Not Dreaming the Dream by Faye Snowden

Deceptively simple, this question broke my brain:

 How did you picture the life of a writer when you first dreamt of becoming one? Did you romanticize your dream? Or were you pragmatic and realistic about it? Compare your dream to the reality. 

I struggled because I never gave much thought to how my life would look like as a writer. I’m trying hard to picture that now, and I can’t. The wheels stop turning in my head and my brain shorts out. Maybe it’s because intuitively I’ve always been a writer? I don’t know. Let’s leave that up to the therapists.

When I first started writing, being a writer was not an identity I ever thought about. Instead I was focused on the act of writing. Think verb, not noun. My dream was about working to write my identity and experiences as an African American woman into the larger but single narrative of TV shows, books, and film. I’ve talked about this before, and explained it best in a Writer’s Digest article I wrote in 2022. Here’s an excerpt:

“When I was growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, scriptwriters and some of my favorite authors appeared to not care about knowing or doing better when including African American characters in books or on TV shows. When these characters were included, they played mostly bit parts, shucked and jived as sidekicks, or mirrored stereotypes that to this day exhaust me. Being disappeared or misrepresented creates real psychological pain and trauma. Not seeing myself reflected in the stories of this country made me question if I belonged in this country. To make matters worse, while reading books by my favorite authors I would often encounter text that caused further isolation. Sometimes it would be a small, throwaway line, or an entire premise that spoke to a shared experience between author and reader— an experience that didn’t include Black people. Maybe something like, When our ancestors came to this country to escape religious persecution, or Women in America received the right to vote in 1920.

Books and television were an escape from both racism and poverty when I was young. The problem was that the very media I was using to survive was in its own way killing me. I would find myself daydreaming entire plots of The Wild, Wild West. In my version a kick-ass Black woman would best Captain James West using physical dexterity, cunning, and intelligence. And she definitely would not be the kind of woman who would surrender with a soul-sucking kiss at the end of the show.”

Eventually, however, I started to write original pieces for sheer pleasure. I’d write on anything and at odd times. At home, I’d might pen a vignette just before dinner on a piece of torn notebook paper. At work, I’d type a couple of paragraphs on a word processor only to exit without saving.  During this time, I don’t think I thought of myself as a writer or imagined what it would be like to be one. I just wrote because it was a thing I did.

It wasn’t until grad school that I started to imagine what it would be like to claim the writer job title. The fact that there were published authors in my family tempered my expectations about the life of a writer. Let me put it this way, no one was driving Bentleys. I already knew writing wouldn’t make me rich, but I did hope that my work would be read. I stopped crumpling up the notebook paper with my writing and throwing them away. I saved the MS Word files with my vignettes to my desktop. With the latest book in my Killing series released on April 14^th I do hope that I will fully realize my dream of being read. How will the results measure up? It’s still evolving. Stick around. Maybe we can learn together.

 

 

LOOKING FOR THE ONE PLACE ON EARTH WHERE AI AND ADS CAN’T FOLLOW YOU? From Jonelle Patrick

This week, the wonderfully talented Jonelle Patrick is posting in my place. Her latest novel, The Samurai’s Octopus, is out next week, April 21. It’s a truly remarkable book, one that surprised and charmed me at every turn of the page. With humor, subtlety, and deep understanding, Jonelle paints the enthralling world of eighteenth-century Japan and the lives of the oiran (courtesans), their wealthy patrons, and the pleasure district of Yoshiwara. It’s an enchanting, fascinating journey. The Samurai’s Octopus is one of the most memorable books I’ve read in years. You’re in for a treat. 

Jim

Here’s Jonelle.

LOOKING FOR THE ONE PLACE ON EARTH WHERE AI AND ADS CAN’T FOLLOW YOU?

You settle into your plush seats at the theater with your bucket of popcorn, ready to relax and enjoy the…ads? Waiting them out, you check your phone to see who won the playoffs, but you accidentally click on the wrong tiny X while stabbing at the screen to close a pop-up window, and suddenly your news feed is hair loss remedies as far as the eye can see. You give up and decide to search for somewhere to eat after the show, but ads keep intruding, touting pricey bars and restaurants suspiciously close to the theater. It’s like the Servers-That-Be know exactly where you are.

 

If it seems like AI and ads bombard us everywhere we go now, you’re not wrong. And if you’re desperate to escape it, you’re not alone. But there’s one place they’ll never catch up with us.

In a book.

And the best kind of book for blocking out the noise takes us far, far, away from our current reality. Traveling is the closest most of us will ever get to being a child again—encountering sights we’ve never seen before, words we’ve never heard before, food we’ve never eaten before—but not many of us can just pack up and go when modern life tips over into Too Much.

 

A great page-turner isn’t just a thrifty way to see the world, it takes us somewhere entirely new without enduring a long flight in veal pen class. It drops you into a different world while instantly conveying insider status, even if you’ve never been there before.

 

I’m talking about books like James Ziskin’s Bombay Monsoon. If that one hasn’t made it to the top of your TBR pile yet, I envy you, because you can still look forward to the pleasure of experiencing the real India through the eyes of his characters, whose virtues and vices are colored by a culture that’s both surprising and familiar. This tale plays out in many of the postcard places people travel halfway around the world to see, but it brings India to life so vibrantly that you don’t just see it, you can taste it and smell it and feel like you’ve seen that chapati vendor on the corner somewhere before.

 

 

Because the author didn’t just go to India and take notes—did you know James Ziskin lived there for years? Neither did I, until about halfway through the book, when I noticed that the details he casually tosses off like he has a million more where those came from are the kind of things only someone who has lived in a country would know. The red-orange streaks on the walls are from men spitting the paan they’ve been chewing, and a mark of luxury living is that the lights are incandescent instead of fluorescent. He knows exactly which private club a successful Indian man of a certain class would be invited to join, and that it’s furnished with a unique piece of furniture with a very…provocative…name. He captures the uncomfortable dance that westerners do around the servants that even the poorest of them must employ, and understands that when you live far from home, you are thrown together with other strangers in a strange land, and can end up with some very strange bedfellows. Including a few who might be spies, human traffickers, or worse.

 

 

But why read a book written by an outsider who lives in a foreign land instead of a native who was born there? The short answer is, you should read both. Why? Let me tell you a story.

 

I’ve never been to India (except in books) but I’ve lived in Japan for so long that the government finally gave in and issued me a cultural visa to stay here indefinitely and write about it.

 

A few years ago, I was working with a Japanese rakugo artist to translate the most famous traditional stories into English. (Rakugo is the art of traditional Japanese storytelling, where an actor kneels on stage and plays all the parts, with only a fan and hand towel as props.)

 

He says to me, “Okay, here’s how the next scene goes.” He stops in front of the house where the scene will take place and says, “Ah. I see everyone is already here,” then opens the door and…

 

“Wait, wait, wait,” I say. “Shouldn’t you open the door first, then say that thing about everybody already being there?”

 

“No, didn’t you see?” Puzzled look. “First I looked down, saw everyone’s shoes were already outside, then I said the line and…”

 

Did you catch that? Neither did I. I had to explain that the scene would make no sense to a foreign audience unless we found a way to remind them that in Japan, nobody wears their shoes inside. (Which is, by the way, why so many bestselling Japanese authors’ mystery books fall flat in translation. Foreign readers are baffled at how the detective could suddenly be so sure that the murderer is just on the other side of that locked door. X-ray vision? ESP? Divine visitation?)

 

If the author was once an outsider themselves, though, they’ve already surfed that learning curve and can tell the story in a way that clues readers into the cultural nuances while making them feel like they already understand them.

 

I hope I’ve persuaded you to take a break from being chased by apps and ads and escape into one of our books instead. As authors who write about our far-away homes in a way that invites you to share their delights more deeply than a mere vacation can deliver, we promise to take you on a technology-escaping ride in the best possible way.

 

 

Jonelle Patrick’s new mystery, The Samurai’s Octopus, is set in Japan’s Yoshiwara pleasure quarter in the 1780s, where the shogun rules with an iron fist, but women hold all the cards. It’s a place where those with the most power must beg favor from those with the least, and one resourceful girl growing up at the House of Treasures just might bring down a high-ranking murderer if she manages to find the mother she’s never known. The next time you’re feeling beset by modern life, here’s where you can see if The Samurai’s Octopus might take you somewhere you’d like to spend some time too. Without standing in a maddeningly slow TSA line.

 

Fan mail stacking like a snowdrift

How did you picture the life of a writer when you first dreamt of becoming one? Did you romanticize your dream? Or were you pragmatic and realistic about it? Compare your dream to the reality. 

By Dietrich

The writing bug first bit me in my early teens. Armed with a cheap ballpoint, a notebook, and the high of my English teacher’s praise, I was ready to riff on Hemingway and Salinger. I didn't exactly picture myself in a Paris café or a Cuban villa, but I figured the prose would just flow out of me. As it turned out, I ended up stuck in a swamp of stubborn idioms and clunky phrases. Writing wasn’t the cakewalk I’d imagined. I tried to turn words into tall tales, but they just wouldn’t fit into anything worth reading. Even at that pimple-age,I knew I was in trouble.

To my credit, I didn’t hold my breath expecting a publisher to send a limo for my shoebox of longhand pages. I didn’t anticipate fan mail stacking up like a snowdrift while The New York Times wept with joy. I was either too pure for all that, perhaps a bit naive, or just savvy enough to know that my “masterpiece” wasn't quite ready for the Big Five. 

Over time, I lost interest in those handwritten pages. They ended up exactly where they belonged: in a heap under my bed, eventually vanishing altogether. I have no idea what happened to them—likely disappeared on some merciful cleaning day. But if they ever turn up posthumously, I just hope there’s no Wi-Fi in the afterlife to see the reviews. I’d die (twice) from the embarrassment.

When the notion to write finally collided with reality many years later, I traded the daydream for the real work of finding my chops. I found that writing a novel is less about being struck by lightning and more about sitting in a chair until my butt aches. I learned the glamorous art of editing the same paragraph seventeen times, and I realized when my brilliant twists weren’t working, and I learned to recognize when my “brilliant” twists weren't working or when my dialogue sounded like an 80s soap opera. 

Early on, I had a talk with myself to brace for the polite rejections and soul-crushing reviews. I looked in the mirror and reminded myself that not everybody likes Salinger or Hemingway either. I was just grateful that I got to do what I loved without having to worry about keeping the lights on. Still am.

Living the Dream

Terry here with our question of the week: How did you picture the life of a writer when you first dreamt of becoming one? Did you romanticize your dream? Or were you pragmatic and realistic about it? Compare your dream to the reality. 

 I was always focused more on the writing than the dream. My vague dream, which emerged gradually, was to write a publishable book. What happened after that was always cloudly. Sure, when I actually hunkered down to write a novel, I had moments of thinking, “What if I write a book that makes it big? What if it sells a million copies?” But I never really pictured what that might mean. 

 My first inkling of what it might be to write something people wanted to read was in seventh grade when our teacher made the assignment that we should a short story about “anything.” I now realize how amazing that was. No constrictions. No “you have to do ‘this’ to get it right.” Just write a story. I don’t remember if it was difficult for me to decide what to write. But I do remember that when it was done, I thought it was a clever, solid story. 

When the teacher was ready to hand back our work, she said there was one that stood out and that she was going to read it aloud. She thought everyone would like it. I remember the rush of knowing, with no reservations, that she was going to read my story. And she did. 

 She didn’t say whose it was until the end. My classmates showered me with praise. And that’s what I always pictured as the life I wanted as a writer—that people would like what I wrote. That people would want to read my stories and would tell me how much they loved them. 

 As a youngster, I thought small. It never occurred to me to write stories and send them off to magazines or to contests. When I read about writers who in their teens sent off their stories with the hopes of getting them published, I’m astounded that they even knew that was possible, much less had the nerve to try. Pragmatic? Realistic? Perhaps. 

But sadly, I think of myself more as lacking in confidence. I didn’t have the confidence to dream, or even to picture myself as a “writer.” But I wrote. In high school when I’d turn in a fiction assignment, my teachers would look at me funny. I know now that they probably were surprised that I had a rich interior life. I had only one teacher who encouraged me to write. But with no suggestion of how that might fit into my world. 

 My actual dream had nothing to do with writing. I wanted to make money. I wanted a job that would support me and where I could excel. It never occurred to me that writing might be that endeavor. At one point I looked into applying for a job as an editor at a publishing house. I didn’t really even know what that meant; just that it would put me into the world of books. I was easily discouraged. Becoming an editor meant moving “back east,” a vague term that for a girl from Texas loomed way too large. And besides, it wasn’t a well-paid job. 

I look back now and think how sad it was that I had no one to guide me. No one who could tell me that as a voracious reader, getting any job in the world of books would be satisfying. (See the end of my post)

 In college, I told my English professor that I wanted to be a writer. He said, “Then don’t major in English literature. Major in something that gets you out in the world where you have experiences.” I majored in political science. And after I graduated, went to work for the CIA. Where I was sent to school to learn how to be a computer programmer/ analyst. I was in IT for the next ten years, first at the CIA, then later at a number of companies in the private sector. I liked IT, and found it rewarding, financially and emotionally. I always liked to achieve a job well-done, so I wasn’t unhappy. 

Still, I often went to my car at lunch and wrote. It took a long time before I began to dream. I wanted to write a novel that would be published. A novel. That was my dream. That “dream” drove me to write novels after work and on weekends. Six of them before I finally got published. 

 To say that I was surprised by the success of my first novel, A Killing at Cotton Hill—winning the Macavity Award, short-listed for various other awards, a best-seller—is an understatement. That success bred in me a passion to do it again…and again. I began to dream bigger, realizing that the success I hoped for was the joy of being immersed in writing, and having people tell me how much they liked the books I wrote. 

Fifteen published novels later, I’m still on the hamster wheel. The only regret I have is that I didn’t persist much earlier. 

My takeaway? If you know someone who is struggling to let their dreams emerge, encourage them. Give them something to dream for.

Malfunctioning When It Comes To Elevator Pitching by Poppy Gee

 
Low Head Lighthouse, Tasmania 

Give us your elevator pitch for your latest book, then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.

This could be the blog post that gets me kicked off the blog. I love being part of this Blogging Collective and I don't want to leave. But my dilemma is, do I write the truth about what I'm writing, or do I keep up the facade of being a committed crime fiction author? 

I think people prefer the truth. 

Anyone who knows me, knows I have been horrified and distressed as we watch a genocide occur in Palestine, while our media sits nervously on its hands or gleefully cheers it on, and Western political leaders provide support for it. Horribly, it's now culminating in awful scenes with hundreds of people bombed to death in Lebanon this week. 

Last year, I was two weeks away from putting the finishing touch on my ski lodge thriller. I stared at the screen for days on end, and felt nothing. I felt disinterested in the work. I took a break over the Australian summer. This year, I started something new about a doctor, who writes crime fiction, who watches helplessly as medics, hospitals, journalists and aid workers are targeted in Gaza. There's a dual time line, with another storyline set in the 1830s. 

Both story lines are set in George Town, Tasmania, a tiny seaside town on the Tamar river mouth. This was a town settled in 1804, and is Australia's oldest town. It was abandoned by the British colonists as there was no freshwater. Consequently, it remains almost exactly as it would have looked in the 1830s. There's some housing subdivisions, and cafes on the main street, but it retains the original grid layout with the Regent Square in the middle, and faded Georgian homesteads and inns scattered around the harbour and farmlands. Also remaining is the Pilot Station from where expert seamen in small pilot boats still lead big ships up the dangerous river; the convict gaol; the lighthouse; and a beautiful mansion called Marion Villa where a rich pastoralist and his daughters spent their summers. On a nearby hilltop you can climb up to the Semaphore Station, which was how the settlers communicated with flags to other colonial outposts along the river. George Town is a beautiful place, but like most of Tasmania, it's a crime scene where massacres, genocide and displacement of First Nation people occurred. 

I'm curious about how ordinary people live their lives while catastrophic inhumanity occurs in plain sight. How do we reckon with our humanity? I don't know the answer to this question. I'm not trying to answer it. My work-in-progress is also a love letter to Tasmania. My ancestors turned up there in the 1850s, looking for farming opportunities. We didn't learn much about the Palawa people at school. It was only when I went to university that the education curriculum changed. Now, in Lutrawita/Trouwerner/Tasmania, school children learn about the past, about the Palawa people who are the traditional custodians of the land, and who survived the brutality of colonisation and dispossession. I believe Australia is making steady baby steps toward reconciliation. 

Do I think agents/editors/readers will be interested in this novel about such horror? Maybe not, to be honest. But sometimes, writing from the heart with no concern for a commercial outcome, can create the best writing. 

Currently, as a crime writer I've gone off-road without a map. I know I can't write anything else right now. I'll be back once this draft is done, if I'm not lost forever in the wilderness of my sadness. I simply can't write crime as real war crimes play out on my screen every day. Reading, however - crime fiction, stories about women, historical novels, wildly original literary works - has been a balm, an oasis of escape from the world's spiralling chaos, a reprieve from the relentlessly shattering news. And the seed of passion for my ski lodge thriller remains. I've worked on it with my agent for over a decade. One day, I will share it with everyone, and that will be a happy milestone. 

To answer the question of the Blog: How would I convince an editor to love this novel? I'd tell them that the reason I'm so passionate about it is that it's set in a fictional tiny ski resort that resembles one where I spent a lot of time growing up, and that it's a coming-of-age mystery, for both a teen daughter and her mother, as they both realise that the world they live in, is different to the world they thought they live in. Coming-of-age is an interesting theme as it can happen to people at different points in their lives, at any age that they have a reckoning with the truth. My agent believes in it, she's loved it for a long time. (My oh-so-patient agent!) I hope that an editor will fall in love with it enough to publish it, one day. 

Elevator pitch for my ski lodge thriller:
A young man mysteriously dies in an old ski hut in a Tasmanian ski resort. It’s 1994 when homosexuality was illegal, and poppy farmer Enid, and her seventeen-year-old daughter, believe this is one in a series of unresolved gay-hate murders. Troublingly, it seems that someone close to them in their ski lodge is responsible.

Blurb*:
A ski club is a strangely intimate place. Every winter weekend fifty people sleep side by side in dormitory bunks, eat breakfast in their pyjamas, ski together, and have lively après ski drinks by the fire. They’re all familiar, yet they don’t really know each other.
 (*I was going to include my full blurb here, but I'm paranoid someone might enter it into AI and produce a similar novel before I get it out there!)

The surest way to convince an editor to acquire my novel is to cross my fingers and toes!

 

... In Space, by Catriona

Give us your elevator pitch for your latest book, then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.

The title of this blog isn't a reference to Artemis II, but rather a nod to the fact that a pitch including the words "in space" is always going to be translated by a movie producer as "One small set. No location filming." But see what I did there? I said "space" when everyone's marvelling at the amazing photographs of the Earth and the Nutella, which doesn't hurt.

Not that I'm any good at that sort of zeitgeist evocation when it matters. Of all the suckage in my suckacious life I suck most at pitches, I reckon. I once said "It's about some people", to an agent. Luckily we were only chatting in a bar and I wasn't actually agent-hunting. Ach, it made her laugh. That's all that matters when you're chatting in a bar. She wasn't to know I'd have said the same thing at PitchFest.

The only kind of pitch I can do at all is the "meets" sort. For the book that's coming out on the 1st of May, THE DEAD ROOM, I went with Sleeping Murder meets Gaslight.

Buy links and other details

Does that work? I've said it to people and got a three-syllable "oo" in reply. You know the one - "oo-OOO-ooo?" - so maybe it does. And it got a publisher to read the synopsis when I put it in a covering letter. So let's say it does. Now, why?

Well, it's going to pull in Agatha Christie fans, mentioning one of her best Miss Marples (imo), and even someone who doesn't know their St Mary Mead from their 221b Baker Street might think "sleeping murder" as a concept sounds like our kind of fun. Similarly, anyone familiar with the 1940s film Gaslight will get that there's psychological trickery in a domestic setting going on here. And, again, younger readers who've never heard of Joseph Cotten or even Ingrid Bergman, will have heard of gaslighting and catch the drift.

Glancing back at the question, though, I see I'm not supposed to be considering potential readers. I'm supposed to be thinking about agents, editors and movie producers. I've mentioned the editor already; I'm never changing agents and it's too scary even to contemplate it; and I'm going to assume that the idea of a film title taking off and coming to define a whole sub-category of dysfunctional behaviour would be catnip to a producer, so reminding them of that time it happened before is a good idea.

The book I'm writing now has a three-way "meets" pitch. I've cast it as The Railway Children meets Rear Window meets The Wicker Man. I'm not sure that would be as successful. Edwardian children's fiction is a long way from enjoying the everlasting relevance of Christie's oeuvre, for a start. 

Rear Window's a good shout, I think. Yes, it's dated but Hitchcock is still cool, as far as I can tell, getting on for fifty years after he died. (At least, the showing of Dial M for Murder in the original 3D, as part of my local art cinema's Hitchcockotober festival last year, was sold out and turning people away.) 

What about The Wicker Man though? The Guardian named it the fourth best horror film of all time but a. that's the Guardian for you and b. this was before The Babadook, Get Out and Sinners. If people hadn't heard of Rear Window or The Wicker Man, my pitch might sound a bit like shading the southern exposure of your house with home-made blinds. And three plucky children in rural England aren't going to help. 

But, assuming editors and producers are familiar with all the references, I think this pitch is a belter. We've got a constrained protagonist, claustrophobia-induced paranoia (or is it?) and an upending of small-town charm that my book jackets have often hinted at but which I've never written about so directly before. I mean, imagine living in the house with the dead room, if you couldn't escape and you couldn't trust your neighbours not to use you as bonfire fuel. 

But that's next year.

Cx 

Going up! (hopefully) by Eric Beetner

 Give us your elevator pitch for your latest book, then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.

A WOUND THAT WILL NOT HEAL is the final book in the Carter McCoy trilogy. As Carter faces his final days, a call for help comes from the past. Bree, the girl who set him on his path of vengeance and vigilante justice needs his help. Men posing as ICE agents have kidnapped a friend and left a 12-year old girl abandoned. In what will likely be his final act before succumbing to his disease, Carter travels West to face a homegrown enemy unlike any he’s confronted before. With his dog, Chester, by his side and nothing left to lose, Carter’s last rescue is his most important, and his most poignant.

An agent or publisher? Who knows? Of course, I’d never go out and try to sell someone on the third book in a trilogy. But let’s look at what I do have on my side:

This is my first foray into writing about contemporary “ripped from the headlines” subjects. In this case, men posing as ICE agents and feeling empowered by the current administration to snatch people off the streets. Whether this is a selling point to the book or not remains to be seen. It came out just yesterday as an ebook (print coming soon and audio this summer) so it’s too soon to tell if people will want to read about something that is in their faces every day. It could be that it is exhausting and people just want an escape.

My hope is that they are drawn to a story in which the little guy wins against this monolith of evil we’ve all been facing down for over a year now.

The first book, The Last Few Miles Of Road, sold as a series based on the pitch of an older gentleman who receives a terminal diagnosis and uses that newfound freedom from consequence to go find and kill the man responsible for his daughter’s death. When complications ensue and he gets wrapped up in the troubles of a local girl, he realizes he can help her by eliminating a troublesome person in her life, too. Now armed with a sense of justice and the all-important “nothing left to lose” he goes off to help others in his limited time left.

That was a selling point and that first book even garnered an ITW award nomination and an Anthony award nomination as well as ending up on several “best of” lists for that year.

As has been the unfortunate case with all of the series I’ve written, this is my 4th trilogy, the second book didn’t fare as well. Will taking on a more immediate contemporary story help with book 3? I’ll find out, I guess.

I think the relatively simple setup of Carter McCoy as a character did help that first book sell. He was easy to explain to people, both agents, publishers and also readers. A few book clubs have picked up the book, which is a first for me. I think that speaks to the pitch working to intrigue people enough. 

I do like a simple setup. It’s tempting to want to put all of your brilliant twists and unexpected turns you worked so hard to put into your novel into a synopsis, but the whole point is to tease just enough to get people to take a chance on your book. If you lay it all out you end up giving spoilers and we all hate when a movie trailer gives away too much, right?

You have to set the hook, but not lose all your bait. Is that an expression?

I find that the real hook to any book is the characters. I think it’s why Carter McCoy was an easy sell. I just need people to know who he is, less so what he gets up to in the books. If people want to know more about him, then the machinations of the plot are secondary. 

For a third book, or any book deep into a seres, you do have the luxury of readers who are already up to speed. They trust you and your characters so you can take some chances, stretch from what came before. Maybe try a new tactic and write about something political. 

Character is crucial when talking about Hollywood. Deals are made in packages with star power being the foundation of almost every project. If you wrote a character some actor would kill to play, then you have a much better chance of getting it made. Get Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts on board to portray your creation and you stand a chance. 

I often think the book world could still learn a lot from the movies in terms of efficiency of story pitches. The whole phrase “elevator pitch” is a Hollywood concept and there needs to be a succinct way to sell your story in a 2-3 minute trailer and even on a poster with a line or two and an image. 

Did I do it on this one? Time will tell. All I know is the readers who have found these books have responded more positively than to any of the 30 books I publisher prior. Carter McCoy may go down as my greatest creation. If that’s my legacy, I’ll take it.

As I bid him farewell, I hope I’m not also bidding farewell to my writing career, but I am faced with the first time in over a decade with no new contract and nothing on the horizon. It’s a scary place to be, but nothing I can’t handle. Like Carter, I’ve got nothing really to lose. And that’s a pretty freeing place to be.

Dial P for Pitch

Question: Give us your elevator pitch (a paragraph) for your latest book (or a book of your choosing), then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about elevator pitches, it’s this: everyone says they should be short, sharp, and irresistible—and almost nobody agrees on what that actually looks like. It’s easy to confuse pitch with summary or logline.

Somewhere along the way, “elevator pitch” became shorthand for a verbal movie trailer: high concept, a couple of comps, maybe a hooky line for a poster. And that can work, if you can pull it off.

I’ve come to think of it differently. A good pitch isn’t a jingle from Don Draper. It’s a spotlight.

I don’t pretend to know what will sell, so I write for myself and hope for the best.

Here are three recent attempts, each trying to answer the same question: how do you get someone to care?

 

EYES TO DECEIT

Pitch:
In 1953, as the CIA and MI6 engineer the overthrow of Iran’s elected leader, American operative Walker is sent to Rome to help coordinate the covert operation. When the coup falters, he must choose between success and his own conscience. Surrounded by ambitious power brokers whose goals constantly shift, Walker begins to suspect he’s not there to win the Cold War—but to survive it.

Logline:
Sent to help topple a foreign government, an American operative watches the mission unravel—and must decide whether he can live with what it takes to finish the job. For readers of le Carré, Furst, Kanon, and Vidich.

Why this might tempt someone:
This pitch leans on the moral dilemma. The historical event gives it weight, but the real hook is smaller: can he live with what he’s doing? Readers respond to character first, geopolitics second. The risk is that stories brushing against real-world events can feel “too political.”

Eyes to Deceit: Company Files 4. Published November 2025. Level Best Books.

 

FOUR ON THE FLOOR

Pitch:
Boston, 1978. Heatwave. Four bodies. One is a journalist with connections powerful enough to shake the city. Vietnam vet and ex-cop Shane Cleary is pushed by politicians and mob interests to uncover the truth before tensions boil over. As he digs into corrupt cops, buried secrets, and a killer who reminds him too much of his past, Cleary realizes he’s back in a war—now fought in alleys and precincts instead of jungles.

Logline:
In a boiling Boston summer, a war-damaged ex-cop pulled into a conspiracy that feels less like a case—and more like the war he thought he’d left behind. Think the questionable morality of Gone Baby Gone with the velocity of Drive.

 

Why this might tempt someone:
This is the cleanest “elevator-y” pitch: clear setup, immediate stakes, familiar genre lane. You can see the movie. The downside is the familiarity of the PI premise—the hook isn’t the concept, it’s the execution and voice.

Four on the Floor: Shane Cleary Mystery 6. Scheduled July 2026. Level Best Books.

 

THE QUIET EAGLE

Pitch:
Cairo, 1956. As global powers maneuver during the Suez Crisis, reluctant American operative Walker is sent into a situation already slipping beyond control. Caught between rival intelligence services, shifting alliances, and two formidable women with agendas of their own, he navigates a shadow war where influence matters more than force. Walker must decide whether he’s witnessing history—or enabling it.

Logline:
Cairo, 1956. Recruited by a former lover, an American operative must navigate shifting alliances in a covert war—where one wrong move could spark an international crisis. This is The Quiet American meets Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

 

Why this might tempt someone:
This pitch sells on tone. The Suez Crisis may not be widely known today, but the story frames how a moment of overlooked history shapes events. The deeper hook is thematic: what happens when empires lose control but pretend they haven’t? It’s atmospheric and subtle—harder to sell, but potentially more memorable if it lands.

The Quiet Eagle: Company Files 5. Scheduled October 2026. Level Best Books.

If there’s a takeaway—other than trying to predict market trends—it’s this: an elevator pitch doesn’t have to do everything. It just has to do one thing clearly enough that someone leans in.

The rest is out of your hands—always was; you just notice it more after hitting send.

 

Wait, I'm ahead? | Tempt agents and publishers with a logline

 While everyone else is talking about how they came to writing, I inadvertently skipped to next week’s topic. It’s a case of deadline brain. It’s like I’m ahead, but I’ve really been lapped. I hope you enjoy a sneak peek to next week!

--

I love the smell of spring especially the flowers blooming in my garden despite my concentrated, but unintentional efforts to send the azaleas to hell, with the tea roses following swiftly behind. Yet, they persevere.

 

What I don’t love is being under deadline which made me almost forget to post tonight. I’m in the final edits of the fourth book of my Killing series, A Killing Earth. The third book in the series, A Killing Breath, will be released April 14^th. I need your grace for any typos or misused words in this post, e.g., if ‘concentrated’ and ‘unintentional’ technically works in the same sentence. I didn’t have time to look it up. These final edits are getting all my attention right now, but I’m gladly taking a break to respond to the prompt:

“Give us your elevator pitch (a paragraph) for your latest book (or a book of your choosing), then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.”

My elevator pitch is a logline. After I read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, I changed the way I begin my books. I now write a logline early in the ideation phase. A logline is a 2 or 3 sentence summary that helps me find the heart of my story. You can easily look up how to write one online. The one for Breath is as follows:

Reluctant homicide detective Raven Burns tells herself that police work is just a job. But as she hunts down a serial killer who is murdering her friends, she realizes that police work being just a job is a distant dream, and wading in blood her only reality.

Editors, agents, and even movie producers can immediately discern the genre, identify the protagonist, and pinpoint both the external and internal conflicts. The external conflict is Raven trying to bring a killer to justice; the internal conflict is the struggle to reconcile with or distance herself from a job that is eating her soul. It makes us wonder if Raven, who has been an unsteady protagonist throughout this series, will be able to conquer her internal demons and live a normal life.

After I’m happy with the logline, I then sit down and write a summary as quickly as possible. My goal is to get something on the page I can edit. Here is the final summary of A Killing Breath:

Raven Burns owes her life to the kind souls who looked after her while her father, unbeknownst to them, sowed a path of blood and bodies from California to Louisiana as one of the most notorious serial killers ever known, Floyd “Fire” Burns. When Raven was a girl, Floyd brutally murdered one of those kind souls, Miss Ruth Jefferson, when the woman made the fatal decision to open the door to him on a pitch-black 4th of July night. As Raven learned of her father’s crimes, she vowed to do everything in her power to put men like him away. Decades later Raven’s hunt for a serial killer terrorizing the town leads her right back to that 4th of July night, and a memory that will make her question how much Floyd’s evil has settled in her bones.

If Breath’s logline tempted you, drop me a line in the comments. If you have a logline for a story you are working on or have written, drop those in the comments as well. I’m on deadline, remember? I need the distraction!