Greenspan Expected to Get Over $8.5 Million for His Memoir
Yes, it’ll sell. But will it sell that much?
Assuming a cover price of about $30, the publisher would have to sell nearly 600,000 copies of the book to recover just the cost of the advance, and Mr. Greenspan would not receive any additional royalties until it sells nearly 1.9 million copies.
Penguin bought the world rights to the book, meaning that it could recoup some of its costs by selling the right to publish translated editions of the book in foreign countries.
Mr. Greenspan’s advance ranks second only to the more than $10 million paid to former President Bill Clinton for his memoir, “My Life,” which was published in June 2004. Pope John Paul II received an advance of $8.5 million in 1994 for his book, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton received an $8 million advance for her memoir, “Living History,” published in 2003.
Mr. Greenspan, in the 10-page proposal for the book that was circulated among publishing houses interested in bidding on it, said that he would write about the presidents he worked with, the relevance, or lack thereof, of his testimony before Congress, as well as others at all levels of government.
“I do not intend to dwell on personality aberrations, except as they affect policy decision-making — which, of course, always involves personalities,” he wrote […] “I will also describe what it’s like to be a prop at a Congressional hearing, which is too often the role of witnesses.”
This is an old, 2003 article from the Telegraph I happened to run across today while googling other things, and I think it’s a nice little bit of commentary—a personal response to some revered writers, as well as a statement on “great” novels—that’s what drew me in.
Says Mailer,
Name any great novel that didn’t weary you first time through. A great novel has a consciousness that is new to us. We have to become imbued with this new consciousness before we can enjoy the work. I’ve been bored in part by Moby-Dick, The Red and the Black, Anna Karenina, The Scarlet Letter, Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain. Hell, even The Sun Also Rises. Of course, I was a Freshman then.
Link here
BAGNEUX, France, March 3 — Two strips of red-and-white police tape bar the entrance to the low-ceilinged pump room where a young Jewish man, Ilan Halimi, spent the last weeks of his life, tormented and tortured by his captors and eventually splashed with acid in an attempt to erase any traces of their DNA.
The floor of the concrete room, in the cellar of 4, rue Serge-Prokofiev, is bare except for a few packets of rat poison, a slowly drying wet mark and a dozen small circles drawn and numbered in white chalk, presumably marking the spots where the police retrieved evidence of Mr. Halimi’s ordeal.
Mr. Halimi, 23, died Feb. 13, shortly after he was found near a train station 15 miles away by passers-by, after crawling out of the wooded area where he was dumped. He was naked and bleeding from at least four stab wounds to his throat, his hands bound and adhesive tape covering his mouth and eyes. According to the initial autopsy report, burns, apparently from the acid, covered 60 percent of his body.
“I knew they had someone down there,” said a young French-Arab man, loitering in the doorway of a building adjacent to the one where Mr. Halimi was held. He claimed to live upstairs from the makeshift dungeon but would not give his name or say whether he knew then that the man was a Jew. “I didn’t know they were torturing him,” he said. “Otherwise, I would have called the police.”
But it is clear that plenty of people did know, both that Mr. Halimi was being tortured and that he was Jewish. The police, according to lawyers with access to the investigation files, think at least 20 people participated in his abduction and the subsequent, amateurish negotiations for ransom. His captors told his family that if they did not have the money, they should “go and get it from your synagogue,” and later contacted a rabbi, telling him, “We have a Jew.”
Read it all
[article continues:]The horrifying death has stunned France, which has Europe’s largest Muslim and largest Jewish populations. Last weekend, tens of thousands of people marched against racism and anti-Semitism in Paris, joined by the interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, and smaller marches took place in several other French cities, including Marseille.
In the wake of the riots that broke out in the immigrant-heavy Paris suburbs last fall, the case seems to embody the social problems of immigration, race and class that France has been facing with so much uncertainty. The emerging details raise deep fears of virulent anti-Semitism within the hardening underclass, and point to the decaying social fabric in which that underclass lives.
Those that the police say kidnapped and killed Mr. Halimi called themselves the Barbarians, and included people of different backgrounds: the children of blacks from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, of Arabs from North Africa, of at least one Persian from Iran, and of whites from Portugal and France.
The gang’s leader was a tall, charismatic young man named Youssouf Fofana, 25, one of five children born in Paris to at least nominally Muslim immigrants from Ivory Coast. When he was a teenager, the family moved to the bleak neighborhood of 12-story concrete apartment blocks where Mr. Halimi was held.
Trouble started early. He studied plumbing at a local vocational school but by the age of 16 had already begun a series of run-ins with the police, eventually racking up 13 arrests for everything from theft to fencing stolen goods. In 1999, at the age of 19, he stole a car, beating the Portuguese owner who tried to intervene. He was arrested and sentenced to his only jail term, serving two years in prisons in Nanterre and Fleury-Mérogis, neither far from Paris.
He returned to his mother’s apartment and used his prison credentials to assume the role of senior tough among younger, idle men and women, people in the neighborhood say. Lawyers familiar with the case suggest that this is when the seeds of the Barbarians were sown.
By 2004, the police say, he tried extortion, aiming at prominent French Jews. When that failed, the gang apparently turned to kidnapping, using young women as bait.
The Barbarians are thought to have been behind six attempted abductions, four of Jewish men, before succeeding with Mr. Halimi.
In a case in early January, a woman tried repeatedly to get a Jewish music producer to meet her on the outskirts of Paris, finally managing instead to persuade his father to come to a suburban parking lot, on the pretext that she had music CD’s that belonged to his son. Several men met the father instead, beating him senseless when he resisted their attempt to force him into their car.
Mike Akiba worked with Mr. Halimi at Voltaire Phone in Paris, one of a dozen tiny Jewish-owned cellular telephone shops along Boulevard Voltaire in the 11th Arrondissement. He said Mr. Halimi was alone in the store when a 17-year-old French-Iranian girl came in and flirted with him. Mr. Akiba said she might have thought Mr. Halimi, a handsome man with piercing brown eyes, was the owner.
Mr. Halimi told Mr. Akiba about her the next day and said he had agreed to meet her that Friday night near Porte d’Orleans, a neighborhood on Paris’s southern edge. Mr. Akiba last saw him about 10:30 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 20, as he drove from Boulevard Voltaire in his Champagne-colored Renault Twingo.
Mr. Halimi apparently met the woman as planned, then drove her to Sceaux, a suburb near Bagneux, where his captors must have grabbed him. His car was later found abandoned in a parking lot there.
Mr. Akiba said the investigating police officers discovered the gang had tried the same tactic on several men in the other phone shops.
Mr. Halimi was taken to the Pierre-Plate housing project in Bagneux, and initially held in an empty third-floor apartment at 1, rue Serge-Prokofiev, with the help of the building’s superintendent, according to the lawyers who have seen the investigative files. The gang covered his eyes and mouth with tape, leaving only a hole for a straw.
The Halimi family’s first contact with the kidnappers was the night of Saturday, Jan. 21, when a gang member called Mr. Halimi’s girlfriend and instructed her to log on to a Hotmail e-mail account. That began a series of agonizingly disjointed communications from Mr. Halimi’s abductors that included hundreds of phone calls and e-mail messages, and ransom demands that started at $500,000 and dropped to $5,000, said the family’s lawyer, Francis Szpiner.
After a few days, the gang moved their captive to the concrete basement room beneath a section of the building a few doors down. They shaved his head and sliced his cheek with a knife, photographed him with blood running down his face, and e-mailed the picture to his family.
As the days wore on, his captors turned increasingly cruel, stripping off his clothes and beating, scratching and cutting him. A burning cigarette was pressed into his forehead.
The family was instructed to send a ransom to Ivory Coast, via Western Union, and Mr. Fofana traveled to that country at least once in early February. According to reports after his eventual arrest, it was after the ransom failed to arrive that the torture of Mr. Halimi began in earnest.
The police did not yet know the identities of the gang members but were close on their heels. Around Feb. 10, Mr. Fofana briefly visited an Internet cafe on the Rue de la Fidélité in the 10th Arrondissement, wearing a cap and a scarf that covered his mouth and nose. “I don’t even think he took his gloves off,” the manager said Friday. Just 15 minutes later, he said, police officers arrived looking for a black man, a computer-generated sketch in hand. They lifted fingerprints from the keyboard Mr. Fofana had used and confiscated the computer’s hard drive and the 5-euro note he had paid with.
On the evening of Feb. 13, Mr. Halimi was found. It is not yet clear when he was stabbed or whether his captors thought he was dead when they dumped him among the trees behind the Ste.-Geneviève-des-Bois train station south of Paris.
Two days later, with the case beginning to make shocking headlines, Mr. Fofana flew back to Ivory Coast and was soon moving freely about town with a girlfriend, identified by the French media as Mariam Cissé. Meanwhile, the police had begun circulating sketches of two women who had served the gang as bait, drawn from the recollections of the men who had been approached.
One was the 17-year-old French-Iranian believed to have lured Mr. Halimi to his death. The sketch of a second woman proved particularly accurate, and when it was shown on television, many people recognized her as Audrey Lorleach, 24, lawyers involved in the case say.
Fearing she would be caught, Ms. Lorleach turned herself in and led the police to her boyfriend, Jérôme Tony Ribeiro, a young man of Portuguese descent. He gave the police Mr. Fofana’s name.
When Mr. Fofana saw his name and image in the French media the next day, he was enraged and called Mr. Halimi’s father and girlfriend and various of his accomplices in France from Abidjan, threatening them all — and confirming his whereabouts to the police. He was arrested on Feb. 22. [Mr. Fofana was returned to France on Saturday after being handed over to French custody by Ivorian authorities, Agence France-Presse reported.]
So far, a total of 19 people, ages 17 to 39, have been arrested in connection with Mr. Halimi’s abduction and death, including the French-Iranian woman, whose first name is Yalda.
The police found Islamist literature and documents supporting a Palestinian aid group in the home of at least one of the people arrested, but lawyers involved in the case dismiss Islamic extremism as a motivation, noting that many of the people involved were not Muslim. The Halimis’ lawyer, Mr. Szpiner, denied French news reports that the gang had called Mr. Halimi’s family and recited the Koran.
Mr. Fofana has admitted his involvement. In an interview videotaped by a local journalist at the police station in Abidjan and broadcast on French television, a smiling, relaxed Mr. Fofana denied that he killed Mr. Halimi and dismissed the anti-Semitic aspect of the abduction.
“It was done for financial ends,” he said on the tape.
Standing in the doorway in Bagneux near where Mr. Halimi was held, the young French-Arab man smiled when asked about Mr. Fofana. “He was nice, everybody liked him,” he said. “If the police bring him back here, the guys in the neighborhood will liberate him.”
In the wake of the riots that broke out in the immigrant-heavy Paris suburbs last fall, the case seems to embody the social problems of immigration, race and class that France has been facing with so much uncertainty. The emerging details raise deep fears of virulent anti-Semitism within the hardening underclass, and point to the decaying social fabric in which that underclass lives.
Those that the police say kidnapped and killed Mr. Halimi called themselves the Barbarians, and included people of different backgrounds: the children of blacks from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, of Arabs from North Africa, of at least one Persian from Iran, and of whites from Portugal and France.
The gang’s leader was a tall, charismatic young man named Youssouf Fofana, 25, one of five children born in Paris to at least nominally Muslim immigrants from Ivory Coast. When he was a teenager, the family moved to the bleak neighborhood of 12-story concrete apartment blocks where Mr. Halimi was held.
Trouble started early. He studied plumbing at a local vocational school but by the age of 16 had already begun a series of run-ins with the police, eventually racking up 13 arrests for everything from theft to fencing stolen goods. In 1999, at the age of 19, he stole a car, beating the Portuguese owner who tried to intervene. He was arrested and sentenced to his only jail term, serving two years in prisons in Nanterre and Fleury-Mérogis, neither far from Paris.
He returned to his mother’s apartment and used his prison credentials to assume the role of senior tough among younger, idle men and women, people in the neighborhood say. Lawyers familiar with the case suggest that this is when the seeds of the Barbarians were sown.
By 2004, the police say, he tried extortion, aiming at prominent French Jews. When that failed, the gang apparently turned to kidnapping, using young women as bait.
The Barbarians are thought to have been behind six attempted abductions, four of Jewish men, before succeeding with Mr. Halimi.
In a case in early January, a woman tried repeatedly to get a Jewish music producer to meet her on the outskirts of Paris, finally managing instead to persuade his father to come to a suburban parking lot, on the pretext that she had music CD’s that belonged to his son. Several men met the father instead, beating him senseless when he resisted their attempt to force him into their car.
Mike Akiba worked with Mr. Halimi at Voltaire Phone in Paris, one of a dozen tiny Jewish-owned cellular telephone shops along Boulevard Voltaire in the 11th Arrondissement. He said Mr. Halimi was alone in the store when a 17-year-old French-Iranian girl came in and flirted with him. Mr. Akiba said she might have thought Mr. Halimi, a handsome man with piercing brown eyes, was the owner.
Mr. Halimi told Mr. Akiba about her the next day and said he had agreed to meet her that Friday night near Porte d’Orleans, a neighborhood on Paris’s southern edge. Mr. Akiba last saw him about 10:30 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 20, as he drove from Boulevard Voltaire in his Champagne-colored Renault Twingo.
Mr. Halimi apparently met the woman as planned, then drove her to Sceaux, a suburb near Bagneux, where his captors must have grabbed him. His car was later found abandoned in a parking lot there.
Mr. Akiba said the investigating police officers discovered the gang had tried the same tactic on several men in the other phone shops.
Mr. Halimi was taken to the Pierre-Plate housing project in Bagneux, and initially held in an empty third-floor apartment at 1, rue Serge-Prokofiev, with the help of the building’s superintendent, according to the lawyers who have seen the investigative files. The gang covered his eyes and mouth with tape, leaving only a hole for a straw.
The Halimi family’s first contact with the kidnappers was the night of Saturday, Jan. 21, when a gang member called Mr. Halimi’s girlfriend and instructed her to log on to a Hotmail e-mail account. That began a series of agonizingly disjointed communications from Mr. Halimi’s abductors that included hundreds of phone calls and e-mail messages, and ransom demands that started at $500,000 and dropped to $5,000, said the family’s lawyer, Francis Szpiner.
After a few days, the gang moved their captive to the concrete basement room beneath a section of the building a few doors down. They shaved his head and sliced his cheek with a knife, photographed him with blood running down his face, and e-mailed the picture to his family.
As the days wore on, his captors turned increasingly cruel, stripping off his clothes and beating, scratching and cutting him. A burning cigarette was pressed into his forehead.
The family was instructed to send a ransom to Ivory Coast, via Western Union, and Mr. Fofana traveled to that country at least once in early February. According to reports after his eventual arrest, it was after the ransom failed to arrive that the torture of Mr. Halimi began in earnest.
The police did not yet know the identities of the gang members but were close on their heels. Around Feb. 10, Mr. Fofana briefly visited an Internet cafe on the Rue de la Fidélité in the 10th Arrondissement, wearing a cap and a scarf that covered his mouth and nose. “I don’t even think he took his gloves off,” the manager said Friday. Just 15 minutes later, he said, police officers arrived looking for a black man, a computer-generated sketch in hand. They lifted fingerprints from the keyboard Mr. Fofana had used and confiscated the computer’s hard drive and the 5-euro note he had paid with.
On the evening of Feb. 13, Mr. Halimi was found. It is not yet clear when he was stabbed or whether his captors thought he was dead when they dumped him among the trees behind the Ste.-Geneviève-des-Bois train station south of Paris.
Two days later, with the case beginning to make shocking headlines, Mr. Fofana flew back to Ivory Coast and was soon moving freely about town with a girlfriend, identified by the French media as Mariam Cissé. Meanwhile, the police had begun circulating sketches of two women who had served the gang as bait, drawn from the recollections of the men who had been approached.
One was the 17-year-old French-Iranian believed to have lured Mr. Halimi to his death. The sketch of a second woman proved particularly accurate, and when it was shown on television, many people recognized her as Audrey Lorleach, 24, lawyers involved in the case say.
Fearing she would be caught, Ms. Lorleach turned herself in and led the police to her boyfriend, Jérôme Tony Ribeiro, a young man of Portuguese descent. He gave the police Mr. Fofana’s name.
When Mr. Fofana saw his name and image in the French media the next day, he was enraged and called Mr. Halimi’s father and girlfriend and various of his accomplices in France from Abidjan, threatening them all — and confirming his whereabouts to the police. He was arrested on Feb. 22. [Mr. Fofana was returned to France on Saturday after being handed over to French custody by Ivorian authorities, Agence France-Presse reported.]
So far, a total of 19 people, ages 17 to 39, have been arrested in connection with Mr. Halimi’s abduction and death, including the French-Iranian woman, whose first name is Yalda.
The police found Islamist literature and documents supporting a Palestinian aid group in the home of at least one of the people arrested, but lawyers involved in the case dismiss Islamic extremism as a motivation, noting that many of the people involved were not Muslim. The Halimis’ lawyer, Mr. Szpiner, denied French news reports that the gang had called Mr. Halimi’s family and recited the Koran.
Mr. Fofana has admitted his involvement. In an interview videotaped by a local journalist at the police station in Abidjan and broadcast on French television, a smiling, relaxed Mr. Fofana denied that he killed Mr. Halimi and dismissed the anti-Semitic aspect of the abduction.
“It was done for financial ends,” he said on the tape.
Standing in the doorway in Bagneux near where Mr. Halimi was held, the young French-Arab man smiled when asked about Mr. Fofana. “He was nice, everybody liked him,” he said. “If the police bring him back here, the guys in the neighborhood will liberate him.”
Tonight I’m booked to do a reading here in town, and for once the prospect doesn’t terrify me. See, it’s a monthly open-mic set-up called The Bardroom, and that means that I’m not going to be the center of attention. Although they’ve mentioned me on the bill that’s been emailed around, they’ve also mentioned some other locals, and have invited any and all to just get out of their seats, climb onstage, and do their bit.
But the real question is: Why am I terrified of readings? In high school I did the drama bit, doing Shakespeare and Thornton Wilder, but those involved mouthing someone else’s words. And no, I was never particularly good at that either.
It helps to be published, of course. But I remember my first terrified reading back in grad school, where I read a couple poems I’d published in the Emerson literary magazine. My face was beet red as I sweated through the few lines of those short pieces, reading (I was later told) at manic speed, so that unless you had the poems in front of you, you’d have no idea what I’d said.
Years passed, and I foolishly didn’t read again until my first book was published. And that was a poorly arranged thing, set up by friends, in my wonderful local Budapest watering hole. We took over a corner and I read some passage, frightened out of my mind, even though all 9 spectators (with the exception of two girls who’d come because of the notice in the paper) were good friends. It ended up being a bit silly, because the rest of the bar was filled with drinkers making lots of noise, and my listeners could hardly hear a thing. The drinks did help me, but only a little.
Cut to reading #3. Again set up by friends, this time in a Budapest bookstore. It was quiet, and again it was mostly my friends there. So I relaxed some, and did all right. It wasn’t until 2004’s reading #4, at Partners & Crime in NYC, that the fear returned. The staff was great, as were my publishers who came along, and the—I think—one person who’d wandered in and wasn’t contractually obliged to listen. But I was still nervous as hell, and then embarrassed when I asked one of the staffers how to improve my future readings: “Shorter. You went on kind of a long time.”For a couple years I was Gail Mazur’s assistant at the Cambridge, MA, Blacksmith House Poetry Series, a brilliant creation that brought major voices of poetry into a small, intimate room where you could listen up close. The poets were wonderful, reading with sophistication and confidence I could only dream of. But at the same time, I realized that I much preferred the poems on the page. With poetry, if I like a line, I think about it, turn it over in my head, and by the time I’ve returned the poet is five lines on, and I’ve missed the thread.
So I can’t say I’ve ever been really behind the idea of standing in front of a crowd, reading my words to people. Writing is all about sitting in a room with yourself. Literature, for me, has never been a spectator sport.
Like I said, tonight’s not a problem. It’s not about me, and if I read poorly, the memory will be washed away by the far more talented performers slated to read.
But I wonder: Do other writers out there have this crushing fear of reading their stuff in public? Do you read shyly or with confidence? And for those who’ve been in the game much longer than myself: Does the fear ever go away?
So I can’t say I’ve ever been really behind the idea of standing in front of a crowd, reading my words to people. Writing is all about sitting in a room with yourself. Literature, for me, has never been a spectator sport.
Like I said, tonight’s not a problem. It’s not about me, and if I read poorly, the memory will be washed away by the far more talented performers slated to read.
But I wonder: Do other writers out there have this crushing fear of reading their stuff in public? Do you read shyly or with confidence? And for those who’ve been in the game much longer than myself: Does the fear ever go away?
Mr Nadler has let roll his solo blog project, Special Forces Then and Now,
devoted to the origins of the special forces, particularly the First Special Service Force (FSSF), a WWII Canadian-American commando unit that along with the OSS’s Jedburghs and Darby’s Rangers pioneered special warfare.
A Perfect Hell,in Canadaunleashed on the States
This solidly researched and smartly written volume is a fitting tribute to a unique group of warriors.
his newest piece
I’ve been out of the picture lately due to a mix of trying to get work done and trying to deal with a pesky cold. But today I was glancing at the Yahoo! search page’s headlines and followed a few links, and began to feel rather apocalyptic.
1) Three killed at Indian anti-Bush protests. That’s not good.
2) Ex-official: Iraq abuses growing worse. Hmm.
3) Al-Quaida figure sets rules for oil war. This looked interesting, so I read about some 2003 rules for engagement set by Al-Quaida—namely, blow up pipelines and tankers, but don’t burn oil fields; we’ll need them when the Islamic Republic is established. And now, via Western news, all us jihadists have this detail straight.
3) Video shows Blanco’s assirances on levees. The Katrina (seemingly named after my sister) melee, proving utter incompetence in centers of power.
I don’t really care about Wendy’s selling their Baja Fresh chain, and though it was interesting, the Nazi code-breakers isn’t really that pleasing to hear about. But get this:
4) Antarctic ice sheet in “significant decline”. The apocalypse is coming at us from all sides.
But then I saw the last bit about:
5) Filmmaker wraps movie in just over two hours.
Well, that’s cool, right? So I follow the link and find out it’s an Indian right-to-die movie filmed around a hospital bed.
Maybe it’s the illness or some other personal fact pulling me in the wrong direction, but geez, the world really is going to shit, isn’t it? And that’s not even taking into account smiling Gary Glitter.
But yesterday, the news had the opposite effect. It actually excited me. Why? This story about the assessment that the Soviet Union did in fact order the assassination of the pope back in 1981.
If you know my books, you’ll know generally why I find this interesting. But there’s more. Writing political thrillers, you sometimes find yourself painted into a corner. People are killing one another, secrets are being withheld, and at some point there’s got to be an explanation. And in the world of my books, it’s easiest to call those answers “conspiracies”.I try to make as interesting and plausible a conspiracy as I can, but no matter how hard I try, there’s always a voice in my head saying, “C’mon Olen. You think anyone’s gonna buy that?”In Yalta Boulevard, I had a group of American fundamentalists planning a revolt in Eastern Europe. This isn’t new—Deighton did it in Billion Dollar Brain—but I wanted to make it seem serious and very very possible. In the upcoming Liberation Movements, the story revolves around psychokinetic experiments that lead to, well, psychokinetic conspiracies (kind of). And in Falling Sickness, the work-in-progress, we open with the assassination of Sweden’s great politician Olof Palme in 1986.Of course I know why he was killed, I just want you to believe it when you read it.
Which is why I was quite nearly thrilled when I saw that the world really is as strange and outlandish as an author’s wandering imagination might make it. (Yes, the Soviets tried to whack the pope because they thought he was causing trouble in Poland; and yes—and almost as strange—they failed.) And the world is even stranger than we can imagine it, as Robin has pointed out before.
So writers, make up whatever shit you want! It’s a wonderful freedom.
Which is why I was quite nearly thrilled when I saw that the world really is as strange and outlandish as an author’s wandering imagination might make it. (Yes, the Soviets tried to whack the pope because they thought he was causing trouble in Poland; and yes—and almost as strange—they failed.) And the world is even stranger than we can imagine it, as Robin has pointed out before.
So writers, make up whatever shit you want! It’s a wonderful freedom.
As part of my endless narcissistic Googling project, today I typed “contemporary nomad” and was pleasantly surprised to find this mention at Slate. Now, who could’ve brought our little blogspot to the attention of that North Star of online commentary?
Unsurprisingly, it was none other than our very own Mr Nadler, quoted with gusto by Michael Weiss:
John Nadler at Contemporary Nomad, who believes Mladic is under the care and protection of “Serbian spooks” (state security), asks, “What do we make of last night’s drama? It is likely the same tired charade the Serbian and Republika Srpska governments conduct every few years to prove to the nagging prosecutors at The Hague that they are doing their best: ‘We got him … oh damn, he slipped through our fingers.’”
As a companion piece to Kevin’s earlier post, there’s a (to me pretty questionable) report on a Vietnamese man who, after suffering fevers in 1973, has since been unable to sleep—at all—in the past 33 years.
“I don’t know whether the insomnia has impacted my health or not. But I’m still healthy and can farm normally like others,” [Thai] Ngoc said.
Proving his health, the elderly resident of Que Trung commune, Que Son district said he can carry two 50kg bags of fertilizer down 4km of road to return home every day.
His wife said, “My husband used to sleep well, but these days, even liquor cannot put him down.”
She said when Ngoc went to Da Nang for a medical examination, doctors gave him a clean bill of health, except a minor decline in liver function.
Among the provcative and always well-worth-your-time discussions going on at Mystery Circus’s Peanut Gallery, the ever-evil Jim Winter asked a question about writing series:
…I look at Doolittle and Gischler and notice they’re writing standalones. And every agent, writer, and editor tells me I need a series.
The book I’m currently shopping is pitched as “a standalone with series potential.” And yet I’m so bored with the idea of doing another series or even my current one that I’m seriously considering scrapping Kepler #3 and starting its replacement off with Kepler already dead.
So why is it they keep saying you have to have a series when so many authors clearly are not writing them?
Part of this was a misconception about what series authors do. I assumed (wrongly) that most mystery authors come up with a first book in a series and simply think, “Oh, I’ve got the hang of this, I’ve got my character figured out—I’ll just keep writing.” That was unfair, and pretty stupid. I also came into contact with more and more series that were not unlike my own, in that they were conceptual. They were constructed like elaborate multi-volume novels, which to me is still the way to write a series.In answer to Jim, I tried to explain my shift of perspective in more personal terms:
I used to rail against the idea of a series—I thought it was too much rehashing of a single idea—but I’ve grown more comfortable with the idea recently. Maybe because my own series is reaching its finale and I’m getting nervous. Now I find myself mapping out a new trilogy that my agent finds exciting partly because the same person reappears in each. The only way I can make myself happy with the idea is to see it as a 3-part novel (like Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson 9-book series) that happens to be divided into multiple covers. More advances for me & my agent, more time to build an audience for it.
Thus the other side of the series, and why I think many agents push the concept: it’s practical. In a day when midlist authors are being dropped like last year’s Gucci bags, a series lets everyone involved have a bit of a rest. A publisher is willing to wait a couple years before making that tough decision, and in the meantime, with yearly advances coming in, the author has more chance of working full-time on just writing as well as s/he can.
Lots of things change with time. When my agent first took me on, we had a nice sit-down to discuss what I wanted with my career. I told him in no uncertain terms that I wanted to write these five crime/espionage novels, and then stop writing thrillers altogether. He nodded. “I’m serious,” I told him, and he shrugged, saying, “Well, we’ll see. Once the money starts coming in you might change your mind.”
He was right and he was wrong. I did change my mind, but not (entirely) because of the money (which pays my rent, but doesn’t do a hell of a lot more). I changed my mind because I changed in the five years since our conversation. I learned that thrillers can be as perfect a form for art as the suburban melodrama, and I learned that a series doesn’t mean someone is lacking in ideas.
I mentioned Len Deighton, but there are so many more. Le Carre’s trilogy collected in “The Quest for Karla”, Philip Kerr’s “Berlin Noir” books, Bruen’s Jack Taylors, and how many in the general literary sphere? The Rabbits, the Prousts, that Dance to the Music of Time, and of course Robin’s friend, Mr Musil. The list goes on & on.
But I do stick to my contention that the most valuable series are those written as a single entity. Call it a multi-volume novel, because that’s really what I’m talking about. It has a beginning and an end, though the writer may not be conscious of it when penning the first volume.
While my outlines have never stretched longer than a single page, I’m the kind of writer who needs to have some idea where I’m going. I knew when writing Bridge that there would be one book for each decade of Cold War, each book would focus on a different main character, and the last book would occur during the 1989 revolution and end with Emil Brod, the hero of Bridge, as an old man. That’s really all I knew, but it was enough to form a concept in my head and keep me going.
Now, as I mentioned above, I’m mapping out a trilogy. This time I’m going about it the way one might when writing a single book. I’m outlining in detail (something new for me) a contemporary spy series that follows a single protagonist over a few years. The core “mystery” remains the same, though in each book the focus shifts to more urgent matters that play themselves out by the end of each volume.
So I’m back in series-land, despite my earlier misguided apprehensions. And I’m liking it. I’m beginning to see the potential in series to do things that it’s harder to pull off in a single book, and I’m finding pleasure in the inevitable security it gives me. Three books, three advances; one book, one advance. You do the math.
But honestly, it’s not just about the money.