20100728 Sample ROAD KILL for FREE

ROAD KILL is PUBLISHED!

How would you like to read the first SEVEN chapters of ROAD KILL for free? No catches, nothing to buy?

Read on!

First, I got this email at 7:44 PM last night:

Congratulations - you’re published!

Congratulations! The title(s) you recently submitted has been reviewed and successfully published to the Kindle Store.

So ROAD KILL is published on Amazon. Wow, that feels some kind of special.  All the hard work to write, edit, and get it ready, and now it’s out there for people to read (The paperback book edition is still in-the-works, since I haven’t received the proof copy yet!).

This is the Kindle edition, so people can download it to their Kindle device, or a FREE Kindle-for-PC viewer.

And that is how you can read a sample of the book.  Kindle has a Try it Free box on the far right of the page with the words “Sample the beginning of this book for free.”

If you own a Kindle already, select that under the Deliver to: pull down, and hit the Send Sample Now button.

If you don’t have a Kindle, no problem, you can install the FREE Kindle viewer. I personally have the Kindle for PC. But you may have an iPhone or Blackberry.


See the links below to add your device of choice:

Read books on your computer or other mobile devices

	Get Kindle for PC
	Get Kindle for iPhone  Also works on iPod Touch
	Get Kindle for BlackBerry
	Get Kindle for iPad
	Get Kindle for Android

Here is the link to the book:

http://www.amazon.com/ROAD-KILL-ebook/dp/B003XF1H9M

Do me a favor?  If you do download & read it, please leave a review on Amazon.  And if you like it, buy it!  If you want to wait for the paperback, that’s cool. I’ll post that link when it’s ready.

Thanks for reading!

20100727 Giving Birth

Over the last week, I went through a marathon of activity, with one goal in mind – to get my book ready for proofing by Sunday, July 25, 2010.  And I made it.  There was a toll, by Sunday noon I had a migraine from eyestrain and lack of sleep.  I have a fulltime job to pay for my creative activities, so pulling double duty to fuel my dreams is a given. I am sure many of my acting and filmmaking friends can relate.

Birth involves pain and sacrifice.  I had to push myself out of the comfort zone of endlessly tweaking a little here and there in a futile effort to achieve perfection, and get down to brass tacks and push this baby out into the cold cruel world. It’s tough, because there are all sorts of bullies on the schoolyard ready to poke fun at the strange new guy.

You don’t think that’s a part of it? Trust me – if you are on an endless treadmill of adding this and making a slight change to that, ask yourself what you are afraid of. If these incremental changes are taking longer than it took to write the first draft, then you may be in the grips of the fear of letting the world see what you’ve been touting as your great masterpiece. 

In your mind’s eye, your work is a grand, fresh idea, and perfectly executed. When it hits paper or is in the editing bay, taking your ideal concept to physical form is a harsh reality. Alfred Hitchcock once said the film was never as good as the script, everything after that is a series of compromises. The same with other works of art.

Anyway, during the last week I taught myself enough about typesetting and the use of Adobe InDesign to produce a very nice manuscript of a quality worth printing.  It’s not perfect, but I am very proud of the accomplishment. The proof copy will arrive on Thursday (7/29/10), so I am excited. I will write more about how I got to this point in later posts.

Mark E. Poole

20100720 Ch-ch-ch-Changes

I have been teaching myself how to do book layout with Adobe InDesign, which is supposed to be a great way to lay out a quality hardcopy of your book. That appears to be true, but it’s not the easiest thing to master. I have been able to get some results, but it will require me to split my one MS Word doc up into 50 separate files (one for each chapter), and apply styles to the text, etc. In short, it’s a lot of work. But it sure looks nice, so far. I’ll go into a little of that in another post.

What looms in the back of my mind is, “why bother to do a hardcopy edition?” especially when I read this morning (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/technology/20kindle.html?_r=1&hpw) how Amazon’s e-book sales had outstripped hardback sales (143 sales of Kindle for every 100 hardbacks). We all know that is where everything is going, eventually. And with the present Kindle, there is no need for the fancy formatting, because it disregards that.

Here are a few reasons:

• I’ve been doing a lot of business travel lately, and spending a lot of time hunkered down in waiting areas and sitting on the tarmac with fellow conscripts, I mean travelers. And most people who are reading are clutching a paperback book. I have seen maybe 2 Kindles in 20 flights. I looked about on one flight and every person in the seats around me were reading a paperback (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is the current fave).
• Hardback books are grossly overpriced. Spend $26 for a novel? Not in this family.
• Kindle sales may be outstripping bloated hardback book sales, but I bet paperbacks are still kicking the Kindle’s shiny little butt. 
• I am not knocking the Kindle, in fact I plan on reaching a wider audience than with any hard copy. But I still want to have a physical copy in my hands, something for someone to stumble across in a few decades, and say, “hmm, what’s this?”
• I also know that later editions of the e-books will be able to support proper book formatting, so learning this now will give me a jump on the change-over. I love learning this sort of thing, and it keeps me out of trouble. So far…

Mark E. Poole

20100718 The Writer’s Bane

I was going to hold off on this subject, for when I was to speak of preparing the manuscript for publication, but Evan Peters changed all that.

The subject for the day is now typos.  The reason is that I threw up my mock-up of the ROAD KILL book cover yesterday, and Evan read it over. And he found a missing word. This kind of shit drives me crazy. Not Evan finding it (for which he has my thanks), but me missing it. I’d like to say it’s a rare occurrence but that’s a load of BS.

In re-reading the back copy, Janice and I found at least 3 more and some clumsy writing. In just a few blocks of copy.

Now imagine you have a book of a couple of hundred pages. Spelling errors have been virtually eliminated with modern editing systems (I use MS Word for novels, and Final Draft for scripts). Grammatical errors to some extent are at least flagged.

 With ROAD KILL, we have read, and re-read it, each time finding at least one error on every single page. EVERY time I read it. We even printed the entire thing out, and found more. I put the novel away for a few months to come back with fresh eyes and still more.

Are our brains wired to gloss over mistakes, once we are too familiar with the materials?

A bunch of common mistakes:

• Using one word, when you intend another: “Quite” for “quiet,” or “there” for “their,” or “your” for “you’re.” They are spelled right, and sound right, but they ain’t right.
•  Crappy punctuation: Commas where they shouldn’t be. Missing question marks.
• Missing Quotes: Leaving the end quote (“) off the end of a block of dialog.
•  Missing words: You’ve just left it out and don’t realize it’s missing until you read it out loud.
• Adverb reliance: My first draft was peppered with them. It’s considered the realm of the novice. I went back and rooted those bastards out, targeting the “ly” words. Slowly, quietly, wistfully. I did leave in a few, but not more than one every 3 pages, instead of the 3 per page I started with.
•  Clunky sentences: Using 8 words when 3 can get the job done.
• Using the same word twice in the same paragraph or even sentence: “Claire knew she had to go, because she had to be there,” becomes “Clair must go; she had to be there.”
•  Passive voice: I’ve done almost three decades of business writing, and passive voice is the style you adopt for that. You don’t say “We’ve changed the HR polices.” It’s phrased as “The HR policies were changed.” It’s less confrontational. And it’s weak, lame and lays there like a plate of cold spaghetti noodles. This took the most time on re-writes, but it was the best thing I did for the book.

Some tricks we used to clean up my manuscript:

• Have someone read it aloud back to the author. Janice did this while I sat in a chair with my eyes closed.  Hearing her stumble over a mouthful of dialog due to a poorly worded sentence was painful.
•  Print it and read each sentence starting from the bottom. After you have read the book a few times, your eyes just skim over the words, and the errors.

I sent out the book to a group of friends, not only for typos, but plot holes and bad logic. I have built up a mental picture of the character, and know why they might react in a certain way. I also know why they may act differently in a certain situation. But the reader isn’t privy to all that, and if I haven’t dropped breadcrumbs along the way, the result is a leap in logic that makes absolutely no sense. Fresh eyes can alert the writer to these issues. You have to have a thick skin, and go into it knowing that these people are going out of their way (and dedicating valuable time) to help you. It’s much better than to throw it out before thousands (you hope) readers and find it then.

Thanks again for Evan, and today’s topic. I’ve put a corrected version of the cover out for your review.

Mark E. Poole
(Note: after I published this post, I have found and corrected 5 different errors. Grrrrr)

20100717 Judging a Book

This may seem obvious, but cover design is vital to getting your work seen. Not just for on the shelf, but as a tiny (49x75-pixel) thumbnail on Amazon.

On top of that, the spine and the back have to do a lot of work, enticing the potential reader to actually scan the text there, gain a small measure of understanding of the book, and the author, if you are a relative unknown. If you are lucky, they may take even a peek inside. All that just to try to get them to drop a few bucks and get a few hours entertainment from your extended labor of love.

I have posted the front cover in two sizes, and the full book jacket layout for now. I will go into why I made these decisions, and how I made the cover myself, using Photoshop and Aftereffects, in a series of posts yet to come.

For now, look it over and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Mark E. Poole


Click on the images, to see it at a larger size:

20100713 ROAD KILL Origins

I found my original synopsis for ROAD KILL, dated 03/29/2009.  After a few weeks or months of scribbling snatches of dialog, ideas for scenes and characters, I use the synopsis to gel everything and give me a framework to shape the tale.

Here is the first paragraph:

Modern Film Noir set against the backdrop of corporate corruption and government complicity in awarding state highway contracts.  A sheriff takes a murder investigation down the twisty back roads of his rural Kentucky county.  He finds greed, corruption, duplicity and desire on his journey.

What is gratifying, now that I have a polished draft, is that it actually became just as I had laid out. Some of the details changed (the setting is now Virginia, not Kentucky, and some of the character names were changed), but most of the situations and the tone are all there, before I got really down to writing the first draft.

That is not to say nothing changed. The act of writing the story takes you on voyages of discovery. For example, I knew I would have a hit man (Blackheart), and in the process of trying to make this a unique individual, I ended up giving this person a much larger role. Blackheart is a fantastically complex and sensual being, after starting life as a three-word description on a character roster: Female Hit Man. And her world view actually helped account for the seemingly random acts of destruction.

The idea for the story came from the real-life scandal in Kentucky involving a former governor and a road contractor, and allegations of bid rigging. The governor tried to stymie the investigation by proactively pardoning everyone involved from any wrongdoing, before they were charged with anything. Much as I tried, I couldn't work that into my tale, because it was so implausible that it strained credulity.

So that became the impetus of the actions of the bad guys, but I told the story from the perspective of a small-town sheriff. I made the bad guy a long-time school rival. I also used the consequences of shoddy road repair as major plot points.

Sheriff Jax Hayes is still the same guy I envisioned, a combination of Marshal Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) in APPALOOSA, and Police Chief Link Mattocks (Brian Keith) in THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING.  He is cool as a cuke, despite everything crashing and burning all around him. It’s helpful to have a firm idea of who your characters are so you understand how they will react in every situation. I’ve had characters take over a scene and move it in another direction, because the fully realized person would not react in a way I may have envisioned when I only had a sketch outline. Character is action.

So make your plans, but allow the story to flow in organic ways, once you get into the fleshing-out stage.

Mark E. Poole

20100712 Introduction to the ROAD KILL Blog

This blog is all things ROAD KILL, the movie script, novel, and attempts to get both sold, published, and produced.

ROAD KILL is a mystery thriller about how a small-town Sheriff deals with a series of brutal killings in rural Virginia. Jax Hayes is struggling to win re-election in this climate of change, only to have bodies start stacking up in the morgue. He’s a man of action, dry wit, and simple tastes, going up against a longtime rival who is attempting to cement his monopoly on the state highway construction business.

The tale is told in the style of one of my favorite writers, the late Robert Parker. His Jesse Stone series and others inspired me to tell my stories stripped down to the bare essentials, great characters, action, and wry conversations.

ROAD KILL actually began life as a screenplay, which I adapted to a novel. That’s backwards. I’ll go into that with the blog.

The novel is complete. After I get some things tweaked, I’ll be publishing it. I’ll go into how that’s done here. It’s my first time, so we can share the journey.

Keep checking back, and if you like it, click the Follow button on the page.

Thanks!

Mark E. Poole