Anthony Neil Smith: 2012

CHOKE ON YOUR LIES Free This Weekend! (2/24 to 2/26)

To answer your question, yes yes yes, I've already been scolded profanely by Octavia VanderPlatts for missing the great marketing opportunity of offering Choke on Your Lies free on Fat Tuesday. Really. She made me feel half an inch tall, or according to her, "The same size as your..."

Anyway...

I bravely soldier on! This weekend, pick up the first in my Octavia VanderPlatts series, Choke on Your Lies, for free from Amazon's Kindle store. Meet this rich, brilliant, mean, and heavily obese "detective" with an appetite for high quality marijuana, Gothic art, and shaming every one she knows--will be FREE this weekend for your Kindle. 

For three days, you can get to know Octavia and Mick Thooft, her narrator friend with a spine less sturdy than old paperbacks, as well as everyone else she surrounds herself with.

Take a look: http://amzn.to/zn8IUJ

I told everyone I'd commit to the second novel in the series when we sold 1500 copies of this one. And we're close, with over 1100 sold so far. I'm not going to count the free ones, but something tells me you might hear some good Octavia news in the coming week if this weekend's promo goes well.

Pretending to be Donald Hamilton

The writer of the Matt Helm novels. Fast and meaty pulp. Flatly violent, nothing "arty" about it (which, of course, makes it great art). Avid hunter and sportsman. And also the guy with the badest-assed of all author photos.

I once read (and for the life of me can't remember where) that a day for Donald Hamilton was some morning writing brutal pulp opera, then heading out to the beach club with his wife to drink martinis, smoke cigars, and watch the ocean.

If true...shit, I would do that. That's awesome.

I've been on a Donald Hamilton tear ever since my old friend Robert Skinner introduced him to me back when I was in grad school. I've been trying to grab up every old copy of his Matt Helm books I can, and I'm moving on to searching for his westerns and suspense novels. I think he's on par with Richard Stark, line by line. But there's something else to Donald Hamilton. Something about the image--that photo, his past, the outdoorsiness--that I try to evoke every time I sit down to work on a Billy Lafitte novel. I want to feel like Donald Hamilton, slamming my fat fingers onto the keyboard that the brutality splurges onto the page like it's coming out of a sausage grinder. When I'm done with a few pages, they'd better smell like blood, even the ones that don't have violence on them. Especially those.

But let's see...

Donald Hamilton was a big time hunter (whereas I got the flu the night before my dad was to take me hunting the first time. He died a year later and I never went hunting).

Donald Hamilton joined the Navy (I sure as hell didn't, though I did live in a Navy shipyard town).

Donald Hamilton loved to sail, and he had a yacht (whereas I like bass boats...but I do not have one).

Donald Hamilton wrote over 40 novels and sold over 20 million copies (um...I do often daydream about that part, but no. 6 novels, maybe around 7000 copies if you include print and ebooks)

Donald Hamilton. Dude.

All I know is that I'm a pretender. I don't go down to the beach club. I go to work at my university and run the creative writing program. I don't hunt. I watch a lot of TV. I don't go sailing. I swim in hotel pools.

And I write about a lousy, cold-hearted son of a bitch. But so did Donald Hamilton.

Good for him.

 

Watch Me Bleed All Over the BLASTED HEATH Blog Today

I was thinking about the Kindle I carry around, imagining it as a tiny paperback pulp novel, the kind I collect from the 50's and 60's, instead of as a mass of wires with a screen and magic ink. Also thought about how pulp paperbacks even changed the way literary writing was marketed (check out these Faulkner "pulp" covers on the Tally Ho blog). And I wrote a post about it, which I handed over to my publisher, Blasted Heath, for their too-cool website.

I'm embracing what I am--a new-fangled grandson of the Gold Medal tradition. Since I can't go back in time and write pulp paperbacks on old-fashioned typewriters, I'll embrace the same attitude and feel with my laptop and e-reader.

Go read "Pulp Machine" at Blasted Heath, y'all.

 

GENRE vs. LITERARY RESPECTABILITY

1. Short answer: "Fuck it."

2. Longer answer: "Let literary respectability come to genre instead of the other way around."

3. Whenever a writer talks about "transcending the genre", doesn't that really mean, "doing things to make readers who don't like genre like this"?

4. Whenever a literary writer "skulks about" in genre, don't you get the impression they think a) they can do something new and powerful with it that mere mortal genre writers can't, or, b) that it should be easy to pull off and grab cash with?

5. Okay, that previous point has gone round and round enough already. Sorry to dredge it up again. I'll leave it, though.

6. Been watching a lot of genre directors' films lately. Down Terrace, House of the Devil, the South Korean flicks Chaser and I Saw the Devil. Revered by film critics, it seems. Genre really means something to these directors. They're working to craft the best work they can within the genre. I mean, lots of no-name directors can grab a thriller and do it by the numbers and it can make Hollywood cash, but the ones who are best at the craft get love from the hardcore fans and critics if not from studios or Hollywood. And if they do get that love from studios, the studios instantly want to change how they do things. Or so it feels/seems. Better to do the best yo can with what you got, or take the bump and see if you can change the system before it changes you?

7. I've got no problem being called a genre writer. A crime novelist. That's what I call myself. 

8. Yeah, I said I get bored with noir. I do. I love the genre so much that it hurts to see writers cling to cliche or hack their way through. If you're going to be a hack (which isn't always a bad thing), be a goddamned awesome hack.

9. Noir is good flavoring. Spicy.

10. Have you noticed that a lot of contemporary noir (some call it "neo-noir", some distinguish it from "real noir", but I don't) has more in common with horror than it does with classic noir? Ever wondered why?

11. Anyway, like I said, fuck it. I'll do the best I can as a genre writer. Let others figure out what the hell to do with it.

Thanks for all the support in getting Billy Lafitte's story into the hand of now over 6000 new readers. Hope they'll come back for more in HOGDOGGIN'.

UPDATED! Let the YELLOW MEDICINE Free-for-All Frenzy Begin: Lafitte for the People

Update #3, 5:15PM: US rank in now #95.

Update #2, 5PM: US rank is 200 overall free as I write this. UK is 269. Closing in. Thanks to a feature of Pixel of Ink, we're bleeding free copies. About to hit 3000 downloads. Push it!

Update, 11:30AM: In both the US and the UK, Yellow Medicine is now ranking in the 400's for free Kindle books right now. High on both hard-boiled lists, too. People are downloading at a faster rate than Psychosomatic. Thanks so much for all the help and support in getting Billy's story into all these new hands. But keep em going up. We're aiming for Top 100. Onward!
 

All right, all right. Get to downloading and get your friends to downloading and just get this thing into the Top 100 already, folks!

Here's some music to download by, something Billy Lafitte might surely like:

YELLOW MEDICINE Exclusive on Amazon & Free for Sat/Sun

Had a nice long think, and I've decided that I'm going to allow Amazon Kindle to have Yellow Medicine for an exclusive three month period. After that, I'll consider putting it back on the B&N site. However, I'm keen on finding as many new readers for the Billy Lafitte novels as possible, especially considering that I should have a new Lafitte ready to make the rounds in a few months, and it seems Kindle is excellent for that, as well as the Prime lending library. 

I'm going to celebrate with a two-day "Free-for-all" tomorrow and Sunday. Free Yellow Medicine for anyone who wants it. And it's DRM-free, too, so you can grab it and turn it into any format you'd like!

So, all aboard the Lafitte train. You won't like him, but you'll root for him. I bet you will. And you'll sure as hell want to read Hogdoggin'.

MY BAD

I woke up yesterday to find out about Trestle Press getting into a lot of trouble over cover art obtained without the artist's permission. So regardless of the fact that I was almost 100% percent certain my e-book cover art--which I either designed on my own, hired a designer for, or let my publisher do all the voodoo magic for it--was on the up and up, my anxiety thermometer fired up until the mercury was shooting out because that's what I do.

Anyway, I'm glad I checked. I made a silly mistake on the Psychosomatic e-cover, and I'm going to own up to it and hopefully fix it.

I worked with a designer on the cover (I won't name him here unless he later tells me he's okay with it), but I still helped out with choosing photos. While the two guys on the cover were stock, as far as I know, I also believed the image of the nurse was a stock photo, too. I believe I tried to write the artist at the time (her email is in my gmail files) but was not able to get in touch. I've always gotten permission in the past for photos I've used for Plots with Guns.  But since it was my understanding that the photo was a stock photo, I thought it was okay to use.

In double-checking yesterday, I finally found it again and discovered I'd misunderstood what "stock" mean in this case. It was one of the Creative Commons photos, meaning I needed to attribute it to the artist, and that I couldn't use it for commercial use. Well, I'd messed up on both counts. And I feel pretty shitty about it.

As for the other image on the cover--the amputee--I have no idea where that one came from.

So I contacted the designer, apologized for this crap, and asked him to start working on a new cover featuring only images we have permission to use. I also contacted the artist for the original print version of the novel (JT Lindroos, who also designed my All the Young Warriors cover) and asked if I could temporarily use that for the e-book instead. He agreed, and so I've just now uploaded that version to the Kindle store (I think it might take a day to change).

And I'm also going to try once again to get in contact with the artist, explain what happened, and offer some compensation from the copies already sold.

I'm glad to have learned more about how this all works. I can only say it was a rookie mistake and I'm working to rectify it as we speak. 

The Wrong Kind of Reading: Chicago, March 1st

Take a gander:

(posted designed by C. Gowran)

Very excited to be a part of this. And you've got a wide variety of styles here. If you're in town for AWP or you just happen to be close enough, check out The Galway Arms in Lincoln Park, voted one of the Best Bars in Chicago.

But I'm always a little uncomfortable at AWP (the Associated Writing Programs annual conference), even as Director of Creative Writing for the undergrad program at Southwest Minnesota State. I've been teaching creative writing for over a decade now, and I love to try new things and find new ways to engage the classes. And yet I always feel a bit of an outsider at AWP. A lot of "hipster douchebaggery" going on, a lot of people who think they're being "unique" end up being very much like hundreds of others there. But at least it spans the spectrum--from young hippie snobs to accomplished, academic hippie snobs (I say it with love, people). And while gene writers who are also academics in writing programs are gaining more and more headway into AWP every year (unlike the first year I was on a genre panel, when a poet walked out in "protest" over the very subject being brought up), I still think the majority of attendees find it "cute" that we're given a little corner to play in, although the genre panels are consistently the ones bringing in the biggest audiences. 

I mean, no offense, but just check out some of these panels and ask yourself 1) would I really want to spend an hour talking about that? and 2) what the hell is [Insert Panel Title Here] even supposed to mean?

I dunno. Maybe it's just me. I don't belong in trendy bars where everyone is wearing ironic t-shirts or all-black clothing carrying around barely stitched together messenger bags. But I do belong at AWP, as do all of my fellow readers at Wrong Kind, as do a whole lot of others who feel just as uncomfortable at AWP as I do. I'm feeling better, actually. Every year, it feels more like my sort of place. Which is weird, too, because this will be my last time for at least a handful of years to attend as a program director (I've been elected Chair of the English Department for this coming Fall), which has been cool because I've gotten to attend the yearly Director's meeting and sit next to Tod Goldberg making jokes at the expense of all the seriousness on the stage. Ah, memories. 

And don't even get me started on how out of place I still feels at Bouchercon...

See you at The Galway Arms!

In case you're keeping track at home, I'm 31,000 words into the first draft of Lafitte #3. Feels like a halfway point, or just about, but I never can tell.