Blogging at Dawn: The Last Blog?

Blogging at Dawn: The Last Blog?: Is this the last blog of the year? Is this the last blog ever?. Nearly 10,000 people have read this blog. I have no way of knowing whether t...

The Last Blog?

Is this the last blog of the year? Is this the last blog ever?. Nearly 10,000 people have read this blog. I have no way of knowing whether that's 10,000 different people, or one person, 10,000 times. There's no rhyme or reason to the number of hits in a day, and sometimes my biggest days are when I haven't written anything at all.

This blog is banned in some places, and that might be a good thing. Sometimes I spend more time posting the blog than I do writing it. "We can tell," some of you might say. This will be the first year that I did not write a new novel. I put the majority of my morning writing into my blog.

I do have enough material in here to actually turn it into a book, maybe too. Some of my blogs are evergreen and will stand the test of time, others are dated by the end of the day, some of them are even dated by the afternoon. I've heard that my best blogs come from the heart. I would agree with that.

I do have to make some decisions on where to go with this blog. I can try to take it to the next level and spend thousands of dollars marketing it. I can let it die a natural death and never post again. I am going to take some time before the end of the year to figure out where to take it.

I do want to thank all of you, the thousands of people who've clicked on me this year. (Or the one person who clicked a thousand times.)

Blogging at Dawn: And & Ampersand or Author and Anchorman

Blogging at Dawn: And & Ampersand or Author and Anchorman: An and credit is better than an "&" credit, one of the first things I learned in Film School. An & ("ampersand")...

And & Ampersand or Author and Anchorman

An and credit is better than an "&" credit, one of the first things I learned in Film School. An & ("ampersand") means that you are part of a team and get a half share, while an "and" means that you are your own person, and getting full credit. Even though I'm not getting paid as an editor of the Southwest Writer's Anthology, I got an "And."

Let's say a movie has a 100 dollar budget for writers. Joe Writer & Jane Writer write the first draft. AND Francis Author writes the second. Joe and Jane split fifty, Francis gets fifty on his or her own.

Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are getting ampersands for writing Anchorman. The writers and performers of my new favorite show, Key& Peele are ampersanded. I don't know if ampersanded is a verb, but it is now.

So when is there an "and." In writing, it means the first draft was so bad, that someone new was called to "punch it up."

Who are the famous "Ands" in film acting? Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men" was an "AND." If not, he should have been.  Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now was an And. There are too many "ANDs" on TV shows to count. Usually the AND is listed last.

So when you read the Anthology, the most important word is the word and.

Blogging at Dawn: Bilbo Burgundy or If the Anchorman was a Hobbit

Blogging at Dawn: Bilbo Burgundy or If the Anchorman was a Hobbit: It's Christmas movie season. The Hobbit opened last weekend and Anchorman opens tomorrow. Next weekend, we see another movie with intere...

Bilbo Burgundy or If the Anchorman was a Hobbit

It's Christmas movie season. The Hobbit opened last weekend and Anchorman opens tomorrow. Next weekend, we see another movie with interesting facial hair--American Hustle. For the more literary minded among you we have the Secret Life of Walter Mitty, based on a Thurber short story. I'm surprised that in one of his fantasies, Walter Mitty hasn't played a Hobbit. Ben Stiller is already short and hairy, so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch.

Speaking of the Hobbit, the new film has an invented love triangle between Evangeline Lilly, Orlando Bloom's Legolas and a dwarf. Seriously. Tolkien is rolling in his grave every Durin's day. When Evangeline Lilly's Kate was torn between Matthew Fox's Jack and Sawyer in Lost, we were rooting for her to make the right choice, but either way it didn't matter.  I'm not saying which side of the Middle Earth triangle I'm on, but it feels like a bad version of Twilight.  Most teen girls don't have pictures of a dwarf hanging over their bed. I'm on Team Legolas I suppose.

Keanu Reeves has a film called 47 Ronin. Apparently 46 Ronin wasn't enough, but 48 would be too many. No, the number 47 was not Keanu's IQ.

I've stated already that I've seen so much promotion for Anchorman, that I keep expecting Ron Burgundy to appear in the other films of the year. I can already picture Burgundy interviewing Ian McKellan, hell I can probably do a Ron Burgundy interview of Ian McKellan in my sleep right now. I can see the Ron Burgundy with Keanu in my head as well. "Which one are you, Bill or Ted?"

As for American Hustle, I've heard that Christian Bale gained fifty pounds for the role, and by slouching he was able to lose a few inches. That is not a joke, he actually herniated a disk by slouching. I once wanted to look like Christian Bale--the Christian Bale of American Psycho, or Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne. I don't want to look like him when Christian plays Jewish.

So, enjoy the movies this Christmas and can someone please tell Ron Burgundy that there's a job opening in Middle Earth.

Blogging at Dawn: Wild Pitch (from the upcoming Storyteller's Anthol...

Blogging at Dawn: Wild Pitch (from the upcoming Storyteller's Anthol...: I went to a Hollywood pitch meeting as a writer and emerged as a criminal defense attorney. In my pre-Hollywood life, I had counseled over...

Wild Pitch (from the upcoming Storyteller's Anthology available Jaunary 4)

I went to a Hollywood pitch meeting as a writer and emerged as a criminal defense attorney. In my pre-Hollywood life, I had counseled over a thousand clients as a lawyer, on charges ranging from first degree murder to trespassing at school. I used the same deep, slow voice for nearly all of them. My clients often suffered from some kind of attention deficit disorder, so I rarely used big words, repeated the key points over and over again, and emphasized the positive as I explained the difference between a deferred and a suspended sentence in the plea agreement.

My “Hollywood pitch voice” was sort of my lawyer voice on speed. Hollywood producers also have attention deficit disorder, so I rarely used big words, repeated key points over and over again and never talked for more than five minutes straight. I just talked much faster and never mentioned anything remotely negative.  Again, the ultimate goal was often getting to an agreement, but this time I wanted it to be a “pay or play” as opposed to a lawyer’s “pay or plea.”

This meeting was at a producer’s home on the west side. As I pulled into this meeting, I was happy enough to find parking on the street near the three story modern-looking apartment complex. Inside, the home was a collection of artsy artifacts and the Producer reminded me a bit of my own mother. She had a nice quality about her in the way that she offered me tea and cookies that would remind anybody of their mother, or perhaps the mother they never had. I swore I could smell last night’s apple pie in the air.

 The home was immaculate, yet all the other doors were closed. If it had been my home, all the dirty laundry would have lurked behind one of those doors, but I figured that all the rooms were probably just as clean as the living room. She seemed that kind of a mom.

The pleasantries over, we started off on a good note. The producer informed me that her assistant had read my legal thriller script and she wanted to hear about all of my other potential projects.

 I talked about my various experiences as a lawyer and how I wrote about “law and life.” 

“So you really were a lawyer, then?” She asked. "So do you have any true crime stories?"

“I guess so.”

It was time to switch from a curve to a change-up. “As a matter of fact, I based most scripts on my real experiences. For instance when I used to represent juvenile delinquents on murder charges . . .”

She stopped me in mid-sentence. “Then you should talk to my son.” She paused for a moment. “Not about scripts, but about law.”

Before I could regain my balance, she hurried over to one of the closed doors and produced her son. Perhaps she did have dirty laundry after all. On first glance, he was hardly my vision of a juvenile delinquent, but was indeed on probation for various minor charges. Yet the charges were getting progressively worse, and his six months of probation kept getting extended until it now stretched for two years. Some of his friends had been busted on weapons charges, so his mother was justifiably alarmed.

He sat down and was surprisingly polite. He reminded of the nice kid that I represented on the trespassing at school charge, who had graduated to murder.

I told the boy my standard stories about staying out of trouble, yet I somehow managed to make them seem both “commercial and edgy.” It was weird, but I was seemed to be talking to the son, yet pitching to the mother.

After about twenty minutes of cautionary tales about the juvenile justice system, she stopped the meeting to take her son to therapy, and told me to meet her to continue the meeting. We played the second half of our double-header in a coffee shop as we waited for her son to “talk through his issues” and get his court-ordered urine test. The mother was tense, but she still seemed eager to hear my ideas -- both legal and literary. One moment we were talking about “setting something up at Showtime,” and then the next we were talking about “alternative sentencing” for her son.

After an hour or two, the boy came back from therapy and apparently had filled the specimen jar with no ill effects. As his mother got up to buy him a Carmel Frappuccino for his troubles, I talked with him some more. Now I was totally in lawyer mode, yet he seemed to want to hear the funny story I had about the criminal who . . .

I thought about Samuel Goldwyn's famous quote about “if you want to send a message, use Western Union.” The fact that the boy was even opening up to someone at all was a good first step. I then told him about the time I met a female killer with my zipper down. He laughed.

His mother returned. It was getting late, so we called the meeting on account of darkness and they went on their way and I went on mine. I felt confident that the boy would be all right, after perhaps a few more detours outside his mother's friendly confines.

I may not have sold a script, but perhaps I had saved a life.

Blogging at Dawn: New Mexico and Middle Earth or the Hobbit in Hobbs...

Blogging at Dawn: New Mexico and Middle Earth or the Hobbit in Hobbs...: What if the Hobbit was set in New Mexico? Just suppose that instead of being an Oxford Don, Tolkien was a professor at UNM, or even better, ...

New Mexico and Middle Earth or the Hobbit in Hobbs

What if the Hobbit was set in New Mexico? Just suppose that instead of being an Oxford Don, Tolkien was a professor at UNM, or even better, an adjunct instructor at Central New Mexico Community College. What would the whole Lord of the Rings saga be like? This is a call to a New Mexico writer, why can't the next Hobbit be from Hobbs or better yet from Jemez?

An article in a New Zealand paper by cultural critic Ed Power stated "one of the more glaring (literally) problems with Jackson's Tolkien films, a problem that has become more evident to me with each instalment. It's the choice of his own native land, New Zealand, as the backdrop for these British stories. The island nation of swooping hills and glistening peaks isn't merely an unfortunate choice - it's one of the worst options I can imagine."

Power went onto state that when viewing the films: "Your first thought is "Wow, that's pretty," and your second may well be "I bet that's a wonderful place for bungee jumping...Jackson ought to have gone to the Old World, to Ireland or Iceland and other places thereabout, where people seldom bungee-jump and the ancient and the modern often appear to live in uneasy alliance."

Is the Southwest a better option for filming? Here in the southwest, we do have ruins from many civilizations, and here the ancient and the modern do indeed often appear to live in an uneasy alliance. There are many locations in the area that would convey that.

But let's go a step further, suppose that the books had an originally been set out here in the Southwest, if Tony Hillerman had wrote the Hobbit, or something like that. I'll let the reader play around with the various scenarios, and decide who will play the Hobbits, elves, dwarves and men. (Not going to go there.)

Tolkein's symbolism could be transported to the southwest. Our lore is as good as Tolkien's lore. Bilbo might be from a traditional Northern New Mexico town, or he could be from a native American pueblo and he journeys to find something.  Smaug the dragon is a metaphor for greed, he could be symbolized by the energy or the military industrial complex. Gollum is an addict and the ring is seeming to be a wonder drug that actually does more harm than good. 

I had a friend who wrote a sequel to the Lord of the Rings, and when he asked for permission from the estate, they said no. It is my understanding that he then went back and literally used the "find and replace" keys on his computer to make changes, until it could pass legal muster. 

Nobody bought his book by the way . . .

We can do better than that, someone out there can write a Lord of the Rings type book set in a historic or an imagined New Mexico. And we can film it here as well.

Blogging at Dawn: Hobbit Hustle

Blogging at Dawn: Hobbit Hustle: If The Hobbit written now, Bilbo and Galadriel would be teenagers, and Galadriel would probably be played by Jennifer Lawrence or Kristen S...

Hobbit Hustle

If The Hobbit were written now, Bilbo and Galadriel would be teenagers, and Galadriel would probably be played by Jennifer Lawrence or Kristen Stewart in the film version. Bilbo could be played by one of the Hemsworths. There would be a forbidden romance of course.

There are no female dwarves which creates more issues, hardly any female characters at all. Did Tolkein get elves, but not get women? He was a contemporary of CS Lewis who wrote the Narnia books, and Narnia had amazing female characters, both good and evil. If Tolkein had written the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, there probably wouldn't be a witch.

The portrayal of the Goblins also feels both racist and classist in the books and films. No Goblin shows even the slightest tinge of humanity. Speaking of forbidden love, why not a relationship between Gandalf and a Goblin? Gandalf disappears a lot, so hopefully some aspiring fan fiction writer out there can spin a tale or two.

I don't love the poems and songs in the book either. The Coen brothers had T-bone Burnett create the folk soundtrack for Inside Llewyn Davies (or whatever, Llewyn sounds like the name of an elf by the way). T-bone could have written a ditty or two.

How many animated dragon movies alone have come out? Bilbo might try to tame Smaug at least . . .

Despite my quibbles, the book does stand up and inspired me to be a writer. You keep turning
 the pages and dream of Middle Earth when you put the pages down for the night.

 I hope that someday, a blogger writes a criticism of my book and billion dollar grossing movie...

Blogging at Dawn: Writer's Vacation

Blogging at Dawn: Writer's Vacation: This is the first December in several years that I am not working on a book or a screenplay. That might be a good thing. I am concentrating ...

Writer's Vacation

This is the first December in several years that I am not working on a book or a screenplay. That might be a good thing. I am concentrating on building my law practice right now. I am spending my mornings. thinking about motions to suppress rather than moving surprise endings.

I also did not set up any book signings this holiday season. Book events on Saturdays were like another work day for me.  I found myself drained at the end of a day of asking random people if they were looking for a good gift.

This wasn't my original intent. I had started writing a book during National Novel Writing Month, and made it to 8,000 words. I had the whole thing mapped out, and then suddenly I lost the thread. I can't just jump in any more, because I don't remember how it started or how it will end. I'm going to let it marinate for a little bit.

I do have an excess of literary inventory right now. I have tow finished 80,000 word manuscripts. I also have a trove of non-fiction which I can turn  into another non-fiction e-book. I probably should go back and clean out the vaults and make the existing stuff perfect.

2014 is looking promising. I just learned today that my ebook "Laws & Loves"  is probably going to come out in print in the next few months. I am listed as an editor of the Southwest Writers Anthology which also comes out soon. I am not THE Editor but I got an "AND" credit. That's much like the cast of the film "A Few Good Men." The cast was billed as "Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, Keifer Sutherland, AND Jack Nicholson." I am the Jack of the Anthology.

I do have some signings already set up in January. I have s speech already set up for June at Southwest Writers. I will write again.

So this is not a writer's block. It is a writer's vacation.

Blogging at Dawn: Drones for the Holidays

Blogging at Dawn: Drones for the Holidays: Amazon recently announced that it is looking to create drones to deliver your package in half an hour. As an author, who still sells more ph...

Drones for the Holidays

Amazon recently announced that it is looking to create drones to deliver your package in half an hour. As an author, who still sells more physical books than e-ones, I welcome the idea of people ordering my books and then Amazon delivers them by drone. Still, I do worry about all the things that could go wrong . . . .

I just learned that the Southwest Writers anthology "Storyteller's Anthology" book project won't be in our hands before Christmas, primarily because of mailing issues. It would have been great if a swarm of drones could carry the books across the country right now.  For some reason, I hear the Wagner's "Valkries" theme playing as the drones fly across the desert and do a dramatic landing at the Southwest Writers office, dropping their payload.

I have been known to be forgetful. On Chirstmas morning, I could see myself waking up, ordering some jewelry and then giving it by brunch . . .

We've all seen heist films, where criminals rob the armored car, truck, train, plane etc . . . That requires robbers who are both fast and furious. Unless these drones have laser defense systems, it's not going to be that hard for someone to take one down with a bow and arrow or perhaps even a sling shot. It will take someone who is slow and accurate . . .

I can think of all the other obstacles in the air that might collide with the drones. What about while landing, can you just imagine a cat jumping on a drone when it lands. Curiosity might do more than kill the cat, it might take it for a little flight to a warehouse back in Seattle.

If the drones are too loud, they will bother people. If the drones are too quiet, I can see bumping my head into one as it tries to land at my neighbor's house.

I do see the need for using the drones to deliver emergency items, especially when there are transportation issues like closed roads or bad traffic.

But for books? You can already order an ebook and have it delivered to your amazon kindle in a manner of seconds. You can already gift that ebook as well. If amazon can deliver your book in a day already, you might have to learn patience. Or at the very least to plan ahead.

I will believe drones when I see them, but you never know.  I will be very happy when a drone can write this blog

Blogging at Dawn: Anchorman Angst or Ron Burgundy Blues

Blogging at Dawn: Anchorman Angst or Ron Burgundy Blues: Can you hype fiction too much? Yesterday, I saw Ron Burgundy interview Peyton Manning on ESPN, and Ron Burgundy has turned into vinegar. As ...

Anchorman Angst or Ron Burgundy Blues

Can you hype fiction too much? Yesterday, I saw Ron Burgundy interview Peyton Manning on ESPN, and Ron Burgundy has turned into vinegar. As an ABQ author trying to land a film deal, I wonder if I have hyped myself so much that my burgundy has gone bad as well.

On the one hand, the Anchorman marketing has been brilliant. The ads for Dodge were funny as well. The fact that I remember that the ads were for Dodge indicates that they raised awareness for the product. They worked both for Dodge and for Anchorman.

Will Ferrell as Burgundy did the news on a North Dakota station, and hundreds of thousands of people did the clip.  I did as well. Burgundy spoke at a real journalism school in Boston for real students. The backlash started there perhaps, when supposedly some students grumbled. Here was an actor promoting a film making fun of what they hope to do for a living.

The interview with Manning was actually quite funny for the first few minutes, but like Manning against the Patriots, it started strong and then faded. Burgundy is going to be on the cover of ESPN the Magazine as well. How many more fake interviews can there be?

Which brings us to this blog. I check my numbers everyday, and you can graph them over the course of a three day cycle. The first day will be big, the second day a little smaller and the third day will be smaller still. And then all of a sudden, the numbers will pick up and then decline again. I have no idea who is actually reading this blog, and whether new people come in on the first day and leave on the third.

Do I write too much? Do I post too much in too many groups? Guilty as charged on both counts.
However, I still pray that someday that I too will be overexposed and my burgundy will be in your wine cellar. I promise I won't do the news in North Dakota.

Blogging at Dawn: Obituaries to the Stars

Blogging at Dawn: Obituaries to the Stars: Can you outlive the author of your obituary? How did so many well-written obituaries about Nelson Mandela go up so quickly, minutes after hi...

Obituaries to the Stars

Can you outlive the author of your obituary? How did so many well-written obituaries about Nelson Mandela go up so quickly, minutes after his death? It's not a conspiracy, many of them were written pre-need." For another celebrity death, the person had died so long after expected, that one of the authors of that New York Times obituary had already died by the time the story was published.

Nelson Mandela has lived so long and done so much in his life that he probably outlived several of the authors you are reading today.

I remember reading an interview with an author who got his start on the obituary column. He recounted doing an interview with an elderly actress who was suffering from a lingering illness. He didn't say why he was doing the interview, he just mentioned to her that they were doing some kind of "profile." Flattered, the actress asked the author when the story was coming out so she could tell her publicist.

I could only imagine her reaction when he told her that the piece was coming out after her death. I wonder if she asked for story approval. I also wonder if the author changed anything or added anything when the story was finally published. If he did, did she haunt him?

Five years ago, when my father died, we had an awkward moment in the mortuary when the funeral director attempted to write my father's obituary using their form speech. Even upside down, my mother noticed that the man was a terrible speller, and even worse at grammar. I vividly remember my mother taking the form away from the man, and writing it herself.

The obituary was beautiful, and heartfelt. It captured my father's life. Her words memorialized my father's life better than any stranger with a fill in the blanks form ever could.

I have been very impressed with the Mandela obituaries today. Not only in the man's life, but how the authors did their best to give life to someone after their death.

My goal is to outlive the person writing my obituary.

Blogging at Dawn: Iron Jon

Blogging at Dawn: Iron Jon: IRON JON             In the seminal book Iron John , Robert Bly surmised that a boy does not truly become a man until his father has di...

Iron Jon

IRON JON

            In the seminal book Iron John, Robert Bly surmised that a boy does not truly become a man until his father has died. My dad had suffered from cancer for years, and had seemingly made a miraculous recovery. He had the occasional fainting spell, but he was still going to work every day and running what seemed to be a thriving business. I figured he would live forever.

            However on December 5, 2008, I became a man.

By 2007, I was still practicing law, but had been able to get malpractice insurance at a reduced rate as a “moonlighting attorney” since I worked less than twenty hours a week. I practiced out of my father’s office, rent free. I didn’t really have my own space, I just shared the room with the copier and the fax machine. When I met with clients, I had to tell everyone else in the office to refrain from copying for fifteen minutes. Usually, they listened.

Some Iron Man, I felt like a tin man who didn’t have much heart.

I still was writing the great American novel when I got the chance, but I had a tendency to rush my writing, especially if I wrote at the office. My editors would fix everything when they went through it if I missed it the first time, so I didn’t care.

I kept doing book signings in Amarillo; unfortunately, I would sometimes spend more money on dinner than I made in a night of book signing. My dad would always ask me “Do you get to keep the money?”

I lied and told him that I did. Money wasn’t important, really.  However, my credit cards were getting a little out of control, but my dad could always help me right? I knew he wouldn’t be around forever because of the cancer, but at least he had life insurance, and that would always be my safety net.

            My father and I had grown closer over the course of the last few years as he recovered from the cancer. While working out of his office, he suggested that I take the insurance exam to obtain a salesman’s license just in case I needed to sign something if he became incapacitated. Call it insurance on an insurance business.

At first, I was reluctant. When I was in High School, my father and I had watched an episode of Happy Days, long before the show had jumped the shark. One character told his father that he would rather eat barf before going into the family business. The character might have said “bark” as opposed to “barf,” but it had become a private joke between the two of us. Study for the insurance exam? I’d rather eat barf.

While at his office, I looked around his business—his phone was constantly ringing and was answered by a nice person. Respectable people came in and out, usually carrying checks.  I wouldn’t mind this being my inheritance.

I reluctantly studied every facet of health and life insurance for a month and I passed the three hour exam on my first time. I scored an 83, the perfect score in that I passed with flying colors, but I hadn’t expended too much energy or lost sleep over it.

Kinda like my life.

With my license in hand, we decided to run an ad in the New Mexico Bar Bulletin as a father and son insurance team. It was a brilliant idea—we were going to use his expertise to market to my connections. Lawyers needed life insurance, and presumably they would want to buy insurance from someone they already knew, like me. My father and I took a picture in his office, with me standing behind him, my hand on his shoulder. Both of us wore matching orange ties.

 “So you’re eating barf now?” my Dad asked me when we looked at the picture a few minutes later. “Someday this could all be yours.”

I looked at his first floor office in a suburban complex. It wasn’t flashy, but the square footage was impressive, and he had decorated it with expensive artwork and photos of his trips all over the world with my mom. He had five people working for him while I had no one. 

“I’m cool with that,” I replied.

            The full page ad ran on the first Monday of December 2008 and by ten that morning, people were complimenting me on my new career. “Are you still practicing law?” Someone asked. “You could make way more money on insurance if your dad sets you up.”

“I guess I’m keeping law as the insurance to the insurance business,” I said. I had checked with a legal advice hotline, I could still sell insurance and practice law at the same time as long as I didn’t sue the companies whose products I was selling. Considering that I didn’t have a single personal injury case, that didn’t seem like a problem.

In Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader had told Luke Skywalker that they would rule the universe as father and son. This would be even better, as I could rule the universe and moonlight by practice a little law on the side.

By Tuesday, one of my friends had actually called about needing a life insurance policy. An hour later, a gentleman from Clovis called, inquiring about group coverage. My father and I spent Thursday afternoon figuring out how to close all the deals and how we would split the commissions. I would get to keep the money indeed.

As we sat at his desk going over paperwork, I felt very close to my father. Maybe we could make this Darth and Luke thing work. I left before five and he kept working. He had some other great ideas he wanted to put together and the next phase of the campaign.

“We can take this national,” he said.

National didn’t sound that bad.

            On Friday morning, I was screwing around at home on my computer writing a silly story, when my phone rang. I ignored it, just another call from my mom.  My Dad had fainted again, and she needed me right away.

            “You need to come up here right now,” she said. “Something’s gone terribly wrong. Your father fainted and he hit his head on the bed.”

            As I took my car onto I-25 heading north, she called again. This time I picked up immediately. My dad had died, my mom explained breathlessly. I didn’t believe her and drove as fast as I could as if that could turn back time.

            I made it to the house and the ambulance was already there. Surely there had been some mistake. They would be able to save them, right. Unfortunately, he was already dead before they had arrived.

It wasn’t cancer. It wasn’t even the fainting. He had fallen and hit his head against metal and it snapped his neck. If he had fallen an inch in either direction he would have survived. Supposedly it was sudden, and painless.

I was there as the paramedics wheeled my father out, his face covered. We said a quick prayer. I had a tear in my eye and one of the paramedics told me I had better “man up.”

            My sister came in from LA that afternoon and she fainted in the middle of airport. Part of manning up was literally picking her up off the floor.

            We had the funeral on a Sunday. I gave a speech to the three hundred people in the audience. I had no idea how popular he was in his community. I gave a speech about how my dad went to Cleveland on business in the dead of winter so I could go out-of state to film school. I mentioned the famous “rather eat barf” quote.

I closed with the quip that my dad was still probably trying to close the Clovis deal from beyond the grave and to watch for him speeding down the highway. I even referenced keeping the money as an author.

There was real chuckling from the audience, much like the famed episode of Mary Tyler Moore, they were happy to be laughing instead of crying.

With the possible exception of the speech I gave at graduation, it was the best speech I had ever made in my life.

A few hours later he was lowered into the ground and I shoveled some dirt. I don’t remember what happened the next day.

            We then we had an amazing discovery on that Tuesday. My dad the insurance salesman did not have life insurance. The insurance salesman did not have life insurance?

            He had spent so much trying to bail us out that he hadn’t been able to renew a policy set at a half a million for me. I figured I would at least get a ten thousand dollar inter-vivos transfer, but that did not occur either.

            The next few months were brutal. Without my father, no one wanted to buy insurance from his company. I went out to Gallup on business and closed a deal, but still I would never be the expert that my Dad was. It became obvious that we would be unable to continue. We had to sell the business at a loss in the midst of the worst recession of all time.

We closed the office by the end of 2009.  I had to work out of my home for a year and I resumed practicing law. I met most clients in Starbucks, unless like one they had never heard of the chain.

Seriously.

I once met with a convicted murderer in McDonalds.

After a year in a daze in my loft, I rented an office, hired staff and secured a valuable state contract that enabled me to survive as a lawyer.  I soon was able to manage a second contract and also branch out into personal injury work.

As for my writing, I could no longer do trips to Amarillo after my father died; they were no longer cost effective, especially when I was spending more on a steak dinner than I was making selling twenty books. I couldn’t ask my Dad to pay my credit card bills any more.

            The safety net was gone.

 I kept on writing and I managed to win several awards, some of them national, for my next few books. This collection that you are reading now was a finalist in one contest and I literally had to go back through everything I had ever written to make sure it was perfect. I no longer dreamed that I would get the magic phone call. I got up at dawn to write for an hour and then worked a full day practicing law.

And yes, I got to keep the money.

Even though, I was not selling insurance, I was eating barf, but I could live with that. I might not have become Iron John, or even a man of steel, but I certainly wasn’t Tin Jon anymore.

I had become a man at last.

Blogging at Dawn: "Wild Pitch" from the Storyteller Anthology

Blogging at Dawn: "Wild Pitch" from the Storyteller Anthology: The Southwest Writer Storyteller Anthology will be out in the next few weeks. Here's my story. Wild Pitch.   WILD PITCH   ...

"Wild Pitch" from the Storyteller Anthology

The Southwest Writer Storyteller Anthology will be out in the next few weeks. Here's my story. Wild Pitch.

 

WILD PITCH

 

I went to a Hollywood pitch meeting as a writer and emerged as a criminal defense attorney.

In my pre-Hollywood life, I had counseled over a thousand clients as a lawyer, on charges ranging from first degree murder to trespassing at school. I used the same deep, slow voice for nearly all of them. My clients often suffered from some kind of attention deficit disorder, so I rarely used big words, repeated the key points over and over again, and emphasized the positive as I explained the difference between a deferred and a suspended sentence in the plea agreement.

My “Hollywood pitch voice” was sort of my lawyer voice on speed. Hollywood producers also have attention deficit disorder, so I rarely used big words, repeated key points over and over again and never talked for more than five minutes straight. I just talked much faster and never mentioned anything remotely negative.  Again, the ultimate goal was often getting to an agreement, but this time I wanted it to be a “pay or play.”

This meeting was at a producer’s home on the west side. As I pulled into this meeting, I was happy enough to find parking on the street near the three story modern-looking apartment complex. Inside, the home was a collection of artsy artifacts and the Producer reminded me a bit of my own mother. She had a nice quality about her in the way that she offered me tea and cookies that would remind anybody of their mother, or perhaps the mother they never had. I swore I could smell last night’s apple pie in the air.

 The home was immaculate, yet all the other doors were closed. If it had been my home, all the dirty laundry would have lurked behind one of those doors, but I figured that all the rooms were probably just as clean as the living room. She seemed that kind of a mom.

The pleasantries over, we started off on a good note. The producer informed me that her assistant had read my legal thriller script and she wanted to hear about all of my other potential projects.

 I talked about my various experiences as a lawyer and how I wrote about “law and life.” 

“So you really were a lawyer, then?” She asked. "So do you have any true crime stories?"

“I guess so.”

It was time to switch from a curve to a change-up. “As a matter of fact, I based most scripts on my real experiences. For instance when I used to represent juvenile delinquents on murder charges . . .”

She stopped me in mid-sentence. “Then you should talk to my son.” She paused for a moment. “Not about scripts, but about law.”

Before I could regain my balance, she hurried over to one of the closed doors and produced her son. Perhaps she did have dirty laundry after all. On first glance, he was hardly my vision of a juvenile delinquent, but was indeed on probation for various minor charges. Yet the charges were getting progressively worse, and his six months probation kept getting extended until it now stretched for two years. Some of his friends had been busted on weapons charges, so his mother was justifiably alarmed.

He sat down and was surprisingly polite. He reminded of the nice kid that I represented on the trespassing at school charge, who had graduated to murder.

I told the boy my standard stories about staying out of trouble, yet I somehow managed to make them seem both “commercial and edgy.” It was weird, but I was seemed to be talking to the son, yet pitching to the mother.

After about twenty minutes of cautionary tales about the juvenile justice system, she stopped the meeting to take her son to therapy, and told me to meet her to continue the meeting. We played the second half of our double-header in a coffee shop as we waited for her son to “talk through his issues” and get his court-ordered urine test. The mother was tense, but she still seemed eager to hear my ideas -- both legal and literary. One moment we were talking about “setting something up at Showtime,” and then the next we were talking about “alternative sentencing” for her son.

After an hour or two, the boy came back from therapy and apparently had filled the specimen jar with no ill effects. As his mother got up to buy him a Carmel Frappuccino for his troubles, I talked with him some more. Now I was totally in lawyer mode, yet he seemed to want to hear the funny story I had about the criminal who . . .

I thought about Samuel Goldwyn's famous quote about “if you want to send a message, use Western Union.” The fact that the boy was even opening up to someone at all was a good first step. I then told him about the time I met a female killer with my zipper down. He laughed.

His mother returned. It was getting late, so we called the meeting on account of darkness and they went on their way and I went on mine. I felt confident that the boy would be all right, after perhaps a few more detours outside his mother's friendly confines.

I may not have sold a script, but perhaps I had saved a life. 

Blogging at Dawn: The Next Hunger Games: How to Turn Books into Film...

Blogging at Dawn: The Next Hunger Games: How to Turn Books into Film...: I saw the Hunger Games, Catching Fire  at ABQ's Century Rio theaters over the weekend without reading the book. Instead of going back an...

Blogging at Dawn: The Next Hunger Games: How to Turn Books into Film...

Blogging at Dawn: The Next Hunger Games: How to Turn Books into Film...: I saw the Hunger Games, Catching Fire  at ABQ's Century Rio theaters over the weekend without reading the book. Instead of going back an...

The Next Hunger Games: How to Turn Books into Films

I saw the Hunger Games, Catching Fire at ABQ's Century Rio theaters over the weekend without reading the book. Instead of going back and reading the book, I read the Entertainment Weekly column on the differences between book and film. Apparently one scene in the film featured Finnick, instead of Enobria. I had no idea who Enobria was.

The author of the article thought it was a good change. I wonder what the author of the Hunger Games thought...

I'm currently talking with several film makers about turning my own novels into films and I realize that they are two different media. I went to Film School, so I tend to write my novels like screenplays already--short scenes, three act structure, character arcs etc... But even then, the printed page is always different from what's up on the screen.

I remember when my book Rattlesnake Lawyer was still in manuscript, I literally tried to cut and paste the word perfect manuscript into some screenplay software, line by line. I was hoping that I could turn book into film over the afternoon. Big mistake.  The resulting page looked liked it had been typed by one of the mutant baboons in the arena in the Hunger Games w

I did have one scene from my novel La Bajada Lawyer turned into a "staged reading." I had a fairly famous B movie actress and her boyfriend, an actor read a scene and then posted it on youtube.  Other than some technical difficulties with sound, I liked the results with one big caveat...the scene was way too long. It had to be broken into two parts for Youtube, a part one and a part two. It wasn't as long as the Hunger Games, but it sure felt that way.

So I've resigned myself to novels and blogs for the moment. My screenplay writing days are over. However you are more than welcome to write a screenplay based on my work and we can sell it together. I won't even care if Finnick is there instead of Enobria.

Cyber Monday Hyper Monday

Today is Cyber Monday. Today is the day to do all your online shopping and make Jeff Bezos rich. The re is an old joke about shopping in the mall-- You spend money you don't have to buy things to don't want to impress people you don't like. Cyber Monday is like that I suppose, but you don't have to worry about finding parking and walking half a mile on a windy day.

As the author of several e-books, I'm in favor of Cyber Monday. I am still learning how to promote. I've already posted links in a few facebook ebook sites. A million other authors have the same strategy. When I did book signings over the holidays, it usually was just me as the author in the store. With Cyber Monday, it's like being mugged in the parking lot by authors and then mugged at the cash register.

In the years to come, I'm sure we'll develop a better internet promotion strategy. Until now, we are all one step away from spamming.

There is one thing that is stressful about Cyber Monday, privacy. Ironically you are being watched more closely when you are home along then when you are in a crowded mall parking lot. (I've had my car broken in at a crowded mall parking lot, so have you). We've all read how easy it is to steal vital information over the net. Now that we are hearing about the NSA spying, I can easily see an NSA agent checking out my book selections. Hopefully he will be so impressed with my books that he will order them for the people on his own book list.

Will Cyber Monday replace Black Friday? I don't know. There is something about going to a mall, and actually touching the merchandise as opposed to looking at a little blip on a screen that is sitting in a warehouse in Seattle.

So happy Cyber Monday. If you have to click, check out Rattlesnake Lawyer, Rattlesnake Wedding and all my other books and ebooks. You don't even have to leave your desk...