Along with my ever-increasing number of siblings, I would sit with some manner of pasta hanging off my fork, drenched in some manner of sauce, as mother regaled us with detailed accounts of the beatings her father had perpetrated on her mother. These were often presented in novelistic detail: “Then he took his arm and swept everything off the table. It crashed to the floor, and he grabbed grandma by the hair and dragged her through the food and plates and forks and spoons into the bedroom of that cold water flat…”

Mother gripped us with suspense, even as she repeated the same stories. There was nothing like being invested emotionally in characters whom you knew so well.

These tales were utterly appalling, hardly the material that young children should have heard, and yet I have to say – in the spirit of let’s try to find something redemptive – that they helped form me both as a writer and as a person. I developed a deep distaste for bullies, whether at the personal or national level, as well as a strong sense of what constituted compelling storytelling, although little that was gray ever intruded on my mother’s accounts. Years later, I would sort out the gray in psychotherapy when I began to understand the perverse mingling of my mother’s unquestioned love for her children with the violence she directed toward one of my sisters and me.

It followed, of course, that I became intensely interested in the work that my wife undertook as a spousal abuse counselor back in the ‘90s. She and a colleague ran a weekly group for men who had battered their wives or girlfriends. To my knowledge, they did not have same sex batterers in their group; although I knew in general the nature of my wife’s work, she maintained the strict confidentiality of her clients.

That didn’t stop my imagination, sparked by memories of my mother’s stories of my grandmother’s plight. And in the way stories sometimes present themselves, the protagonist of STRIKING BACK, Gwyn Sanders, arrived on Rollerblades in the heart of the UCLA campus. Why L.A.? I don’t know for sure. But I have my suspicions.

I lived in Hollywood for long stretches while writing and directing at Paramount Studios on a very successful TV series, Hard Copy. Much of my time was spent putting together segments on the murder trial of OJ Simpson, the poster boy for spousal abuse. It came as no comfort to me to realize, after having a distinguished career in broadcast journalism – four Emmys for investigative reporting for my on-camera work for NBC News – that I had an uncanny ability to write tabloid TV. It was as if I’d been born to do it. And then the big bonus hit: L.A. and Hollywood turned out to be perfect settings for STRIKING BACK. At least that’s my judgment, now that the tale’s been told.

But the story that became STRIKING BACK didn’t appear right after I left Hollywood for the mountain home I had in Oregon at the time; characters and plots often don’t arise in such linear fashion. It took a good ten years before Gwyn started blading down the wide pathways of the UCLA campus, and more than a year to write the mystery and romance that formed the heart of the novel.
But the origins of STRIKING BACK were easy for me to divine. They began decades ago at a dinner table with my mother’s own stories.

I’ve always felt that given enough exposure, PRIMITIVE would find a substantial audience. Now we’ll see if that holds true. There are two weeks of this promotion, so if you haven’t availed yourself of the offer, by all means have a book on me.

John Atcheson, writing for the blog Climate Progress, which Time called the Web’s most influential blog on climate change, last week called PRIMITIVE “a thriller pure and simple – the reader hops into a rocket sled and holds on for dear life, in a nail chewing ride full of action, gut wrenching fear and genuine terror. There’s no getting off once you’ve boarded.  So leave yourself some time.”

Atcheson has posted his highly favorable review on Grist and other “green” sites.

As you might gather, I feel passionate about PRIMITIVE; judging by reader reviews on amazon, so do a lot of other readers.  I trust you’ll take the opportunity to snatch up a free ebook of PRIMITIVE.

Best wishes to all of you.

The first time I jumped on this carousel was in the late ’90s when HUSH was published, a thriller featuring an art therapist; a book, I should add, that has an odd way of showing up on the top ten lists of teenage readers, though it was as far from a Y/A novel as a scorching thriller could get. I know one reader who wept with relief when the horror of the novel’s final third ended. Definitely of the “take no prisoners” variety of psychological thrillers.

I’d been dubious about HUSH’s film possibilities because, at the novel’s heart, lay the sexual abuse of a young boy. Hollywood, much as I could see, had developed an aversion to that story line, as I had.  But I soon found myself in la-la land for another reason entirely.

Financial woes brought me to Hollywood to write and direct segments for “Hard Copy” at Paramount Studios. Working on the show made me squirm a bit. After all, I’d left the world of big time mainstream journalism — and four Emmys for investigative reporting — to write fiction, and here I was returning to the field, but for a significantly debased form of it.

I worked there twice.  The first time I was hired on to write and direct much of the OJ Simpson trial coverage. Hey, it was a job. And it was pretty easy work. I’d generally show up about 5:00 p.m., fresh from mountain biking in the Angeles National Forest, or weight training in the Paramount gym (I preferred the one for the stage hands and other support staff, rather than the gym reserved for directors, producers, and “talent”). The show’s executive producers would assign me the OJ story of the day, I’d review the trial tapes, write the segment, direct it, and generally get out the door five or six hours later. The pay was very good, and the residuals poured in for years afterward.  I don’t even remember the stories I did during my second HC gig.

I have to say that I enjoyed working at HC a great deal. Not enough, I should note, to accept a lucrative offer to become the show’s senior producer (I turned it down to return to my TV-less log cabin in the mountains to write more fiction), but enough to make my year there a memorable pleasure. I also found the largely younger staff of the show to be far less pretentious and even less preening — oddly enough, given that it was Hollywood — than some of my colleagues had been at NBC News in New York; the latter might have nabbed a Nobel for charting new pathways in brain circuitry for all the pompousness they evidently found licensed by working for the peacock network. Then again, perhaps it was simply impossible to become too self-impressed at HC when you were pumping out segments about Penthouse Pets and their pajama parties (I kid you not).

While I was down there I received a call from my literary agent at the time, saying that a certain director, mostly of art house films, including one that starred a singer-songwriter of great repute, was interested in optioning HUSH. Would I meet with him for lunch?

I was quite excited about this. Here was a director of films I’d actually seen. Whoopee! I met him at a Thai restaurant not too far from Paramount, and settled in for a long lunch. I mean a very long lunch because the director, after telling me I’d written a “great book, a really really great book,” talked about himself non-stop for more than an hour. At some point, I don’t recall when, I realized that an option offer was highly unlikely: Lunch, for him, was a cheap way to buy an audience. Nonetheless, I ate, I smiled, I listened, I checked the time discreetly, and then I brightened because he said “Now I suppose you want to hear about what I can do with HUSH.” Well, yes, I remember thinking, that would be nice. But that wedge in the wall of his monologue was just to give him breath before hour two commenced.

I finally slipped away with the first of my Hollywood hopes considerably dimmed. He never optioned HUSH; I suspect within a week or two he’d moved on to another first novelist who’d put up with his narcissism.

HUSH did get optioned about a year later to an independent producer who actually had an office and staff. The money wasn’t great –$5,000, to be paid in three installments — but if the film ever rose out of development hell and actually got made, the lucre would be excellent. Of course, that didn’t happen. In fact, I received a single check for $1,500, and never heard from the producer again. My ex-agent, a laconic sort, said “The only difference between these flakes and the usual flakes I deal with out there was that we actually got some money out of them before they disappeared.”

More recently, I had coffee with another director whose most recent work I’d thoroughly enjoyed. He proved to be marvelous company. No endurance necessary for that tete-a-tete. And he did make an option offer; alas, I had to turn it down. But my meetings with directors were at least trending upward.

So now HUSH and a couple of others have been optioned, including my most recent novel, PRIMITIVE.

A few more sparks in the furnace.

Her response accurately anticipated some of the responses to BP. Other readers found much of it funny. I would count myself in the latter group.

But PRIMITIVE is a different beast of a book. There’s no serial killer, unless you’re inclined, as I am, to include climate change in that category. She read it with great interest, so much so that I didn’t adequately anticipate the reaction of readers who were put off by a scene of animal abuse. Need I note that exploitation of animals is a leit motif of the novel? Thus, it never occurred to me that I’d be vilified for the scene in question. For more on this, see an earlier post of mine.

What surprised me on the family side of PRIMITIVE was my eleven year-old’s avid interest in the book. When she rises in the morning, she drags down to my office, and no matter what I’m doing I put it aside and spend a good ten, fifteen minutes with her. Then we usually have breakfast together. As a homeschooled kid, she has a lot of time with me, which is one of my life’s greatest gifts.

At some point in writing P, as I’ll refer to it henceforth, she asked me to read her the chapter that I was working on. So I did. I take the approach with my child’s reading that anything she wants to read, she’s welcome to read. When she got a hundred-fifty or so pages into T.C. Boyle’s DROP CITY, I was shocked. The material was not exactly what I would have preferred to have her read, but she was burning through it. It led to interesting debriefings about the predilections of hippies in the sixties, about which I’m well versed. She found some of the “practices,” let’s call them, gross; I didn’t disagree. It was her call, much as believing in god is her call. I told her my dim view of the matter, and added “This is one you’re going to have to figure out on your own, kiddo. Lots of folks believe that stuff.” So far, bless her heart, she’s an atheist. Thankfully, we live in a an open-minded community, though today she was riding up the chairlift with a boy her age who was discussing ski boots. My daughter mentioned that she has small feet. “God must have meant you to have them.” “God?” my dear child exclaimed, “there’s no god.” “There sure is,” the boy insisted, “and if you don’t believe in him you’re going straight to hell.” “I want to go to hell,” my daughter said. “The people down there will be a lot more interesting.” No, she doesn’t actually believe in hell, either, but she has a bit of the provocateur in her (as if that needed noting.)

So when she asked me to read from P, I did. I’d read entire chapters to her at a time. When the audio book arrived for vetting, she happened to be around when I started the process. She settled in for all eleven hours, spread out over several days. She loved the book. No, she adored it. I’m not so desperate that I’d pimp my child’s interest in a book to impress readers of my blog. Besides, you’re about to hear what happens when she doesn’t like something I write.

When I wrote BURN DOWN THE SKY, a post apocalyptic climate collapse novel that just sold to Eos, the HarperCollins sci-fi/fantasy imprint , I read her the book chapter by chapter. I did omit a couple of passages that contained sexual material that I felt was too rough for her. So, yes, bowdlerized, but not much. Really.

When I reached the end of the book, her fury could barely be contained. She rose from a futon I keep in my office, red-faced, voice rising, telling me I absolutely under no “frickin’” circumstances could kill a certain character; I’ll leave said character unnamed because it would be spoiler material. I tried to explain that I didn’t kill her: the circumstances of the story and who she was as a character had brought her to her death.

That didn’t wash. At all.

My daughter has a temper, and it was almost fully spent on the character’s death. The character in question was second tier, but clearly my girl loved her.

So I started thinking about the character’s death after my own child made her flamboyant exit and thumped upstairs. And I thought about it some more. More to the point, I thought about it all day and into the next morning.

That led me to play with the idea — and that’s all it was at that point — of letting the character survive, to the end of BURN DOWN THE SKY anyway; BDTS is the first book in a series. At some point within a day or two of my daughter’s explosion, I accepted that the character might get to live. I rewrote the death passage, and felt a brightening in seeing her live. Moreover, I saw a whole lot more about where letting her live could lead.

So when I told my child that the girl had lived, she was quite happy, and not a little smug about her achievement. But it proved short-lived because it’s the only time I’ve responded so favorably, as she would see it, to a criticism.

But she was right, just as editors are sometimes right when they ask me to consider a shift in a passage. I really wouldn’t have changed the outcome to please my daughter, you’ll understand; but I’m very happy that her objections led to a different outcome. BTW, when she heard that BURN DOWN THE SKY sold to Eos, she asked about the publisher. I’d already figured out what to tell her: “They publish Tolkien.” “Yes,” she exclaimed, with a big fist pump.

I’d worked for New Times Weekly in the early seventies, and had met Miller on one of my trips to the underground paper’s Tucson office. I’d also been there just a few years earlier to get literally blind drunk at a senior day celebration at the University of Arizona. Senior as in high school. How drunk? A good friend sat up with me most of the night wondering how he was going to explain to my basketball coach that I’d died from an obscene overdose of Mexican moonshine.

The two women from the bookstore locked up and walked me to a Mexican restaurant. On the way one of them said “You broke the cardinal rule, you know.”

“I did?” I assumed she was referring to something about HUSH, and I was right.

“You killed the cat.”

Oh, boy, did I ever. There’s a scene in HUSH in which Celia, the art therapy protagonist, has locked herself in a bathroom to try to escape Chet, a horrendous killer. Let’s just say a poor bedraggled cat becomes Chet’s demonstration model for what will happen to Celia if she doesn’t unlock the door.

“I take it I shouldn’t have killed the cat.”

“No, you should never kill the cat,” the woman replied.

So I haven’t killed any domestic cats since HUSH. But, in PRIMITIVE, a really nice canine endures undeniable cruelty. Unlike the cat, he doesn’t die, but to see the reader reviews, I did far worse than kill him.

Now I certainly don’t take lightly any depiction of animal cruelty, and consider myself in many ways more sensitized to the subject now than I was ten years ago, even though in my diet I was avoiding most forms of flesh back then. But I was taken aback by readers who commented at length on a fluffy white dog’s suffering — and took me to task for showing it — without ever noting the book’s many implicitly positive references to the animal rights movement. I was also struck by the fact that most of the readers excoriating me never noted the far more extensive cruelty that humans were exposed to in the novel.

In short, I set off this mini-uproar by describing what happens to that white dog.  Just for the record, I have a dog, a fluffy white one as a  matter of fact.  I try to love him but I still miss my German shepherd, Kato, who lived in a mountain cabin with my wife and me for eight years.  He even spent a summer living in Hollywood.  He weighed one hundred twenty pounds, was well trained, and truly impressive.  I was working at Paramount, which at the time was in a fairly sketchy part of town.  My wife would drive down to pick me up when I got off work at eleven or twelve at night but I never worried about her.  Nobody was about to carjack that little Honda with Kato in the seat.  He never bit anyone, never even got in a dog fight; and let me tell you there were some strange canines in the L.A. dog park we frequented, and even stranger people, in some instances.  But Kato had an uncanny sense of humans, a kind of radar for them.  All he ever did, and he did it only a few times, was growl.  He sounded like a locomotive.  Twice he did it when we ran across hunters poaching on our land.  I never worried about my wife when she walked around L.A.  Kato, from all appearances, ignored everyone; but appearances were deceiving.  Nothing ever seemed to go unnoticed by him, but he was always by my wife’s side, in the heel.

We moved back to Oregon, sold the cabin, and settled in a subdivision.  Kato’s life went straight to hell.  Here was a dog who’d lived on a lot of acreage and kept the coyotes, cougars, and bears at bay for most of his first eight years.  Suddenly, he was in a subdivision.  It had to be hell.  It wasn’t real great for us, either, I might add.  What were we thinking? Those words crossed our minds on a number of occasions.

So I do care for dogs but I’m not sentimental about them.  I’ve had one great dog in my life, and that dog, of course, was Kato.  I have a dog now, as I’ve noted, that I try to love; but I don’t really.   Having Kato for almost twelve years gave me a gift that’s lasted for a long time now.  He’s been a wonderful model for all the dogs I’ve written about in my books.  Chaska, who suffers in PRIMITIVE, has some of Kato in him.  I would venture to say that if I hadn’t cared so much about Kato, readers wouldn’t ever have cared so much about Chaska.

I was listening to a sixties station on Sirius when the old Rolling Stones song “Out of Time” came on. I hadn’t heard it in years and really enjoyed it. At some level, I might have enjoyed it too much because it just keeps on playing. I wake up in the middle of the night to use the facilities, and there it is, as if it never sleeps. The hit that just keeps on coming…forty plus years later.

At least it’s a song that’s marginally pleasant to listen to…even if it’s for the thousandth time in the past week. There’s an obsessive compulsive quality to its presence that makes me wonder if authors are particularly susceptible to this, well, affliction. I say that because brain scans of authors, as I recall, bear intriguing similarities to the brain scans of people who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder.

I wasn’t surprised when I read that years ago. I can’t let a chapter go out to my circle of early readers without pouring over every syllable for days. And I rewrite constantly. In fact, one of the nice things about blogging is that I don’t rewrite over and over, which you might have figured out on your own by now.

Stephen King once wrote a column for Entertainment Weekly magazine about songs that play in his head. He said that you just have to let them play themselves out, clearly suggesting that sometimes, at least, he has a rather active mental soundtrack. Of course, he’s a musician as well, right? So I’m guessing what he hears has a fidelity sorely lacking in my mind, although Mick Jagger does sound pretty true to form as I hear him, but that could be my lame inner ear testifying.

Of course Stephen King might have achieved his equanimity because he’s never had to put up with that “B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, and Bingo was his name-o song.” An editor friend of mine from my days directing segments for Hard Copy at Paramount once had that bit of insipid songwriting play in his head for days. Or was it weeks? It was hellish, as he reports, in any case.

Certainly, it makes me realize that nothing on this day of masks and make believe craziness can rival the real madness of our own minds, even in its more benevolent manifestations.

“You’re out of touch, my baby…” blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah…

But this doesn’t bother me because I figure that I’m doing my job well if readers simply cannot distinguish between the author and his work.

Then there are the hardcore fans who seek you out. A young woman came up to me at a reading the other night holding a copy of PRIMITIVE and a dog-eared advance review copy of THE BONE PARADE. At a glance, I knew that the latter had been read many times. If further confirmation were needed, it came when she told me that she adored BP and had, indeed, read it over and over.

Her name was Caitlin, and she said she’d started reading me at fifteen. After BP, she’d gone back to HUSH, read that, and then read SEARCH ANGEL when it came out.

“I’ve been waiting years for you to come back here so I could get you to sign this.” She held out the weathered copy of BP and an unwrinkled trade paperback of PRIMITIVE. I was so pleased to inscribe both books for her, and only gently surprised when her mother took a photograph of her daughter standing next to me. It was a cozy reminder that readers’ passions are very important to us. Now here’s what I truly love: Even as I write these words, with my wife driving down an interstate to Portland, Oregon, my eleven year old daughter is in the seat right behind me saying ”Oh God, Oh God, he’s such an evil bastard.” No, she’s not talking about me, but about a character in the audio book that she’s listening to.

I strongly suspect that someday my daughter may be approaching the author of a book that made her emote, and saying something like “I’ve been waiting years for you to come back here so I can have you sign this book.”

Or perhaps she’ll be an author herself. She’s already started writing two novels. One of these days she may finish one of them. Or both. Or maybe those chapters will be like the novel I started writing at age eight. I never finished it but it was definitely a starting point.

Kevin explained that Sonya, like most of the models he’s known – Kevin still models occasionally – was narcissistic, an element of her personality that her daughter Darcy, recognizes, and that Sonya herself comes to see, though perhaps with less insight or force than does Darcy. Kevin went on to say that Sonya’s psychological abandonment of her daughter through much of her youth mirrors the way we’ve abandoned the earth with our own narcissism, which I agree is greatly exacerbated by consumerism and its attendant demands for self-gratification in every possible way, regardless of its impact on the earth.

I bring this up because readers often point out themes in my work that I haven’t noticed. It happened when another old friend, author and journalism professor Mark Feldstein, pointed out a couple of years ago that in writing Primitive I was writing a highly allegorical novel. He’d noticed that at one point Sonya was placed in an underground cell, and as Mark noted it bore a resemblance, a pretty obvious one, to the spider hole in which Saddam Hussein was found by U.S. military forces. Up to that point I hadn’t been at all conscious of the parallels between what I was writing and the greater world events that were transparently – to others, not to me –informing the novel.

I was grateful for the insights. That they were necessary — that I hadn’t seen these obvious parallels — didn’t bother me at all. I think when we write fiction much of our work is imbued with elements that we rarely identify consciously in the early drafts, nor would we necessarily want to identify them at that time. Our job is to tell a story, and if the story resonates, well, that’s great. That’s one indication that we’re cooking on all the burners.

So I’ve learned to listen to readers at author events; often they have insights into my work that have eluded me. I don’t get out to meet them that often, but every time I do I’m reminded that there is an audience and that their appreciation plants seeds of its own.

The simplest approach I could take is to check my watch, read for thirty plus minutes, and quit on a line that I can intone with some sense of finality…but not too much finality because I want the audience to anticipate the even richer developments to follow.

But there’s a big problem taking this approach with PRIMITIVE: potential readers would only have heard about the protagonist, Sonya Adams. And they would have heard only about Sonya at the start of the story. There’s an intriguing and, at least from my POV, a compelling arc to her character. Moreover, she’s not the only important character. There are also Darcy, Akiah, Chandra, Johnny Bracer, Lotus Land…the list goes on because there are, at last count (they may be multiplying) more than forty-five characters with speaking parts, to borrow yet another term from H’wood.

So what am I doing? I’m making surgical strikes to lift text, setting aside passages that can stand on their own without much of a preamble; but I’m also altering passages ever so slightly to avoid “reveals.”

This presented its greatest challenge with a passage that I particularly love. It comes when Darcy meets The Ten Tribes of the New Apocalypse. A lot has just happened to Darcy, so what I’ve done to avoid giving away too much of the plot is to omit the identity of the man she’s just killed. It leaves mystery for the audience while providing them with information necessary for understanding Darcy’s emotional state. And given that this is a novel with scores of plot lines, I think it’s likely that many readers will forget what they’ve heard at a reading until after they’ve read this part of the book. That’s when I trust they’ll have their “Oh, that’s right” moment, as opposed, let’s say, to a more profane thought of the author giving away too much at his reading.

In any case, I’m asked quite a bit about my favorite part of the book. I’d like to fudge this answer and say that each part of PRIMITIVE is essential, which, of course, it is to the overall story, and that therefore it’s hard for me to answer that question. Doesn’t that sound like utter crap? Here’s the truth: By the time Darcy meets up with the Ten Tribes, I, and I think many readers, need and want a breather, and we get it in this section. It’s fun, funny, romantic, and a respite — the break before the harrowing final chapters, none of which make an appearance at my readings.