Showing up for downtime

Besides writing, what else do you do? What’s on your writer’s bucket list?

by Dietrich

It’s too easy to get wrapped up in a story. Even when I’m not writing, I often want to jot down notes as I think of a scene, or work out details for one in my head. So, it’s important to pry myself away and leave time for other things. Writing is solitary, so I need time to be social. And writing means a lot of sitting, so it’s important to get off my butt.

Art is entertaining, and I like anything from theatre, dance, live music, visiting an art gallery, to stopping to listen to a busker on a street corner. Whether I’m writing or not, I’m often listening to whatever music that suits my mood. I’m partial to my music on vinyl, and I know LPs are gaining popularity again. It’s interesting, I’ve been around long enough to see how we play music go full circle from records to eight tracks to cassettes to MP3s and back to vinyl again. And I still listen to much of the same music from the days when I first started collecting LPs. Does anybody remember those cheap little transistor radios we used to carry around, playing the top 40, even before the days of those suitcase-size boom boxes?

Not that I make much time for it anymore, but I occasionally paint, abstracts mostly, and I like to dabble in photography, creating images a different way. And I play guitar and create my own sound, or in my case, noise.

“I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they’re any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things. Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things…Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look.” — Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners 

“I basically like to apply paint onto canvas. I just like the act of it — I make it up as I go along. I really don’t analyze them that much.”  — Paul McCartney.

It’s interesting how many writers are musicians, and musicians who are also writers: Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Cat Stevens, Leonard Cohen, Steve Earle, Josh Ritter, Stephen King. And many musicians and writers who are visual artists: Charles Bukowski, Miles Davis, John Lennon, John Mellencamp. Ronnie Wood, Grace Slick, David Bowie, Kim Gordon, Tony Bennett, George Frayne, and the list goes on.

"I'm a painter first, and a musician second.” — Joni Mitchell

And it’s interesting how some famous writers incorporated their outside interests into their work. Dame Agatha Christie accompanied her husband on archaeological digs, her experiences inspiring several novels. Tolkien studied languages, and Hemingway was an avid outdoorsman.

Aside from painting and music, I’m an avid reader, and I’ve always got a stack on books on the go with the occasional audiobook tossed in.

So, as you can see, I don’t live life on the edge; I don’t run with the bulls, or jump out of planes or off cliffs or bridges with a big rubber band attached to my foot. And while I’m in pretty good shape for a fiction writer, I don’t compete in many sports these days. In fact, my sports are pretty much limited to the TV. And these days, it’s down to soccer, mostly European matches and tournaments, and the world cup every four years. 

“It’s better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.” — Charles Bukowski

I don’t know that I really have a bucket list, but I do like to travel, and there are a number of places that I’d like to see. One of my favorite places to go once the rain clouds start to gather here in the northwest is down the coast to California, and we get down there every chance we get. In fact, it’s just about time to get out the suitcase as I get set for another book tour down the coast. 

Which reminds me, I should mention my new one Call Down the Thunder will be released October 15th. You can order a copy or find out more at www.dietrichkalteis.com or at www.ecwpress.com.

Here’s the short pitch: 

Sonny and Clara Myers struggle on their Kansas farm in the late 1930s, a time the Lord gave up on. The land’s gone dry, barren and worthless. And the bankers, greedy and hungry, make life even more impossible, squeezing farmers out of their homes. The couple can wither along with the land, or surrender to the bankers and hightail it to California like most of the other farmers. But Sonny comes up with a way for them to stay on their land and prosper while giving the banks a taste of their own misery.

Is That a Bad Review or Just a Ham on Rye?

How do you react to negative reviews?

by Paul D. Marks

I call up my friends in the Mossad and tell them to seek out and destroy all negative reviewers in the shank of a dark and stormy night. Oh wait, no, that’s what a producer said he was going to do to me when we got in an argument about a script.

Take 2:

Some people say never to read reviews and that’s probably good advice, and probably what one should do. But it’s hard not to. Why? Because, I’m sure, we all want to have our egos stroked. And we’re looking for the positive reinforcement that says we haven’t wasted our lives working on something that nobody likes. So our expectation—our hope—is to get good reviews for that and other reasons. When we don’t our egos are shattered. And those who say it doesn’t affect them, well, let’s just say I think they’re most likely doing that stiff upper lip thing.

I’ve been gratified by most reviews, whether by professional reviewers or consumers on Amazon and the like. But every once in a while...

Even big stars like to check their reviews. I was on the Warner Brothers lot (though it may have been called The Burbank Studios at the time, now it’s back to Warner Brothers [long story]) one day and saw Bill Murray leaning against a car reading a review of “The Razor’s Edge” (1984) that had just come out (and based on my tied for favorite book along with The Count of Monte Cristo). It wasn’t getting rave reviews to say the least, but as I say above, we all want to be validated and maybe also get some constructive criticism as to what went wrong. And I remember thinking even Bill Murray, with all his popularity from “Ghostbusters,” etc. still must feel the sting of a bad review like everyone else.

Hell, even Bob Dylan doesn’t like the sting of being booed, as when he first went electric and rock from strictly acoustic folk music. Check out this YouTube clip. It’s less than a minute long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS1RRoR6Miw

So let’s focus on Amazon reviews because they’re there, for good or ill. I don’t like reading negative reviews, but how I react depends on the review. Not everybody can like everything. I get that. Of course, one is tempted to remind some reviewers what their mommies told them, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” But that isn’t the real world, is it? So for me, it depends on what the reviewer says. Does it seem like they actually read the book? Do they have an axe to grind? Are they offering constructive comments about what worked or didn’t for them or are they just off on some kind of tangent? Did they get what I was trying to say and, if not, is that my fault or theirs?

I got a couple of one star reviews for my short story collection “LA Late @ Night”. And they did piss me off. I had gotten some lukewarm reviews on “White Heat” and lived with them. But these two reviews for “LA Late @ Night” just didn’t make sense to me. These two reviewers, who seemed cut from the same cloth (literally), both hated the book and the stories in it. But their comments made little sense.

One said: “Uninteresting, choppy writing. No plots. I wouldn't waste my time reading this series of books as they are rambling writings.”

Where do I start? With the fact that it’s not a series. Uninteresting, well, that’s your opinion. Choppy, well that’s my style on some things. But each story had previously been published in a magazine or anthology, so somebody found them interesting. No plots, see previous response. Bottom line, I wonder if they even knew what book they were reviewing—But Wait: There’s More. The Kicker is yet to come. But First:

The other crappy review:

“Not that great of stories and the writing is stilted...I didn't even finish them all!”

Oh, where to begin: How ‘bout them criticizing my writing as being stilted when their sentence is grammatically incorrect? So maybe someone who doesn’t know proper grammar criticizing my grammar is actually a compliment.

Okay, here it comes. Hold your breath. The Kicker:

Being a glutton for punishment, I of course had to check each person’s profile to see why they hated my book so much. What I saw were reviews for muffin pans, muck boots, kitchen gadgets, children’s books, religious/inspirational books and very few mystery books, and no noir or hardboiled books. So I wondered why they even bought my book? Judging from their other reviews I could have told them they wouldn’t like it and would have saved them the time, aggravation and money.

It made no sense to me why they would even read a book like mine. So I had to assume there was an agenda going on. I called this to Amazon’s attention, asking them to remove these reviews, which they wouldn’t. I still think there was some kind of agenda happening here, though I couldn’t say exactly what the motivation is and these are the kind of reviews, totally baseless, that really piss me off. And I know authors are not supposed to say that, we’re not supposed have emotions or respond, but hey, you asked, that’s our question this week.

And here are some other One Star Amazon reviews for your entertainment pleasure, only the names have been removed to protect the guilty.

Reviews from Amazon – yellow highlights and purple comments have been added by me.


Reviews of The Big Sleep:

One Star
boring
By XXX/Reviewer’s Name Removed
The book is a big sleep. (Paul’s comment: Well, some of us who liked this book must just be insomniacs.)
 
One Star
By XXX/Reviewer’s Name Removed
Dated




Reviews of Crime and Punishment:

One Star
By Amazon Customer
Very slow & plodding. (Paul’s comment: That damn Raskolnikov, why didn’t he just get it over and confess? On “Law & Order” Briscoe and Curtis would have had him spilling all in 2 minutes flat.)

One Star
Too Long
By XXX/Reviewer’s Name Removed
Long and pretty boring I don't like the old timely language they use in this book I know it's translated from German or Russian maybe but I was bored to tears and there was never any payoff really just goes on and on.


Reviews of 1984:

One Star
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
I love a good dystopian but this was just such a…
By XXX/Reviewer’s Name Removed
I have always heard about 1984 being the father of all dystopian novels... I love a good dystopian but this was just such a hard book to read because in the entire story, there is no room for hope.
(Paul’s comment: Maybe Katniss from “Hunger Games” should show up and rescue Winston and Julia from O’Brien.)

One Star
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful
….must be a book only an English teacher would like. I classify this a worse than "Catcher and ...
By XXX/Reviewer’s Name Removed
This must be a book only an English teacher would like. I classify this a worse than "Catcher and the Rye" (Paul’s comment: Is that a new book, Catcher AND the Rye, or is that something you get at Canter’s Deli (or Katniss’ Deli) – or maybe Canter’s and the Rye, or maybe Ham on Rye – h/t Chinaski.)

Damn! I’m hungry now.

So, overall, you have to take both the good and the bad with a grain of seasoned salt, a quesadilla and some damn good and spicy hot sauce.

***

Vortex: My new Mystery-Thriller novella coming September 1^st. Available for pre-order now.

“...a nonstop staccato action noir... Vortex lives up to its name, quickly creating a maelstrom of action and purpose to draw readers into a whirlpool of intrigue and mystery... but be forewarned: once picked up, it's nearly impossible to put down before the end.”

—D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review






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