt an existing script for murder suicide that they have acquired from reading about or seeing it in news and dramas.

Try reading the list from the perspective of a writer and you'll see that most of us are constantly on the verge of blowing our stacks.

Must remember to have a social life. Must remember to stop daydreaming. Must remember to build a history of interpersonal violence.

No wait, that's a story I was thinking about. That's not reality.

Must remember the difference between reality and fantasy.

Must stop this obsessive need to remember a list of things I must do.

World Peace

Damn it. I was supposed to post something really silly today. Instead I wrote this half-baked 'Save The World' poem in a fit of self-righteousness, prompted by the complete lack of media coverage for the International Day Of Peace, which I also happened to ignore.

APATHY

I don't care what your religion is
As long as you
Never kill another human being

I don't care what your beliefs are
As long as you
Don't impose them on others

I don't care if you're offended
As long as you
Know you are no more important than anyone else

I don't care who you are
Come have a beer with me

How To Save The World

Religion, politics and war are all prominent topics pervading the world's media and our thoughts at this point in history. I have some strong opinions on all of these, which basically amounts to a wish that all three did not exist. But focusing on a wish like that is ignoring the reality of the problems in our world.

Today I tried three times to write a coherent explanation of my thoughts and feelings on these subjects and couldn't come up with anything that expressed the truth of what is inside me. It was almost as if an answer to everything was hiding in a corner of my mind and all I had to do was take the correct mental route to let it out into the world.

But it didn't happen and I gave up. It's all just too complicated.

So instead I'll share with you a little ditty, courtesy of Zen Stories To Tell Your Neighbors.

It might be what I was really looking for.

SPIDER

A Tibetan story tells of a meditation student who, while meditating in his room, believed he saw a spider descending in front of him. Each day the menacing creature returned, growing larger and larger each time. So frightened was the student, that he went to his teacher to report his dilemma. He said he planned to place a knife in his lap during meditation, so when the spider appeared he would kill it. The teacher advised him against this plan. Instead, he suggested, bring a piece of chalk to meditation, and when the spider appeared, mark an "X" on its belly. Then report back.

The student returned to his meditation. When the spider again appeared, he resisted the urge to attack it, and instead did just what the master suggested. When he later reported back to the master, the teacher told him to lift up his shirt and look at his own belly. There was the "X".

I'm interested to see what thoughts this story triggers. Share away if you feel an inkling to. I promise to write something far sillier in my next post.

Danny Hawaii 'Live' On Thrilling Detective

3 billion years in the making, Danny Hawaii's debut adventure is up and at them in the latest issue of Thrilling Detective.

Read BREAKING IN and a slew of other fine PI material from the likes of Sarah Weinman, Kim Harrington, Russel McLean, and D.H. Reddall.

One of these days, I might even finish Mr. Hawaii's first novel.

But only if you ring in NOW, for the amazing low price of $1999.95!

Yes, you too can grab hold of the whole set of Danny Hawaii's misadventures in the ancient land of Rockabilly-nesia. Dance with the immortal Hula girls! Mix beats with the masters of funk and roll! Shamble your way through the fields with the local zombie hordes!

*needle scratches across record*

EDIT: If you're feeling a little ornery, try out the Redneck version of Danny Hawaii's debut, courtesy of the Dialectizer.

Are You Serious?

How serious a person are you? Do you spend a large part of your day stirring up trouble, streaking past office workers in your birthday suit, or playing practical jokes on innocent victims involving poo?

This is something I've been pondering lately. No, not poo, but how serious my writing is and how serious I want it to be.

After starting off a short story that will most likely become a new novel, my writing has taken a more serious tone. At first it was something I resisted, but more and more I have felt the pull away from humour.

It was the last story I wrote that really set me off in this new direction. I'm sure it will take forever to get out there into the publishing world, so I won't talk about it in too much detail, but suffice it to say that it's a story about meditation in prison. The nature of the subject matter called for it to be a serious story, and any humour in there is to lighten the somewhat heavy load.

The surprising thing about this story is that it has given me more satisfaction than anything else I have ever written.

On only a moment's reflection, it's easy to see why: the story actually meant something. There is a purpose to it other than pure entertainment. Usually, that would be enough for me, and in fact most of the time I prefer pure entertainment. I want to escape from the real world into one that doesn't necessarily teach me something about life, but simply shows me a good time.

So the next novel I'm working on is going to follow a similar path. It will definitely take a more serious direction, and I'm hoping that along the way I can find something deeper in it.

After that, it's back to making fart jokes.

Hardcover vs. Paperback

I don't like hardcover books.

I don't like the feel of them in my hands, can't be bothered carting them around, and I'm not a fan of the smell that builds up on them over the years. Yes, I know I'm contradicting something I've said before, but so be it. The mark of being human is the ability to have contradictory thoughts without exploding.

My attitude to hardcovers is the result of the publishing industry in Australia and my childhood.

I'll tackle the publishing side first.

In this fine sunburnt country, hardcover books aren't that common in bookstores. At least not in terms of current fiction releases. Our market is simply not big enough to warrant the printing of large quantities of hardcovers, except in the more high profile novels like the Harry Potter series and anything by Matthew O'Reilly. And even these are often sold at very narrow margins by the bigger retailers.

Newspapers in Australia are also quite happy to review books in paperbook form, although this is usually in the larger C-format or trade paperback size. So there's nothing stopping Australian authors getting the same kind of promotion for paperbacks that authors overseas get for hardcovers.

As a result of this, most of the books I'm exposed to are paperbacks, so I've learned to relate the smell of them to the purchase of a shiny new story, filled with the promise of many nights of curled-up-in-bed reading bliss. And that's why I love the smell of a new paperback, reeking of binding glue and whatever the hell makes the cover smell so sharp.

My name is Daniel and I am a paperback addict.

Which wins for you, hardcover or paperback?

A New Novel Begins

Danny Hawaii's non-epic, non-saga of lack of love and betrayal has been sidelined for a couple of months now. I've filled that novel-writing void with the final polishing of a short story I have high hopes for, which probably won't see the light of day for about half a year.

But it hasn't been enough.

I don't plan to completely kill Danny off, especially since (any day now) he'll be making his official entry into the world of crime fiction (ANY DAY NOW). But having spent two years working on my first novel while learning to write--and perfecting my abilities at procrastination--I feel a need to stretch my writing muscles in a different direction.

Those couple of months of Danny Hawaii-sidelining have opened my mind up to be filled with new creative obsessions, inspired in equal parts by my trip to the City Of Shadows exhibition last year, and my recent reading of a true crime book about the underworld wars in Melbourne called LEADBELLY. Add to the mix a tasty sampling of Sara Gran's COME CLOSER and various excellent short stories over at Spinetingler Magazine, and the melting pot has started to boil.

So what are we looking at here? What's Daniel Hatadi's latest idea for a novel?

Without giving too much of the game away, it's looking like a cross between Donnie Brasco and Donnie Darko, Australian-style. It won't be about time-travel or bunny rabbits, it'll be more along the lines of crime bosses, drug-coated nightclubs and disturbing voices in the head.

I'm going to spend the next month trialling my ideas in the form of a short story and, if all goes according to plan, this will be the beginning of the novel. The first five hundred words are already humming away in my laptop, eagerly awaiting the return of my fingers.

Today marks this new beginning and so does this post. A step backward, a step forward, it's all part of the dance that is writing.

PALE IMMORTAL by Anne Frasier

I am seriously psyched to read this, so that's why I'm part of the PIMP SQUAD for Anne Frasier's new vampire extravaganza of a novel, PALE IMMORTAL, which comes out today.

Read the first two chapters and learn more at the book's chilling blog:

http://paleimmortal.blogspot.com/

Here's a detailed synopsis to whet your appetite:

Welcome to Tuonela, a sleepy Wisconsin town haunted by events of 100 years ago, when a man who may have been a vampire slaughtered the town's citizens and drank their blood. Now, another murderer is killing the most vulnerable...and draining their bodies of blood.

Evan Stroud lives in darkness. The pale prisoner of a strange disease that prevents him from ever seeing the light of day, he lives in tragic solitude, taunted for being a "vampire." When troubled teenager Graham Stroud appears on Evan's doorstep, claiming to be his long-lost son, Evan's uneasy solitude is shattered. Having escaped Tuonela's mysterious pull for several years, Rachel Burton is now back in town, filling in as coroner. Even as she seeks to identify the killer, and uncover the source of the evil that seems to pervade the town, she is drawn to Evan by a power she's helpless to understand or resist....

As Graham is pulled deeper and deeper into Tuonela's depraved, vampire-obsessed underworld, Rachel and Evan team up to save him. But the force they are fighting is both powerful and elusive...and willing to take them to the very mouth of hell.

And a music video:



I'm going to find a way to get hold of this book, even if it means flying half way across the globe. Or at the very least, getting someone else to fly for me. Like, you know, the U.S. Postal service. Yeah, they'll do.

Lastly, this will probably ruin my future writing career, but here's my pimp name:

Your Pimp Name Is...

Prince Mystery

What's Your Pimp Name?

Spam Poetry

Found this at the bottom of an email telling me how I could become my own employer and earn $30 per product shipped. Interesting word choice and rhythm.

bloody-hearted rubber latex Paleo-amerind
pulse-jet engine step turn poplar-covered
field ash nail-headed red-fleshed
guard ship hill station hand-filled
chicken gumbo quasi-grave carriage bow
gold-studded up-bow sign storm-boding
fairy godmother ivory cutter printing-in
vine fretter north-countriness saddle cutter

It speaks for itself, doesn't it?

PI School Part V: The Dropout

Okay, I don't know what I was thinking with that last post. Time to get back to some familiar territory.

Today's focus is on what it feels like to be a PI-school dropout. For background on this intensely personal (i.e plastered all over the Internet) subject, please refresh yourself by looking back at the previous entries in my PI School series:

• Part I: The First Night
• Part II: The Stories
• Part III: The Law
• Part IV: Surveillance

Finished? Great. Thanks for sticking it through.

Now that you're back I can explain the full truth.

I AM LAZY.

Yes, it's true. Night after night of rocking up to the class, heavy books in hand, bicycle chained to a bench out the front of the campus building, I eventually broke down.

Not exactly a nervous breakdown, more a realisation of 'what's the point?' I mean, I only ever enrolled to get some background info on what it was like to be a private investigator. And since my character is a PI-in-training, you could call it a little method acting on my part. But hey, this is fiction, not film, and I don't have to spend weeks studying Johnny Depp's mannerisms in Fear & Loathing to come up with some background. But that's not the only reason I dropped out.

It was the silence that got to me.

Maybe the nature of the PI is such that the people attracted to the profession are those of the private kind. Reserved, quiet, aloof. Observers rather than active participants in life. Sure, one of them had tattoos on his arm that he'd designed himself, and a couple of the youngest were a little more than entertaining during the class, but ultimately, a private bunch.

I found myself feeling very alone. Add to this the tedious drawing of traffic diagrams, the need to remember by rote the various government Acts, and one night after work I just decided not to go. Thought I'd make it the next week, after all, I wasn't missing out on much.

Next week came around and my schedule told me there was a two week break. Great. I could collect my thoughts, look through the PI textbooks, and recharge my batteries. Two weeks passed.

And I never went back.

My name is Daniel Hatadi and I am a PI-school dropout.

Marketing Versus Art

Marketing: A Case Of Diminishing Returns And Cycles

"Hey, these Mars Bars sure are tasty. I'd like four hundred please."

Thirty later ...

"I don't want to see another Mars Bar for as long as I live."

A decade later ...

"Mars Bars are back!"

Art: An Endless Search For Perfection

"Can I have a bite of that Mars Bar?"

A pause.

"Not bad, but I've already moved on. It doesn't mean anything to me anymore."

Another pause.

"What's that in your other hand? A Snickers? Can I have a bite?"

Do You Believe?

Thanks to the wonders of free cable television, I accidentally watched an episode of Star Trek: Voyager last night.

For those less geeky types that may not know, the premise of Voyager centres around a spaceship that is catapulted to the other end of the galaxy. The main point of each episode is trying to get the crew home. Remember this, it's important.

The episode I watched last night was about a civil war within the Q Continuum, a race of omnipotent, interdimensional beings. For whatever reason, one of them, known only as Q, decides that the only way to stop the war is to plant his omnipotent seed in the vessel that is Captain Janeway.

Who wouldn't? Look at that smile, that stance, that hair.

The scene was played out in fantastical fashion, with Janeway viewing the activities through the device of an American civil war era translation, due to her (and our) limited intellect as bipedal beings. This, I could handle. After all, it is science fiction and we are talking about interdimensional beings who all have the same name. But then I lost my belief in the story entirely. Q propositions Janeway again, this time with the promise of returning her crew to Earth.

Returning her crew to earth. The goal of the whole series.

All Janeway has to do is give birth to the child of an omnipotent being and her crew will be returned to their homes. One hundred people rejoined with their families before they all grow old and die. I think it's a pretty worthy sacrifice. But no, Janeway has moral issues. She says they'll do it through hard work instead of a quick fix. I wonder what the crew would have said if they found out? I'm thinking mutiny would be well on the cards.

This is where the story mechanics show their gears. Obviously if Janeway takes Q up on the offer, the series is over. It's no longer Voyager. It's Star Trek: Stay At Home. Isn't quite as catchy.

The rest of the episode was a joke. Another member of the Q Continuum, this time a hot redhead, is stranded onboard Voyager and somehow stripped of her powers. Yet she is still smart enough to help the crew bend the laws of astrophysics to enter the Continuum itself, decked out in full Civil War regalia. A gunfight ensues, and Janeway and Q are rescued from the firing squad.

Janeway then passes on more of her superior morals by convincing Q to get with the hot redhead and give birth to a baby Q. They copulate right in front of Janeway, ET style, by touching glowing fingers.

I turned the TV off before the credits rolled.

Anyone else had an experience with a book or movie where the suspension of disbelief was broken?

Variation On A Desk

Snagged this little doohickey meme from Christa M. Miller, but I decided to do my own version of it. A simpler version.

Instructions: show three of the most interesting items on your desk.

Even this presented a problem for me. See, I use a laptop at home nowadays, and since our dining table decided to take over the living room, the upstairs bedroom that was my work area is now used for other, more evil activities.

Which leaves me without a desk.

Luckily, I have a day job, which includes a desk. If I told you the details of what was on it, I could very easily have private investigators follow me around for weeks as part of an elongated background check.

Enough with the chit-chat. On to the ITEMS (spoken in booming voice).

Below, we have DARTH TATER, NUNZILLA, and DEAD DUCK.



Yes, I am a geek. But, like, black's a really cool colour, okay?

Now, your turn.

Death

Anne Frasier started up an interesting discussion on the brokenness of writers and whether death has had anything to do with it.

This is roughly the comment I left on her blog:

If I have any fascination with death, it's because of the taboo surrounding it.

When someone dies we are supposed to be extremely careful about everything we say, even if it happened on the other side of the globe and we have absolutely no connection with the events. We're not supposed to talk about death, for fear that even the mention of it may bring bad luck. In some cultures, widows wear black for the rest of their lives and never remarry.

All of this gets the rebel in me fired up.

Death is part of life. It seems absolutely absurd to ignore it or brush the subject under the carpet.

I want to be able to joke about death. I want to imagine what life would be like if my loved ones die, or what it would be like for them if I die.

Death comes to us all, so I believe I have the right to explore the subject in any way I see fit, so I can come to terms with death in my own way.

When I die, I don't want to take up land that could be used for something better. Compact me into a brick and use it as a foundation stone for a building. Don't dare cremate me and pollute the atmosphere. Dispose of my body in an enviromentally friendly way, because I don't really care what happens to it. I'm no longer there.

When I die, I want people to dance to John Lee Hooker singing Boom, Boom, as loud as the sound system can go.

My death is mine, let me deal with it as I please.

Hatadi Shot In The Mag

NEWSFLASH! PART II

It's certainly the month of Hatadi and I'm grateful to be the one sharing this with all of you, mostly because I get to refer to myself in the third person.

I'll cut to the chase: Shots Magazine UK, a fine crime establishment, has joined the ranks of Crimespree and allowed my name to grace its pages.

Head on over to the Short Story section and read my contribution, DOLLARS & SENSE, as well as fine new crime by Steven Torres and others.

On top of all this mayhem, if all goes well, it won't be long until my PI-in-training, Danny Hawaii, makes his fictional debut, somewhere, sometime, soon.

Where and when for this thing? You'll just have to keep checking back here until it happens.

Diabolical of me, isn't it?

Hatadi On A Crimespree

NEWSFLASH!

The current issue of Crimespree Magazine has allowed me to grace its hallowed pages with an article called IS THE P.I. DEAD? More a plea than a piece of well-researched non fiction, it was inspired by my obsession with the fictional world of the private investigator.

Spinetingler's own Sandra Ruttan also makes her Crimespree debut in the very same issue. If she weren't Canadian, female, with fine red curly locks of hair and a completely different name we would be ... exactly the same. The mind boggles.

If you haven't subscribed to Crimespree and you're a fan of crime fiction, you're missing out.

Remedy this at: www.crimespreemag.com.