Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture

Okay, to be perfectly honest, Let’s Play Ball has yet to become a Major Motion Picture. But I was curious to see what it might look like if and when it did hit the silver screen. So I splurged to have a Hollywood Book Trailer made. It features a montage of scenes from the novel and a voiceover description of the high points.  It’s a substantial cut above the relatively simple book trailers I already have on YouTube for my three novels, as those are limited to still shots and captions. I wanted to see my characters come to life, and for a minute or so, they did.

It’s a real kick to see your story dramatized. The actresses who play the fraternal twin sisters in my story are beautiful young women. The actors portraying both the kidnap victim and one of his alleged kidnappers are handsome guys, athletic looking enough to be the ballplayers they’re supposed to be. What’s more, the entire “cast” features good actors and good acting. The scenes require them to show glee, sorrow, fear, hatred—the whole gamut.

Not surprisingly, the trailer is more action-packed than the book. My story does indeed feature a kidnapping at the beginning and a hostage scene near the end. In between, the violence abates as the relationships between the characters come into focus. The big-picture political ramifications of what has taken place are paramount. The trailer doesn’t lie: the book has both action and hot sex, just not on every page. The voiceover is delivered in a solemn male voice suitable for describing the most suspenseful story of the year. All in all, an expensive but fun project. The results can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt13WeCDOC0.

 

Raised On Baseball

I love most spectator sports, but baseball is my passion. My dad began instilling this in me over fifty years ago on a hot summer afternoon in Griffith Stadium, a place that no longer exists. That day our Washington Senators were pounded unmercifully by the hated New York Yankees. My second experience that same summer was no better, as the Senators fell by almost the same score to the Cleveland Indians. Our team was not only bad, but comically incompetent. I distinctly remember two infielders running into each other trying to catch a routine pop-up. The manager was so angry that he wouldn’t speak to either player after the game, even to ask if they were hurt.

Griffith Stadium was not very kid-friendly. There were always poles blocking my view. I must have gotten tired and whiney, but we stuck out those brutal games. I guess my dad wanted me to learn that the joy of victory doesn’t mean much unless you also know the tiresome futility of losing. Besides, we had our own heroes─definitely not the caliber of Mickey Mantle or Mudcat Grant, but at least Harmon Killebrew and Camilo Pascual were our own.

It’s always been more futility than joy for D. C. baseball fans. Two Senators teams departed, spurred by almost criminally bad owners. The first of these teams was just beginning to improve when it was snatched away. I remember listening to the radio one evening as the Senators trailed the enemy Yankees by 5-0 in the late innings. Then our team miraculously erupted for three runs─only to see the rally washed out by a torrential rain. God was cruel that night, but announcer Bob Wolff’s excited, sympathetic descriptions made it an experience nevertheless.

There was a gap of 34 years between the departure of the last Senators team and the arrival of the current team, the former Montreal Expos, now the Nationals. The romance of the game endured, fostered by its very absence. In the seven years they’ve been here, there have been many obstacles to overcome: a farm system left to die on the vine before the move; no genuine ownership or cable TV contract during their first two years; inadequate facilities until a new stadium was built; a prolonged fight between the City Council and Major League Baseball over funding for that stadium; the absence of a strong fan base because of all these issues. Still, every season brought moments to savor.

Now our Nats are finally starting to look like a team, but that doesn’t guarantee success. It has yet to happen on the field, day in, day out. The modern new ballpark contains echoes of the ones that are gone. Old or new, ballparks are enchanted realms where the bad outcomes feel like tragedy and victories are sometimes miraculous. Grown men play the game with the exuberance of boys. It’s basically the same game they played in Little League. That belies the tremendous skill and discipline it takes to succeed at it.

Baseball marks the seasons of the year. Opening Day means spring, even when the freezing temperatures require winter coats and heavy doses of hot chocolate. The year moves on quickly to hot summer afternoons and warm evenings that bring the thirst-quenching taste of cold beer. Then there’s the fall classic (only a pipedream in D. C. so far). Summers fade away and leave their sweetest memories behind. There’s nothing more magical than the nation’s pastime.

The D. C. Angle

I am a career-long Washington bureaucrat. I’m also the daughter, sister, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of bureaucrats. The first in this line, my German immigrant great-grandfather, was a friend and colleague of Teddy Roosevelt. D. C. is in my bones. It’s hardly surprising that my novels Secretarial Wars and Let’s Play Ball are set in and around the nation’s capital.

I’m also a fan of chicklit. I particularly enjoy stories that feature strong women in conflict with one another, or not-so-strong women struggling to survive. At the risk of losing IQ points, I follow all of the Real Housewives franchises on Bravo TV. I love catfights; the dumber, the better. Chicklit and politics are two threads that seem to combine in my own stories. But how well do they really mix?

There’s nothing like a good Washington scandal. To be worth its salt, it must lead all the way to the top, to the Oval Office. Watergate still takes the prize, owing to its complexity and the numerous threads that took years to unravel. But it would’ve been spicier if it had featured more women in starring rather than peripheral roles. On the other hand, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair had enough sex and sleaze for anyone, but in the end that’s all it was. Not enough threads to make for a really compelling tapestry.

My stories have been criticized on plausibility grounds. How likely is it that a mere secretary (in Secretarial Wars) or the twin sister of a sportswriter (in Let’s Play Ball) could use their positions to roil the White House and help to bring down a President? Well, it gets complicated, but that’s why they call it fiction. If you’re going to build fantasy worlds, they might as well be fantastic.

A Second Look At Stranger In A Strange Land

 

As part of an ongoing effort to relive my youth during the wild and wonderful sixties, I recently downloaded Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land to Kindle. I tried to rekindle, so to speak, the excitement that groundbreaking novel once aroused among many of my peers. Back then it seemed to tap into our youthful need to believe that a total transformation of society was possible.

Heinlein’s book wasn’t the easy read by the light of the lava lamp that I thought I remembered. I was surprised at how messy and complicated it was. Apparently, I never made a serious effort to comprehend it the first time. I owned a paperback copy which passed back and forth rather secretly between friends, as if it were a subversive document. I must have skipped the heavy themes and focused on the cool parts. A religion based on free love spoke to the wannabe hippie in me. The mantra “Thou art God” was a more empowering philosophy than any known religion offered.

How well has the book aged? I still think the mantra is good. The recognition of every other human being as divine would be a fine development for mankind. Other than that, the book let me down as a cultural document and a guide for living. The hero, Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and brought back to earth, doesn’t make a believable Messiah. His teachings are inaccessible to ordinary humans. To follow him, they had to transform themselves into Martians.

Smith resembles Jesus Christ in obvious ways. They both die at the hands of people who feel threatened by them. Their murderers are forgiven on the spot since they “know not what they do.”  But Smith’s followers don’t grieve, and that is what’s inhuman about them. Christians can’t help grieving for their Messiah. They need to believe that he rose again, or isn’t really dead, or will return. Smith will never return in the flesh, but his followers take it in unearthly stride. That’s what keeps the book in the realm of science fiction. Heinlein was a master of that genre. But I wonder: did he intend this book to be more?

Books To Movies — Need To Focus

Thanks to the self-publishing revolution, many thousands of novels are published every year. Given the competition, how is an author supposed to break out of the pack and get noticed?

One possibility for expanding your audience is to try to convert your stories to movies. Sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? Watching movies is a lot less work than reading. It stands to reason that the movie-watching public will always outnumber the reading public.

Not that the conversion process is easy. Novelist and screenwriter skills don’t necessarily equate. In fact, a novelist is likely to be too enamored of her sprawling story and plethora of characters to do the necessary trimming. That’s why I’m paying a pretty penny to have experts do this surgery to each of my beloved novels. These screenwriters are reputed to have experience in harnessing such sprawls into treatments, or outlines, which form the basis for screenplays. The process requires stripping away everything but the essential story, figuring out which scenes are cinematic, and employing various other tricks to increase dramatic impact.

It’s not only the plots that must be simplified, but the characters as well. My original rendering of The Rock Star’s Homecoming featured a shy college coed with two high-powered roommates whose personalities tended to squash hers. In the cinematic version, the two roommates are combined into just one girl, who has some of those Superwoman qualities but whose impulsiveness is more self-destructive than admirable. The movie would also reduce a campus-full of characters to one representative of each type … jock, Jesus freak, hippie, cheerleader, etc. Either way, the once-timid heroine learns not to be intimidated by any of them.

The movies’ endings will get my heroines closer to “happily ever after” than the novels do. Secretarial Wars features three D. C. secretaries who set out to outsmart the bureaucracy, each in her own way. In the novel, they overreached and crashed down to earth, with only the main heroine landing on her feet. In the cinematic version, all three will find the career success and romance they seek (once they get out of jail)!

Let’s Play Ball revolves around the question of whether the shady characters involved in a plot to kidnap a major league ballplayer will be brought to justice. In the movie, naturally, the villains are identified through the heroine’s amateur sleuthing and are arrested in a dramatic scene near the end. The novel, by contrast, features a much larger, less resolvable conspiracy. It takes time for the evidence of guilt to percolate all the way to the top of government. As it does, it takes down some of the participants and allows others to wiggle off the hook. In the end, the “happily ever after” feeling mingles with the suspicion that there are still mischief makers lurking, capable of striking again.

Do the simplified versions work better as stories? There’s no denying that they’re more dramatic. But I still maintain that novels can and should be different from movies. It’s okay to let them sprawl in every direction, like real life. It’s okay for your characters to be as complex and inconsistent as real people.

The Case for Slower Reading

Now that I’ve managed to download my three novels to Kindle, I’ve been reading the e-versions straight through, trying to judge them as if somebody else wrote them. The print versions came out in 2003 (Secretarial Wars), 2007 (The Rock Star’s Homecoming), and 2010 (Let’s Play Ball). It’s been quite a while since the final pre-publication read-throughs. While I can’t say such distance allows total objectivity, it’s a different perspective than the eye-glazing, last-minute proofreading I did when my main goal was to get rid of them and move on to something else.

Even after all that proofreading, including professional editing, they are not as error-free as they should be. A few formatting mistakes are to be expected in this new digital age. Grammatical slip-ups, while few in number, are grating. But on the whole, the digital revisits gave me the gratified feeling that for the most part, I realized the vision I had for each novel.

I wrote the kinds of books I like to read, but I suspect I’m not a typical modern reader. My idea of literary heaven is not an action-packed adventure story, but a leisurely tale with many characters. For example, Gail Godwin’s rich, complex tales about Southern families have incidents, but they serve mainly to delineate the characters. The characters are people you might meet on the street: not vampires, werewolves or zombies. One review of Let’s Play Ball accused me of losing control of the plot. I guess I’m guilty of losing this reader, but I maintain that the plot was sustained in the interactions between the characters from beginning to end. The reader lost patience. It takes time for these stories to unfold, and this is an impatient age.

The best part of self-publishing for me is that I can indulge my preference for character development over action. I advocate more careful reading for everyone, but it seems to be out of style. Slowness of plot would surely doom anyone trying to break into traditional publishing these days. But now a certain impatience has overtaken the self-publishing world as well. People are downloading hundreds of books at a time. Does that really allow enough time to absorb each story and to let it unfold?

This Is Our Ballpark

I couldn’t have written this story any better. It’s Sunday afternoon, and our feisty Nats are facing the Philadelphia Phillies in the deciding game of a three-game set. Our ballpark is once again being overrun by a horde that came south on I-95, snapping up all the empty seats that our local fans do not fill. This breed of Phillies fan, I’ve heard, is louder, drunker, and more obnoxious than the usual patrons of Citizens Bank Park, who patiently waited many years for the winning team they enjoy now.  Our guest fans apparently can’t get tickets to their own home games, so they must grab other opportunities to make themselves seen and heard.

The Nationals are mostly about the future. That team to the north, which went through a prolonged rebuilding process ten years ago, is their model. But sometimes, just sometimes, the Nats are about the present. They had won Friday night’s game with a fabulous walk-off grand slam by main star Ryan Zimmerman, only to drop Saturday night’s game. So they are primed to take the series, but so are the Phillies hordes.

In the ninth inning, the Nationals are trailing 4-3 and down to their last strike. The Phillies reliever is dealing, having struck out the first two batters. He has the talented but erratic young shortstop, Ian Desmond, on the ropes. Everyone in the ballpark knows that Desmond will strike out to end the game and the series. He strikes out a lot, and is particularly susceptible to sliders, this pitcher’s specialty. So the Phillies fans are already on their feet, yelling for the inevitable victory and shouting down any Nationals fans who dare to hope. It simply couldn’t end any other way.

Except, it does. Somehow that next slider stays up, and Desmond knocks it out of the park. It’s a 4-4 tie, and the outnumbered Nationals fans invite the Phillies fans to sit back down, since it ain’t over yet.

The story line gets even more improbable in extra innings. In their half of the tenth, the Nats load the bases, assisted by the ex-Phillie Jayson Werth, who momentarily silences the boos he’s been hearing in his new home ballpark. Coming up with one out is a tattooed comedian named Jonny Gomes who has hit into his share of double plays. Only this time, he drives in the winning run by somehow allowing himself to be hit by a pitch. He rubs his elbow and glares at the crestfallen pitcher with all the false outrage he can muster.

Who cares how it happened? For once, the irritating villains have to make the long trek home with their tails between their legs – and true life turns out sweeter than any fictional twist I could have invented.

If You Didn’t Read It, Don’t Review It

I must have really made it, now that I’m getting one-star reviews! They are from “reviewers” who profess themselves too bored or unimpressed to finish reading my books. From the sound of it, the poor dears had to struggle to get through the first few chapters. One reader declared it a “waist” of time. Another managed to at least skim the book, enough to offer a non-comprehending, out-of-context opinion about one episode.

Offering the books free seems to invite this kind of trashing. It’s assumed the author didn’t value her own work enough to set a price on it. That really isn’t the reason, at least not for me. I write for the love of it and to attract readers, not to make money.

Even a very bad review can be fair, but there is no chance of fairness if there is no attempt to at least grasp what the author is doing. The stories have a beginning, middle, and end, all of which need to be a part of any honest evaluation. So do us all a favor, one-star reviewers. If finishing the book is too much for you, just put it down. Forget about it, delete it, throw it in the trash, or resell it. Just don’t feel obligated to comment.

Lovable Losers No More?

My beloved Washington Nationals are sitting at .500 (46-46) at the all-star break. This wasn’t supposed to be their year, so my pleasure at this better-than-expected record may well prove to be fool’s gold. This is a team that aspires to greatness someday, well in the future. The futility of the present is symbolized by Racing President Teddy Roosevelt, always grinning, always losing.

As a writer, I invent happy endings that may never happen. The other night, Jayson Werth, the team’s most expensive free agent acquisition to date, had a chance to become a hero and turn his disappointing season around. He’s a perfect character for such a story. Despite a horrendous batting slump, he carries himself like a team leader, a confident athlete who understands the ups and downs of baseball, and an all-around cool dude. It was all set up for him to break out in a big way in the bottom of the ninth inning. The Nats were down by one run, with the tying and winning runs on base. Boos were raining down on him. I just knew he was about to silence those boos and win the game. He’d done it often enough in the past, when he was the opposition. How could such a perfect scenario fail to materialize?

If I were writing this story, Jayson Werth would have blasted the ball to kingdom come instead of grounding into the typical double play. He would go on earning his huge salary from that night on, which nobody would begrudge him, since he would be propelling the Nats toward their first winning season. And incidentally, Teddy’s losing streak would end, since it would no longer be a suitable metaphor. I guess I’ll keep on dreaming, until reality provides a better alternative than my dreams.

My Presidents Are Clowns

Two of my novels, Secretarial Wars and Let’s Play Ball, deal in a peripheral way with fictional presidents of the United States who are basically clowns. That is, they are overgrown cowboys who starts wars on an impulse and quickly gets in over their heads. They tend toward empty religiosity and have hidden personal lives that fail to match their “family values” rhetoric. Being wannabe athletes as well as chicken hawks, they amuse themselves by interfering in the management of local sports teams and hobnobbing with the owners, to the distress of many D. C. fans. Their impeachable offenses in the political arena are well covered up, until some false friend or lover betrays them.  

Without naming any names, I dare say these traits would look familiar to any casual observer of American presidential politics. However, the current incumbent might not be such a good model for stories in which rash acts drive the action. He thinks before he acts, even when preparing to taking down the most notorious terrorist in history. Despite his own turbulent childhood, his family life appears stable. I guess a cerebral president isn’t nearly as exciting in fiction as a jackass.