Writing Bullshit

Is this what your outline looks like?

NOT where I write...

by Tom Schreck

There's a lot of bullshit communicated about successfully writing a novel. If you heed much of it you'll get paralyzed and never be able to finish your own work of fiction.

The truth is that writing a book isn't joining the Marines, it isn't Transcendental Meditation nor is it discovering cold fusion. It has more to do with cleaning your basement, building a bird house or creating a garden in your backyard.

In other words it involves some planning, some trial and error and quite a bit of time on task.

It doesn't require any of this crap:

* Large amounts of uninterrupted time in a beautiful oak paneled office.

I write before my day job in between hound bays and getting up every 7 minutes to act as the uniformed doorman for my three four legged VIPs.

* You must have a completely formed idea, outlined neatly with Roman numerals, bullet points and color coded categories.

Actually, you need an idea. Then another idea of where to go. Do that for 300 pages and you get a book.

* You can't start your book until you go on police ride-a-longs, volunteer on the local SWAT team or travel to Rome to interview the custodian at the Vatican for your story background.

This is fiction. You make this shit up. Read an article, go to Wikipedia and then start writing.

* You must write only when the muse comes to visit you.

Good luck with that. It's plain crap.

* You can't finish because you're blocked.

You're not a colon and you don't get blocked. You stop working. If what comes next to you isn't obvious then you have to problem solve, do some trial and error and rewrite.

It's work.

Tom Schreck writes the Duffy Dombrowski Series and the stand alone thriller GETTING DUNN. TKO is the #1 boxing book on Amazon Kindle.

Why Fighting is Important

Isn’t life a fight for all of us to one degree or another?

And we don’t win all of those fights and even the ones that we win often leave us marked up, sore and exhausted.  I box as a hobby and part of the reason I do it is because it is a metaphor for everything else I do in life.

I’ve fought for 34 years, first getting my black belt in Tae Kwon Do and then moving on to boxing. I’m glad I can defend myself and I think it is important for everyone to know how to throw a punch or kick if they have to.

But these aren’t the main reasons I fight.

I do it because it still scares me and I do it because it teaches me over and over again that I can take pain if I have to.

http://tinyurl.com/Duffyontheropes

The more pain I can endure, the more I can get out of life. The more I can put off the immediate gratification addiction the more long-term hedonism I can enjoy. Getting hit, feeling it and dealing with it, let’s me know I am not a slave to always feeling good.

Doing what scares me over and over teaches me that I can deal with emotions I don’t like and move forward anyway.

My character, Duffy, lives by this.  He’s scared to fight but terrified of getting too old not to fight. In my-work-in-progress he’s sent in to crisis when it looks like boxing is going to be taken away from him. He knows it’s who he is not just what he does and when that’s taken from him he realizes he might not be any different than anyone else.

I judge pro boxing and last Friday I did the ESPN fights. In two of the bouts guys took beatings that no reasonable person would ever endure. When the fights were stopped by the referee both fighters complained. They wanted to keep going.

They were both bleeding from several facial lacerations and their eyes were swollen. I watched the replay of the fights and television homogenizes the brutality of the sport. Up close it’s real trauma, real blood and real hurt.

To do that willingly you have to be special. Some might even say insane.

But if you’ve done it you know that there is something intoxicating about it.

Facing what scares you and keeping on when you’re hurt is its own special high.

You don't have to fight to get this but for me it is the cleanest of the metaphors.

What do you do?

Judging a Book by the Cover

Tom Schreck

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was at the Baltimore Bouchercon sitting having beers with my buddy and mystery writer extraordinaire, Henry Perez.

"I read 'On The Ropes' and damn, Schreck, you can write," Henry said.

"Wow, thanks, Henry," I said.

"Yeah that was some dark shit."

"Dark? People usually tell me it's funny," I said. I hadn't heard "dark" before.

"A coerced mother-daughter internet sex ring isn't dark?" Henry said and took a sip off his Sam Adams.

I guess he had a point. Then he said something shocking.

"You gotta lose the dog on the cover, though. That's going to kill you."

"What? I love the hound." I thought everyone did.

"Yeah, he's great, Schreck, but you put a dog on the cover and everyone thinks you're a cozy writer. Let me tell you, you ain't a cozy writer." Henry took a self-congratulatory pull off his draft.

Fast forward six years and Thomas & Mercer releases the fourth in my series, "The Vegas Knockout." My editor told me when he signed me that we were losing the hound. I was bummed.

For a little while.

The book was released at the end of April.  On July 1 it was the number one rated hard-boiled mystery on Amazon.

The cover is a close up of a fighter getting punched in the face and spitting out his mouth guard.

Well, I got my rights back to my back list and in a joint effort with my literary agency, Irene Goodman, we're re-releasing the books with new gritty covers. In the first week "On the Ropes" with no advertising or buildup made it to the top 50 of the mystery sports genre six years after its original
release.

What do you think about covers? Which of my covers do you prefer and why? Even if you like the doggy one which one would you be more apt to buy?