Take a Hint

A while ago, my friend Rob Swartwood had a great idea -- Rob's had lots of great ideas, actually, but this one just happened to catch on big time. The idea was, is it possible to tell a good story in twenty-five words or fewer?

The result of that idea is Hint Fiction, a nifty new anthology of uber-short stories, edited by Rob and coming out November 1st from Norton. You need this book for a number of reasons -- there's never been anything like it, it's unbelievably addictive reading and includes stories by authors as varied as Peter Straub, James Frey, Joyce Carol Oates and even that guy that wrote Star Wars: Death Troopers.

Some of the stories are scary, some are funny, some are sad, but they're all examples of what can be done with just a few choice words. With the holidays coming, it's the perfect gift, but do yourself a favor and order two, because once you start flipping through it, you're going to want one for yourself. And frankly, you should probably carry around an extra copy the next time some jackass comes up to you and tells you they don't have time to read.

The coolest thing about Hint Fiction is that Rob's created a big bag of literary Doritos -- and I'll bet you that you can't eat just one.

NYCC!

I'm very psyched to say that I'm going to be appearing at the New York Comic Con this weekend. I'll be doing signings both days, and the good folks at Del Rey are going to be handing out free copies of Star Wars: Death Troopers in paperback, along with some crazy two-sided Red Harvest posters so awesomely new that even I haven't seen them yet. If you put it in front of me, boy, I'll sign it.

Hope to see some of you there.

Seeing Red

Today Lucasfilm brings you the cover art for Star Wars: Red Harvest.

I like it.

LA Play Date

I spent last week in Los Angeles meeting with people who had a chance to read Crazy European Chick, and it was great. Extremely busy, though -- I averaged five meetings a day all over town, from downtown to Burbank, driving a rental car back and forth up and down Santa Monica Boulevard, eating a whole lot of excellent sushi and almost never getting lost.

It had been a while since I'd been out on general meetings like this, pitching stories and talking about ideas with executives, producers and development people, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is to sit in a room with people who are genuinely excited about making movies. Many of them had common interests with me, and a lot of them liked the new ideas that I was talking about, both film and book concepts, although only two of them, Roy Lee and Irene Yeung from Vertigo, had the misfortune of having to watch me try to eat noodles with chopsticks while telling them about my great new ideas. Sorry, Roy and Irene. I'll try to practice more at home, I promise.

One of the most exciting pieces of news to come out of all of this is that I'll be doing the big screen adaptation of Ryan Brown's novel Play Dead. For those who haven't heard of it, Play Dead might best be described as a high school football zombie novel, a sort of Friday Night Lights meets Dawn of the Dead. Check it out...

Now I'm in Boston for the weekend, and tomorrow I'll be meeting with my editor at Houghton to talk about the book side of things, which is also moving forward. Recorded Books bought the audio rights to Crazy European Chick last week -- a piece of news that I got on Friday right before sitting down with Josh Schwartz and the creative team in their offices to discuss plans for the movie version. Again, very exciting, but for those with a taste for temporal dislocation, I recommend a meeting on the Warner lot followed by a redeye flight that delivers you the following morning to the East Coast...or perhaps not.

In any case, I'm almost fully recovered now, meaning that all I'll need is black coffee and a shave to get me ready to meet my editor and the publicity people at Houghton tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it. LA is a lot of fun...but I do love Boston, especially now that it's September.

Crazy update

Two weeks ago today, I got the message from my agent that Houghton Mifflin wanted to buy my YA novel, Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick, and I was ecstatic. I'd written the book back in February, and it had been turned down a few places, and I was starting to forget that it was out there. Ideally that's what happens when your work is making the rounds -- you're preoccupied with something new, and you don't sit around and stew about it.

Well, there wasn't much sitting around after Houghton Mifflin's offer. I accepted on the spot. A blurb in Publishers Marketplace described the book as "Ferris Bueller meets the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," and the next day I got an email from a producer asking if the film rights were available, and was there someone that she could talk to?

There was. I put her in touch with my film rights agent, Don Laventhall, who -- as it turns out -- had already gotten considerable interest in the book from studios and producers. Keep in mind at this point that the book deal was literally a week old. After months of nothing, things were happening with stomach-knotting speed.

By Monday of this week, my agent had sent the manuscript all over Hollywood, and the first offers were starting to roll in. By Tuesday afternoon, West Coast time, the bidding had gotten down to Paramount and Fox, both of whom wanted it badly enough to knuckle down and get serious when Don made it clear that he was going to close the auction that night.

In the end, the rights went to Paramount, who acquired it for producer Roy Lee, with Josh Schwartz and Wendy Savage's company Fake Empire potentially involved. Josh is the guy who created The O.C., Chuck and Gossip Girl, and in the middle of the bidding, he sent me an email saying, no matter what happened, how much he loved the book. To my mind, at least, his enthusiasm matches the madcap enthusiasm of the book itself. At its heart, Au Revoir is a middle-aged novelist's attempt to recapture what it feels like to be back in high school again, that simultaneous sense of anything-is-possible exhiliration and sheer adrenalized panic.

To say that I was flattered by every producer and studio who expressed interest in the project would be the understatement of the year. While it was happening, the whole thing felt totally unreal. And as the sun set in the west, those personal emails from Josh and Fake Empire, and the fact that Paramount was able to put together the absolute best deal all the way around, made all the difference. It goes without saying that I'm delighted with all of this, even moreso because it was all completely unexpected.

Crazy times, indeed.

Going Crazy

So I got some good news on Friday. My agent, Phyllis Westberg, emailed and told me that she'd sold my new novel, Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick, in a two-book deal to Houghton Mifflin.

This is exciting on a number of levels. First, because Au Revoir is technically a Young Adult novel, a genre that I hadn't really attempted before. In publishing terms, this simply means it's got a teenage protagonist (in Hollywood, they just call this smart marketing) -- although I didn't purposefully write it any differently than any of my other books. My goal was the same as it is every time I sit down to write, which is to amuse myself as I wade ever deeper into the uncharted waters of middle age.

In this case, I started thinking about what might happen if John Hughes had been hired to write La Femme Nikita. Basically, Au Revoir is about a high school kid with a female foreign exchange student living in his house, who turns out to be an international assassin with a one-night multi-kill job in New York City before she gets sent back home. As the night gets progressively wilder, our teenage hero gets roped into driving her around whether he likes it or not. The idea kind of drove me nuts, in a very pleasant way, like a pop song that you can't get out of your head...

...which is another reason this particular project was such a blast. I wrote it back in early February, and I was waiting to get the notes back from Del Rey on the book that would become Star Wars: Red Harvest. My part of the world was getting slammed with a series of snow storms, everything outside was very white, and suddenly I found myself sitting in front of the dining room window with the laptop open, just dying to write this story.

I think the first draft took me all of three weeks. I wrote it without hesitating or second-guessing myself, just having the time of my life on every page, and when I wasn't working on it, I was thinking about it -- what was going to happen next, and when I could jump back into it again. It was the most purely intuitive experience that I'd had since 2003, when I wrote the first draft of Chasing the Dead in radiography school, in my breaks between classes.

When I finished at the end of February, I made a few changes and showed it to two people. One was my wife, who read it and loved it, and the other was my friend Rob Swartwood -- who happens to be a very gifted writer, editor and anthologist, and whose forthcoming Hint Fiction anthology you should order right now. Rob read it, and he and I had lunch, and he told me all the places that needed work -- and he was right about almost all of it.

I did another polish, and my agent took it out...and Au Revoir started getting rejected. I think the rejections started in May or June, and continued into mid-July. I think maybe a half-dozen different houses turned it down, all for different reasons. Either they didn't like the characters, or they had something similiar already in the pipeline, or they just plain didn't dig it. These rejections were a bummer, but at the same time, I couldn't overlook the fact that everybody was passing on it for a different reason, which meant that maybe, somehow, given the right person, it might just hit the sweet spot.

On Thursday of last week, Rob texted me: "Any offers on the YA?" I told him not yet, but that I hadn't given up hope...although secretly, I was beginning to wonder if I'd written a dog -- a fun dog, but a dog nonetheless.

Then the next day, Phyllis emailed and told me about the offer. Houghton-Mifflin loved Au Revoir and not only wanted to publish it...they wanted a sequel too.

I've been through this moment several times now -- that moment when the offer arrives, utterly unexpected, out of nowhere. It gets me every time. I feel like I'm ten years old again, goofy and hopeful and weightless, like I've been drinking Jack and Cokes all morning. With The Unholy Cause and Death Troopers and Red Harvest, the process had been different, the offer extended tentatively at first and then solidified, the contracts signed and delivered long before I sat down to write Page 1. This was different. Compared to those things, this was high-wire work, no guarantees and no safety nets, and it was written for the sheer pleasure of writing it.

On Friday, I took my family out to lunch to celebrate, and I drove to work with the windows down listening to ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky." I was forty years old, and I was about to publish my first Young Adult novel. Maybe I didn't exactly feel young -- but damned if I didn't feel at least a little bit less like an adult.

May we all be so fortunate as we wade ever deeper into the uncharted waters of middle age.

How long should I work on a project before I give up on it?

Recently I decided that I needed to try harder to finish things. It only took me thirty years to arrive at this decision.

Traditionally, if a writing project wasn't working for me on an intuitive level, I tended to let it go. If I liked it but felt as if it was getting away from me, my instinct was to power through it as quickly as possible--like a bad meal that I suspect might be poisoned -- and live with the consequences. As a result, my career is cluttered with a lot of unpublished (and unpublishable) stuff, material whose potential I either ruined or abandoned by refusing to take my time.

My ongoing project is a novel called Stillwater -- nominally, a thriller about a dysfunctional family on a boat being terrorized by something in a New England lake. I started it back in the summer of 2007, finished the first draft that fall, and sent it to my agent, who made some basic suggestions, then passed it onto my publisher. Meanwhile, Random House published my novel Eat the Dark, and got back to me on the book that would become No Doors, No Windows. The notes on No Doors were extensive, and in the middle of that process, I changed editors, and Stillwater sank to the bottom of someone's desk. In the meantime, Random House accepted No Doors, and more or less right away contracted me to write Death Troopers, with the idea that both books would come out at the same time. Those titles hadn't even pubbed when Random House contracted the Death Troopers sequel...and I got to work on that, followed immediately my Supernatural novel.

Sometime around this time, my new editor, Mark Tavani, finally got back to me with his notes on Stillwater, which were far more encouraging -- and far-reaching -- than I'd expected. Mark saw real potential in Stillwater, and his enthusiasm reminded me of how I'd felt about it, a couple years earlier. I got it out and tinkered with it, ended up taking out the entire second half...and then left it alone to write a young adult novel instead. I'd finished that when the notes for the Death Troopers prequel Red Harvest came in...and they were quite extensive too, so back to the bottom sank Stillwater.

Recently, though, with the delivery of my final Red Harvest draft, I found myself casting about for something new -- and remembered my "something's in the lake" book, still drifting around my hard drive. I got it out and discovered that I had some new ideas after all. I started typing them in...and then flew out to LA to work on a screenplay instead.

One way of looking at this is that I've given up on Stillwater a half-dozen times. But another way is that I've never really given up on it, although I have come close enough times that these days, when I tell my wife that I'm getting out Stillwater again, she just gives me an amused look, like, "Don't forget to wear your helmet if you're planning on smashing your head against your desk for a prolonged period of time, dear."

And in a sense, I suppose I am. I've inserted and deleted enough text from the Stillwater file to make up a much longer book, and I've published three other novels in the meantime, but when I sit down to work on the book, I'm generally still pretty excited about the possibilities. There's real magic in it, and if I can find a way to keep from completely screwing it up, I think it could be terrific.

We'll just have to see.