Finding Humor in a Dark Future

By L.J. Sellers, author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mysteries. This essay was originally posted at Alex J. Cavanaugh's blog, but it's worth a repeat.

In my new novel, the future is bleak, my characters are flawed, and their quests are intensely personal. Writing this novel could have been depressing, but I set much of the story in an endurance contest called the Gauntlet, which provided some unusual and amusing research moments.

In one competition scene, the protagonist is required to crawl through tunnels. I wanted her experience to seem real, so I left my keyboard and got down on my hands and knees. I crawled around the family room for a few minutes, trying to decide how big the tunnel needed to be and what part of my body would start to hurt first.

Of course, my husband walked in as I was crawling and said, “When does the barking start?”

It was the first laugh “til your belly hurts” moment I’d had in a long time.

In another phase of the contest, Lara enters a locked-room scenario, in which she must use the items on hand to find a MacGyver-type solution to get out. I admit, I sought help from my husband, who designs and builds things for a living. We came up with a plausible three-step solution, then decided to test the parts of it that we could. Not wanting to give away this scene in the story, let’s just say we headed down to the garage with a box of matches and some potentially combustible material. (It’s Oregon, and it was raining, so we had to stay inside.)

As we struck the matches and cheered for a flame, we remembered catching our three boys doing something similar when they were young. We imagined our kids walking in on us while we attempted to start a fire in the garage, and saying “What the hell?” We laughed until the tears rolled.

It’s good to experience little moments like that when you write gritty thrillers. Otherwise, it’s too easy to get sucked into a dark mode and forget that people and characters can find joy and humor even under stressful circumstances. I also managed to sneak a light moment into the story near the end. And even though The Arranger is set in a bleak world thirteen years from now, the overall theme is an affirmation of the human desire to improve oneself and make a difference in the world around us.

Do you need humor in every novel? What weird/funny things have you done for research?

I've Seen the Future and It's Not That Scary

by L.J. Sellers
The changes in publishing are happening so fast and furious, it’s almost surreal. If someone had predicted this stuff even five years ago, people would have scoffed and called it social-science fiction. Here’s a recap of the last two weeks:

• Amazon launched a fifth publishing imprint, Thomas & Mercer, which will focus on mysteries and thrillers. Its first four titles will be available on the Kindle, in print and audio formats at amazon.com as well as in bookstores.
• Amazon hired former Time Warner Books CEO and current agent Larry Kirshbaum to head Amazon Publishing’s New York office, putting Amazon in direct competition with NY publishers.
• Amazon has asked publishers to start submitting books in epub format, paving the way for standardization of digital books. Readers and authors rejoice!
• Liberty Media, a cable conglomerate, offered to buy Barnes & Noble, and most analysts say it’s on the strength of the retailer’s e-reader (Nook) and plans to expand into global digital markets.

You’ll note that three of those announcements involve Amazon, and all of them involve e-books. As someone who’s currently writing a futuristic thriller, I've been thinking a lot about the future 13 years from now. In addition to the dystopian elements I’ve included in my novel, I try to imagine realistic changes in business and commerce. The one thing that seems inevitable is that Amazon will become a huge, media and retail conglomerate that wields mega power. In my current reality, my husband and I survive on the royalties I receive from Amazon for my print and e-books sales.

What does all this mean? For starters, if you can, buy stock in Amazon. ☺ And if you still want to sign a contract with a publisher, Amazon should be your first choice. I also think traditional publishing will consolidate to the point that there may only be two or three main presses, and I expect Amazon and B&N to be the dominant forces because they control distribution. B&N is likely to follow Amazon’s lead (as it has done with Nook and PubIt!) and enter the traditional publishing business, signing with authors to release books in all formats and also with e-book exclusivity clauses. This could be a negative for readers because some titles will be available only on Kindle, and some titles will be available only on Nook.

The good news for readers is that there will eventually be more standardization of e-book formats. A few years from now, any e-book you buy will be readable on every device you own... unless it was published by the competition.

For writers, it means you either get picked up by one of the Big 3, with a much better deal than any Big 6 press ever offered, or you go it alone and promote like hell. Small presses will likely disappear too.
 
I also believe e-book prices are going to drop significantly in the near future, driven by Amazon’s dominance as a volume retailer and by self-published authors drive to gain readership. As a reader, this is good news. As a writer, this is the one thing that makes me the most nervous.

Where do you think the industry will be in five years? Ten years?