Skidding Across the Lip of Sixteen with the Eff-Bee-Eye

[ed. In the process of creating the new RonChalice.com, I ran across this story as part of the "Ron" bio. Since it's kind of fun, I publishing it as the first "real" article from the new website.]

I had just skidded across the lip of sixteen when the Feebs (the EFF BEE EYE) first came knocking at my door.Okay, my mother’s door – looking for me. They were tall, and expressionless, like Sergeant Joe Friday on tranquilizers. Their suits were the same gray, their shoes the same shiny black. I figured what I had done was freedom of expression, they called it something else. ‘Nuf said.

My “crime” appeared to be that I was a ringleader in the Great Pizza Protest of 1966 in a northern Colorado high school (I could tell you the name but then I’d have to — you know the drill.) The high school had begun to enforce what they lovingly called a “closed campus.” This meant, among other things, that our lunch-time sustenance would be limited to — you got it — school lunches the stuff that comes in 55 gallon drums that the govmint hands out. If you’ve ever had one, you’ll understand the reasoning behind the Great Pizza Protest of 1966. A bunch of us had the gol-durned gall to have fresh, steaming, sweet smelling PIZZAs — about 50 kazillion of them — delivered right to the school lunchroom. ‘Nuf said.

Turns out the administration felt that the Great Pizza Protest of 1966 was distracting, disrespectful, disruptive, and downright disAmerican. They handed out a lot of detention and other forms of horrible, evil punishment. Man, it was terrible. ‘Nuf said.

So, right about now, you’re wondering. What the hell does the FBI have to do with the Great Pizza Protest of 1966? Were they using mozarella made with plutonium shavings? Nah, Rocky Flats was about 30 miles away. It kind of went this way — I decided that I would let the principal know my true feelings about the horrible, evil punishments meted out, especially to us ringleaders. How did I let him know? I wrote him a letter.

Huh? You ask.

Then (suspenseful pause inserted here) — I MAILED IT.

Turns out if you’re going to mail somebody a letter about horrible, evil punishments meted out to everyone especially the ringleaders, you ought to be careful about the language — and the timbre and tone, if you know what I mean. Otherwise, the FBI, with nothing better to do, will come and pound your door.

If I took a poll right now, you’re opinion would probably be that I made all of this up. You’d probably think that there really was no Great Pizza Protest of 1966 — but you’d be wrong. Every bit of it is true. It’s the rest of the stuff you see here that’s made up.

I’m a writer, ya know.
rlc

Multimedia and Good Buddies…

A good, lifetime friend is working on a new multimedia project. Sneak peaks are cool…

One Freakin’ Page?

What the heck?

I just went over to the Ron Chalice Official Website and was shocked to see that it is only ONE page. No links, nothing! My first thought was that what the Boss said a couple of months ago about whacking me might just be true.

Then, I took half a minute to actually read what was written on the page. It says that things are just temporarily on hold over there because new projects are coming dow the pike and I’m going to get some help!.

Cool!
rlc

[ed. note Since you can see this is a brand new site for RC, we obviously didn't fire him. He's hard at work on a new project this very second. RB]

Sometimes a Martini

Sometimes a martini just hits the spot. I finished a book over six months ago and set it aside. I loved it, but response was somewhat mediocre, one of the problems being that the title sounded like a romance novel. Nothing wrong with romance novels, but this is a thriller.

Update:

Sometimes a martini can get you whacked!

Two freakin’ years this post has been sitting the “drafts” bin, and I still haven’t had the martini I was going to talk about when I started this post. OK, I have had a couple of martinis in that time, but not the martini I was dying for in July of 2008.  Since then the manuscript’s been through a number of revisions, a gender change on the romantic interest (huh?) and a couple of other permutations. People from a couple of the larger houses have seen it:

Response A:” Great concept! An extreme escape thriller — will be a hard sell because it’s too real and the escape is too uncomfortable.” – Huh? too real? Maybe there is something to that. I did have a conversation with a filmmaker about it and he said, “Sounds like non-fiction to me.”

Isn’t that the point? Don’t we want our stories to smack of realism? Aren’t scary things more scary, and thrillers more thrilling when they are realistic?

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Near-apocalyptic Snorker

OK, so I’ve been trying to figure out for freakin’ years just what it is that I write. Thrillers? Sort of. Suspense? Kinda. Mysteries? Not really. Humor? On good days.

And… drumroll… It finally came to me.
The Near-apocalyptic Snorker.

Huh???? I can see the wheels spinning behind your eyes. “How the hell did you come up with THAT?”

Welcome to NaS 101.

First, we’ll start with the middle. (Don’t we always, but I digress.) Apocalyptic. Most people think it means the end of the freakin’ world. And, to most of the world’s religious definitions, CAPITAL A Apocalypse does mean the end of the world. Everybody’s toast, kaput, all-she-wrote. The freakin’ fat lady sang.

But what about LITTLE A apocalypse? The etymology is Greek apokalyptein – or “uncover”.

Heaven knows (yes, that’s intentional) we’ve certainly uncovered a lot of things in the past couple of years. What the hell, maybe the “uncovering” even began with Watergate. Besides, uncovering could mean a lot of things, and I do a lot of uncovering in my plots.

Ex. 1 Combes threw back the tarp to uncover the body in the truck bed.

Ex. 2 Berni’s ex-husband, the ex-race driver, threw back his martini so fast that his toupee slipped, uncovering the warts on his head.

Ex. 3 Vaz threw back the blanket to uncover Macie’s…

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Public Consumption

OK, so The Flyover War project is getting a bit consumptive, of both energy and time. Unfortunately, doing things that haven’t exactly been done before often are. It’s a lot like publishing your outline, then figuring out how the heck you’re going to stick to it now that it’s out there. Or like building a house in components, confusing as hell while it’s going up in pieces all over the lot, hoping the foundation you laid actually works, and then finally tying it all together.

As I laid out the intial strategy for the project, and as it comes together piece by piece, the concept I had in my head was like filmmaking, but without the camera. In the process of making a film, it’s very rare that the scenes are shot in the same order in which they’ll appear in the finished product. For an outsider looking in, the filmmaking process seems disjointed, often disorganized, with a number of people, or teams of people, working on seemingly unrelated activies, simultaneously in a dozen or more different locations. Somehow, within the scope of the director’s vision, the efforts of dozens, even hundreds of people all seem to come together in a perfect union — 120 minutes or so in length.

Most novels come together in a completely different way. A solitary author drafts, hones, polishes, redrafts, submits, reworks, resubmits, and finally sends an completed manuscript to a publisher. At this point, the editor, the cover designer, and the marketing teams build the finished project from the author’s foundation.

A relatively new concept in the the publishing world, the brand or franchise model, expands the basic concept of novel production to include many of the elements used in the creation of a film. The franchise project may actually begin in the hands of a packager, who pairs a brand-name author with a development team that may include apprentices and co-writers, then involves the marketing and branding people from the projects inception. Sounds a lot like movie making to me.

The key thing that all franchise projects have in common is an immense scope. Like a major film, the franchise novel (or more accurately novel series) has immense revenue targets, in the millions and tens-of-millions of dollars. At this level, dozens and perhaps hundreds of people tackle myriad tasks and assignments necessary to bring the project to completion.

Then, the inevitable happens..

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Almost Live from the Pikes Peak Writers Conference

A little tongue-in-cheek at 5:30 am on April 23.

Interesting Article on CNN

CNN on-line published an interesting article on self-publishing today, and sometimes it turns out that the responses are more interesting than the main article. I won’t go into a lot of detail, because you have a finger-clicker right there in front of you [and I hate taking the time to paraphrase what somebody else has already written]. To sum up, the article talks about Lisa Genova’s Still Alice, about a woman with Alzheimer’s. Good for her! She spent a year and a half working on the project and after several agents told her “nobody wants to read about Alzheimer’s” she published it herself. This isn’t an ex-cop  sitting in a basement pounding on keys with dreams of being the next James Patterson, it’s a woman with a touching story that, as it turned out, touched at least 300 readers.

So the agent says, “300 sales wouldn’t even pay for my morning latte.” OK, probably true. But it might have done something for the 300 people who bought the book that a decade’s worth of Venti half-caf-half-decaf-two-percent-low-cal-hazelnut lattes could never do.

Bogart once said “you got a message, send a telegram.” That was before lightning fast world-wide communications and the freakin’ Xerox Docutech laser printer.

Go for it, Lisa!

ttfn, rlc

CS Indy Interview

I’m juiced. I did a newspaper interview last week with Jill Thomas of the Colorado Springs Independent. No details until her article comes out this week, but I would like to say that the Indy has been a great supporter of Pikes Peak Writers and the Pikes Peak Writers Conference.

Thanks!

Ron

Harlan Coben, you’ve broken my heart

I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not in THAT way.

For someone who spends hours in a car every day, audio books weigh in right up there with the microprocessor in the advancements of the 20th century. I listen to at least one every week, sometimes two.  A lot of my driving is late-night from Colorado Springs to the northern Denver Metro area, and the first thing I learned about late night audio books is that “literature” doesn’t cut it. Yes the words can be beautiful, engrossing sirens that pull you into the world the author has created – right off the freakin’ side of the road!

Gimme Action! Give me a complex plot and a lot of things that keep my brain cranking along throuht the winding highway through Monument Hill.

Coben is GREAT at that. Ok his first couple of audio books were self-narrated (hmmmm, ‘nuf said) but this guy Scott Brick is a true master of his craft. Coben always has an array of important characters, many more than most of the genre I feel, and Brick is able to bring each of them a unique and highly identifiable audio personality. [Stage aside: A fellow Colorado writer, Charlie Callaway, once asked Coben how he kept all the complex details of his stories so well organized, and Coben's response was a nine-word classic I will remember forever - "I just do, don't know how, I just do."]

OK, I can read your minds. What does this have to do with your opening line? How the freak did Coben break your heart?

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