P.I. Rick Cantelli, Back Again

My aging Private Eye, Rick Cantelli, could not stay out of my head. He demanded a Part 3 in his adventures. It’s the funniest one yet and another 4,000 word excursion with the best P.I. since Magnum. Writing needs to be profitable, but if you do it for profit, good luck to you. My character, Rick Cantelli, reminds me on a daily basis why I write. I have parachuted out of an airplane in the Philippines when I was stationed on the USS Ranger. They had a parachuting club. I have scuba dived for over forty years. Nothing compares to the adrenaline rush I get when a character like Rick forces me to relate his adventures on the computer.

My friend, Jordan Summers, blogged about the coming Amazon selling of used digital books among other things. If they want to commit suicide relating to their book business, I can’t think of a better way. Why would an author ever publish for Amazon Kindle if all the readers buying their novel can immediately put it up for sale again with no royalty generated to the author? This is coming because of the excruciatingly high numbers of self published material. I foresee a revolt at hand also. The moment Amazon does it, without a royalty payment to the author, I will remove all novels from Amazon, and never publish again on their site.

I pray we have another venue that resists this perversion of the marketplace.

Rick Cantelli, P.I., The Sequel

I thought up another humorous adventure for my aging private eye, Rick Cantelli. I couldn’t wait a couple weeks before putting out the sequel to the first story, An Old Acquaintance. The over 4,000 word sequel, Rick Cantelli P.I., developed on Word in a couple sit downs, and I laughed through most of it, even the editing. I’m glad Triond put it up so quickly on AuthSpot. I have a feeling another Cantelli story will pop into my head quicker than the two week increments I was considering for publishing these short stories. I still have a great sequel in my head for my other short story, TheReunion, but Cantelli and his partner Lois just couldn’t wait.  :)

My novel HARD CASE climbed up the Amazon rankings in a couple categories. It hit #5 in Criminals, and #8 in Crime & Criminals. I have no clue how they come up with this stuff, but it’s neat to see it up there. I have 40,000 words done in my sequel. I’ll also be releasing the sequel to my YA novel DEMON in the first part of March. As I’ve mentioned, the title will be DEMON INC. It’s both funnier and darker than the first, but also still staying within the young adult parameters. My character Demon the dog, and sidekick Mike, expand their new enterprise of paranormal reality gigs.

I’ve found out a bunch of stuff on the screenplay writing front. There are a myriad of contests all over the place for paying to enter your script, supposedly to be looked over and judged by producers, directors, and high ups in the film industry. Having actually communicated with some professional screenwriters on the Stage 32 site I belong to, I’ve found out these are nearly all gimmicks, a lot like the poetry.com scam from decades ago. They select finalists for some big final reading. Only one problem – you pay your own way to get to the place. As one screenwriter posted on Linked In, ‘you would have a better chance of winning the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes’. Needless to say, I’m not blowing any money on an unknown entity like my screenwriting ability, but I’m not giving it up either. It’s fun and exciting. I’m over 40 pages/40 minutes in my third feature length screenplay based on my DEMON trilogy. I’m becoming more and more adept at the Final Draft software.

Anyway, that’s it for now. If you like humor mixed with a little action, check out my Rick Cantelli stories.

New Short Story

AuthSpot picked up my hardboiled detective story from Triond. It’s titled An Old Acquaintance. About 3,400 words, it blends age, humor and action, with a twist. It was a fun story to write, and I’m trying to get one done every couple weeks as I did with my first offering The Reunion. They get hundreds of hits, and some of that hard to get name recognition.

Rick Cantelli is a P.I. working out of a Santa Barbara office. I liked the character almost as much as I did my two in The Reunion. Writing the short story freebies isn’t taking away from my novels or screenplays. I went over 35,000 words in my new sequel to HARD CASE, and I passed the 30 page/30 minute trek to a completed third screenplay using my characters from DEMON. I figure maybe if I have a complete 7 feature film set showcasing my YA trilogy, and the books do well, maybe someone will look at the scripts. Just thinking about it is what makes all this stuff exciting.  :)  After I get a slew of the short stories done, I’ll probably join them all up into a novel and sell them on Amazon for 99 cents or something.

Enjoy the Superbowl today. St. Joyce is a rabid 49er fan, and boy, if they don’t do well, there is going to be hell to pay. I’ll talk her into having a couple pops to settle her down before the game. I’m making pork roast when I get home from playing basketball, so it’ll be ready when she starts screaming at the TV.  :)  I figure to get maybe five more pages of script done and a couple thousand more words on the new novel: The Lure of Hell.

Book Killing

Writing has been going very well. I learned about a practice this week from an article my friend Jordan Summers tweeted about. It’s called ‘Killing a Book’. According to the article, a new practice in operation on Amazon involves authors who use their sock puppet and trolls to fill a competing author’s reviews with one star hit pieces. Another more subtle one is using trolls or sock puppets to put a favorable review on an author’s book, and then using the same entity to trash everything else the author has done, using the line ‘I really liked such and such book, but this one is horrible’.

I thought it was strange when the long knives came out in droves to eviscerate E.L. James for her ‘Fifty Shades’ lightning strike. Then there was Stephen King announcing that Stephenie Meyer ‘Can’t write worth a darn’. King’s statement was incomprehensible in that he insulted a fellow author who not only was writing, but everything she wrote sold in the millions of copies. Even if he were asked to critique Meyer’s writing, he could have stated ‘I don’t care for her writing style, but obviously I’m the only one’.

It makes me wonder – can’t anyone simply be happy for another author's success? In the examples of hit pieces done anonymously, did the perpetrator actually believe the readers would immediately buy their offerings instead? In King’s case, did he think readers hearing or reading his Meyer remark would then become his fan? In the ‘Fifty Shades’ evisceration, you could at least tell that most of the remarks were from people who had actually read the book, mostly because many of them were very funny. I confess when I need a laugh, I go over to read comments on ‘Fifty Shades’. I don’t agree with doing them, but there are some real comedians out there doing the comments on ‘Fifty’. Besides, if I were E.L. James, I’d be on the boards enjoying the hell out of it.

The ‘Book Killing’ phenomena is much more dangerous. I have writing friends who have had this done to them. They’re trying to make a living off their writing, and a ‘Killing’ will many times drop sales down from the thousands to single digits. To me there’s no excuse for one or two star bombers on Amazon concerning books. A reader is allowed a very extensive preview of a book. If it’s poorly edited, written, or the plot’s not what they thought, there is certainly ample warning to avoid purchasing it. I’ll use my book MONSTER as an example. It’s over 640 pages long by even Amazon’s calculation. They give the reader six full chapters to decide. Believe me, if you read the first six chapters of MONSTER, you can make a decision.  :)

It's rough out there in the marketplace.  :)