The Two Goldberg Brothers You Meet in Heaven

(Cross posted from Tod Goldberg's blog)

As I think everyone knows, I'm a huge, huge Mitch Albom fan, so imagine how happy I was to learn that his next book, after The Four Chinese Gymnasts You Meet In Pre-School, would be called The Two Goldberg Brothers You Meet In Heaven! And keep an eye out for the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie based on the book, starring Lou Diamond Phillips as me and Levar Burton as Lee, with special guest appearances by Rosie O'Donnell as our sister Linda and Illeana Douglas as our sister Karen...

In celebration of this exciting honor, my brother Lee and I have decided to go out on the road to meet the people who will be so inspired by us next year at this time. This weekend we'll be making two appearances and, just for kicks, thought it might be fun to sign some of our own books, too. I'll be signing The Fix and Lee will be signing his 145,032nd Monk novel.

Here are the details:

First, this Saturday at 1pm, we'll be at Mysteries to Die For in Thousand Oaks. If you happen to be one of the many people who've threatened to kill us over the years, this would be a good one to attend as our sisters will be there, too, and you can take out the whole family.

Then, three hours later, at 4pm, we'll be at the Mystery Bookstore in Westwood. My understanding is that for this event they are anticipating over 150,000 people, but my numbers could be slightly off.

If that still doesn't satisfy you, I anticpate stopping off at the Starbucks on the 210 in Rancho Cucamonga at about 7pm and would be happy to sign anything you might have then, too. Alternately, I might roll by the Baja Fresh across from Ontario Mills at about the same time, so watch this space for continuous updates.

More STAR TREK translations

(From Dayton Ward's blog)
Thanks to a heads-up from defcons_treklit, I can verify that CrossCult, the publisher responsible for German translations of the first three Star Trek: Vanguard, plans to publish a translation of Open Secrets, and release their edition (titled Offene Geheimnisse) in May 2009 simultaneously -- or, pretty close, anyway -- with the regular English-language version. You can see their page for the entire Vanguard series here.

According to the site, they also plan to translate the existing line of Star Trek: Titan, beginning in November 2008.

Woo to the mutha-effin' Hoo.

The Latest News from Karen Traviss

(Cross-posted from Karen Traviss' website) Talking of endearing rogues in saucy armour, ORDER 66, book four in the Republic Commando series, is out on September 15. After that, the books continue as IMPERIAL COMMANDO. (Because that nice Emperor Palpatine said so.) Other upcoming Star Wars books from me include a Boba Fett novel and an essential guide to the military. (See theDel Rey interview.) I'm also working on a new series of my own that's a bit of a departure from the Wess'har Wars and my usual SF, as well as what I can only describe as "other projects" at this stage. So no rest for the wicked. It's a grand life if you don't weaken!

The Oh-So-Tiresome "Canon" Discussions

You know why every single discussion about canon on the Internet (and elsewhere) is stupid?

Because nobody has once asked Christopher Nolan or Jon Favreau if they're "worried" or "concerned" about the fact that neither Iron Man nor The Dark Knight are canon. I, meanwhile, get that question all the time...

I'm constantly hearing from assorted keyboard monkeys talking about how they won't read tie-in fiction because it isn't canon, which is why they read the Star Wars novels -- which, by the by, aren't canon, either, and anyone who tells you they are is lying, and as evidence I point you to a) the history of the Fett family and b) the upcoming Clone Wars animated film, which I bet won't be consistent with the various CW novels and comics (not to mention the Genndy Tartovsky animated shorts) that are allegedly canonical -- and yet I bet not a single one of them has refused to see the most popular movie on the planet because it isn't canon.

And it isn't. The Dark Knight is based on the Batman comics that have been published over the years, but they make no effort to be consistent with them, and ignore them as they see fit. They're not canon. The "canon" of Batman consists of the various comic books published by DC Comics.

No, what we have here is the fact that, in this country, we view things on screen as more real than things in print. Part of it is simple numbers: more people watch TV and movies than read books and comic books. That's why when you adapt a novel into a movie, you've got an entire Academy Award category to yourself (and other adapters like you), but when you adapt a movie into a novel, you're a talentless hack who's just in it for the money (never mind that screenwriters are far better compensated for their work than prose writers).

The people who say they won't buy a Buffy novel or a Star Trek comic book because it's not canon are most likely lying, unless they have also refused to see The Hulk, Iron Man, The Dark Knight, any of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films, etc. for the same reason. It's just a feeble justification for a prejudice against prose in general and against tie-in fiction in particular.


Keith R.A. DeCandido has written flipping great wodges of tie-in fiction, including thirty novels, seven novelizations, twelve novellas, twenty-one short stories, a bunch of comic books, and a partridge in a pear tree in the universes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Classic BattleTech, Command and Conquer, CSI, Doctor Who, Farscape, Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, Marvel Comics, Resident Evil, Serenity, Star Trek (in all its incarnations, plus some new ones), StarCraft, Supernatural, World of Warcraft, Xena, and Young Hercules, and not a single frapping one of them is canon. So there. Find out more about Keith at his web site at DeCandido.net or his blog at kradical.livejournal.com.

Comic Con and the Scribes

(This is cross-posted from Lee Goldberg's blog. That's a picture of Alan Dean Foster and Lee on the left)



My daughter Maddie and I left the house yesterday for Comic Con in San Diego at 5:30 am and walked through the door of the convention center at 8:30. The Scribe Awards weren't until 2, so we roamed around the exhibition floor for a few hours.

The Scribe Awards and Tie-In Panel was sparsely attended at first, but by the time we were mid-way through, we built to nice-sized crowd. Our 2008 Grandmaster Alan Dean Foster gave a thoughtful, and very funny, speech on the lack of respect tie-in writers get from the publishing industry and their fellowAlan Dean Foster and Lee Goldberg writers, despite the huge success of tie-in books. He applauded the International Association of Media Tie-In Writer's efforts to change that and to increase the awareness of tie-in writing in the mainstream media.

Other panelists included Andy Mangels, Max Allan Collins, Steve Leiva, Kevin J. Anderson, William Dietz and Stacy Deutsch. I must admit, though, that I was distracted for much of the panel by an audience member who had long hair and a beard on one half of his face and was bald and clean-shaved on the other. I couldn't help thinking that he was a man born to drive Adrian Monk insane...

The Scribe Nominees and Winners (noted with asterisks) are below:

BEST GENERAL FICTION ORIGINAL

CSI NY: DELUGE by Stuart M. Kaminsky
**MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS by Lee Goldberg
MURDER SHE WROTE: PANNING FOR MURDER by Jessica Fletcher & Donald Bain
CRIMINAL MINDS: JUMP CUT by Max Allan Collins

BEST GENERAL FICTION ADAPTED

**AMERICAN GANGSTER by Max Allan Collins (nominee & winner)

BEST SPECULATIVE ORIGINAL

LAST DAYS OF KRYPTON by Kevin J. Anderson
**STARGATE ATLANTIS: CASUALTIES OF WAR by Elizabeth Christensen
STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Q&A by Keith R.A. DeCandido

BEST GAME-RELATED ORIGINAL (SPECIAL SCRIBE AWARD)

HITMAN: ENEMY WITHIN by William C. Dietz
FORGE OF THE MINDSLAYERS by Tim Waggoner
**EBERRON: NIGHT OF THE LONG SHADOWS by Paul Crilley

BEST SPECULATIVE ADAPTED

RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION by Keith R.A. DeCandido
52: THE NOVEL by Greg Cox
**30 DAYS OF NIGHT by Tim Lebbon

BEST YOUNG ADULT ORIGINAL

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: THE DEATHLESS by Keith R.A. DeCandido
GOODLUND TRILOGY: VOLUME THREE: WARRIORS BONES by Stephen D. Sullivan
**NANCY DREW AND THE CLUE CREW #10: TICKET TROUBLE by Stacia Deutsch & Rhody Cohon

BEST YOUNG ADULT ADAPTED

**THE 12 DOGS OF CHRISTMAS by Steven Paul Leiva (nominee & winner)

Trek Stuff

From Keith DeCandido's blog) As many of you probably know, a bunch of new Star Trek prose projects were announced at Shore Leave 30 this past weekend. Full news stories can be found at Trek Today, TrekWeb, and TrekMovie.com.

I already posted the covers to A Singular Destiny and Mere Anarchy. Here's what else of mine was announced:

There will be another Corps of Engineers compilation next year, Out of the Cocoon, which will be published in December 2009, and which will include four eBooks (the title story by William Leisner bill_leisner, Honor by Kevin Killiany, Blackout by Phaedra M. Weldon [info]meharet, and The Cleanup by Robert T. Jeschonek and a new minipedia compiled by me. (The current plan is to try to do two trades per year that collect eBooks. We'll get Mere Anarchy and Out of the Cocoon in 2009. Still to come are Slings and Arrows and the final three COE volumes, What's Past, Turn the Page, and Remembrance of Things Past.)

In August 2009, there will be an anthology called Seven Deadly Sins. This will feature seven novellas picking an alien species (or, in one case, an alternate universe) that represents one of each of the seven deadly sins.

Big surprise -- I'm doing the Klingons, who represent wrath. Can't say much about the story just yet, but I can say it'll be my first time writing 23rd-century Klingons, which I'm looking forward to.

Here's the whole lineup:

Pride: the Romulans, by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
Envy: the Cardassians, by James Swallow
Wrath: the Klingons, by Keith R.A. DeCandido
Sloth: the Pakleds, by Jimmy Diggs
Greed: the Ferengi, by David A. McIntee
Gluttony: the Borg, by Marc Giller
Lust: the Mirror Universe, by Britta Dennison

River Runs Red Cover

I saw that the cover for my new supernatural thriller River Runs Red (Penguin/Jove, October) was starting to show up at various places online--but it's the early "solicitation" cover, and it has Brian Keene's generous quote from the front of Missing White Girl on it instead of the correct David Morrell blurb, so I thought I'd post the right version here. The book earned some lovely blurbs from other writers who I'm honored to be linked with in print, and which I'll share at another time. RRR is the second book in the loosely linked "border trilogy" that began with MWG and ends next year with Cold Black Hearts. You might have to click on the picture to enlarge it enough to read... (Crossposted from Jeff Mariotte's blog)

The Fix: Behind the Music and an Excerpt

A month from now my first Burn Notice book, The Fix, will be released into the wide world. I'm already well into writing the second book and thinking about the third one, too. It has been an odd process for me for several reasons, not the least of which being that I am typically a pretty slow writer, tend to agonize over every word and have a micro manager's attention to detail as it relates to marketing, art and advertising. I've been spoiled in a way because with Simplify, for instance, my great publishers at OV Books actually listened to my rants and things worked really, really well. (And it should be noted: I am hoping to have good news shortly about my new collection of stories.) With The Fix, it was an entirely different experience. I wrote the book in about 70 days. I have no micromanaging tendencies concerning anything with the art or marketing, particularly since its hard to complain about television ads running on USA, a huge web presence on USA's site and assurances that the book will be in every store in the known universe. Unlike my previous books where I've toured the nation, I'm doing a limited amount of touring this time around -- I'll post the schedule shortly, but it's primarily in the west -- focusing mostly on mystery and crime book stores, which have always shown me a tremendous amount of support for my previous books, and festivals. The reality is that this book will probably sell itself. The other reality is that my ego won't allow me to stay home and hope that happens.

I would be lying if I said writing this book wasn't a challenge. It absolutely was. I've never written a traditional crime novel. Anyone who has read my work in the past will tell you that linear storytelling isn't exactly my calling card. Nor is having a narrator who is reliable. Of course I've written linear work in the past. And of course I've written reliable narrators in the past. But one thing I don't think I've ever written is a hero, even an ironic hero like Michael Westen. My characters tend to be pretty fucked up and of course Michael is fucked up in his own way, too, but not in the "he may have killed his wife and daughter" sort of way. The challenge for me was to convey him on the page in a way that made me enjoy writing him and also was true to Matt Nix's creation.

Which brings up another challenge: I had to remember to be funny. My tendency in writing fiction is the opposite of what I do here on this blog. And of course this blog isn't even really me -- it is some blog version of myself, some stylized version of my life and opinions (I don't say the word fucktard all that often, really) -- so if you pick up a book of mine looking for whatever is you find here, you're going to be disappointed. One of the more common things I hear when I meet people at book signings and such is, "I bought your book thinking it would be really funny. But this is really different. It's serious!" Which I guess is the hazard of keeping a blog. At any rate, I gave myself the freedom with The Fix to let go of some of my literary pretension, leaving that for the short fiction I wrote this year, and hopefully found a voice that would give readers what they want in terms of the humor of Burn Notice.

After the book comes out, I'll post some other interesting stuff about the book -- including a little bit about the Easter Eggs I put in the book, which will be part of a contest I'll run here for people who happen to be fans of the entire family of Goldberg siblings and can spot all of the allusions I've made to previous works by all of us -- including some stories about the actual writing of scenes and such (there is one notable scene that occurred while I was literally freezing to death in Vermont).

Until then, Penguin has posted a pretty extensive excerpt -- the entire first chapter -- here. The spacing is a little funky in places -- some of the dialog gets shoved together in odd ways -- but it will give you a nice flavor for the book.

(Crossposted from Tod's blog)

IAMTW at BookExpo

IAMTW co-founders Lee Goldberg and Max Allan Collins signed their Scribe-nominated MONK and CRIMINAL MINDS novels at the BookExpo convention in Los Angeles last weekend. Other Scribe honorees featured at the convention included Marv Wolfman (SUPERMAN RETURNS) and Christa Faust (SNAKES ON A PLANE), while 100s of galleys of Steve Saville's new TORCHWOOD tie-in were quickly snapped up from the Titan Books booth by booksellers and librarians.

Has New York Become Too Safe To Write About

IAMTW Grandmaster Donald Bain was among the mystery writers interviewed by the New York Times on how crime writers are adapting to a safer city.

As New York celebrates the sharp decline in crime — earlier this year the city revealed that the 494 homicides in 2007 were the fewest since reliable police statistics became available in 1963 — the crime writer may be the only New Yorker for whom that drop is not an unequivocal blessing. Just as the breakup of the Soviet Union caused problems for writers whose plots hinged on the dark doings of the cold war, so New York’s crime writers are wondering where to find grist in a far safer city.

[...]Sometimes New York’s crime writers grow wistful about the bad old days for unexpected reasons, as was the case with Donald Bain, the highly successful author of more than 30 “Murder, She Wrote” books along with other crime novels.

In January, Mr. Bain was the main speaker at a meeting of the Mystery Writers of America, held at the National Arts Club, opposite Gramercy Park.

At dinner in the club’s high-ceilinged dining room, Mr. Bain, a tall man with a white beard, reminisced about the early ’90s, when his daughter lived on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. Her apartment building was next to a social club run by Vincent Gigante, a k a the Chin, the mobster whose associates used to sit outside the club, playing cards and drinking late into the night. If one of the men saw his daughter emerging from the subway station a few blocks away, Mr. Gigante dispatched one of them to walk her home safely.

The other writers at the table laughed, but their laughs were tinged with nostalgia for a vanished version of New York that could hand you a scene, just like that.