The Value of Video Promotion

So, I've mentioned before that I don't think Book Trailers, as they are typically done, are effective marketing for a book.  Frankly, they're rarely going to get the attention of anyone who wasn't already interested, and at best they probably won't detract from audience interest.

And that's because translating "movie trailer" style to promoting books doesn't quite work.
But I've been putting some thought into how video can be used, if not for book promotion strictly, then as part of author branding (there's that thing again).  And, I mean, I do have a degree in Film & Video Production.  So I know something about how the medium works.

So I'm putting something together, teaming up with my son (who is pretty gifted in the video arts, see below) which should be fun and dynamic to watch in its own right, and just possibly inspire some book sales.  We'll see.  Watch this space, because stuff is coming.  (And in case you missed it, earlier this week we dropped the cover to Lady Henterman's Wardrobe.  Check it out.)

Cover for LADY HENTERMAN'S WARDROBE

We have a cover for LADY HENTERMAN'S WARDROBE, the second Streets of Maradaine novel, coming out in March 2018.  If you're anxious for more Rynax brothers after reading THE HOLVER ALLEY CREW, here's their next adventures.  (And if you haven't picked up THE HOLVER ALLEY CREW yet, get on that.)



Mixing high fantasy and urban fantasy, the second novel of the Streets of Maradaine series follows the Rynax brothers' crew of outlaws as they attempt their biggest heist yet and restore justice to the common people.

The neighborhood of North Seleth has suffered--and not just the Holver Alley Fire. Poverty and marginalization are forcing people out of the neighborhood, and violence on the streets is getting worse. Only the Rynax brothers--Asti and Verci--and their Holver Alley Crew are fighting for the common people. They've taken care of the people who actually burned down Holver Alley, but they're still looking for the moneyed interests behind the fire.

The trail of breadcrumbs leads the crew to Lord Henterman, and they plan to infiltrate the noble's house on the other side of the city. While the crew tries to penetrate the heart of the house, the worst elements of North Seleth seem to be uniting under a mysterious new leader. With the crew's attention divided, Asti discovers that the secrets behind the fire, including ones from his past, might be found in Lady Henterman's wardrobe.

Lady Henterman's Wardrobe will be released on March 6th, 2018.

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Amazon and Goodreads pages for Lady Henterman's Wardrobe. 

Ego Check

The topic this week from the SFF Seven is "How do you keep your ego in check?"

And I'm just thinking-- pretty much by being a midlist fantasy writer.  Frankly, I can't imagine anyone getting too big of a head doing this work.  

More to the point, you have to get in the absolute top levels of this industry to even be in danger of getting a big head.  Unless you were already the type of person for whom any level of success would inflate your ego.  To an extent, that's some Dunning-Kruger territory.  

Look, I don't want to give the sense that I'm not thrilled, absolutely thrilled that this is my life, and that I'm incredibly fortunate that my hard work has paid off as well as it has, that I get to tell the story of Maradaine and all the champions within that magical city.  That I get to keep telling it.  It's amazing.

But aside from a few brief moments, rarely does anything in this business actually charge your ego up.  It's far more of a Keep Your Chin Up So They Don't Grind You Down sort of industry.

I still love it, though.  I love the work.  Time to get back to it.   

MODERN PROBLEMS: A Bad Movie I've Watched Many, Many, MANY Times

I have a bit of a confession to make on this one: Modern Problems might very well have been my first Cinematic Anticipation Obsession.  By which I mean that, at the tender age of eight, I saw the commercials and trailers for this movie and my reaction was OH MY GOD THIS MOVIE IT MUST BE MINE.  Just based on commercials of Chevy Chase glowing green and things flying around him, I had already decided that THIS MOVIE WAS AWESOME and nothing would brook my opinion of this idea.  Had there been an internet in 1981, I would have been on it, exclaiming my excitement and anticipation at 24bpm.

I didn’t end up seeing it until at least a year or more later when it finally showed up on HBO or so.  Because I was eight, and in 1981 a PG rating really meant, “Seriously, parents, think about this first.”  I'm pretty sure it did not interest my parents in the slightest, and they were likely even less interested in bringing their eight-year-old son.  But I was excited about a movie with green glowing telekinetic effects, so once I could see it, I did, and I kept seeing it.

But let’s make something very clear: the green glowing telekinetic effects are more or less the only reason this movie exists.  I mean, the plot is quite thin, so I’m pretty sure the decision to make this movie boiled down to a conversation of, “This effect is something we can do now.” “Then let us make a movie in which we do this effect.”

The plot is basically this: Chevy Chase plays an embittered air traffic controller who is certain his girlfriend (Patti D’Arbanville) is cheating on him.  He is spiraling into deeper amounts of awful with his jealousy and bitterness and the lack of power he has in the world.  After an evening of indignities, the roof of his convertible gets stuck open, and he drives home behind a toxic waste truck.  Said toxic waste splashes onto him, and he gets telekinetic powers.

As you do.

Once he gets a handle on what he’s got, he starts on a little gambit of petty revenge against coworkers and rivals, as well as winning back Patti D’Arbanville, all while becoming more confident in his life in a deeply toxic way.  This involves making stuff fly around Air Traffic Control, giving Patti's suitors power nosebleeds, and inflating a ballet dancer’s crotch.  I'm really not sure what the inflating crotch accomplished.  But he wins her back, and then of course, he's telekinetically giving Patti D’Arbanville mindblowing orgasms from the other room.

As you do.

Seriously, it’s about three minutes of Chevy puttering around in the kitchen, making a smoothie in the blender or something, while Patti is going full Chernobyl in the bedroom.  And I have to admit, in my youth I expended far too much brainpower trying to make direct correlation connections between Chevy’s smoothie-blending actions and what he might be specifically doing to her.  Perhaps because Patti hits a crescendo of fever pitch that seems to match pouring from the blender.

Then it gets just plain odd.

The back-half of the movie seems to have been imported from a previously-written script that didn’t involve telekinesis, as it is a complete left turn from where we've been.  Chevy and Patti drive out to a beach house for a getaway weekend with friends.  In this whole part you’ve got Mary Kay Place, Dabny Coleman, Nell Carter and Brian Doyle Murray in a wheelchair.  Why is Brian Doyle Murray in a wheelchair?  He just is.  Maybe it’s a metaphor for Chevy feeling frustrated and powerless despite being perfectly healthy, while this guy is totally laid back and easy-going, despite being in a wheelchair.  But it’s a big reason why I think the whole “beach house” part of the movie is imported from some other script.  Plus: Dabny Coleman shows his bare ass.  For reasons.

Dabny Coleman really is above and beyond in this movie, and gloriously so.  There’s an utterly random scene where he’s standing on the beach in a bathrobe, tape recorder strapped around his neck, where he recites a “partial list of his favorite things”.  Why?  I don’t know, but there’s not a word that comes from Mr. Coleman’s mouth that isn’t delightfully absurd.   “I’m a goddamn good-looking man!”

Things come to a head as Chevy goes from “confident due to his power” to “overconfident” to “batshit crazy”.  It's a whole escalation where he floats up Dabny Coleman and drops him in the mashed potatoes.  Shit goes crazy, and Nell Carter—with absurd Haitian accent—tries to exorcise him with her “demon powder”.  This gives us the signature scene, where Chevy floats around the bed and snorts up all the demon powder like it was super-cocaine, and cackles, “HAHAHAHAHA I LIKE IT!”

And then-- on a dime-- he freaks out and says he’s a monster and heads to the roof.  Patti D’Arbanville talks him down, but not before he’s hit by lightning, which transfers his power to Nell Carter through the TV antenna.  And then everything’s great as they watch the sunrise.

One of the things that always sort of troubled me about this movie is the way it tries to have its cake and eat it with Chevy’s power.  He does “fun” petty things to vent his frustration, and the movie treats it like he’s winning.  It pretty much makes getting back together with Patti D’Arbanville the prize that he’s earned.  But then he acts just plain crazy, and the movie wants us to believe that it’s not him, but the power itself.  Yeah, it’s funny that Nell Carter treats him like he’s possessed by a demon, but he acts like he’s possessed by a demon.  And then when he loses the power, he’s “cured” and calm again.  Because when you think about it, everything he does is pretty horrible, but the movie wants you to feel like that’s not really him doing it.

Like I said, it feels like some other movie—more dramedy than comedy—is living inside this movie, that’s just about an ATC who loses his mind, and the telekinetic stuff got imported onto it.  I mean, it takes twenty-five minutes—a full third of the running time—before we even have the empowering toxic waste incident.  I wonder if that might have actually been a better movie.

But it certainly wouldn’t have earned an eight-year-old’s fanaticism.

On editing and editors

So, I had a few different angles I considered taking on this.  Do I talk about my editing process?  I considered that, but that's largely only useful to you if you think my nuts-and-bolts method is something you can use.  Do I talk about the value of beta-readers & editors and getting other eyes and opinions?  I could, but you know that.  Or, rather, if you're looking for writing advice of any kind, you've already seen that, and have absorbed it, or it's bounced off you and nothing I say will change your opinion on the subject.

Instead, let's talk about specific editors.  Namely, my editor, Sheila Gilbert, who I adore. She won the Hugo for Best Editor Long Form last year, and she's nominated again this year.  Now, you may say to yourself, "Hey, she won last year, should she really win again this year?"  I say: hell yes.  And that sort of thing is hardly unprecedented.  Heck, in the history of the Best Editor Award, before it was split into Long and Short, over thirty years there were only nine different winners.  NINE.  And after it was split, Patrick Nielsen Hayden won three times, and David Hartwell won twice in a row.  So there's plenty of precedent for Sheila to win twice, and she totally should.

Now, you're going to ask me, why should she, Marshall?  What does she do that puts her above the rest of the crowd?  (The rest of the crowd is 80% excellent, of course.)

The obvious answer is, she publishes my books.  This makes me biased, certainly, but it's an important point from my point of view.  But you want something a bit less subjective.

So, let me put something else on the table, in terms of What Editors Do, since it often seems so very nebulous.  I often go to conventions, meet other authors, do the barcon thing, and so on.  There's a lot of in-the-trenches horror stories.  Stories about editors butchering manuscripts, demanding changes that would fundamentally alter the story.  Stories about copy-edits that went outside of the bounds of the copy-edit.  Stories about horrendous covers that the author got stuck with, deeply unhappy with how their books were going to look.

These horror stories are part-and-parcel with the industry.  I've heard them from big names and midlisters and newbies.  

And I don't have one.

I do not have one of those editorial horror stories, and that's because Sheila has been there to keep me from having them.  Even when I've had cover art come in with problems, she's right with me saying, "Yes, let's fix this."  That's what makes someone a Best Editor, in my book.  All five books, in fact, with the sixth, seventh and eighth on the way.

(Speaking of, I have editing to do on that eighth one.  Off to it...)

VIBES: A Bad Movie I've Watched Many, Many, MANY Times

It’s probably hard to imagine here and now, but there was a point in time where the conventional wisdom was that Madonna was a flash-in-the-pan artist, and Cyndi Lauper would be the one to stand the test of time.  This, of course, did not turn out the be case, but as Cyndi Lauper’s music career was losing steam, she decided the best course of action was to follow Madonna’s path and supplement it with an acting career.  Somehow this led to her starring in Vibes, a movie that probably wouldn’t have been made without the novelty of putting Cyndi Lauper in the lead role.  But, mind you, “Cyndi Lauper in the lead role” never became a common sentence in pop culture.
This is a pretty wacky, surreal movie, involving psychic powers and Incan ruins, and unless someone was trying to capitalize on a late-in-the-game Ghostbusters kind of thing, I don’t know how this movie was made.

So: Sylvia (Lauper) and Nick (Jeff Goldblum) are both psychics.  Sylvia's powers are that she has a spirit guide named Lucille who communicates with the dead or astrally projects her, or otherwise does roughly whatever the plot needs Cyndi Lauper to do at any given point.  Goldblum is a psychometric, meaning he reads the history of objects by touching them.  Sylvia is crass, coasting through life, and generally something of a loser, though its worth pointing out that she specifically doesn’t use her powers for cheap profit or screwing people over.  She’s a loser with a heart of gold.  Nick is more educated and refined—because he’s Jeff Goldblum—whose powers are more in the gift/curse territory.  He’s not taken seriously in his job at the museum, where he’s expected to do party tricks.  And he finds out his girlfriend is cheating on him when he picks up her underwear.  (“This underwear was held by another man.” “My brother did my laundry.”  “Your brother scored two goals that night?  And an assist?”  “I knew I should have burned that pair.”  There’s something fundamentally hysterical about Goldblum’s delivery of “And an assist?”)

The two of them meet when they get involved in a psychic study run by Julian Sands, where they’re the best two in the group. Meanwhile, Sylvia gets contacted by Harry (Peter Faulk), who wants to hire her to help find his missing son in the Andes mountains in Peru.  Sylvia doesn’t think she can do it alone, so she convinces Nick to join in.  Given aforementioned party tricks and cheating girlfriend, Nick’s in.  And it’s adventure time!

They get to Peru, and things get hairy.  First they spot someone else from the study, which leads to awkward, “So, what are you doing in Peru?” “What are YOU doing in Peru?” stuff.  Then a half-naked Elizabeth Peña tries to kill Nick.  Which leads Nick and Sylvia to say, “Maybe this isn’t about a missing kid”.  After Harry tries to muddle through some lies (which doesn’t work well, because: psychics), he fesses up to really being a treasure hunter, looking for an Incan “Room of Gold”.  This whole middle bit is coupled with some wacky sequences involving Goldblum and Lauper dancing, and Lauper channeling an assassin’s dead mother so he won’t kill them.

Eventually they’re on the path to the hidden Incan temple, but then they come across the other psychic from the study again, and he’s travelling with Dr. Julian Sands.  Julian Sands turns out to be the bad guy here, which is not a shock to anyone who’s seen Julian Sands in anything.  He kills Harry, mostly because he’s a jerk.   Seriously, for two thirds of the movie, Harry is sort of this lovable scamp, as only Peter Faulk could pull off, and then BAM.  Julian Sands kills him dead just to be a jerk.

So Sylvia and Nick are brought to the Incan temple at gunpoint, where there’s a pyramid of raw psychic power, and shit more or less goes down.  You get Jeff Goldblum saying, “Of course I know how to handle a machine gun. I was the captain of the machine gun team in high school.”  You get Cyndi Lauper possessed, saying things like, “This is the tip of God’s arrow.”  Bad guys are routed (or vaporized by pure psychic juju), and a bit of romance is tacked onto the end, and everything ends up as best as could be hoped for.

The romance really is tacked on, which is a shame, since Lauper and Goldblum actually have a rather nice platonic energy between them.  There’s a rather nice bit in the middle—when they’re at the hotel—when they both have spotted attractive people that they're interested in (the aforementioned murderous, half-naked Elizabeth Peña in the case of Goldblum), and rather sweetly help each other score their potential paramours.  Nick then screws up Sylvia’s, but only because he presumed it was going to turn as murderous as his own did.

Given that the movie’s primary writer mostly only has episodes of “In Search Of…”  and “Ancient Aliens” in her writing credits, I think she took this stuff pretty seriously.  There was probably a movie somewhere in there that was a serious thing about psychics and ancient Incan power, but it got retooled to star Cyndi Lauper, and there you go.  Though, in all fairness: Cyndi Lauper’s acting is fine.  I mean, she’s playing a part that’s more or less in line with the Cyndi Lauper persona (and Goldblum is at his most distilled Goldblumian), but it’s not something she does a bad job with.  But it’s nothing special, and by 1988, “Starring Cyndi Lauper” was not going to give your movie more credibility.

Vibes kind of fascinates me, though, because this is the kind of movie that could never, ever have been made any time other than the ‘80s.  You would never see a movie like it today.  Well, scratch that: you would, but only if they were explicitly making a remake of this movie, starring Ke$ha or something.

Dear Hollywood People: I would totally watch a remake of Vibes starring Ke$ha.  Many, many, many times.

ArmadilloCon Writers Workshop

For the past few years I've been running the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop, and in the years before I was teaching it, I was a student in it.  The first chapters of The Thorn of Dentonhill, A Murder of Mages and The Holver Alley Crew all were workshopped there, and I believe it's an incredibly valuable resource, especially for the cost.  Plus, it's a great SFF-Lit focused con, especially for prospective writers wanting to turn professional.  This year Rebecca Schwarz is taking the reins of the workshop, and she's going to do a fantastic job.  Check it out.

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The ArmadilloCon Writers’ Workshop has become a major event for aspiring SF/F writers. It meets on Friday morning before the convention opens, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The curriculum is designed for beginning and intermediate students. Workshop participants will have their work critiqued by instructors who are professional editors and writers working in the field today.

The morning panel sessions will cover a wide range of topics from managing craft elements such as style, plot, theme, and characterization to the dos and don’ts of preparing your work for professional markets and different approaches to publication (e.g. traditional vs. independent). During the afternoon breakout sessions, participants work together in small groups along with two instructors to exchange critiques in the Milford style. Each participant will receive a personal, in-depth critique of their work from both the instructors and their peers. Learning to receive – and to give – a meaningful critique of a work in progress is an invaluable skill for writers who would like to better assess and improve their own writing.

The ArmadilloCon Writers Workshop is committed to diversity
Diversity is vital to speculative fiction. A genre centered on exploration and encountering the Other must include voices and visions from writers, readers and thinkers of all kinds. For this reason, the ArmadilloCon Writers’ Workshop actively seeks to include students, faculty, visiting scholars, and volunteers from a variety of backgrounds including, but not limited to: race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, economic status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, and ability.

This year we are pleased to offer a limited number of sponsored seats to writers of color. If you would like to be considered for a sponsored seat please complete and submit this form. If you have any questions contact the workshop coordinator at armadilloconwritersworkshop@gmail.com.

How to Enroll
Pay the workshop fee, $90.00, which includes the full ArmadilloCon convention membership.
Submit your original, unpublished work of science fiction, fantasy, or horror fiction. Maximum length 5,000 words. 
Manuscript Deadline: Sunday June 11, 11:59:59 p.m.

Instructors
Nisi Shawl
Trevor Quachri
Don Webb
Martha Wells
Nicky Drayden
D. L. Young
Christopher Brown
E. J. Fischer
Jessica Reisman
Marshall Ryan Maresca
Stina Leicht
Rebecca Schwarz (Workshop Leader)