Scribe Awards and Grandmaster Announced

The International Association of Media Tie-in Writers is proud to announce the 2011 Scribe Award nominees for excellence in licensed tie-in writing --  novels based on TV shows, movies, and games – and this year’s Grandmaster, honoring  career achievement in the field.
This year’s Grandmaster is Peter David, who has worked in television, film, books (fiction, non-fiction and audio), short stories, and comic books. He’s the acclaimed author of over fifty novels, many of them New York Times bestsellers. His extraordinarily prolific output of consistently excellent books includes two dozen original Star Trek novels, three Babylon 5 novels and novelizations of such major motion pictures as Spiderman, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, and The Hulk.
David is also one of the most successful and acclaimed comic book scripters in the business with popular runs on such titles as Supergirl, Star Trek, Wolverine and, in particular, his work on The Incredible Hulk franchise (in comics as well as books). His many awards include the prestigious Will Eisner Comic Industry Award. He lives in New York with his wife Kathleen and their three children.
Our 2011 Scribe Nominees are:
GENERAL ORIGINAL
CSI: SHOCK TREATMENT by Greg Cox
BURN NOTICE: The Giveaway by Tod Goldberg
MIKE HAMMER: THE BIG BANG by Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane
MURDER SHE WROTE:  The Queen's Jewels by Donald Bain
PSYCH: The Call of the Mild by William Rabkin
SAVING GRACE: TOUGH LOVE by Nancy Holder
SPECULATIVE ORIGINAL
GUILD WARS: GHOSTS OF ASCALON by Matt Forbeck and Jeff Grubb
STAR TREK: MIRROR UNIVERSE: THE SORROWS OF THE EMPIRE by David Mack 
STAR WARS: FORCE UNLEASHED II by Sean Williams
SUPERNATURAL: HEART OF THE DRAGON by Keith R. A. DeCandido
WARHAMMER: BLOODBORN: ULRIKA THE VAMPIRE by Nathan Long
BEST ADAPTATION
FINAL CRISIS by Greg Cox
GOD OF WAR by Matthew Stover & Robert E. Vardeman
THE WOLFMAN by Jonathan Maberry
BEST YOUNG ADULT
ALPHA & OMEGA: THE JUNIOR NOVEL by Aaron Rosenberg
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: ALDWYNS ACADEMY by Nathan Meyer
THUNDERBIRDS: SITUATION CRITICAL by Joan Marie Yerba

The Fifth Annual Scribe Awards will be given at a ceremony and panel discussion held during Comic Con International in San Diego in July 2011. Details will be announced soon.

Burn Notice: The Reformed

From Tod Goldberg's blog

My second-to-last Burn Notice novel,"The Reformed", comes out today, to be followed this summer by my last Burn Notice novel, "The Bad Beat," so in honor of that, and because my ego demands that I tell you all every small, insignificant detail about my life, here's a bit of background information about the writing of the book. (If you'd like signed copies of the book -- or any of my books, for that matter -- I suggest you contact the fine people at The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles: They'll have signed copies after this weekend. And if you live in Los Angeles, I'll be doing a booksigning this Saturday at Mysteries to Die For in Thousand Oaks at 2pm, along with my brother Lee, who'll be signing his latest Monk book.)

1. The client's name is Eduardo Santiago. He's a Cuban gangster who has been....wait for it...reformed. I don't know a lot of Cubans. But one I do know is the excellent writer Eduardo Santiago, author of Tomorrow They Will Kiss and a former student of mine. So when I started the book, I used his name as sort of a place holder for another non-Eduardo Santiago name. But then, after 300-some pages of him being Eduardo Santiago, well, he became Eduardo Santiago for good. Sorry Eduardo.

2. There's a hard-as-nails-and-other-cliches-friend of Sam's named Chris Alessio. Chris and I went to elementary and middle school together and then I didn't seem him for 25 years. When I finally did see him, I found out he was damn near a professional paintball player and wrote extensively on paintball stuff for a variety of different magazines. So when I needed information about paintball markers and needed a hard-as-nails-etc bad ass, he became Chris Alessio.

3. Julia Pistell, whose name appears in this book as a person who has had their identity stolen, went to graduate school with me and is one of the best humans alive. She happened to be visiting Wendy and me last January, when I was in the middle of the book, but didn't have a title yet. However, the fine people at Penguin needed a title and needed it right now, except that right now happened to be while Julia, Wendy and I were eating lunch at a deli in Palm Desert. So I said to Wendy and Julia, hey, anyone got a title? And Julia came up with The Reformed. (This was after The Godfather was rejected.)

4. I finished writing this book last March. I started it in December 2009. So, at that point, I'd read the scripts through the middle of season 3. I tell you this so when I get the inevitable email from someone asking me why X happened when Y happened in Season 4, I can remind them that Season 4 didn't exist when I wrote this book, even though it does now (which is why Jesse isn't in the book). Generally, as with all the books I've written in the Burn Notice series, I try to keep them evergreen so they don't work in lockstep with the seasons and can be read any time.

5. There are swear words in this book. Just to clarify my position on you being offended by swear words: Oh, go fuck yourself. This isn't a kids book. Nut the fuck up. You don't like it? Don't buy the fucking book. Really. Have a great day!

Mystery Scene is Tied In

The current issue of Mystery Scene magazine (with Dennis Lehane on the cover) includes a rave review of  TIED IN: The Business, History and Craft of Media Tie-In Writing and some photos of vintage tie-ins. Reviewer Jon Breen says, in part:

If this is the Golden Age of anything in the popular fiction field, it may be the tie-in novel [...]There have always been formidable writers doing tie-ins, but they have generally been dismissed, not unreasonably, as quickies tossed off for a fast buck. That image has been improved somewhat by the quality work of editor Goldberg, the late Stuart Kaminsky, Max Allan Collins, and some of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers members contributing to this volume. [...] With it's helpful how-to tips and articles, the book is primarily directed towards other writers, and established pros at that. But many fans and scholars will enjoy the inside-the-business stuff.

Breen goes on to single out chapters by David Spencer, John Cox, and Max for praise. I hope this will give a jolt to sales of the book, proceeds of which go to support the IAMTW. Lee

Tie-In Synergy

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting piece on the shrewd way that Hyperion has handled publication and cross-promotion of their CASTLE tie-in novels. They said, in part:

Publisher Hyperion, which had success with similar projects connected to sister company ABC's soaps "One Life to Live" and " All My Children," decided to bypass a traditional TV tie-in and instead go with a Richard Castle-authored book after seeing the greenlit pilot. Castle's name alone appears on the books, without any nod to a real-life scribe. "The main character's a writer! How perfect is that?" says Gretchen Young, an executive editor at Hyperion and its editorial director for ABC Synergy.
[...] The show plays with fiction and reality: On it, Castle has talked about his upcoming publication commitments with his agent (yes, Hyperion will be publishing two more) and played poker with real-life mystery writers James Patterson and Stephen J. Cannell, who died in late September.
In an upcoming episode, "Heat Wave" — a novel written by a fictional television character — has been optioned by Hollywood. "It gets very meta in the show," Marlowe admits, laughing.
And in person. As part of Hyperion's release last year of "Heat Wave," Fillion appeared as Castle at two Southern California bookstores.

It's not a new idea. The MURDER SHE WROTE books are written by Jessica Fletcher & Donald Bain, and she was a mystery novelist, too. But the producers didn't integrate the tie-ins into the TV series as cleverly as the CASTLE folks have (or at all, if memory serves). But now that HEAT WAVE has become a bestseller, you can expect more TV tie-ins to follow their example...

tie-in writers guest blogging!

During the Labor Day weekend, as Dragon*Con was taking over Atlanta and WorldCon was taking over Melbourne, I decided to run a series of guest blogs by fellow tie-in writers, give them all a chance to talk about what they do to a (hopefully) different audience.

Here's what we got:

Robert Greenberger on Superman.
Aaron Rosenberg on Eureka.
Joan Marie Verba on Thunderbirds.
Steven Paul Leiva on his original character the Fixxer.
Steven Savile on Stargate SG1.
Paul Kupperberg on Archie.
Nancy Holder on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Crusade, and more.
Diana Botsford on Stargate SG1.
Dayton Ward on Star Trek: Vanguard.

Check it out!

TIED IN: "The Most Fascinating, Entertaining, and Honest Book About The Writing Life..."

From author/editor/publisher Ed Gorman's blog:

I say this without a whit of exaggeration TIED-IN edited by Lee Goldberg and written by Lee and other members of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers is the most fascinating, entertaining and honest book about the writing life I've ever read.

With writers such as Max Allan Collins, Tod Goldberg, Nancy Holder, Donald Bain, Greg Cox, William Rabkin and many others dealing with their experiences of converting movies, tv shows, movies and games into novels, we see the pleasures and frustrations of this particular craft. And in the process we see what life is really like for professional writers. Max Collins' piece on converting his own Road To Perdition to conform to the movie script for the tie-in; his dealings with the Dick Tracy movie were even stranger. Nancy Holder's take on visiting the set of the tv show she was novelizing shows just how brutal fourteen hour days are for everybody involved in creating the episodes. A number of writers use a page or so of script to show how it looks as prose after they've done their work--extremely helpful. 

Greg Cox tells some fascinating stories about writing sequels then prequels and keeping storylines straight; and Lee does an excellent job setting the book up with his piece called Tied In: The Business, History and Craft of Media Tie-In Writing.

TIED-IN is rich with humor, lore, wisdom about the writing life and Lee Goldberg is to be commended for editing it with such verve and style.

And his brother Tod is to be commended for writing the best line in the book. Lamenting that his literary novels have not sold a great number of copies, he writes "I'd need the Jaws of Life to pull me on to the bestseller list."

James Cameron disses novelizations -- in other news, sun rises in east

James Cameron provided the following gem while discussing his forthcoming Avatar novel with MTV:

I didn't want to do a cheesy novelization, where some hack comes in and kind of makes s--t up. I wanted to do something that was a legitimate novel that was inside the characters' heads and didn't have the wrong culture stuff, the wrong language stuff, all that.

Yeah, heaven forfend a writer make shit up. That might be, I dunno, fiction or something!

More seriously, novelizers have to make shit up because a movie only has a long short story's worth of actual plot in it. If you're gonna get a novel-length story in there, you have to add stuff.

Whether or not that shit is true to the film generally depends on the level of cooperation the film studio provides the publisher of the novelization. As a for-instance, the producers of Darkness Falls were hugely helpful, providing me with a ton of backstory that didn't make it into the final cut of the movie. As another, the producers of Resident Evil: Extinction encouraged me to add a ton of material -- lots and lots of "making shit up" -- to bridge the gap between Apocalypse and Extinction, and also to fill in what was happening with the Jill Valentine character. As a third, Serenity had fourteen hours of televised episodes of Firefly as additional background.

And sometimes producers don't cooperate at all and the novelizers don't have a choice to make shit up. That's not hack work, that's writing and creating. But, y'know, it's just prose, so it doesn't count. It's not real writing, not like a script is.... *rolleyes*

As ever, I am amused by the fact that a writer who adds plot and characterization to an existing story in order to make a movie into a novel is dismissed by people like Cameron as hacks, while screenwriters who (ahem) hack away at a novel's story and remove huge chunks of it in order to whittle it down to a movie's length get their own Academy Award category.

This is why we formed the IAMTW, to combat this obscene prejudice against our craft. Ignorant comments like Cameron's are a good reminder of how far we have to go.

Tudors Novelization Wins Praise

Elizabeth Massie, the Scribes, TIED IN and the IAMTW all get some attention in this article in the Waynesboro News-Leader. They say, in part:

As a writer of original works, Massie's "Tudors" projects presented her with some unique challenges.

Massie, 56, was sent scripts for each episode and then wrote the season into one book at the same time it was being filmed in Ireland.

The books had to be loyal to the show, but the scripts, as they tend to be, were scant in details and description.

So Massie had to conduct historical research to bring the story alive on the page.

"The script would say something like, 'King Henry enters the room. He sits on a chair. He starts to talk,'" she said. "I had to fill in details of the way things looked, what they ate, how long did it take to get from London to Hever Castle (by horse and carriage). Things like that."

TIED IN - The Paperback

For those of you without a Kindle, the trade paperback edition of TIED IN is now available here. It will soon be available on Amazon as well.

TIED IN Ties Up Rave Reviews

Our first reviews for TIED IN have started coming in...the first is from the Television Obscurities blog... and it's a rave.  They said, in part:

TIED IN doesn’t focus solely on television tie-ins. It also covers movie novelizations, comic book tie-ins and computer game tie ins. But that actually makes it even more valuable and more interesting.

[...]my favorite essays were those that did focus on television tie-ins, especially David Spencer’s wonderful “American TV Tie-Ins from the 50s through the early 70s,” which delves into the history of television tie-in novels and examines several of the writers from those decades, including William Johnston, Keith Laumer and Michael Avallone.

TIED IN is a fascinating exploration of the media tie-in business.

Novelist James Reasoner has given TIED IN a rave. He says, in part:

For someone like me, who’s very interested in the history of popular fiction, the highlight of TIED IN is David Spencer’s “American TV Tie-ins from the 50s Through the Early 70s”, which is almost a book in itself. It’s a fascinating historical discussion of how the TV tie-in novel originated and evolved over the years and touches on many of the books I was buying and reading when they were new. This article really brought back a lot of good memories for me. Along similar lines, also of great interest to me were fine articles by Paul Kupperberg about comic book and comic strip tie-in novels (I read a bunch of those, too) and Robert Greenberger about the connection between pulp magazines and tie-ins.

 TIED IN is available as an e-book right now, with a print edition coming out soon. Either way, I don’t think you can go wrong. It’s informative, entertaining, and a must-have if you have any interest in tie-in fiction. Highly recommended.

And Bill Crider also gives the book kudos. He says, in part:

I started reading, and I was fascinated. I kept right on reading, long past the time I'd intended to stop. This is really interesting and entertaining stuff.

I started with Tod Goldberg's essay on writing the Burn Notice books, moved on Jeff Mariotte's "Jack of All Trades," got really caught up in Max Allan Collins's "This Time It's Personal," kept right on going through the great round-table discussion, and read three or four more of the essays, including one that harks back to my era, David Spencer's "American TV Tie-Ins from the '50s to the Early '70s." All I can say about that one is that I'm glad I have my copies of John Tiger's I Spy novels because I'm sure a lot of people are going to be looking for them now.

I still have a few more essays to read, and I'm really looking forward to them. I was genuinely surprised at how much fun I had reading this book, and I'm sure most of you would like it, too. It's currently available in electronic format only, but a paperback is on the way. Check it out