The Joy of the Heist

I'm guest blogging at  Elizabeth A. White's blog today on how and why I came to write ICE CHEST. C'mon by!

Twitrage Strikes Again

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

The online reaction to couple of recent news items illustrates once again the dangers of what I’ve come to call “Twitrage.”

Twitrage happens when someone sees an item in print or on the Internet, gets offended, then immediately takes to Twitter or other sites on the Web to trumpet their outrage, all before taking a closer look to see if there’s really anything to be offended about.

For our first example, we turn to Amanda Carpenter, whose Twitter feed describes her as a “Speechwriter/senior communications adviser to Ted Cruz.” Sen. Cruz’s designated mouthpiece was mightily incensed over the idea that in these troubled times, President Obama would be frivolous enough to host a concert by teen idol Katy Perry at the White House.

“Do they even care about optics anymore?” she tweeted, before comparing all the important things her boss had been allegedly working on: “Israel, border crisis, Internet taxes, NSA, FAA. Iran. Not Katy Perry concerts.”

Only problem was, Ms. Carpenter had missed the fact that, not only was the president certainly working on all those things as well, but that the concert was a benefit for the Special Olympics. As one of Cruz’s fellow Republicans once famously said, “Oops.”

After this was pointed out to her, with a few questions as to what, exactly, Cruz’s office had against benefit shows for disabled children, she deleted the tweets in question and apologized — not to the president, the person she’d actually insulted, but to her Twitter followers. Obama Derangement Syndrome means never have to say you’re sorry --to the president.

Then there’s the liberal outrage directed against State Sen. Richard Ross of Massachusetts, after The Boston Globe’s website reported the Republican senator was sponsoring a bill to require divorcing couples to get court permission before dating.

It’s pretty much standard language in a custody order that neither party can have “unrelated overnight guests of the opposite sex while the children are in their custody.” The theory, and it’s not an unreasonable one, is that it would be upsetting to children to have someone who’s not Mom or Dad stumble out of the former parental bedroom yawning while the kids are eating their morning Froot Loops.

This bill, however, went even farther than that. It says that in a divorce proceeding “the party remaining in the home shall not conduct a dating or sexual relationship within the home until a divorce is final and all financial and custody issues are resolved, unless the express permission is granted by the courts.”

Got that? For divorcing couples in Massachusetts, the bill as written would require judicial permission to even date until the case is settled.

We should all be pretty outraged about this, right? Sen. Ross is pushing a major invasion of personal privacy and liberty, right? Certainly there’s been much headshaking and finger-wagging on Twitter, as well as on liberal blogs such as Jezebel.com and ThinkProgress.

“Hard to believe a small-government Republican would want to make you check with the government before having sex,” tut-tutted Alan Colmes’ blog Liberaland.

But, as so often happens with Twitrage, there’s less to this story than meets the eye. As reported by Boston Magazine, “the bill has no legislative sponsors, no support, and is in no way under consideration by anybody.”

It seems there’s an old tradition in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts called “the right of free petition,” which allows private citizens to submit just about any bill they want to the legislature for consideration. You want to propose legislation to make putting pineapple on pizza a capital felony in the Commonwealth, you could do it. The only requirement is you’ve got to find an actual member to file the paperwork.

According to Boston Daily reporter David S. Bernstein, “many legislators aren’t even aware that they are allowed to deny a citizen petition request.” Just because a proposed bill gets filed doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, or even that the person who signed off on the petition cares enough about it to bring it to the floor.

As it turns out, this same bill has been proposed by the same guy, an 83-year-old codger named Robert LeClair, for years, and it never gets anywhere. LeClair clearly has an ax to grind, but nobody in the legislature is turning the grindstone for him. So everybody just calm the heck down.

In these times of instantaneous worldwide communication, false or incomplete information can, in the words of the old saying, “be halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” So can the indignation from the kind of stories that cause both liberals and conservatives to say “isn’t that just like those [insert your favorite bogeyman here]” before they have all the facts.

So let’s be careful out there.

The Big Blog Hop

Okay, so there I am, minding my own business, when out of the blue fellow Polis Books author Casey Doran (writer of the Jericho Sands series) drops into my e-mail inbox to ask if I wanted to be part of the International Blog Hop. "The whut?" I answered in my best Gomer Pyle accent.  It's simple, he said: you just answer four questions  about the way you write, add a pic of you, a cover pic of your latest book with a buying link; plus a link to your website and FB page. Your posting date would be Monday April 21st. You then need to invite three more authors, and tell them that if they agree, they will need their post scheduled for Monday April 28. 

Sure, I said, and so, here I am. 

What am I working on?

I recently turned in my fourth Jack Keller novel, DEVILS AND DUST, to Jason Pinter at Polis Books. I’m still waiting on notes for that, so in a sense, I’m still working on it. In the meantime, I’m working on what I call “my latest venture in career suicide.” See, the conventional wisdom is that your next book should be pretty much like your last one, only different enough so that the reader doesn’t feel ripped off. That’s why so many series go on longer than they should, and, I think, why an awful lot of writers burn out. So I’m constantly writing something different. In addition to the Jack Keller and Tony Wolf/Tim Buckthorn novels, I’ve written a standalone (STORM SURGE), a legal thriller (LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY), a military thriller (GALLOWS POLE) a military/space opera/vampire novel (MONSTER) and a medieval fantasy/mystery crossover (THE KING’S JUSTICE). It seems I want to write at least one book in every genre I enjoy. So for my next act, I’m trying a comic heist novel, a la Donald Westlake. It’s about a group of eccentric crooks who decide to steal this: 

No, not the model. The fantastic, outrageously expensive jewel-encrusted bra that Victoria’s Secret uses every year as a promotional gimmick. There are redneck crooks, Jersey mobsters, and, of course beautiful women. Working title: BOOBS: A COMEDY OF APPEARANCES. It’s a lot of fun to write. I was in the middle of it when Jason and I struck up the conversation that led to me picking up Keller again, and now I’m back at it. 

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Other than the fact that, as noted above, I’m all over the map genre-wise, I think my work tends to deal more than most with the effect of violence, even so-called “good” or “justified” violence, on the people who commit it. Jack Keller kills people, often for excellent reasons, but the violence takes its toll. Mark Bishop, the leader of an elite and highly clandestine anti-terrorist team in GALLOWS POLE, is still dealing with a terrible choice he had to make to save one of his people on an op gone wrong, a choice that violated his own sense of morality to the point where he literally built his own prison and locked himself in it, because no one else will do it. Laura So, the genetically engineered vampire commando of MONSTER, is literally born (or more accurately created) to kill, but even as she quests across the cosmos taking revenge on the people who murdered her unit, she struggles not to become the monster she was designed to be.

Why do you write what you do? 

Because these are the movies that are playing in my head. I tell you, I am not a well person. 

How does my writing process work?

The flippant answer that comes to mind is “only sporadically,” but I know that’s not very helpful. I’ve gone in recent years from being a total seat of the pants writer (or “pantser” as I’ve heard it called) to being a bit more of an outliner, especially once I got the hang of the wonderful program called Scrivener. But I still tend to only plot out a few chapters ahead in advance, with the vaguest of ideas as to where I want to go from there. And then, as usual, my characters look at what I’ve planned out for them, laugh, and go “Yah. As if.” Then they do whatever the hell they want anyway. 

So, anyway, there you are. My four questions. As for my latest, it's BROKEN SHIELD, the sequel to my best-selling BREAKING COVER, featuring sheriff's deputy Tim Buckthorn. Get it exclusively at Amazon (for now) in both e-book and trade paperback. 

As for who I'm tagging to follow up next Monday...hm. Yes. Well. I seem to have let that skip my mind. Sorry. So let me get back to you on that, ASAP....anyone want to volunteer, drop me a line at jdustyrhoades@aol.com.

Blogs for BC: Hands Across the Sea Edition

Finnish non-fiction writer Juri Nummelin has good things to say about BREAKING COVER over at his blog Pulpetti:

The pace is fast and there are no empty scenes. The lead character, a mystery man called Tony Wolf, is not at all unlike Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm, one of the toughest heroes of hardboiled writing.

Juri was kind enough to feature a flash fiction piece of mine called Hundred in his fanzine Ässä,("Ace") which I have prominently displayed in my office. It's a little mind-bending, I have to say, to see one of your stories rendered in what looks like Elvish.

Thanks for everything, Juri! And how do you say "Breaking Cover" in Finnish?

Murder by 4

I'm guest blogging today at Murder by 4, and the subject is Marketing vs. Connecting. Drop by and let's talk.

Thanks to Marta Stephens , author of Silenced Cry, for inviting me!