In No Particular Order

From the driver's seat

2011-07-06T19:44:00.008-04:00

Want to know what it's like to race a sports car? Here, split into two segments, is in-car footage shot from my Honda S2000 at a Sports Car Club of America race held at my favorite track - Connecticut's Lime Rock Park.

The lion's share of the image is devoted to a camera aimed straight out the windshield. The inset window shows me in the driver's seat. At my company, Flatout Motorsports, we've also got our dashboard data integrated into the image. This is fun because it definitively answers the number one question for any racer: How fast do you go? (At Lime Rock, in my car, the answer is 122 mph.)

This was a good news/bad news race. I started on the pole (good!) and finished fourth (bad!), but it was a tight battle all the way, with an insanely close finish (very good). Enjoy!

Release day roundup

2011-05-10T07:31:00.006-04:00

Well hell.

This is the official release day for my first novel, Purgatory Chasm.

I'm grateful to so many, for so much, that I can't go into it without getting all I-love-you-man. And if I wanted to get all I-love-you-man, I'd still be drinking.

Instead: one long, heartfelt thank-you to everybody who helped in any way with the book. And that includes the millions of men and women who've graced the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And now (claps hands twice, briskly): links!

First, commerce: Buy the book at Amazon (hardcover or Kindle)! At Barnes & Noble! At Tatnuck Bookseller, my irreplaceable local indie! Or find a great independent bookseller near you!
More commerce: Looking for a signed copy? Try "M" is for Mystery or the Poisoned Pen, two bulwarks of the crime-fiction community.
You want reviews? We got reviews. Associated Press, Publishers Weekly (starred!), RT Book Reviews (Top Pick!), Working Stiffs.
For a strong, well-written take on me and the book, check out this feature article in the Metrowest [MA] Daily News. I've also enjoyed some smart Q&A sessions, such as this one with the aptly named Best Damn Creative Writing Blog.
Finally, in case you've stumbled across the blog and want to meet via social media, please find me on Facebook and Twitter.

Thanks! I love you, man.

Oops.

The kindness of strangers

2011-05-01T07:31:00.005-04:00

If, as some would have you believe, there are squadrons of snarky, bitter writers out there - leaning right this minute on hipster-cocktail-party walls, sniping at their peers, believing themselves too smart and complex to succeed in a Jersey Shore world - I am one lucky son of a gun, as I have completely avoided them.

Quite the contrary: As the publication of my debut novel, Purgatory Chasm, nears, I meet only generosity and warm wishes from my fellow writers, whether they're veterans with 20 fine books under their belts or still grinding away seeking an agent.

This generosity takes many forms: Facebook messages from long-ago writing group pals, attaboys from published novelists who only know my name because they made a point of learning it, email congrats from folks who spotted my name at a blog somewhere.

Exhibit A: Bruce DeSilva.

Several months ago I read Bruce's novel Rogue Island. I'd heard good things about the book, and it was a debut mystery set in New England written by a former journalist - how could I not read it? The book was excellent, as you would expect a mystery raved about by Dennis Lehane and Joseph Finder to be. I wasn't surprised when it was nominated as Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America.

Fast-forward to last Saturday night, at MWA's Edgars award banquet. A gent dropped by my table and asked which ne'er-do-well was Steve Ulfelder. Relatively certain the man wasn't a bill collector (they seldom wear tuxedos anymore), I raised a hand.

The dapper gent was none other than Bruce DeSilva, dropping by to compliment me on Purgatory Chasm. It turned out he'd written a kind blog post on the book.

I was bowled over. This was Bruce's night, after all: he'd written a great novel, battled his way up the ladder the way we all struggle to (agent, contract, rewrites ...), succeeded brilliantly, earned an evening in the spotlight - and he was taking time to meet me, a fresh-fish newbie whose book hadn't yet hit stores.

That's a stellar example of the generosity I'm talking about.

This story has a perfect ending: Amid stiff competition, Rogue Island won the Best First Novel Edgar. Couldn't have happened to a classier or more deserving guy.

Hakuna matata

2011-04-21T16:02:00.007-04:00

I'm a big fan of Nissan's new Juke. If I were shopping for a cute-ute, it would be a contender. But from the first time I saw one, it reminded me of something ...

You tell me.

AA procedural: Lawrence Block's A Drop of the Hard Stuff

2011-04-13T07:50:00.009-04:00

A Drop of the Hard Stuff
By Lawrence Block
Mulholland Books

How's this for daunting? May 10, I fulfill a lifelong dream by publishing my first novel. Purgatory Chasm introduces amateur sleuth Conway Sax. He's a recovering alcoholic, and AA is tightly woven into (indeed, inseparable from) the story.

Two days later, there's another novel coming. Its protagonist is an amateur sleuth. He's a recovering alcoholic, and AA is tightly woven into (indeed, inseparable from) the story.

Who is this copycat? Hell, it's only Lawrence Block. And the novel, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, is only the much-anticipated 17th book in the Matthew Scudder series.

Gulp.

Longtime Scudder fan that I am, I twisted a few arms and scored an advance copy of Hard Stuff. The book is outstanding.

Block sets up his story as a reminiscence, as Scudder and a friend idly wonder whether they could have taken different paths through life. The friend asks if Scudder - a former NYPD cop who now functions as an unlicensed private investigator - could have been a criminal instead. In pondering the question, Scudder recalls the story of Jack Ellery, a boy he grew up with in the Bronx who became first a criminal, then a murdered criminal.

Here's the nice thing about this framework: it pulls Scudder back to his first year of sobriety. Indeed, his first anniversary approaches as he investigates the murder of the small-time crook. Because Ellery had sobered up and joined Alcoholics Anonymous before being killed, AA is everywhere in this book. I hereby declare a new subgenre: the AA procedural. Scudder sits in his rented room. He selects a meeting. He makes his way to the meeting. Afterward, he drinks coffee or dines with AA friends. At every step, he learns a bit more about the suspects.

The intensity of that first year of AA shows on every page. Scudder often hits two or more meetings a day; things with his girlfriend Jan get bumpy as he approaches his AA anniversary, a notoriously rough time for relationships; he ponders AA's Twelve Steps; he calls his sponsor frequently.

At the perfect time (two-thirds of the way through the story, nearly to the page - hey, you don't become a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master without knowing how to construct one of these things), Block bumps up the stakes and the urgency, and then it's hell-bent-for-leather to the finish.

For me, two things stand out about Hard Stuff. The first is its pacing, which is deceptive. At a glance, some might say that not a lot happens until the story hits its crisis point. Scudder walks to an AA meeting. Scudder eats with Jan. Scudder has a passive-aggressive non-argument with Jan. Scudder walks home and calls his sponsor.

But.

As I thought it through, I realized Block's pace was actually the effortless gait of the natural athlete, the guy who looks like he's jogging at a 10-minute-mile pace but turns out to be running 6:30s. The master storyteller makes everything count. Every arc and every thread pays off, every Act 1 gun-on-the-wall is fired in Act 3.

The other thing I love about the book - and I believe, with no evidence whatsoever, this explains why Block set the story early in Scudder's sobriety - is the protagonist's subtle but unmistakable growth as he examines, for the first time in his life, the behavior and thought patterns that brought him to AA. In particular, Scudder's self-sabotaging attitudes toward Jan nearly form a running gag in the novel: he often thinks they're having a big fight, or are on the verge of one, but we can see that from Jan's point of view there's no problem whatsoever - other than her moody boyfriend. This is subtle stuff, difficult to pull off with a first-person narrator/protagonist.

It's good to have Scudder and Block back. Here's hoping we don't have to wait another six years for the next one.

Notebook dump!

2011-02-08T10:17:00.002-05:00

It's been way too long since I did one of these. I jot things down in my Blackberry (yes, I am the Last Man in America with a Blackberry), and I need to capture the ideas here (hell, anywhere) before said phone gets lost or croaks.

So here are the phrases, names, and images that rattle around in my walnut-sized brain occasionally. If you have trouble figuring out what they mean, imagine how I feel.

Serious as an Amarillo barfight.
Actual name: LeRoy Hoikkala, childhood friend of Bob Dylan.
Fair-weather optimist.
Like the Tin Man at a limbo contest (how Conway Sax feels in a suit).
Forgive me all my anger; forgive me all my faults/There's no need to forgive me for thinkin' what I thought. - Guy Clark, "Dublin Blues"
German male name: Nico.
Women make up "bar names" to tell dudes.
Lockstep nonconformist.
Smells like a barbershop in a barbecue joint - not bad, but not right.
Create a character who used to work for the NSA reconstructing shredded documents.
Name: Oskar.
Saddest color: burnt orange.
Carmelina (Matisse).
Surname: Kilroy.
Tahoe conscience.
Copperhead.
Framingham Housing Authority projects off Concord Ave., near Mass. Bay Community College.
Hollis St, Framingham. Great run of Brazilian businesses: moneygram/fax/check-cashing place, salon, restaurant, convenience store. All signage in Portuguese.
"Just As I Am, Without One Plea" (hymn).
A cloud of witnesses (scripture).
Moline Blues/Moline Hustle.
Actual name: Robert Hoxie.
Create a Barnburner who owns and operates a car wash.
Hey bartender - I think I'll hit the throttle (Dwight Yoakam).
Torque shear.
Create a character who watched twin drown in a pool at age 4 or 5.
"Tennessee Plates" (Commander Cody song).
Iron Lords (actual hotrod club, Concord, NC).
Surname: Dent.
New Hampshire: a state without lips.
Like reasoning with a pack mule.
Name: Brixton Bragg (British sports-car guy).
Square Del: nickname for a politician named Delbert.
Sophie riding her bike down the steep embankment that backs the reservoir at Hopkinton State Park.
Civil War names: Patrick Cleburne, Emory Upton.
Rebel River Blues.
Urban Moody.
Civil War note: some men in Sherman's Army of the Tennessee marched 7,000 miles.
William D. "Pig Iron" Kelley.
Surname: Hartline.
Strip Mall Hero.
Echo Bravo (East Boston).
8-Ball Deluxe (pinball game).
Parnell.
Suicide Serenade.
Create a Barnburner who's a mall cop at the Natick Collection. Retired, unselfconscious, loves his job.
Two junkies bust into a car and find a filled-out form for an X-ray at the local hospital. One of them takes the form and gets an X-ray. Just for something to do.
Conway line: Show me somebody working harder than a Brazilian and I'll show you another Brazilian.
Weathermen and stock analysts: they're good at predicting what happened this morning.
Wide Open Throttle.
Foul I fly.
Wild blue yonder.
Konrad Zuse: German inventor.
Kotikov: Russian surname.
Hotshoe.
Whip City Shakedown.
LeMay Coal & Feed Co.: stenciled on Berlin Airlift planes.

What it looks like out there

2011-01-04T09:40:00.007-05:00

LRP NARRC Runoffs 2 Oct 2010 (ITR-ITS-ITB) from Glenn Lawton on Vimeo.

I just found the in-car video above, shot by Glenn Lawton, a longtime friend and competitor. It's pretty cool, and it turns out I'm prominently featured; I start just ahead of Glenn (the red-and-white Honda S2000, number 05) and, for the most part, stay there until I spin off into the drink on lap 23 (oops!).

The race in question was run at Connecticut's Lime Rock Park, my favorite track, and was a championship event - the North Atlantic Road Racing Championships Runoffs. Late in the race, you'll see me grappling for several laps for the lead with a black BMW (number 21). That's when I spin out following two days of heavy rains, which explains to still photo. Bummer.

Slow-blogging: an explanation and a teaser

2010-12-23T07:16:00.003-05:00

Yeesh, have I really not posted in six weeks? Sorry. My excuse, er, reason: I'm writing another Conway Sax novel, and this one's on a fairly tight deadline. I should come up for air in April.

At times like these -punching away at a first draft, working hard through the holidays - any ray of sunshine helps, and yesterday I got a doozy via the friendly FedEx man. Above you see advance copies of my debut, Purgatory Chasm! I'm not sure this cover art is the final, signed-off version, but I like it a lot - there's something desperate and lonely about it that suits protagonist Conway Sax and the story.

Deep breath. Back to the grind. Merry Christmas.

Memo to Hollywood: If you’ve lost Ulfelder … (Part 1)

2010-11-03T10:19:00.009-04:00

The last movie I saw was Jackass 3D, more than two weeks ago. Two weeks before that I saw The Social Network, and two weeks before that I went to Scott Pilgrim Saves the World. For most folks, I know, three movies in six weeks is a brisk pace. My wife, to take one example, doesn’t visit our local UltraPlex three times a year.

But I’m not most folks. I’m a movie junkie. I’m easy money for moviemakers: a loyalty-card-toting, popcorn-buying (no sneaking in of the snacks for me!), not-at-all-demanding consumer of cinematic slush.

The point being: If Hollywood can’t make pictures that lure me to the UltraPlex, it’s an industry in deep trouble.

Roots
Ten years ago, when I traded the cozy staff-writer life for freelancing, I understood the tradeoffs: while my raw income would grow, expenses would too (hello, health insurance), and I would wave goodbye to virtually all benefits. In a bid to remind myself why I’d gone freelance to begin with, I decided to create my own benefits – or, put a different way, quantify some of the things I could now enjoy that had been impossible when I worked for somebody else.

High on the list was my newfound ability to see movies the way I like to see ’em: at 12:30 or 1:00 pm in a near-empty weekday theater. Love movies, hate crowds.

(Side note: four or five times a year, I sit in a movie theater absolutely alone, the sole viewer in a 400-seat auditorium. I consider this a treat. My wife thinks I should be locked up. What say you?)

To track this new benny, I began listing the movies I saw and the dates on which I saw them. And so I can state with confidence that since 2001, I’ve visited the movie theater almost exactly once a week on average, and often more (in ’08, I saw 72 flicks).

Both the bar and my brow are low
Here’s something else about my moviegoing habits: I’ll see damn near anything.

Let’s qualify that: no torture porn, no slashers. Rom-coms are a last resort, as is anything with subtitles.

With those exceptions, I am Homer Simpson at the Springfield 14. Give me car crashes. Give me high-school kids on a quest to get laid. Give me superheroes, tired remakes, over-the-hill action ensembles, fart jokes, plucky rescue-pets, plucky sports underdogs, plucky misfit teens, helicopter-to-rooftop-pool stunts, Justin Long, Judd Apatow, Jason Statham, Jason Bourne (especially once his annoying girlfriend drowned – what a relief). Yes, you may even give me Adam Sandler and the many wisecracking (yet unfunny) buddies who rely on him for their annuity.

I’ll see any of ’em. And I’ll pay $10.75 for a popcorn and a lemonade every single time. (I won’t upsize to a Medium, but on the other hand I won’t get annoyed when the counter-kid asks; I realize her boss makes her do that.)

We’ve established, then, that I’m a sucker for movies. And yet very recently, my moviegoing has tailed off by half. What happened?

I'll answer that in Part 2. Which is, I guess, the sequel.

Even in the victory lap, pratfalls lurk

2010-09-17T07:29:00.007-04:00

Hey, I won one! OK, I won three - had a good weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, put the new S2000 on the pole, and checked out in all three of my sprint races.

When you win, you're entitled to a victory lap. You cruise down pit lane, a volunteer worker hands you the checkered flag, and around you go. This lap is cherished (Lord knows amateur racers like me get little return on the blood, sweat, tears and cubic money we pour into the ridiculous hobby), but it's also fraught with peril.

In the photo, note that I've enlisted a crew member to hop in the car's passenger door and hold the flag. This is partly to thank the crew (who put in more hours than the drivers for even less reward), but it's partly to avoid embarrassment.

What embarrassment? Check out that flag. It's big. It whips around quite a bit during the lap of honor. Now imagine yourself trying to hold the flag, steer, change gears, and somehow wave to the spectators. The racing world is rife with stories about dropped flags, stalled cars, and even humiliating spinouts during what is supposed to be a glorious moment.

There you have it: the backstory on victory laps. Wish I had more of 'em under my belt.

No brakes at ninety

2010-08-24T10:37:00.010-04:00

Well that was exciting. Let's not do it again sometime.

Saturday, New Jersey Motorsports Park, 40 miles from Atlantic City. I'd spent Friday testing the new race car I've been posting about. I was also learning the track (dubbed Thunderbolt) and getting back in the swing of things after a 10-month layoff.

The testing had gone fine (thanks in large measure to my new Cool Shirt, which deserves and will receive a post of its own), as had morning qualifying; I'd run the fourth-quickest time out of 21 cars. I was now starting a qualifying race - a 10-lap sprint that would set the starting grid for Sunday's main event.

The start of sprint races is vital; because the cars are jammed so closely together as they creep toward the green flag, this is your best shot to steal a position or two.

My start was weak. Wish I could say otherwise, but it was. I was rusty, and because the Honda S2000 was new to me I was overly cautious when shifting from second to third gear (it's easy to screw up and shift from second to fifth, after which you watch the entire field stream past).

Two cars passed me in the first two turns, and that wasn't the worst news: I was on the outside of the track. Way outside. In fact, I ran hard through the rumble strips lining the outside of Turn Two.

A word about rumble strips. Racers, being an incorrigible and shifty lot, will and do drive on any paved surface that affords even a hundredth-of-a-second advantage. Those who design and build race tracks respond to this sneakiness by lining turns with rumble strips, sometimes called alligator teeth, that are rough and extremely unpleasant to traverse, especially in a car that's already more or less out of control. The idea is to remind drivers that when they feel that rumble, they're this close to being off the track entirely. Which is bad. (Unless you're a super-duper pro racer being paid a king's ransom to set track records, in which case you'll happily run over grass, dirt or your mom's foot to gain a thousandth of a second.)

Rumble strips occasionally have another effect on race cars: they rattle the brake pads slightly, shoving those pads a few millimeters farther away from the brake rotor than is optimal. After encountering rumble strips, wise racers use their left foot to pump the brakes a few times (leaving their right foot firmly on the throttle, of course) before they reach the next corner, settling those little pads back where they belong.

I forgot to pump my brakes.

Half a mile later, running about 90mph in fourth gear, I hit the brakes to slow for a right-hand turn.

My foot oozed to the floorboard.

I slowed not at all.

In the next half-second or so, all that dry info about rumble strips and brake pads and hydraulic pressure flashed through my brain.

I went straight off the track and into the rocky dirt that lines NJMP.

The worst part was that on my way into the dirt, I rammed a fellow competitor who was just racing along, minding his own business. Took his bumper cover right off.

After the race, he was ticked. And that's putting it mildly.

The good news is that the damage wasn't weekend-ending to my competitor or me; we both finished out our full complement of racing. Sports Car Club of America, the sanctioning body, takes a dim view of racers ramming one another (as well it should), so I was sent to the principal's office and penalized a couple of positions. And it's safe to say there's at least one fellow driver who'll be in no hurry to sign up for the Facebook "fan" page I need to set up soon.

Me, I'll pump my brakes next time.

It lives! (Update: first action shot!)

2010-07-25T06:09:00.007-04:00

It's been a long haul (I believe I bought the donor chassis in December), but my Honda S2000, built to compete in Sports Car Club of America's Improved Touring R class, has finally hit the track ...

... in style. Friday, my comrades at Flatout Motorsports took the car to Watkins Glen International for a couple of important races. (Why didn't I go? Family duties - it's a big weekend for ferrying kids to camp. Do I wish I was at the Glen, the greatest track in North America? Hell yes.)

The S2000 was fast as soon as they rolled it off the trailer. In only its third session, driven more than capably by my partner Nick Leverone, the car set a new track record for the class. Now, a track record is an accomplishment anytime. To set one in July, on a power-robbing 90-degree day (internal combustion engines like cool weather), on a sun-slick track, in a brand new race car ... that's astonishing.

I'm grateful to Nick and all the guys at the shop who put this car together. And man oh man, do I ever look forward to driving it.

Update: The top photo shows the car hammering through Watkins Glen's famous Bus Stop chicane. Is that a pretty race car or what?

The TBR shelf, worth-a-thousand-words style

2010-06-23T08:10:00.004-04:00

Thing is, I do have a Kindle. But I prefer hardcopy for biography and history (hence the U.S. Grant, Dylan and Churchill); Joe Finder was available to autograph Vanished for me, and I couldn't turn that down; and Day One, by my pal Bill Cameron, has generated so much buzz and praise that I knew hardcover was the way to go on that one.

Notebook dump!

2010-06-22T09:36:00.004-04:00

Time to hose out the Blackberry by dumping notebook ideas here.

Fun fact: I can look back through old notebook dump posts (here, here and here, for example) and find ideas that have made it into books - including the title Purgatory Chasm. Kinda kool! (Well, I think so, anyway.)

Here's the new batch:

Title: Western Star
Man facing firing squad in Utah. 4 live rounds, 1 wax bullet. The idea is that there's lifelong doubt as to whether you killed a man, but in practice the experienced marksmen know immediately if they fired wax.
Black cherry.
Good time to meet a character: first day on a new job he's overqualified for. His business failed, he's embarrassed, he's working with a bunch of kids.
Title: Surface Rust (like that one - Conway?)
Eudora Spoon [a character in some Conway Sax books]: painter?
Character who manages a perpetually-about-to-go-out-of-business clothing store at a mall.
Conway subplot: biological father of Jesse or Sophie [whose mother, Charlene Bollinger, is Conway's girlfriend] comes sniffing around. Says he wants a relationship, actually wants a payday.
Woman's first name: McLaren, named for the F1 team.
Proximity crush: the half-hearted crush a girl has on a boy because he's the only game in town.
Title & book idea: Flat Black Truth: Godspeed Travis McGee
Name a character Gretel Killian (McGee homage)
Surname: Torok (Russian?)
Blowtorch orange (blowtorch blue?)
Her overgrown pageboy looked like it had sneaked up on her head.
He had the feeling if a nickel fell from his pocket today, he'd find a dollar bill growing tomorrow (rich soil - put this line in Black Cat Arkansas).
Junior Mance: actual jazz musician
Character who's so lonely he sees 3 dentists because it's the only time women touch him.
Title: Petty Blue (Conway)
Character who dealt with midlife crisis by running unsuccessfully for town selectman. We meet her the day after the election, as she drives around clearing out her signs.
Protag (Conway?) notices a tough guy's wearing flip-flops, promptly stomps his foot with workboot.
Woman driving a GMC van around picking up rental tuxes. She owns the rental shop. She wears black slacks (too tight) and a leopard-print blouse. Her assistant is Brazilian, maybe Columbian.
Surname: Warfield
Title: Blunt Force Trauma
Mitchell, SD, is home of the Corn Palace.
Character who owns a small, regional moving company - constantly coming into contact with people in transition. Blue-collar shrink. (Protag of American Freight & Storage?)
"Bright Mississippi," Thelonious Monk tune.
Joe Ely's version of "West Texas Waltz."

Godspeed, Travis McGee

2010-06-15T10:45:00.005-04:00

For some time after the great John D. MacDonald died in 1986, there were rumors he'd written a final Travis McGee novel in which McGee - hero of MacDonald's best-known work, boat bum, under-the-table salvage expert, knight in rusty armor on a swaybacked steed - died himself.

The rumors persisted, veered and flared awhile, as rumors do. MacDonald's estate is in turmoil and is holding up publication! The book is narrated by Meyer, McGee's sidekick! The title will surely feature the word "Black"! Then they petered out, as rumors also do.

I don't know how much truth, if any, there was in all of this. And I no longer care.

Reason: I recently reread all the McGee books in order, as I do once a decade, and found MacDonald's true farewell midway through the final novel in the series, The Lonely Silver Rain. Here it is:

Too many had gone away and too many had died. Without my realizing it, it had happened so slowly, I had moved a generation away from the beach people. To them I had become a sun-brown rough-looking fellow of an indeterminate age who did not quite understand their dialect, did not share their habits - either sexual or pharmacological - who thought their music unmusical, their lyrics banal and repetitive, a square fellow who read books and wore yesterday's clothes. But the worst realization was that they bored me. The laughing, clean-limbed lovely young girls were as bright, functional and vapid as cereal boxes. And their young men - all hair and lethargy - were so laid back as to have become immobile. Meyer was increasingly grumpy, and sometimes almost hostile. I couldn't remember the last time I had tried to stop laughing and couldn't. I could hang around while the rest of the old friends slid away. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had twenty people aboard the Flush at the same time. When the green ripper dropped around and took the Alabama Tiger off for permanent and much-needed rest, the heirs had sold the 'Bama Gal to a fellow who moved her around to Mobile. For a time ladies of an overwhelmingly female persuasion had stopped by to ask me where the hell the Tiger had gone. I told them he had died smiling, and they had toted him off to the family plot, and the longest floating house party in the world had at last ended. Always, they wept. The party was over.

If this isn't a passage written by a man pondering his own mortality, I don't know what is.

Contest: Guess wordcount, win swag! UPDATE: Winners!

2010-05-28T07:29:00.010-04:00

Slow blogging month, but I think you'll agree my excuse is valid: Yesterday I finished the first draft of a book (its working title is Black Cat Arkansas, and I blogged about it here and here).

If you include my 20-year-old doorstop novel, Black Cat marks my fifth first draft - and I've yet to fully sort my thoughts on them. Rookies and non-writers believe the first draft is the end (ha!). At the other end of the continuum, many writers view the first draft as little more than a frame on which to hang the true novel, which will emerge over time. I fall somewhere in the middle; I'll appropriate Churchill's phrase and say that when I type END (if you type THE END, you're using twice as many words as you need), I've reached the end of the beginning.

Truth be told, finishing a first draft also brings the nagging, grainy knowledge that the book will never be as good as your initial conception of it. The confrontations aren't as powerful, the action scenes not as breathtaking, the observations of the human animal not as fresh as you knew they would be seven months ago when you created a new Word document. (Yeah, this one took seven months, including a three-week break during which I revised another novel for my outstanding editor at Thomas Dunne Books. Not bad!)

Dealing with the vague disappointment of a first draft separates the men from the boys, the pros from the workshop wannabees. The wannabees, in my experience, stall out, lurch to another project, and eventually leave nasty anonymous comments at literary agents' blogs. The pros roll up their sleeves, print out the effing mess, and get busy with revisions.

I start revising Tuesday.

Guess! Win! Wear!
On to the promised contest. It's simple: guess the wordcount of the first draft of Black Cat Arkansas. Nearest guess wins a stylish Flatout Motorsports T-shirt. We have many sizes, colors and sleeve lengths.

A few hints to get you started:

It's between 85,000 and 105,000.
In typical Word format (12-point Times New Roman, double-spaced), page count is between 325 and 375.

And a few rules set up by the crack legal beagles at Dewey, Fleecem & Howe:

Enter by leaving a comment on this blog post. This is the only way you may enter.
I'll accept entries until noon Eastern on Wednesday, June 2.
The winning guess can be under or over; this ain't "The Price Is Right."
I've tweeted the wordcount in a direct message to my agent, the peerless Janet Reid. Accompanied by Geraldo Rivera, Janet will unveil the number during a live TV broadcast from Al Capone's basement. (Well, she might. Negotiations are ongoing.)

Good luck!

Update: High noon has come and gone. Tenterhooks, bated breath, etc. etc. The mob surrounding my house threatens to turn ugly.

Oops. That mob turns out to be the landscapers. My bad.

Anyway, we have a winnah! Actually, we have two. The actual wordcount was 98,385, which means Marcy Campbell, who guessed 98,256, missed by only 129! Marcy, drop me an email or a Twitter DM; we'll talk color, shipping, and so forth.

Also, my pal Julie Weathers clocked in with a guess of 98,580. Damn close! Julie, you get a shirt too; I'll DM you.

Thanks for playing, everybody. This was fun; I believe we'll do it again after a revision or two.

The cobbler's child

2010-04-25T07:21:00.006-04:00

Building a race car is like putting an addition on your house: it always takes far longer than you expect, but once it's finished, the angst and impatience vanish.

Because I'm co-owner of a company that builds race cars, you might think I'd have some weight to throw around. You might think I could put some pressure on the guys at the shop to get my hot rod ready for its debut.

Nah. Quite the opposite. I'd rather see Flatout Motorsports focusing on clients' cars. If I miss a few races because we're keeping customers happy, I can live with that.

Besides, there's tangible progress to report, as documented in the photo above (snapped by Flatout's Mike Knapp). My Honda S2000, which I'll race in Sports Car Club of America's Improved Touring R class, has been painted white and red, Japan's traditional racing colors, and is being reassembled. The front and rear subframes have been reinstalled, as have the bulk of the braking and steering systems.

As the suspension components receive their custom bearings and go together, I promise (threaten?) to shoot pics of the underside that only car geeks will love.

Present completion target: a May 11 test day at Lime Rock Park, followed by a race at the same track. Will we make it? Stay tuned!

Submitted for your approval

2010-04-06T19:20:00.002-04:00

Interview: Conway Sax, the Barnburners, and Purgatory Chasm

2010-04-03T06:26:00.003-04:00

That was fun - I was interviewed, just like a real live author!

Here's the deal: a bunch of terrific writers put together a Pay It Forward project in which they interviewed agented-but-not-yet-published novelists about their books, characters, and (in many cases) publishing deals.

My friend Kari Lynn Dell, with whom I share an agent, drew the short straw and had to speak with me. For the results, go here. ("Here," by the way, is the website of Sean Ferrell, yet another client of Maximum Agent Janet Reid and author of the forthcoming novel Numb, which is going to rock your world.)

I'll close out this linkfest by aiming you at some of the other Pay It Forward interviews.

Notebook dump!

2010-03-27T10:43:00.004-04:00

They begin in my walnut-sized brain, progress to my Blackberry, find a home here on the blog, and - if they're lucky - eventually find their way into a book. Here they are, in no order and with as little cleanup or explanation as possible:

Tactile: the crown's tiny ratchet when you wind an automatic watch (love scene?).
Fellowship Hall.
Surname: Gill.
The rebel in winter.
Conway Sax idea: suspect who's a pharmaceutical sales rep.
The sound of bubblegum pop on a transistor radio.
Last name for minor character: Haas.
Phrase: punitive sexual practices.
Conway line: A gun is like four-wheel-drive in a truck: you hardly ever need it, but when you need it, you need it bad.
Brazilian gal in Conway book: has a long name, but goes by Moka.
Three-man hit team. One has a Dick Tracy profile. One looks Slavic and cruel, chews gum, never removes headphones. The third looks like a near-retirement gym teacher. He's the wheel man.
Conway subplot: Floriano has a cousin who works cleaning planes at Providence airport. He fails drug test. Floriano takes the fall, gets deported so cousin can stay in U.S.
Nickname hand-painted on fuselage of WWII P-51: Ace High.
Officious jerk (gov't worker, maybe teacher). Richard Something. Behind his back, co-workers call him Relevant Rick.
Phrase: flat-black truth (swiped from Anton Myrer's Once an Eagle).
Woman's name: Savannah, called Savvy.
"This is my body, broken for you." (Communion; never heard it phrased that way before.)
Character: woman with a ghastly marriage she can't escape. She meets her sister, who's in the same boat, for morning power-walks through the local mall.
Denmark Vesey: actual historical name. Originally from St Thomas, led a Charleston slave revolt in 1822.
Mesteno (tilde): Spanish for mustang.
Neva: Russian river, good name for woman character?
Magazine: Shotgun News. Actual cover headline: "Guns of the Philippine Constabulary."

Busman's holiday

2010-03-11T07:45:00.003-05:00

How do race-car builders spend their downtime? At Flatout Motorsports, our crew builds stuff like this - the ultimate videogame rig for the racer who has everything. The lucky recipient goofs off ... er, prepares for the race season with iRacing, which is such a cool videogame that the company would prefer you not call it a videogame, but rather a simulator.

That's a genuine Momo racing seat, by the way. And you've got to admire the little rollover hoop, in case the gamer ... sorry, simulator gets so enthusiastic he flips the thing over.

Sold a book - time to get to work

2010-02-28T12:50:00.002-05:00

Back when I used to work for somebody other than myself for a living, I managed to earn a promotion or two (God knows how). The sweetest (albeit briefest) times, I came to realize, were those between the announcement of the promotion and the morning the new duties started. Flattering memos! Attaboys! Drinks on us!

I'm now in the writer's equivalent of this golden moment, with the minutes ticking away. A few days ago, I got word that St. Martin's/Minotaur will publish what is known for now as Purgatory Chasm, a Conway Sax novel. The glorious phone call was delivered by Janet Reid, the best agent in the world, who's spent the past two and a half years working her tail off on my behalf for payment totaling ... let's see ... zero dollars and zero cents (unless you count holiday chocolate bribes).

Is it a thrill? A dream come true? Am I walking on air? You bet!

But only for a few more hours. Tomorrow at 7:30am, I plant myself in the chair and stay there for 1,500 words, as per usual. The twist will come later in the week, when I have el editorial meeting grande with my terrific Minotaur editor. After that I'll need a split schedule, writing fresh words for the book in progress while revising Purgatory. And before you know it I'll want to get cracking on the next book, and my website very much needs freshening, and there's the small matter of the business I can't ignore ...

I suppose all this will wipe the silly grin off my face. Eventually.

The thick of it

2010-02-14T10:38:00.004-05:00

A few evenings ago, near the outset of a new writers' group I'm part of, I took my turn to deliver a one-minute report on what I was working on and how it was going. When I finished, the woman who was next in line blinked and said, "Well ... it's hard to follow a happy writer."

Happy indeed, because the work in progress (working title: Black Cat Arkansas) is chugging along nicely. Word count is up to 53,000 of an anticipated 90,000, so I'm closing in on the two-thirds mark, where Act 2 ends and we careen into Act 3.

The pic you see here illustrates why I'm having such a good time.

One type of idea consists of character names, broad story ideas, and quickie images or thoughts. Every once in awhile, I capture these sorts of images in a Notebook Dump post.

That type of idea is well and good. But the ideas I'm having now, as shown in my psycho-killer-block-printed Post-Its, are specific to Black Cat. They're links, connections, ties, scenes - and the ones I fold into the manuscript will make the story richer.

While writing first drafts, I go months without having ideas like these. That's the time of doubt, the time for gritting teeth and writing another 1500 words just to hit the daily quota. The Post-Its are the payday, the proof that all along, something was happening in my head after all. Maybe even something worthwhile.

Also handy for roasting oxen

2010-01-29T10:41:00.002-05:00

That's my racecar-under-construction (a Honda S2000, though it's hard to tell right now) on a rotisserie. Why go to the trouble of custom-welding a set of brackets, then bolting an automobile to a giant spit? This will make our lives easier for the next few weeks as we painstakingly chip all the sound insulation from the unit body (aka the tub); sand and prep it; and finally paint the car's nether regions battleship gray.

Q: Do you know why racecar undersides, interiors, and engine bays are typically painted this drab color? (I'll answer in the Comments section.)

Fear not: when all is said and done, the car's exterior will be a much prettier color or colors. You'll see.

Trend watch: logos

2010-01-23T06:59:00.007-05:00

Last spring, I took the family to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. The lapel stickers they pass out to indicate you've paid caught my eye. (Sorry about the bad cell-phone pic, by the way.) Hating the weak teal color but loving the M in a box, I saved the sticker with an eye toward stealing the look for letterhead or a business card.

Looks like I wasn't the only one. On my way into the gym yesterday, I spotted the pilates logo at right. Unlike me, they must have liked the teal.

By the time I notice things like this, they tend to be full-blown trends. Have you seen any new first-letter-in-a-box-with-text-beneath logos lately?

Protecting me from myself

2010-01-15T15:04:00.006-05:00

To you it's a bunch of ugly metal tubes. To me, this rollcage will look positively beautiful if I one day find my race car tumbling merrily along the track - with me strapped inside.

Wall of Shame

2010-01-08T07:19:00.006-05:00

When anybody from Team Flatout wrecks a race car, we celebrate by hanging high the crinkled body panels (photo credit goes to Jacki Rigoli).

Why don't you see any bright-green parts bearing my number, 05? For starters, we've run out of space. This is a relief to many clients; believe me, we could quadruple this display if we had room. Also, I have a history of smashing up the rear quarter panels on my cars - they're too heavy and awkward to hang (thank God).

74,978 (Part 2)

2010-01-02T09:45:00.006-05:00

Where was I? Ah yes, the ultrapredictable year-in-review post, a staple of lazy journalism. Consider yourself fortunate I don't bookend it with the equally tiresome 2010 Predictions piece or, worse, Resolutions.

In Part 1 I accounted for 36,225 words of my 2009 output; that's what I wrote to finish Purgatory Chasm, the third Conway Sax book. Now, about those other 38,713 words:

Fully 10,160 went into the start of Conway Sax Four, as I called it until a working title (Just Drive) began to suggest itself. There I was, clicking along at page 40, having a nice time with Conway; his girlfriend Charlene Bollinger; sidekick Floriano Mendes (who I was happy to welcome back from the sabbatical I granted him in Purgatory Chasm); a creepy pair of political fixers; and KC, a smokin' hot former lover of Conway's who had HOMEWRECKER stamped on her forehead.

But for over a year I'd had this idea for a heist story. It would have to be written in third person, with multiple points of view, and while the story involves no helicopter-to-helicopter gun battles or fistfights on the wings of airborne Harrier Jets, it does play out on a bigger stage than Conway's.

This story kept gnawing at me, and once I got a handle on its protagonist, I had a hard time thinking about anything else. (The hero is gang-pressed into a heist crew. They kidnap his wife as leverage; what they don't know is that he was planning to ditch her that day.) After consulting with super-agent Janet Reid, I decided resistance was futile. In November, I told Conway to take five and lit into the heist book, whose working title is Black Cat Arkansas.

And that, friends, is where my final 28,553 words went. That's a two-month total, mind you; relatively speaking, I am flying through this story. Small wonder, as I'm having a ball with every scene. After three books and change written in first person from the point of view of a single taciturn character, writing third person with multiple POVs is a hoot.

So this is where I stand at the dawn of 2010: a third of the way through Black Cat Arkansas, having fun with the manuscript, looking forward to each day's writing. Even allowing for the inevitable slowdowns, I'll finish a draft sometime in March and then see what I've got.

As to Conway: fear not, I'll get back to him.

74,978 (Part 1)

2009-12-31T10:17:00.006-05:00

Hey, you know those insipid "by the numbers" pieces newspapers and magazines do at the end of the year (not to mention decade)? This is one of them!

(Inside former-journo scoop, although you probably figured this out long ago: the reason periodicals love end-of-year wrapups is that you can prepare them well in advance, then get the hell out of Dodge for the last week of the year.)

The headline above is the number of brand-spanking-new words I wrote in 2009. I was a bit disappointed at the tally; Stephen King writes chunks of homespun dialog longer than my total for the year.

But.

Today and tomorrow I'll explain how those words break down and why they don't tell the full story:

36,225 of the new words polished off Purgatory Chasm, the third Conway Sax novel, which I began in fall 2008. This was my longest book yet, at a hair under 80,000 words total. Moreover, it included two separate bouts of heavy rewriting.

The first bout came when Janet Reid, my tireless and superb agent, gave me a roundup of editor feedback on Shotgun Lullaby, the first Conway Sax book. I wrote that book (and indeed planned to write the whole series) in a heavy-duty staccato style, often called telegraphic (think James Ellroy). While many acquiring editors liked this style themselves, they questioned whether readers would.

Me, I want to sell books. Lots of 'em. So Janet and I decided that while the moment had passed for Shotgun Lullaby, it would be worth my while to rewrite the second Conway, Dirty Pictures, as well as Purgatory Chasm (which was then about half done), in a more conventional style - fewer colons, more commas, even an adjective or two (but no adverbs!).

All of which is a roundabout way of saying I lost a couple of months' worth of fresh work on Purgatory because I was rewriting it and Dirty Pics. (Parenthetical comment: the rewrites were a complete success and an example of an agent handling a thankless task. So brilliantly did Janet persuade me to change the style that I damn near convinced myself it was my own idea.)

The second bout of heavy lifting on Purgatory was more typical and more painful. In April, upon finishing and reading the first draft, I came to the unpleasant realization that I'd screwed the thing up. In Acts 1 and 2 I had hung all the right guns on the wall, but in the final act I'd either left them unfired or popped off weak, ineffective shots over my shoulder - like a French infantryman.

That was a rough moment. I have no fear of rewrites (I was primarily an editor for many years before becoming a writer), but Purgatory essentially needed an entirely new Act 3, to the tune of 25,000 words. And the bizarre personal accounting system I use in tallying words held that because I was rewriting, I did not get to count that new Act 3 as fresh words.

Make sense? Not to me, either, but there it is.

Semi-happy ending: I did what needed to be done, and Purgatory Chasm is my best book to date. Why is this only semi-happy? Because the doggone thing hasn't sold, so only I, Janet and my wife know how good it is.

Tune in tomorrow when, between college bowl games, I'll continue my little apologia. I've got 38,713 words yet to explain!

Stripped!

2009-12-24T10:06:00.003-05:00

Race cars are like "Biggest Loser" contestants: once you start the process, they look really bad before they look good.

About a week ago, I luxuriated in the leather seats of my new Honda S2000. Now? Not so much. We've stripped the interior, the trunk, the plastic inner fender liners, and some of the crap from the engine bay (in a race car, such items as air-conditioning, the ABS system, and cruise control are counted as crap). We've also removed the ridiculously light aluminum hood and the folding top. Having had a good look at the car underneath all this frippery, we can start with the fun stuff.

Yesterday, I decided which racing seat to use. I went for a newer model from a company called Racetech. The seat has a U-shaped headrest that blocks peripheral vision quite a bit, and I'm not crazy about that. On the other hand, this is the trend in racing seats; the idea is that the less your helmet (and the head within, and the brain within that, to the extent racers have brains) moves in a crash, the better off you are. So you swap a few degrees of peripheral vision for an unbruised brain. Fair enough.

With the seat selected, we positioned it and made sure I could reach the pedals, gearshift, and steering wheel comfortably. I could - and how! Now our rollcage-building maestro begins cutting and welding a safety cocoon for me. That's an exciting part of the build, so expect pics and updates along the way.

Merry Christmas!

Found: My 2010 race car

2009-12-18T09:38:00.004-05:00

It's a sweetheart! A Honda S2000 built in 2000 (the first year this model was offered) with only 49,000 miles on the odometer. Yeah, I paid more than I wanted to, but when you compare this donor (as we in the biz call the cars we hack up) to some of the other heaps I was considering, you'll agree it was money well spent.

In this photo, the car's connected to my company's dynamometer, a tool that measures engine power. I "drove" the car during dyno testing. It's an odd feeling to put the shifter in fourth, mash the gas, and watch the tachometer and speedometer climb (in this case, to 9,000 RPM and 114 MPH) - while the car remains stationary, its rear tires having been removed and its wheels hooked to the aforementioned dynamometer.

The next step is one that may make this grown man cry: we need to remove the S2000's gorgeous leather interior and sophisticated dashboard in order to weld up a rollcage to protect me when (not if) I do something silly on the track.

Creampuffs!

2009-12-04T11:37:00.005-05:00

Shopping for a race car is not like shopping for a street car. But it's just as frustrating.

I'm looking for a Honda S2000 to race for the next several years. The ideal donor would have high miles or even a blown engine (because the second thing you do when creating a race car is rebuild its engine) and a ratty interior (because the first thing you do is strip out that interior, which in a race car is nothing but fuel for a potential fire), and would thus be relatively cheap.

Now S2000s ain't Civics, that I grant you; in the four model years I seek (1999-2002), roughly 30,000 were sold in the U.S. But these tend to be second cars for enthusiasts, well maintained and garaged. Between that and the time of year - late fall is the best time to buy a convertible here in the northeast - I thought I'd have an easy time of it.

Not so. Everybody who wants to part with an S2000 seems to think it's worth $2,000 more than I'm willing to pay.

So I've lowered my standards. Where once I demanded a completely straight car with a virginal unit body (or tub, to racers), now I'm willing to look at flood victims and wrecked chassis like the dreamboats seen here. Hell, why not? Sooner or later it's going to look like this anyway.

BTW: The picture at left speaks for itself. In the one at right, there's a giant, jagged hole in the oil pan, and a close look shows the entire subframe is toast. So much for that new-car smell.

I'll keep you posted.

Notebook dump!

2009-11-20T07:55:00.002-05:00

Hey, haven't done one of these for awhile. Here are the names, phrases, ideas (such as they are) and ephemera that have been piling up in my Blackberry:

Name: Professor Graymeat (Dickensian!)
Holed-up heist gang sends 1 guy to supermarket. He comes back with 48 chicken pot pies 'cause they were 3 for a buck. They eat nothing but chicken pot pies for 3 days. Everybody's pissed.
Dust Bowl - rabbit drives - Black Sunday, April 1935 [This is from PBS's "Surviving the Dust Bowl," which leans heavily on The Worst Hard Time, a fantastic book by Timothy Egan.]
qfisllc.com, forensics website
CODIS - FBI lab DNA database
University of Leyden - Dutch, John Quincy Adams studied there
Whip City Chargers
Dexter Arthur Wheeler, known as Dart?
Character from Black Cat, AR
Actual name: George Forsyth
Plot: a son or daughter makes self up to look older, can pass for parent - uses this trick for gain
Whip City Sinners
Actual surname: Pitkat
Prissy FBI supervisor makes his office a foot bigger than regs allow
Mood Ring Eyes
MS13, brutal Salvadoran gang
Mannix Whitlock
Dindo Ramos: actual Filipino name
Fulfilled as a strip-mall mattress salesman
Title: SUICIDE RUN
Odd feeling: seeing something you once owned (a chair, etc.) used as a period movie prop
Sunset hero: a big talker who seems not to be around when shit hits fan
Shards of silence (from Dwight Yoakam song)
Character with huge beaky nose, reminds narrator of canoe-carrying Indian from old cartoon
Name for minor character: Sherm Howe (tip of cap to Travis McGee)
Title: INDIA INK
"You're uncouth." "Me? I got couth drippin' out my asshole, lady."
Song: Flora's Waltz
Character: singer/songwriter who scrapes by in bars. He's afraid nobody'll clap when a song ends, so he segues each song into the last, plays 45 minutes straight.
You might as well tell a skunk he stinks.
Character who takes delight in being unmemorable, invisible
Title: FELONY STOP
Title: CEMETERY RIDGE (from Gettysburg?)
Abe Lincoln: "Argue long enough and you can convince yourself there's no difference between a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse."

Out with the old

2009-11-12T10:46:00.004-05:00

Just sold the Mazda RX-7 I raced for six seasons, and I did so with no regrets whatsoever. Indeed, when the guys at the Flatout Motorsports shop told me they were set to trailer the car to its new owner and asked if I wanted to drop by, snap a few pics, and maybe pat its haunch tearfully, I said hell no - haul that sucker away and bring me a check.

Let me add hastily that this was and is a damn good race car: fast and reliable, with all the important bits put together correctly and tuned to suit my driving style. I have no doubt its new owner will enjoy it as much as I did.

But that's all the affection I can muster for the 05. Yup, the 05 - my number. If your interest in racing stops at Days of Thunder, you may think drivers give their cars feminine nicknames and mutter to them affectionately. Not so. Race cars exist to be used up, thrashed within an inch of their life, and then disposed of. In one of my books, protagonist Conway Sax (a former NASCAR driver and mechanic) says, "A street car's a tool. A race car's a weapon. Not much more to it than that."

So I sold my old weapon, and you know what that means: time to build a new one. Which entails, of course, a future blog post.

Worth a thousand words

2009-10-31T18:06:00.004-04:00

Somebody asked recently how I named Conway Sax, the protagonist in my mystery series. By way of response, I simply emailed this photo.

One! Two! Got the swine flu

2009-10-23T08:23:00.005-04:00

I'll never know for sure whether I had a bona fide case of H1N1, as I didn't go to the doc for confirmation, but this much is certain: Been sick as a damn dog since Saturday.

So's half the country, of course; schools are ghost towns, the Cleveland Browns are so decimated they're seeking a roster-rules exemption just to field a team, and vaccine shots are running way behind demand.

I'm just about healthy again. The details I'll spare you, but trust me - you wouldn't wish this sickness, whatever it is, on your worst enemy.

And yet! As an optimist, I insist on silver linings, and the scores of hours I spent staring vacantly at the TV produced a few. For starters, the final scene of my Conway Sax work-in-progress came to me while I watched, of all things, "The Biggest Loser." Hey, you takes your inspiration where you finds it. The epiphany is a true comfort to me. In the past, I've always known my novels' final scenes before I started writing (which, by the way, is extremely common among writers I know). Such was not the case this time around. I waded into the book anyway, because that's what you do, but I admit I felt somewhat adrift without a final scene in my head.

The other tidbit I picked up comes from a multi-part documentary IFC is running on Monty Python. There's a gag in Monty Python and the Holy Grail that I'd forgotten. King Arthur canters past a couple of serfs. Serf One prostrates himself and says (quoting from memory), "Bless you, good King!" Serf Two says, "How do you know he's a king?" Serf One says, "He doesn't have shit all over him."

I love that bit - it reminds me of the "A young bull and an old bull" joke from Colors. In Conway Sax' world, anybody not covered with shit is indeed a king. I guarantee you I'll work it into a story sometime.

It looks like the Daytona 500 in the record books

2009-10-12T10:10:00.004-04:00

In Victory Lane I, my daughter, my son, and my fabulous wife Martha do our best to dent my expensive aluminum hood. Photo: Amy Mills.

A killjoy could peer at the results of yesterday's Sports Car Club of America race and conclude that I won almost by default, as most of the top drivers in my class chose to skip the event at Watkins Glen International (the best race track in North America, by the way, and absolutely stunning in mid-October).

But you're not a killjoy and you don't have access to the results (not if I can help it), so take my word: I was Jackie Stewart out there. I was Emerson Fittipaldi and Juan Manuel Fangio and Ayrton Senna all rolled into one, with just a soupcon of Dale Earnhardt Sr. for grit's sake.

At least that's what I told my family, who finally got to see me do something other than hit the wall.

In which I stock up on nonfiction

2009-10-09T07:06:00.007-04:00

I don't like to read fiction while I'm writing it - I find myself unconsciously aping my favorite writers. (I can flip through my first book and say That's a James Ellroy sentence, or That's a Travis McGee-style minor character.) I need to be reading at all times, so the solution is to load up on nonfiction for the six or eight months it takes to write a Conway Sax first draft.

Mission accomplished!

I bulled through the local Borders* yesterday and came out with the following trade paper:

A Terrible Glory, James Donovan. This one, which like most nonfiction has an overlong subtitle, is a bio of George Custer and a history of Little Bighorn.
What Hath God Wrought, Daniel Walker Howe. This U.S. history covers 1815-1848. Having read plenty of Revolutionary and Civil War histories and biographies, I now find myself filling in gaps with books on the Industrial Revolution and Reconstruction.
Memoirs of the Second World War, Winston Churchill. I'm a big Churchill fan - William Manchester's (sadly unfinished) bio of the titan is one of my favorite books - but I'll admit to being put off by his imperious prose. Time to get past that!

This lot, combined with the John Quincy Adams bio that gathered dust on the TBR stack all summer while I gorged on McGees, ought to carry me through. And then some.

* 'Twas a pleasure to buy physical books for a change. I love my Kindle, but I've decided it works best for novels. Hefty nonfiction, with its maps and footnotes, is best read in hardcopy.

You got how many MPG in that 20-year-old Honda?

2009-09-28T10:39:00.004-04:00

Chang Ho Kim is an old friend of mine, a top-notch mechanic specializing in Hondas, and a championship-level autocrosser, so I need to link to this post at a green-car blog.

When Chang heard about a fuel economy competition, he dusted off a 1989 Honda CRX HF that was sitting behind his shop, tuned it up, lowered it (to reduce wind resistance), installed snow tires (to reduce rolling resistance), put on the funny-looking cow-catcher you see here, and had a go.

And won, achieving a 118-mile-per-gallon average and beating some fancy hybrid machines in the process. So surprising was Chang's low-tech approach that contest organizers hyper-scrutinized his fuel consumption, but in the end he won fair and square.

Follow the link above to read how he did it, and keep in mind that there's more than one way to skin a cat: light weight and skilled driving are your best friends whether you're racing or saving fuel.

The first paragraph of Conway Sax 4

2009-09-25T08:43:00.003-04:00

Yeah, I'm going to need a better working title than that. One candidate is Mood Ring Eyes, but while I like the feel of the phrase - three four-letter words with distinctly different vowel sounds - it's better suited to a romance (or for that matter a cheesy pop song) than a noir mystery. Anyway, here's the opener as it now stands:

I was running and I was naked and my hands were cuffed behind my back. Ziptied, actually, the plastic strips cinched tight as hell, circulation long since gone. I pictured my hands oversized and puffy, like the Hamburger Helper mascot.

Forty words down, 76,960 to go! (Actually, I'm more than 5,000 words in, and I like where the story's heading.) Stay tuned.

They don't make 'em like they used to

2009-09-18T17:02:00.004-04:00

I'm not an unqualified fan of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, but the group does know how to throw a party. To celebrate its fiftieth birthday, the IIHS crashed a brand new 2009 Chevrolet Malibu into a '59 Chevy Bel Air.

If you think of cars from the 1950s as rolling fortresses, iron-framed behemoths that could run right over today's tin cans, watch this. (Stick around until the end to see how the drivers would have fared.)

Even a Blind Pig Dept.

2009-09-14T13:34:00.004-04:00

Well what do you know! I won a race for the first time in more than a year.

My company, Flatout Motorsports, made a pilgrimmage to New Hampshire Motor Speedway for a double race - one Saturday, one Sunday. I invited family Saturday, whereupon Murphy's Law kicked in: clammy drizzle prevailed. My family patiently waited for my race. I got a great start, passed the guy in front of me, got carried away entering the first turn (a high-speed NASCAR oval), and spun out in front of the entire field. They missed me, but I didn't miss the wall; I slapped it hard with the right front corner of my car. The photo you see here is small, but a careful look shows that the entire front end, which I'd bunged up in a previous race, is pretty ugly looking. It's held together, for now, with duct tape and Dzus fasteners.

By the time we came past the grandstands in which my family sat expectantly, I was DFL (dead bleeping last), and there I would stay.

Sorry, family.

The next day was a different matter entirely. I've never golfed, but those who do say it's that one sweet shot per eighteen holes that keeps you coming back to play the frustrating, expensive, time-consuming game.

Sunday was the racing equivalent of that one sweet shot. From the drop of the green flag, I battled hard with two friends who drive cars much like mine. One friend would pass me, I would pass him back, and so on. We were each focused on the few hundred yards ahead, but were thinking strategically at the same time. How good are his tires? Should I press him or wait for a mistake? Will we come up on any lapped traffic soon?

In the end, I beat my pal by a whopping three-tenths of a second - half a car length. It was by far my best race of the year, and maybe my best ever. It made up for the season's mechanical glitches, bad breaks, and driver incompetence.

Now if only my family had been there to see it.

The season wears (and wears) on

2009-09-08T11:53:00.005-04:00

This picture feels right because of that blue tape patch on the fender of my race car, which reminds me of a cartoon bandage that Wile E. Coyote or Foghorn Leghorn might wind up with.

A few weeks ago during qualifying for a Pro-IT race at Connecticut's Lime Rock Park, I carried too much enthusiasm - that is, speed - into a corner, skidded onto wet grass, and watched helplessly as a tire wall (which is just what it sounds like: a wall composed of stacked tires, which help dissipate energy when shmucks like me crash into them) rushed toward my windshield.

I hit the tires hard but square, and was pleasantly surprised when I was able to back away and continue with qualifying. Finished third in the race, but it wasn't a third to be proud of - I was way slower than I should have been.

It's been that kind of season, right from lap one of race one, when a competitor punted me, breaking my transmission and causing my engine to fail. I've squeezed in a few decent results, but they've been overshadowed by mechanical failures, wrecks, running out of gas (which cost me a second place), and mediocre driving.

But I've got three more shots at my three favorite tracks: New Hampshire Motor Speedway this weekend, Lime Rock later this month, and glorious Watkins Glen in October. Here's hoping I and my poor old bandaged-up car can finish the season with a little pride.

McGee swings into the '70s

2009-07-21T07:29:00.005-04:00

As I may have posted before, I'm rereading my favorite detective series - John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels - in order. One of the series' many delights is anthropological. Bachelor (and how!) McGee spends the first four or five books in the 1960s of Brubeck and Hefner. The next half-dozen are set very much in the '60s of the Beatles, more-or-less harmless recreational drugs, and unselfconscious sex.

Well. I just finished A Tan and Sandy Silence. Published in 1972, it's the thirteenth McGee book and the first with a '70s vibe (The Long Lavendar Look, while published in 1970, is a '60s straggler in tone).

I'm astonished at how Tan and Sandy catches the post-Altamont shift in the nation's mood. Gone are the flocks of beach bunnies who populated the early books; they're replaced by a cult of nudist retro-fundamentalists who are miserable with crab lice (I kid you not). Carefree one-on-one flings, fueled by booze and enjoyed by both parties, are replaced by a sort of floating whorehouse. The antagonist is a blossoming sadist, and the sexual jollies he gets with his victims (male and female) are hinted at, if never spelled out. The feeling, overall, is of depravity, of a center not holding, of consequences not anticipated by Kesey & Hefner & Co.

Which is to say the book is a perfect anticipation of the 1970s.

MacDonald's gift in this regard is unparalleled. It's been awhile since I read all the McGees, so I look forward to seeing whether the books capture the feel of the 1980s with similar eerie accuracy.

Exhale!

2009-07-14T06:09:00.003-04:00

Hmm, you ask yourself. How long can Ulfelder keep up this torrid one-post-per-month blogging pace?

All right already. Here's the excuse: for the past month-plus I've been consumed with the rewrite of the third Conway Sax novel. Yesterday I sent the manuscript off to my incredible agent, Janet Reid. She got back to me with edits. I made the changes pronto, because Janet wants to start shopping the book pronto, and have thus earned a bit of by-God relaxation time.

(You read that right: Janet read my 80,000-word novel and turned it around with insightful suggestions in less than 24 hours. Keep that in mind next time you hear disgruntled writers griping about agents.)

The Conway Sax Full Employment Plan strikes again

2009-06-08T15:31:00.003-04:00

My protagonist, Conway Sax, lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, and helps people solve squalid problems, usually of their own making. This story demonstrates that Conway will never run out of things to do.

Quick rundown to save you a click: A toll taker owes a Framingham construction worker - and, more to the point, cocaine dealer - $70,000. One night he decides to kill the dealer, thus pocketing the $70K. So he and a pal who owns (what else?) a concrete business visit the dealer (who's named Angel, BTW), shoot him in the back of the head, cart his remains to the concrete place, chop him up, and cook him.

Into the notebook it goes ...

The last Parker

2009-06-01T16:53:00.005-04:00

I just finished Dirty Money, which turns out to be the last Parker novel (author Donald Westlake, who wrote the Parker books under the name Richard Stark, died in December).

Dirty Money is a typical - meaning damn good - Parker novel. And like the others, it leaves you wanting more. Parker stories rarely end cleanly, with the maiden rescued and the treasure secured. I think that's why once you discover these books, you tend to read them three or four at a time.

In fact, Dirty Money is best understood as the last in a three-book run that centers on a single (botched) armored-car heist. Start with Nobody Runs Forever, stick with Ask the Parrot (which is, I must say, the weakest-ever Parker book), and then read Dirty Money.

That's racing

2009-05-04T06:55:00.004-04:00

Boy, did my 2009 racing season get off to a lousy start. Saturday, I had a great qualifying run at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. I would start the race third in class and fifth overall (out of about 30 cars) - at the sharp end of the field, ready to slug it out with fellow Mazda drivers and a bunch of fast BMWs.

The green flag fell. We screamed through Turns 1 and 2 - the NASCAR oval - at NHMS. As we approached Turn 3, I was right where I wanted to be: on the bumper of a BMW that was my bogie, on the outside of the right-hand turn, ready to trap some cars when we got to the next turn, a left-hander.

But at NHMS, Turn 3 is a notorious accordion on the first lap of any race. Cars slow from 100+mph down to 35 or so. Ugly things happen.

In my case, the ugly thing was a tap in the rear bumper that turned me good and sideways. My car was perpendicular to the race track, and I braced to get T-boned - but didn't, thanks to heads-up driving by the rest of the field.

I saved the car without losing too many spots. The red mist descended: I was pissed at losing all those positions, my race more or less ruined after 20 seconds. But at least things could get no worse. I gritted my teeth, flew up the hill from Turn 3, and grabbed third gear.

There was no third gear.

Whether as a result of the half-spin or purely by coincidence, my transmission was down one gear - a common problem in RX-7s. I babbled this info over my radio and watched the pack vanish over the horizon. From a starting position of fifth, I was now DFL - dead bleeping last.

My crew calmed me and told me to run the race in second and fourth gears. I began to do so. The problem is, NHMS requires a lot of third gear, so I was well and truly crippled. Oh well, I thought, limping around 4 seconds per lap slower than I should have been: at least things could get no worse. I would pick off a few slower cars, challenge myself to do the best I could, and earn points for the season-long series.

While thinking these thoughts and cruising, I should have been watching my gauges. My motor seemed to run flatter and flatter as the laps wore on, and by the time I checked my oil temperature it was off the charts.

I'd blown my engine.

That race reminded me of this little backstory passage in Dirty Pictures, the second Conway Sax book. Conway, protagonist and narrator, is recalling when he met his friend Floriano Mendes:

It turned out Floriano came north with a Brasilia-based pro racing team. Then the stud driver jumped ship for a more prestigious ride in Europe, and took his sponsorship money with him. The team folded twelve hours later, left a dozen Brazilian techs high and dry.

When Floriano told me all this we shrugged and both said, at the exact same time, “That’s racing.” Laughed.

Then I told Floriano I used to be a driver. NASCAR Busch Series, a step below what was then Winston Cup. He asked if I ever ran a Cup race. I said no, made the glug-glug gesture for drinking. Floriano said, “That’s racing too.” We laughed again. Been friends ever since.

A ittle ink for Flatout

2009-04-27T18:01:00.003-04:00

First things first: Photo credit for the shot you see goes to Bear Cieri of the Metrowest [MA] Daily News. Here's a link to a very generous profile of Flatout Motorsports written by the MDN's Paul Ring.

That's me inside the race car with my partners Nick Leverone (center) and Andy Bettencourt.

I was a journalist for 20 years, so it was kind of fun to be on the other end of a feature story for a change!

Ten years ago ...

2009-04-20T13:06:00.006-04:00

... I ran the Boston Marathon. Without training for it.

I was a dedicated runner at the time but had never gone farther than 10 miles. The Friday before the race (which is always held on Patriots' Day, a mid-April Monday), forecasters predicted perfect marathon weather: cool but not too, overcast, with a west wind to push runners along.

I announced to family and friends I would run the race. They laughed at me, which was an appropriate response. I didn't truly expect to finish. Rather, I thought it would be nice to run 15 miles, bail out in the town of Wellesley, and take a taxi home.

Monday, the weather was warmer and sunnier than expected - a setback - but I donned a lucky Minnesota Vikings T shirt, stuffed the pockets of my running shorts with nutrition gels and ibuprofen, and traveled the three miles from my home to the starting line. As a bandit (a runner who hadn't qualified for the race), I started as far back as possible, next to the octogenarians and the guys dressed as Groucho Marx. Most of those guys left me in their dust. That hurt.

Nevertheless, the first half of the race went better than expected. Having failed to do my homework, I didn't know that despite its famous Heartbreak Hill, the Boston course actually slopes downward for much of its length. Between this downhill run and the astonishing energy of the spectators (a thousand people must have called out "Go Minnesota!"), I surprised myself by clicking off thirteen or so 9-minute miles.

I blame the girls of Wellesley College for my downfall. These students famously scream themselves hoarse encouraging runners (what's not quite so well known is that, on warm days at least, a few off them whip off their tops and do their encouraging in brassieres), so just when I should have been choosing a spot to drop out, they convinced me I was quite a manly man. Thus puffed up, I trotted through the streets of Wellesley, knowing now that I could knock off the remaining 11 or so miles ...

... and that's how I was thinking when I hit the first of the hills in Newton, and just about dropped dead. These hills made clear what the brassieres of Wellesley College had masked: I was all done, with the bursar sacs in both hips and one knee (which had caused me trouble in the past) on fire.

But it was too late now; I'd blown through my 15-mile target, and a water- and commonsense-deprived part of my head declared that running 18 miles would be truly stupid unless I went ahead and ran the remaining eight.

Those last eight miles took me almost as long as the previous 18. I walked quite a bit, and when I ran I looked like a man with both legs in splints (locking my knees made the bursitis in my hips marginally less painful). People kept asking if I was okay. Around mile 21, Mother Nature decided it would be funny to kick up a stiff ocean breeze to further slow me. Somebody from an emergency aid station saw me shiver and handed me one of those little aluminum blankets. I wrapped it around my shoulders and finished the race with it. Between that and the knees-locked gait, I looked like the Tin Man.

I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I tell you that when I rounded the final corner onto Boylston Street, all pain and discomfort simply vanished, and I ran the final half-mile as easily as I had the first. My time was four hours and fifty-four minutes. Running th Boston Marathon was and remains the best stupid thing I've ever done.

Notebook dump!

2009-04-14T09:05:00.005-04:00

As I take a few days off before wading into my Purgatory Chasm rewrite, it's time for administrative tasks. There's one job I never look forward to, but which always turns out to be kind of fun: transferring random notes and thoughts from a notebook to a Word doc.

The notebook is now actually a Blackberry. It took me time to give up my hardcopy notebook, and in many ways I think it's superior, but why carry two things when you can carry one?

Here's an unedited list of items, beginning a few months ago. (You'll quickly notice I love dreaming up titles - I'd have to live to 150 to write a crime novel for each great title I've got.) Here goes:

Title: Swank
Bell choir plays “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” (“A Scottish Melody”)
Name: Bert Saginaw
Titles: Cherry Bomb, Tahoe Baby, Wheelman, American Bullnose, Death or Glory, Flat Broke, Hot Pursuit, Police Interceptor
Real name: Billie Smaha
Have a retro-punk character who dresses like 1977 punk rocker
Character: Cruzatte, descendant of a member of the Lewis & Clark party
“He’s not immune from me.”
Title: Cripple Creek
Fact: many GIs in early Korean War had committed crimes while stationed in Japan – had a choice between the brig and fighting in Korea.
Have a character who hates the Amish
Purgatory Chasm
Breond Yarbrough – (real) name
Surname: Bowyer
Woman with eye patch
Name: Archie
Title: Baby Blue
Derwin Loundin – (real) name
Occoneechee Speedway, Hillsborough, NC
Famoso Drag Strip
80 West opener: Fat Jack Sebring was quicker than he looked, so nobody was surprised it was him shot the Somalian through the eye. Even the Somalian's remaining eye - his left - looked more or less resigned.
Eat an apple in the dark – that way, you don’t notice the soft spots.
Switchback
You could lose a one-man staring contest
Actual first name: Roebuck
Bellet – French surname
Steve Seabolt – actual name
It is difficulties that show what men are – Epictetus
Title: Slow Pay
Title: Damaged Goods
Slow as a middle-school second hand
Sarah Siddons: 18th century English actress
Name: Herschel
Surname: Cranch
Name: William Abdee, former slave
There is an urbanity without ostentation or extravagance which will succeed everywhere and at all times – John Adams
Title: Top Fuel
Name: Cotton Thaxter
If conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value. – John Adams
Name: Tymon Dogg
Star of Wonder
Put Lacross and Ike Maple together in story (Pure?)
Coffee – good cop name
Open a book with a plane crash into water
Title: Lefty Loosey
Hot Rod Noir
Tumblehome
Have a character who wrote a musical based on COPS.
Have a character whose claim to fame was appearance in “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” ad.
Have a character who thinks wind direction should be determined by where it’s going, not where it’s been.
Have a hail-fellow-well-met character who says things twice, gaining momentum. “That’s the spirit, THAT’S the spirit.”
Memphis County Jail.
Have a character who works in a furniture store, likes to sit in chairs after closing.
Ram you damn you (adj. describing Jack Aubrey)

A thousand words a day

2009-04-13T09:58:00.005-04:00

I'm neither sentimental nor a pack rat; I don't save a lot of notes or other ephemera regarding my books (rather, each gets one chaotic Word doc that serves as an all-purpose dumping ground for character sketches, plot ideas and the like).

However, for each novel I do save a document like the one you see here: a simple running count showing how many words I wrote on a given day. This one is for Purgatory Chasm, but I didn't have that title when I started in August 2008 - hence the heading "CS3" for the third Conway Sax book.

My goal is always to write a thousand words a day, Monday through Thursday. Four thousand words a week equals 16,000 per month, which would give me an 80,000-word manuscript in five months. Of course, real life and work or a reasonable facsimile thereof intrude, but a man's reach must exceed his grasp.

If you can read the individual entries in the photo, note that the first draft of Purgatory Chasm saw a two-month-plus interruption while I reworked the voice of both Dirty Pictures, the previous novel, and PC. Start to finish, the first draft of PC took just under eight months. Subtract that two-month hiatus and you get a presentable draft in six months. I'll take it.

Worst celebration ever (but a celebration nevertheless)

2009-04-09T17:31:00.005-04:00

Today I finished the first draft of Purgatory Chasm, the third Conway Sax novel (I got that working title here). Various Twitter and Facebook pals have urged me to enjoy an adult beverage or three this evening in celebration. (Truth be told, nobody said anything about this evening - they want me to start drinking right now.)

Trouble is, I'm a teatotaler.

Usually my celebration would take the form of either a trip to my local obscenely overpriced ice cream parlor, if I wanted to get the kids in on the act, or a less sociable pint of Ben & Jerry's.

But - and this is where I shake my fist at the heavens and cry Why me, Lord? Why must you do this to me? - I gave up freakin' sweets for Lent this year. 'Twas the first time in 40 years I paid any attention to Lent. Haven't cheated once, either. Easter is Sunday, and I'll be damned (poor word choice, I know) if I'm going to screw up this close to the finish line.

So what am I supposed to do? Suggestions welcome, but do keep in mind this is a PG-rated blog.

Dept. of Too Much Time on Hands

2009-03-24T05:31:00.002-04:00

You want a model railroad? A massive, overengineered, perfect-to-the-last detail, obsessed-over model railroad? Call a German.

(The not-quite-right English translation here is kind of endearing. Near the end, listen as "house of ill repute" becomes "house with a bad reputation.")

Family dogs then and now, Part 2

2009-03-21T15:19:00.004-04:00

Second in a 3-part series

Part 1 of this overlong post addressed the modern method of procuring a family dog - and found it wanting.

Once you get the dog home, things get worse. Again, my point of comparison is the 1960s and 1970s, before the ninnies and the nannies took over.

Back then, once you got the mutt (and indeed it was a mutt) home and purchased a 40-pound sack of Puppy Chow, your work was nearly done. Sure, when you first tried to shut your pup in the garage or basement overnight, you had to plug your ears with toilet paper in a futile effort to get some ever-loving sleep over the whining. But that problem was solved when the kids sneaked the grateful little guy out of the dark and into their room - where he promptly piddled.

Ah yes, the piddling and the pooping. Chasing the dog around with a rolled-up newspaper occupied a week or two, but once he was housebroken, an all-American mutt's training was over.

Train a dog? What for? In all but the worst weather, everybody simply let their mutts out the kitchen door each morning so they could commence their canine patrol. They did their business, prowled here and there, found romance, chased cats, maybe tipped over a garbage can or two. Essentially, dogs were allowed to vanish for hours - as were kids - and that worked out fine most of the time.

Which is not to say every time (thus creating an opening for the ninnies and the nannies, on whom more later). A roaming dog is a dog at risk (gasp!). We had a pup named Porky who was a relentless chewer. When he devoured a neighbor's $35 golf shoes - those were seriously expensive kicks in 1968 - my dad was forced to take him to that beautiful farm reserved for unruly mutts.

And then there was Violet, a sweet little mutt who could and did run all day. She was killed by a car when I was 12; my mother and I got a very concrete lesson on the meaning of "dead weight" when we put her on a bedspread and dragged her up the driveway, tears rolling.

By contrast, between the web research and the electric fences and the Science Diets and the eye-roll-inducing obedience schools that mark dog ownership today, it's a wonder all the pampered purebreds don't live to be 40. In human years, that is.

I wonder if the leading cause of death among today's suburban dogs is sheer boredom. Six AM walk, poop, watch the human pick up the poop, head home for 4.4 ounces of bio-engineered food, then it's into the cage for five or six hours until the kids get home from school. Yawn.

For God's sake, you want to tell these poor dogs, bust a move! Chase a squirrel! Sniff out a pile of another dog's feces and roll in it! Find something, anything, and hump it or chew it!

That's what I want: a humping, chewing, drooling, free-running, not-especially-bright, tongue-hanging mutt.

In the third and final part of this screed, I'll discuss the ninnies and the nannies as well as the stuff that got me thinking along these lines in the first place: dog poop. Which adds another dimension to the idea of waiting with bated breath, eh?

Sis! Boom! Bah!

2009-03-19T09:03:00.005-04:00

My company's pro race team headed to Homestead, Florida, last weekend for a Grand-Am race. That's our Mazda MX-5, surrounded by, um, enthusiastic fans [Whose fathers are probably younger than you - ed].

It's a thin line between clever and stupid*

2009-03-19T06:17:00.006-04:00

Is U2 good anymore? I don't know and I don't care. Reviews of the band's new album, "No Line on the Horizon," are mixed, and I know many folks are good and sick of frontman Bono's political posing.

Ah yes, posing - the subject at hand. Specifically, band pictures. Remember how cool you thought they were when you were in high school? Remember how you studied them (especially when your concentration was, er, enhanced by various substances)? Remember how you focused on each band member individually, seeking clues and hidden messages in his expression and body language?

What brought all this to mind was the photo of U2 above. It occurred to me that these guys are roughly my age - within hailing distance of 50 - and this must be the eight zillionth stupid-ass band photo they've posed for. If they are solid dudes, as I hope and suspect they are, they must dread these shoots, with the stern gazes and the one-guy-squatting routine. After the shutter clicks, does Bono gripe that his knees are killing him, ask for a hand up, and tell the Edge that next time it's his damn turn to squat? (Also, does the Edge stifle an impulse to say "Call me Dave, for crissake - I've started receiving mailings from the AARP!")

Question: What's your favorite cliched band-photo pose? Is it the one where they all hold their instruments, and the poor drummer stands there with a ridiculous pair of sticks? The one where one member refuses to look at the camera? The one where the lead guitarist aims his ax at the camera like a machine gun (aka The Eddie Van Halen)?

* Trivia: What classic movie is this line from?

Family dogs then and now, Part 1

2009-03-17T10:31:00.016-04:00

First in a 3-part series

My family inches ever closer to buying a dog, and this is a fine thing. You know how there are cat people and dog people, and never the twain shall meet? I'm an exception: while deep down I'm a cat person (we've owned four, including Herschel the Best Pet Ever and the two malcontents staring at me right now), I truly love dogs as well.

But I'm not as thrilled by my canine prospects as I ought to be. I don't merely want a dog; I want to obtain and own a dog the right way. And today, that's virtually impossible.

What is this right way? Simple: the way my family did it in the 1960s and 1970s.

And just as Suburban Dad can no longer toss a half-dozen kids in the Ford Country Squire and let them slide around, seatbelt-free, for a run down to the ice-cream stand (a fast run at that - Suburban Dad is emboldened by three beers in his belly and one tucked between his pre-cupholder legs), a family can no longer get a good old-fashioned dog and treat it the way good old-fashioned dogs ought to be treated.

Let's start with obtaining a dog. There are two methods I approve of:

A neighbor's bitch has yet another litter of puppies. Your kids visit them in the neighbor's basement, then wear you down with can we can we can we pleas. You chat with the neighbor, and you both know what's going to happen to the pups he fails to get rid of, so ... aw, hell.
The kids wear you down, but there's no convenient litter of pups in the neighborhood. So one warm spring evening, with mom making the kids promise they'll walk and feed and whiz the dog (right), the family piles into that Country Squire for a trip to the local pound. There the kids sit on the floor, get swarmed by adorable puppies, and fight over which one to take home. An agreement is reached (usually when the eldest sibling shuts up the youngest through a liberal application of noogies and/or titty twisters).

Note that in both scenarios the breed, size, and disposition of the puppy are utterly irrelevant. That's because every single pup under consideration is a mutt. Who knows how it'll turn out? It may be a barker, a chewer, a runner, a drooler, a shedder. You picks your dog and you takes your chances.

Clearly, dogs are no longer selected this way - at least not in my reasonably upscale suburb. Today, the process begins with (what else?) web research. You want a dog that will weigh no more than X pounds full grown. And you want it docile. You don't want a barker, God knows, and a shedder is unthinkable. The kid next door is allergic to everything and her father's a personal injury lawyer, so you'd best get a dog that's hypoallergenic. You'd prefer a light brown dog, truth be told, but not a light brown that would fight with the sisal mat in the family room.

The result of millions of households performing this calculus is ... the Labradoodle. I could rest my case right there.

Which brings us to breeds and back to the 1970s, when the assumption was that every dog was a mutt. In fact, non-mutts (except German Shepherds and Golden Retrievers, which rightly got a pass due to their general doggy goodness) made us all suspicious - why, precisely, would anybody pay $250 for a freakish Giant Poodle when he could have had a floppy-eared mutt for a $10 ASPCA donation? Was a mutt not good enough for him? Did he think he was better than us? Well la-di-freakin'-da.

It's all been inverted, of course. In the past couple of years, at least a dozen families in my neighborhood got dogs. Only one that I can think of had the spirit and heart to adopt an old-fashioned mutt from the pound (it's liberating to call the Animal Shelter the pound, just as it is to call the Transfer Station the dump).

Once a breed is decided on, the Calling of the Breeders commences. From the stories I've heard, selecting a breeder is a lot like selecting a contractor: everybody tells you to get references and ask a hundred incisive questions, but the truth is you're going to go with the first one who calls you back. In the case of a good friend, that call came from ... Indiana. That's right, he paid $1800 to a woman in Indiana for a Standard Schnauzer. The woman, who happily made the 1880-mile round trip, was a delight, as is the dog. But still.

Not for me. I want a mutt, I want it from the pound, and I want it free or damn near. And once I get that damn-near-free mutt home ...

Well, that'll be tomorrow's post - what dog ownership is like now, what it was like then, and why the old way was better.

Victory is mine

2009-03-16T11:56:00.002-04:00

Hah!

(This is an update to this post.)

I wonder if Elmore Leonard started out this way

2009-03-09T15:27:00.003-04:00

For Christmas, my wife and I each presented the other the most diabolical jigsaw puzzle we could find - fully expecting to work on them together. But when she opened the 1500-piece puppies puzzle I purchased for her, I took one look and bailed out. She clicked home every last piece on her own, cursing me the entire time.

Turnabout is fair play. Above you see an in-progress shot of the panoramic cabin-in-woods puzzle she bought for me. The good news is I've got only about 250 pieces left. The bad news is they all look exactly the same.

This is the best excuse I've got for the fact that my latest manuscript may be delayed a few weeks.

Decline and fall

2009-03-07T07:41:00.003-05:00

A jackass named John Tassoni Jr., who is a Democratic state senator in Rhode Island, has introduced a bill that would create a youth sports oversight council that would, according to this CNN story, "act as mediator in disputes between parents of youth athletes and sports officials."

No word yet on whether Tassoni will propose a similar agency to mediate whose turn it is to take down the trash.

Assuming the good people of the Ocean State laugh off Tassoni's bid, he will have done us all a service by demonstrating that P.J. O'Rourke's perfect description extends to the state level. "The founding fathers, in their wisdom," O'Rourke wrote, "devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm."

In like a lion

2009-03-01T06:51:00.002-05:00

Ouch. February was truly a lame month for el blog. March will be much better. Random notes, some of which I'll elaborate on soon in meatier posts:

I came, I saw, I Kindled! Took delivery of my Kindle 2 the other night. I won't issue a verdict until I've used it more, but my initial impression is very favorable. Amazon paid Apple-like attention to the little things - packaging, interface, user manual. My rapidly aging eyes are weeping with gratitude over the ability to increase the font size. And here's a benefit I haven't read about yet: if you like to read in bed, but your spouse prefers to sleep (how odd), your ship has finally come in.
February was a lousy month for this blog in part because it was a stout month for my work in progress, the third Conway Sax mystery. I knocked off more than 14,000 words and have moved solidly into the final third of the book - I'm on page 240 of the manuscript. At this rate, I'll finish the first draft right around the end of March. It's always hard to tell when you're in the thick of it, but I'm pretty sure this is the best Conway yet.
And then there's dog poop, or the dearth of it. I was reminiscing with a buddy the other day. We agreed that when we were kids in the 1960s/1970s, stepping in (and even rolling in, during sandlot football games) doggy doo-doo was a simple fact of life - you did it, you smelled it, you said ew, you scraped your sneaker with a popsicle stick, you got on with life. Today? Not so much. In an unscientific survey, we were unable to find a kid who's stepped in crap more than twice. Most have stepped in it not at all, and those who have remember the episode as if it were the Hindenburg disaster. I believe this says something unfortunate about our culture and times, and you can soon expect me to devote my full intellect and gravitas (ahem) to an exploration of the phenomenon.

Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3*

2009-02-07T08:55:00.005-05:00

Economy in the terlet? Ice dams on the roof? Sure, but how can you not be an optimist when you look at the pic above? (Photo credit goes to a gent identified only as Les, who sent the image to my town's hyper-local news site.)

The sunrise shot was snapped Feb. 6 from Route 85 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and the snow- and ice-covered body of water that appears to be a lake is actually a reservoir.

I drive this road several times a week, and while I try to be appreciative, I suppose it's natural to take for granted such easily available splendor. I'm grateful for a photo reminding me how much I have to give thanks for.

I've got one more connection with this photo: the spot is precisely where the final scene of one of my novels takes place. In the very near future, that novel will be in the hands of some acquiring editors (lovely, handsome, powerful, brilliant folks one and all, by the by). I choose to see this picture as a good omen.

* Do you know what UK band recorded that song in 1979?

Cavalcade of excuses

2009-01-30T07:37:00.003-05:00

No blog posts for two weeks? Surely this demands a bullet list of half-assed excuses. Fortunately, half-assed excuses are a specialty. As are bullet lists, come to think of it.

Twitter scratches the itch. A few months ago I joined Facebook, just like all the other day-late-dollar-short middle-aged doofuses. And like many of my fellow doofuses (doofi?), I got sick of Facebook after the third [Name of old highschool friend] is eating Cheetos newsflash. But then somebody shunted me over to Twitter, and somehow it's more fun, with its tighter circle of followers/followees and its 140-character posting limit. Over the past two weeks, thoughts that could have been blog posts have turned into Tweets.
Winter blues. I don't particularly like January and February (especially once the Vikings and Patriots are out of the playoffs), and Mother Nature is rubbing it in with an old-fashioned ass-kicker of a winter. Bah.
Business beckons. My company, Flatout Motorsports, is in the midst of an exciting growth spurt - and how many enterprises can make that claim these days? Having nailed down some capital investment, we're buying cool equipment (such as a dynamometer to measure engine output) and making plans that will make us a true powerhouse in our part of the racing world.
WIPsawed. The past few months have been interesting for my work in progress - the third Conway Sax novel, whose working title is Purgatory Chasm (here's where the title comes from). October was my best writing month ever; I knocked off 17,000 words and was pleased with the story's narrative drive. But then I took a break to rewrite the second novel in an effort to address some of the feedback my fabulous agent had heard from editors about the first novel (got that?). The rewrite was a grand success - it made the book more accessible without destroying the voice - so once I was done with the second-novel rewrite, I rewrote the first half of Purgatory Chasm in the same style. What all this means is that I went two full months without writing any new words for the WIP - and it ain't easy getting back in the swing. Over the past two weeks I've managed 6,000 words, but I haven't entirely recaptured that narrative drive, the feeling that this thing is going exactly where I want it to go.

Solution? Hell, that's easy: keep writing words. Sooner or later, a few of them are bound to be good.

Movie review: Gran Torino

2009-01-14T15:21:00.003-05:00

2.5 stars (out of 4)

If it came from out of nowhere, this would be a 3-star movie. I'm docking it half a star for not meeting expectations.

Quickie recap: Clint Eastwood is Walt Kowalski, a mean old man whose wife just passed away. He lives in Detroit, worked at a Ford plant his entire adult life, appears to be haunted by atrocities he committed during the Korean War, and hates everybody - especially the Lors, a Vietnamese family who live next door. Especially when that family's teen son, Thao Vang Lor (played by Bee Vang), makes a half-baked effort to steal Kowalski's beloved 1972 Ford Gran Torino*. The attempted theft is a gang initiation; Thao doesn't want to join, but in this neighborhood, he doesn't have much choice ...

INPO's tagline: Archie Bunker sees the light.

Why it's just okay: Start with Eastwood's performance. He's been getting raves for his Kowalski, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. He growls, he rasps, he drinks eight Pabst Blue Ribbons on his porch every afternoon. Big deal.

The screenplay (by Nick Schenk) has its moments, but too often it feels writerly, as opposed to real. During allegedly crackling dialog, you half expect a stage hand to lean into the shot with a sign reading This is a metaphor. And there are more than a few lazy clunkers. To wit: "What are you gonna do with your life, kid?" In a different scene: "You're a good man, Walt."

For my money, the whole production has a not-as-clever-as-it-thinks-it-is feel to it. The final scene and shot, in particular, could have been written and blocked by a group of AP English kids who'd just read The Grapes of Wrath.

* Car guy bonus: The Gran Torino itself is a strange choice as an iconic car. In the movie, Kowalski's ride is coveted by all who lay eyes upon it, as if it's the absolute zenith of the musclecar era. In fact, it's closer to the nadir. By 1972 smog regulations, gas prices, and insurance rates had well and truly murdered musclecars; the '72 Gran Torino, while handsome, was a pudgy, vinyl-roofed pig of a car that didn't do much of anything well.

The mouse says buy

2009-01-13T13:27:00.003-05:00

When it comes to predicting consumer behavior, do you know of any person or entity with a better track record than Disney?

Neither do I.

With that in mind, check out this blog post concerning the mouse-eared empire's apparent thoughts on the current recession - specifically, on the duration thereof.

Never let it be said that In No Particular Order fails to keep a giant ear to the ground.

Donald Westlake's death

2009-01-03T09:43:00.006-05:00

He was a fine writer. I've said before that the Parker novels he wrote under the name Richard Stark are among my touchstones. It would be fruitless to add more; rather, you can check out Sarah Weinman for an unmatchable reaction roundup.

Here's the thing, though: we treasure these writers too late. Once they hit age 70 (Westlake died at 75), if they're still producing, we condescendingly treat them as national treasures: a pat on the head, a newspaper feature story about Writer X, "still going strong at ..." The work itself is deemed immune from judgment - as with the talking dog, the quality of the output is an afterthought.

I've been saying for 20 years that Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series would stand as a towering achievement of Twentieth Century American art, period. Someday, the world will see that (he said, striking a Napoleonic pose). But Evan Hunter/Ed McBain should have been accorded this respect before he died in 2005 at age 78.

With this said, let's do some Journalism 101 and go to the Forward Spin. Elmore Leonard is 83 years old (and still going strong - ask the feature writer in your local paper's Arts section!). For selfish reasons, I hope he lives to be 100 and continues to write a book a year. Whether he does or not, though, it's too bad Leonard has long since acheived Living Legend status. Why? Because he continues to innovate, and indeed his writing is growing bolder, more idiosyncratic, fresher.

In the last several Leonard books I read (the most recent being The Hot Kid*), I was struck by some of the narrative, scene-setting, and temporal techniques. It seemed Leonard had both amplified some of his established tricks and added new ones (notably in time shifts - I may be wrong, but I think the octogenarian picked up some ideas from new-wave crime movies. How cool is that?)

I know I need to illustrate all this with examples. I promise to reread The Hot Kid, read Up in Honey's Room, and flesh out this post.

Here's the big point, though: once they become stars, too many novelists appear to celebrate their power by blowing off much-needed edits and fluffing up their page counts. I submit that Leonard has instead used his power to develop some powerful techniques that would probably be detuned if a younger, less battle-tested writer tried them.

* Since I'm not here to pat Leonard on the head, I'll say I didn't particularly like this book.

Books, lists, mortality

2008-12-28T09:06:00.005-05:00

Years ago, when I left my cushy feature-writing job for the wilds of freelancing, one of the many benefits was the ability to see a movie by myself at 12:30 on a weekday afternoon (without lying to my boss, that is), a practice I loved, love, and will always love.

After a year or so, in an effort to quantify and thus better appreciate this bennie, I began keeping a list of the movies I saw in theaters. No reviews, no ratings, just a simple list of titles and dates. Sure, my reasoning went, I had to hustle up every scrap of work I could find; pay full freight for my family's health insurance; and face a future without the prospect of promotions or raises. But by God I could drive over to the Ultraplex and see Curse of the Jade Scorpion on Free Popcorn Tuesday! (I saw that one Sept. 3, 2001, and have no memory of it whatsoever, which is true of three-quarters of the movies I've seen.)

I enjoyed my movie list so much that beginning in 2002, I began similarly tracking the books I read. As with the flicks, there are no reviews or summaries; I simply list the title, author, and date I finished.

So I can reliably note that over the past seven years I've read 177 books, 29.25 per year. (That number is bumped artificially by 2003, the glorious year I discovered Richard Stark's Parker series. For three weeks or so I read a Parker a day, giving me a tally of 42 books for the year. But hey, an average is an average.)

Since I began writing novels in 2006, my book tallies have dropped for a simple reason: I don't like reading fiction while I'm writing it. So during the 6- to 8-month first-draft process, I work through histories and biographies that take me forever (among my myriad deficiencies is the fact that I'm a slow reader). In the past three years I've read 65 books. Because I hope to keep writing novels forever, let's agree on 23 books per year as my reading diet.

Now things get depressing.

At 23 books a year, if I live to be 90 (and can read right up to that final day when my loving family gathers at my bed and begs for permission to pull the damn plug already), I have only 989 books left to read in my lifetime.

This is terrifying. In 2005, there were 172,000 books published in the U.S. alone, and well over 400,000 in the larger English-speaking countries. Rough math says there'll be well over 16 million English-language books published between now and my ninetieth birthday.

And I get to read a thousand of them, if I'm lucky.

I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on mortality, but I find this difficult to face. Reading has always seemed infinite, limitless. No more: all of a sudden it's a race against the clock.

This will change my reading habits. Remember the "Seinfeld" episode in which Elaine Benes, facing a dwindling supply of contraceptive sponges, begins to judge the spongeworthiness of prospective lovers? I may follow suit, weighing a title's merits to determine whether it belongs on my thousand-book countdown.

Sigh. Well, back to David McCullough's John Adams, which I just started. The idea was that the bio will carry me through the first draft of my work in progress, but jeez, I could read six or eight thrillers in the same amount of time ...

Now that's a great family

2008-12-25T10:19:00.004-05:00

My wife and kids got me a bunch of neat Christmas gifts, more than I deserve. The pic above shows the king hell present for an old Clash fiend like me. Wow. This is not your father's coffee table book.

My fave Christmas flick is ...

2008-12-24T08:28:00.002-05:00

... well, you'll have to click on over to Dark Party Review to find out. The good folks over there asked a bunch of us for our top picks.

Brilliant - if true, and I have my doubts

2008-12-22T07:15:00.003-05:00

This article, from the Montgomery County, Md., Sentinel, is being linked like crazy this morning because it's so fun.

Quick summary: Montgomery County, like many municipalities, has set in place a disgraceful revenue-generation ... er, traffic-enforcement program in which robot cameras snap photos of speeding cars' license plates. Ingenious teens are said to be creating copies of their teachers' plates, taping them to their own cars, and then ripping past the cameras. Three days later, the dumbfounded teachers get tickets in the mail.

Very cool. Too cool. It smells like an urban legend. All the ingredients are there, right down to the earnest news story that finds not a single actual victim of the prank (but I'll bet your cousin's best friend's sister had it happen to her, right?).

Prediction: Montgomery County will be bowled over by the national interest in this story, will do a quick investigation, and will debunk it. Call me Snopes!

The best before the best

2008-12-21T07:51:00.004-05:00

Been too long since I posted - was busy as heck with a big rewrite, then a proof of the rewrite that turned into more than just a proof, as they always do.

But the manuscript is done and back to my agent, Janet Reid. It's her problem now. So I'm free to catch up on blogging.

First, I note with pride and shame that I've seen 70 movies in theaters this year. (Why pride? Because that's a new record for me. Why shame? Because it's clear that I waste too much of my life in movie theaters, eating bad popcorn and drinking $5.25 pink lemonades.)

Despite my track record, there are a bunch more flicks I feel pressured to see in the year's final 11 days. To wit: Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Revolutionary Road, Milk. Blame the Oscars for this foolish annual backloading.

As I gird my loins for the final moviegoing sprint of the year, I thought I'd hit you with my own Top Ten to this point. The following list is in chronological, not qualitative, order, and reflects the dates on which I saw the movies, not their release dates:

Juno
There Will Be Blood
Run Fat Boy Run
Ironman
Redbelt
The Dark Knight
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Sex Drive
Role Models
Rocknrolla

Pretty thin gruel, eh? I thought about including Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian out of sentimentality (I loved the books as a kid - they're the only ones I saved to pass on to my own children), but it's hard to love any movie that's all special effects. For similar reasons, I wasn't as big a fan of Ironman and The Dark Knight as others were.

Redbelt I had to include because it's David Mamet, the Last Auteur. Sex Drive, as I noted in a review at the time, stunned me by being a teen-sex-roadtrip flick but possessing, nevertheless, plenty of heart.

My own reaction this list is: Jeez, I saw 70 frigging movies and this is the best Top Ten I can come up with? The Oscar hopefuls mentioned above had better be good.

Separated at birth?

2008-12-11T15:46:00.002-05:00

Disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D - the trough) and Lego Man. (H/T: Chicagoist)

My town

2008-12-09T19:30:00.001-05:00

Took this pic at my town's dump, which they don't call a dump anymore, but rather a transfer station. I like living in a place where somebody went to the trouble of making a flag-disposal bin.

When car guys watch movies

2008-12-05T04:58:00.005-05:00

Great post by Chris Hafner on distracting automotive product placement, most notably in the new Bond flick.

I'm a car guy and a watch guy, so I've been amused by the recent prominence of Craig's Omega Planet Ocean wristwatch. Next time you walk through a theater lobby, take a look at the big cardboard cutout of the actor - I guarantee you'll see the watch. Wardrobe must have shortened his left sleeve an inch ...

The sausage factory

2008-12-03T19:40:00.003-05:00

The photos above show what my company does to hapless Miatas that happen to get left in our parking lot. First we strip them down to an utterly bare chassis, called the tub. Then we fabricate and weld in a roll cage.

Statistically, driving a race car on a track is far safer than driving your minivan down the street, and the cage you see above is one of the primary reasons. We're mighty proud of the cages we put in racing Miatas - we think they're the best in the nation.

Next up: we'll prep and paint the interior, cage and engine bay battleship gray*, then stick a suspension underneath this '99 and start bolting it back together.

* Do you know why that's the standard color for race car interiors and engine bays?

3-word movie review: Four Christmases

2008-12-02T16:55:00.000-05:00

1 star (out of 4)

Well, it's short.

Dave Zeltserman on Jim Thompson

2008-12-02T07:45:00.006-05:00

So I got an email from an old pal of mine who's using the handle GFS3 (very cool, that - I asked for such a handle once, but everybody started calling me DPSHT1, so I quietly let the matter drop). This guy and I became friends when I was in tech journalism and he was a PR guy.*

GFS3 is running a cool blog these days, Dark Party Review. Kinda literate, kinda noir, with some great social commentary and culture-vulture stuff thrown in. Highly recommended, and now on my blogroll.

GFS3 knew he could hook me with a Dave-Zeltserman-on-Jim-Thompson essay. If you haven't heard of Zeltserman yet, you will soon enough. He's written a bunch of good crime books, and his latest - Small Crimes - looks like a breakout, having earned raves everywhere. Dave's a fellow Massachusetts guy, and I've chatted with him once or twice.

Zeltserman's argument is that Thompson, a crime writer from the golden age of pulp, would have a hard time getting published today - that New York editors would be too timid to publish him.

I read (albeit long ago) virtually everything Thompson ever wrote, and my own take is that he's overrated. For every The Getaway or Pop. 1280, he wrote two mutts, as far as I'm concerned. Even some of his best books are sloppy and inconsistent. That was the nature of pulp: a penny a word, no rewrites, grind it out. Somebody in the movie biz (sorry, I forget who - it may have been Stephen Frears, who directed the outstanding film adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters) said he was happy to undertake the project to "give Thompson the second draft he never got," and that pretty much sums up the way I feel about him.

* Yes, I was friendly with many public relations folks when I was a journalist. Journos who affect disdain for PR types are the worst, dumbest, most self-important hacks you'll ever run into.

Knock me over with a feather

2008-11-28T04:33:00.003-05:00

Rosie O'Donnell put on an old-fashioned variety show last night. If you weren't aware of the fact, you've got company: 295,000,000 Americans somehow missed the broadcast.

How'd Rosie do? Depends on whom you ask. Some say she bombed, while others contend she bombed. One glass-half-full critic boldly contends that she bombed but had a couple of decent skits. The consensus, however, seems to be that she flat-out bombed.

Thankful 200 times a day

2008-11-27T06:19:00.003-05:00

This PSAS must be a tough nut when it comes to fundraising; do we want to eradicate it - or spread it around?

20 for 20

2008-11-26T05:51:00.002-05:00

It's not wise to mess with the United States Marine Corps. (To decipher my headline, read all the way through the story.)

They say it's not a joke

2008-11-23T06:21:00.005-05:00

I saw the photo above here. My first reaction was to wonder if it was a Photoshopped joke, perhaps a nice hoax from the Onion. Apparently it's not. It is, rather, an early photo of Porsche's forthcoming Panamera.

It may be the ugliest car I've ever seen. Looks like a manatee that dressed up as a shark for Halloween.

It is also precisely what high-performance cars shouldn't be: long (16.3 feet) and heavy (about 4000 pounds). Here's a point of reference: my Honda Ridgeline, a four-door pickup truck, is 17 feet long and weighs 4500 pounds.

Even the name is ridiculous. It's meant to evoke the Carrera Panamericana, a storied open-road race run in Mexico back when men were men and their helmets were leather. But somehow "Panamera" sucks all the Latin heat from the phrase - death by focus group.

And given the size of the car, it's not as if the name had to be shrunk to fit. Hell, they could have named it Panamericanananana.

A Message from the In No Particular Order Editorial Board*

2008-11-22T08:33:00.007-05:00

We've differed with the New York Times Editorial Board in the past. But we firmly believe in giving credit where it's due, and so we congratulate that thriving paper's Board on winning what we believe must have been a contest seeking the lamest, most clueless, most BosWash-corridor-inbred post ever created.

You can view the entry here.

We have yet to find the name of this contest, its rules, or official confirmation that the Times' Board emerged victorious. But we are confident the contest encouraged editorial writers to come up with an effete, out-of-touch post that confirmed readers' cruelest suspicions about the rapidly dying elite media. We are even more confident that the Times' effort bested all comers.

We tip our caps to the Times. Now we must repair to our fainting couch, where we will struggle with the grim thought that the meat we have been eating all our lives was killed by someone.

* Because we are a Board, we use the Royal We and write as if we had a Royal Stick lodged in our Royal Netherparts.

Baked!

2008-11-17T06:53:00.004-05:00

This past weekend I hit my third consecutive Crimebake - the mystery conference put on by the Mystery Writers of America's New England Chapter, of which I am a proud member. The organizers did a terrific job, as usual. A few highlights:

Was pleasantly surprised at how many attendees and panelists I knew. By nature I'm not a joiner, but I've made plenty of friends in the mystery community. Eventually they'll get wise to me and that will be that, but between MWANE meetings and my writers' group (which includes the delightful Sibylle Barrasso, who recently published Dark Waters), I found familiar faces all over. Couldn't help but contrast that with my first Crimebake in 2006, at which I knew not a soul.
Harlan Coben was the guest of honor. I've never read his stuff, but I will now. Impressive guy: funny, self-effacing, insightful. He was at ease discussing big-picture storytelling, technique, the industry - you name it.
Got to meet with my agent, Janet Reid. She caught me up on the status of my first Conway Sax novel, which she's submitting now. Even better, she had an edit on the second novel. Funny thing: Janet thought her edits were blunt, even harsh, and seemed to expect me to cry as we went through the manuscript. Truth is, hers struck me as an easy edit - thorough and thoughtful, mind you, but nothing that'll require me to tear the thing apart (Janet frequently claims she's not an editor, but she is - all agents are - and a damn good one). I think two factors came into play. First, I was a journalist for 20 years. You want harsh edits? Boy oh boy, I've been on both ends. Second, a rewrite is nothing, repeat nothing, compared to staring at your laptop and conjuring the original story from thin air.

Whew, those were some long bullets. Bottom line: back from the 'Bake, ready to set the third novel aside for a few weeks and hit Rewritesville on the second.

Modicum of Puzzlement

2008-11-12T07:10:00.005-05:00

Has there ever been a worse title for a hit movie than Quantum of Solace?

The second Bond flick of the Daniel Craig Era doesn't open in the U.S. until Friday, but there's no doubt it'll be a hit - the movie broke records all over the world last weekend, earning $25.3M in the UK alone (trouncing a record held by Harry Potter and the Flatus of Sequelor).

I liked 2006's Casino Royale a lot, simply because the keepers of the Bond franchise were finally embarrassed into making a real movie. You know, with a plot and stuff. I also like Craig. He looks like he's been busted up some - a fresh take on the Bond image. I look forward to Quantum.

But the title stinks. Titles demand concrete words (says the author of Shotgun Lullaby). You can get away with one abstract word, but only if it plays off other, more concrete words in an amusing or tension-building way.

What's more, few are familiar with the word "quantum" as a noun. (When's the last time you said your chili needed a quantum of tabasco?) Most of us know "quantum" solely as an adjective with "physics" right behind it.

(BTW: Yes, I realize the title is taken from a story written by Ian Fleming. So what? It's not as if the franchise slavishly follows Fleming's wishes; if it did, Craig's Bond would smoke 80 Dunhills a day, limiting his full-sprint pursuit capability to half a city block.)

I imagine I'll see Quantum of Solace once the weekend rush clears out - perhaps on Free Popcorn Tuesday. Hope the movie's better than the title.

Movie Review: High School Musical 3: Senior Year

2008-11-09T15:12:00.003-05:00

4 stars (out of 4)

So you think you know pressure. Ever review a movie under the baleful glare of your preteen daughter? I was told as the credits rolled that this would be a four-star review. I wonder if this ever happened to Pauline Kael.

Baleful glare or no, there are plenty of nice things about High School Musical 3: Senior Year. To wit:

The move to the big screen was handled with aplomb (the first two HSM flicks were made for TV), with stars, sets, camerawork and pacing that feel at home in the Ultraplex.
Several of the melodies are quite pretty. Syrupy, of course (baleful glare), but pretty.
Troy Bolton's eyes are dreamy.
Compared with the other HSMs (yeah, we're big fans of the entire trilogy around here), there's more of a sense that something's truly at stake. The movie revolves, after all, around senior year in high school - and actually captures well the bittersweet feeling of that life stage.
Troy Bolton takes his shirt off!
Having recently seen Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Role Models (wow, I haven't reviewed either yet - falling behind!), I was good and ready for a sweet, G-rated movie.
Speaking of sweet: from the corner of my eye, I watched my daughter's reaction when Troy and Gabriella finally kissed. After that, I would've given it a dozen stars if she asked me to.

Michael Malone is on fire! (Notes on entrepreneurship)

2008-11-01T09:20:00.004-04:00

You know that blend of admiration, envy and guilt-tinged hatred you feel for somebody in your field who's more successful than you - but has earned that success, and seems like a decent sort to boot? (It's hard as hell to hate such folks, hence the guilt.) That's how I used to feel about Michael Malone. While I was slamming out 1200-word articles on web servers for trade rags, he was one of the early crossover technology writers, doing good work for the New York Times, WSJ, and many others, all while publishing solid books.

In his blog, Malone has really hit the jackpot recently. About a week ago he published this definitive post on the utter shame of the mainstream media in this election cycle. The post lit up the blogosphere, even earning a Drudge link. As a recovering journalist, I was grateful to Malone for saying, in such dispassionate fashion, something that needed to be said.

I'm not a journalist anymore, thank God (I've made a lot of bad decisions in my day, but man did I pick the right time to jump off that particular sinking ship). What I am, in addition to a wannabee pro novelist, is co-owner of a small business (which is growing like crazy, he added with pride). So a new Malone post on entrepreneurship, particularly the presidential candidates' attitudes toward it, caught my eye.

I'll quote Malone to give you the bottom line:

What is missing from the economic debates of this campaign — as it has been from every presidential campaign at least since the Reagan years — is a recognition of the absolutely central importance of the entrepreneur to the health of the American economy.

Entrepreneurs, and the new companies they create, are the source of almost all of the new jobs, the new wealth, technological innovation, revolutionary new products, positive balance of trade, and improvements in productivity ... Yet in the debate over how to ‘fix’ America’s current economic mess, they are the forgotten men and women.

The post has few kind words for either candidate or major party and is definitely worth a read.

At Flatout Motorsports, we're concerned as hell about the nation's economy. The services we offer are a luxury, the whipped cream on successful people's Life Sundae. And it's easy to skip the whipped cream (although we would argue that ice cream and hot-fudge sauce do not a sundae make!). It'd be nice to believe the next President will recognize our contribution to the economy. But it looks like we'll have to continue to succeed in spite of the government.

Solid month here at Amalgamated Crime Books Inc.

2008-10-31T07:19:00.004-04:00

I decided not to produce any words today: Conway Sax, my protagonist, gets a breather.

And a well earned one. At the beginning of October, Conway had just met Andy Phigg. Andy's the only son of Tander Phigg Jr., the heir to a Fitchburg, Massachusetts, paper-mill fortune who blew his inheritance (how?) and hanged himself (or did he?) in a squalid outbuilding in Rourke, New Hampshire.

Busy month for Conway:

He learned that the week before his father's death, Andy Phigg returned from four years in Vietnam with a wife and 3-year-old son in tow. Nice timing, eh? And why'd he vanish to Vietnam for such a long time? Have anything to do with his (now departed) father?
He went to New York City to talk with an 80-year-old contemporary-art dealer who knew the late Tander Phigg during Phigg's Bohemian phase, which sticks out like a sore thumb because he was otherwise a straight arrow.
During that NYC jaunt, he encountered a rude young fellow in an art gallery and felt compelled to teach the gent some manners, Conway Sax style.
He rescued Ollie Dufresne, proprietor of an automotive garage in Rourke, from a trio of hillbillies. In return for the rescue, he persuaded Ollie to explain how and why he got into the heroin-smuggling business. (Oh, he also learned Ollie did a stint in the French Foreign Legion. Which explains why he was cool as a cucumber even when Conway poured three gallons of gas over his head and lit an acetylene torch. But enough about that stuff I wrote back in September.)
He served as emcee at a memorial service held for Tander by the Barnburners, the tightknit AA group for whose members Conway does favors, up to and including breaking legs and killing.
When he emerged from the memorial service, he got a call from the local insane asylum, which informed Conway they've got a new patient who claims to be ...

There's more, but you get the gist. In October I wrote 17,263 words, which comes out to 69 pages. I'm pleased with that pace. I've been shooting for 1,000 words a day, four days a week.

This novel (working title: Paid in Full, though I'm not overjoyed with that and am toying with others. What do you think of 5 Good Years? How about Died Sober?) looks to be longer than the previous two; the twist in the final bullet point above marks the one-third mark, and I'm 32,000 words (127 manuscript pages) in. I truly doubt the final manuscript will be 96,000 words; I'm shooting for something closer to 75,000. We'll see.

Movie review: Sex Drive

2008-10-27T09:41:00.004-04:00

3 stars (out of 4)

I pondered this review for a few days - thought a fever might be clouding my judgment. Decided my judgment is no worse than usual, so here goes: Sex Drive is a fine, fine movie, one of the best I've seen in 2008.

Yes, the title makes simply buying a ticket an embarrassment. Yes, it's another horny-teen flick chock full of tasteless gags (not that there's anything wrong with those). Yes, it features a muscle car, just like every movie made since 2005. And yes, Seth Green plays an Amish dude.

Yes, all this would appear to add up to ... another horny-teen flick. Sex Drive is a damn good one.

But it's also much more than that.

Quickie recap: Josh Zuckerman is Nerdy Virgin. Clark Duke is Best Friend Who Has All the Moves with Chicks (odd but clever bit of casting, that, as Duke looks more like an Even Nerdier Best Friend character). Amanda Crew is Platonic Friend Nerdy Virgin Secretly Pines For.

Nerdy Virgin gets an Internet chat going with an (apparently) cute gal, and next thing you know the three high-schoolers are off on a Road Trip to Get Nerdy Virgin Laid. Oh, and said road trip is taken in the aforementioned muscle car, a Pontiac GTO. Oh, and said GTO belongs to Nerdy Virgin's Older Brother Who Is A Complete Tool.

Fresh as a daisy, eh? I know, I know - but believe it or not, within this ancient subgenre, director and co-writer Sean Anders creates a charming, genuinely character-driven story. Really. Without sacrificing testicle jokes, coprophilia, and an Amish girl partying till she pukes. Who said you can't have it all?

There's another thing Sex Drive has that virtually all Hollywood pictures lack these days: a sense of place. The road trip runs from Chicago to Knoxville, Tenn. I'm an old Midwesterner myself (Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio), and despite the fact that most of the movie takes place in a GTO on an Interstate, the vibe is right.

Bottom line: damn good movie that, due to its genre, won't be appreciated the way it ought to be.

Science explains why I gave up my lunch money every day

2008-10-25T09:47:00.002-04:00

It was written all over my face! (The KICK ME sign taped to my back served as confirmation, I suppose.)

Movie review: Max Payne

2008-10-20T17:38:00.006-04:00

2 stars (out of 4)

(Caution: there's a spoiler a few paragraphs down.)

First the good stuff, sans spoilers: The look of this movie is very noir-cool. New York, nighttime exteriors, light snow lazing horizontally. It's effective, especially when a rainy scene pops up - I found myself hunching my shoulders, feeling that miserable 34-degree rain.

More good stuff: the rising action and climax are satisfactory (if overlong); a good honest burst of retaliatory fury.

Now the loophole: I didn't realize going in that this movie is based on a video game; assumed it was based on a comic book (er, graphic novel). So shame on me if my expectations were too high.

Bad stuff No. 1, no spoiler: Mark Wahlberg in the title role. His acting always seems like that of a middle-school boy whose buddies are watching. He never goes all in. It's as if he fears that one of the buddies will call him a pansy for acting and Wahlberg needs an out, needs to be able to say he wasn't really trying.

Either that or he can't act his way out of a paper bag.

Bad stuff No. 2, with spoiler: Before she was savagely killed, Max Payne's sainted wife worked for ... a pharmaceutical company. Now you tell me: what is the likelihood that a pharmaceutical company in a Hollywood movie will be a generally benificent enterprise, employing thousands and seeking to improve consumers' lives, to ease their pain?

Did you say The likelihood is precisely zero? Right you are! The pharmaceutical company is ... colluding with the Defense Department to create a drug that turns soldiers into bloodthirsty savages.

And you say: Of course that's what the pharmaceutical company is doing.

Bad stuff No. 3, also with spoiler: Beau Bridges pops up in the movie playing what I call the Gene Hackman role (but you could also call it the Michael Caine role, the Donald Sutherland role, the Ned Beatty role ...). His character, BB Hensley, is a trusted elder and mentor, a friend of Max Payne's late father. Known Max all his life, dandled him on his knee, etc. Why, dear old BB is even head of security at the very pharmaceutical company that employed Max's sainted wife, and nobody, repeat nobody, regrets her horrible death more than he.

Now you tell me: what is the likelihood that BB will turn out to be the bad guy, taking advantage of Max's trust to funnel the hero toward a horrible fate?

And you say: The likelihood is precisely 100% that this will be the case.

Sigh. Don't they even try to surprise us anymore?

Things football fans know

2008-10-19T09:14:00.003-04:00

I'm not a big college-football guy, but I watched a bunch of games Saturday because I was under the weather. Once you tame your cynicism (most of the players seem to be 23 years old and to have matriculated at State U for six years - except for the best running backs and wideouts, who these days jump to the NFL after their sophomore seasons), college ball is fun to watch. I was reminded of these Three Things that True Fans Know to Be True:

When your team faces third and four, a 4.5-yard run is more satisfying than an 18-yard pass.
There is nothing cooler than a 2-point safety.
The only possible exception to 2 is a goal-line stand. However, for a goal-line stand to be cooler than a safety, it must be a true four-down stand (no field goal attempt), and fourth down must be a rushing attempt that is stuffed.

Keepers

2008-10-14T17:28:00.007-04:00

You know how a project begets projects, each of which begets a project or two of its own? We recently got new basement carpeting. As installation day approached we needed to clear all furniture from the finished portion of the basement. And that meant clearing the bookshelves.

Took a good look and a deep breath and decided Everything Must Goooooooooo ... Hauled a thousand or so books to my town's Swap Shop, from whence they have a strong chance of migrating to good homes. I'm especially pleased with the fate of my castoff mysteries: a member of my writers' group volunteered to take them to a state prison that badly wants books.

I was merciless. I'm the opposite of a pack rat, and where books are concerned I've never been a love-that-musty-smell guy. (Frankly, I believe anybody who hangs onto every book he's ever read does so at least in part to show how smart he is; my toss-happy style may thus be a reverse snobbery routine.) Oh, and as I blogged awhile back, I am getting set to buy a Kindle, so I'm feeling impatient with all this infernal hardcopy.

Whatever the case, the criterion was simple: I'm keeping books only if there's a strong chance I'll read them again.

Which brings us to those that made the cut:

Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. My favorite novel, period. I read it every five years or so.
John Irving's The Cider House Rules. A close second.
Don DeLillo's White Noise. The definitive novel about late-Twentieth-century America - and that's saying something, as the book predates the rise of the Internet.
John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels. As I've blogged before, I'm reading these in order for the third time.
Ed McBain's Eighty-Seventh Precinct novels. This was a tough call. Will I really read all fifty-something of them again someday? Decided it'll be a good project for my dotage.
Richard Stark's Parker novels.
The Cold Six Thousand, by James Ellroy, and the books informally called his L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz).
George V. Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Best mystery debut ever?
The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by Conan Doyle of course.
Maggot, by Robert Flanagan. A sentimental choice - he was my college writing prof. Good boot-camp novel, too.

On to nonfiction:

The Last Lion, William Manchester's two-volume (and, sadly, unfinished) biography of Winston Churchill.
Shelby Foote's three-volume Civil War history. I spent the better part of a year with this masterpiece (I'm a slow reader), and I already look forward to doing so again.
Michael Herr's Dispatches. My favorite Vietnam book.

That's it! Bring on the Kindle.

So you want to rent a race car

2008-10-12T20:01:00.009-04:00

Did I light off some bad karma? A couple of posts down, you'll spot me bragging about one of my company's Mazda Miatas being featured in a Bloomberg News article.

The photo above is of the same car - good old number 91, a 1.8-liter Miata that may have been our fastest rental - after a massive wreck Saturday at Watkins Glen. The driver, who was uninjured, had rented the car for the weekend. The Number Two question* non-racers ask of amateur race drivers is: "Do you have insurance for those things?" The answer is no. You break it, you buy it.

The truly unfortunate part of the story is that the car was T-boned by another Flatout Motorsports client, a terrific gent who's had more than his share of bad racing luck lately. That driver broke five ribs and punctured his spleen and lung; Team Flatout is praying for him as he heads into surgery.

Miatas are tough little cars, but number 91 is well and truly totaled. The impact bent the roll cage in a way that rendered it unrepairable, and get a look at that rocker panel below the door - the entire unit body, or tub, is badly bent. That means we'll have to buy another tub and perform what's called a "rebody," removing all the mechanical bits from this car and bolting them into its successor.

* Can you guess what the Number One question is?

Biz casualty: Craigslist before there was Craigslist

2008-10-11T07:16:00.003-04:00

Bummer: The Want Advertiser, a weekly classified-ads mag that I loved and used for decades, has gone under.

My friends and I used to call it the Dollar's Worth of Dreams as we pawed through the high-ruboff newsprint in search of coveted cars. This was before the Web's impact, of course, and in particular before Craigslist hit the scene.

One cool thing about the Want Advertiser was that it ran on the honor system. You paid nothing up front for an ad; if you sold the item, you were supposed to send the magazine its cut. If memory serves, the figure was 10% up to a maximum of $70. I always paid, but I imagine the pub took a beating from the dishonorable.

I bought and sold a few cars in the Want Advertiser (including the best car I ever owned, a 1992 Nissan Sentra SE-R that was a fantastic autocross car because it had zero options - not even air-conditioning - and thus weighed barely 2300 pounds). Wheels and tires were another big item; you could always get a killer deal on snow tires by scanning the Want Advertiser in May or June.

The pub offered a lot more than cars, though; you could find Cape Cod real estate, tools, guns, novenas, and just about everything else. The saddest sales were always the no-longer-necessary engagement rings advertised by jilted dudes.

In 2000 I wrote a column about the Want Advertiser for Boston.com. The point (to the extent I had one) was that while upstart dot-com companies (which were all the rage; this was pre-bubble-pop) simply appeared on the scene and announced they had legendary customer service, the Want Advertiser had earned its reputation the hard way, by doing everything right for two generations.

Unfortunately, the pub did at least one thing wrong: like so many businesses that traffic in information, it never successfully made the leap to the online world. I'll confess I haven't bought a Want Advertiser for five years. Why pay to strain your eyes at eight-point type and a grainy pic (if you're lucky) when you can click through free high-resolution images all day long - and click a convenient email link if you're interested?

Ah, well. RIP.

Hey, that's my car!

2008-10-09T10:37:00.004-04:00

Our car, actually. In this Bloomberg News piece about Connecticut's Lime Rock Park race track, the orange-and-blue car shown crossing the line (in a photo by Bloomberg's Jin Lee) is one of Flatout Motorsports' rental Mazda Miatas. Small wonder, as we are the official provider of Miatas to the new Club at Lime Rock.

119-word movie reviews: An American Carol

2008-10-08T17:51:00.005-04:00

1 star (out of 4)

Rats. I wanted to like this one. I tried to like this one. But awful is awful, and this is an awful movie. Moreover, conservatives who try to tap-dance around that awfulness take a real intellectual-honesty hit as far as I'm concerned.

Recap: An American Carol is David Zucker's Christmas Carol riff in which left-wing film-director idiot Michael Malone (Malone and Moore both begin with M - get it?), on the eve of a rally to eliminate the Fourth of July holiday, visits past, present and future with Kelsey Grammer's George Patton serving as tour guide.

The middle-school jokes (Airport security is like a trip to the proctologist, as you can see here because one man has his arm up another man's butt! And hey, why are all these terrorists named Mohammad?) are interrupted only by ham-handed preaching and griping that feels like the Comments section of a third-rate political blog (as opposed to a third-rate nonpolitical blog like the one you're reading).

Oddly (or perhaps not), the only scene that's not awful occurs when Malone/Moore (played by Kevin Farley, who does what he can) visits Jon Voight's George Washington at St. Paul's Chapel near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. Voight plays it straight; the result is heartfelt, haunting - and out of place given the poo-poo jokes and bullet-point conservatism that fills the rest of the movie.

119-word movie reviews: Beverly Hills Chihuahua

2008-10-07T13:50:00.004-04:00

2 stars (out of 4)

I wanted to give it one star. My daughter, with whom I saw it, pushed hard for three. And she busted me for falling asleep during the flick, so my hands are tied: we'll split the difference and give it two stars.

I will say that making-animals-look-like-they're really-talking technology is now flat-out astonishing. I don't know, or care to learn, how they do it, but when the chihuahuas (and the token German shepherd) discourse, it looks genuine in a creepy way.

Also, it could be that the 20 minutes I napped through were positively Citizen Kane-like.

Mad about "Mad Men"

2008-10-03T09:01:00.006-04:00

I like car chases and guys firing two pistols at once and fistfights that take place on the wing of an airborne plane.

So why do I like AMC's Mad Men series so much?

I believe I know the answer, but first: This'll teach me to question the estimable James Lileks, one of my favorite bloggers and my first read each weekday morning. Lileks wrote awhile back that Mad Men was superior to The Sopranos, the gold standard for TV series. At the time, I'd watched a few minutes of MM, been unimpressed (by the dearth of car chases, no doubt), and sagely pronounced: "Meh."

My take on Lileks' essay was that he, an admitted sucker for well-executed period pieces (as long as the period's right, and the early '60s is), had been seduced by MM's fantastic set dressing and costumes.

I was wrong. He was and is right. I've seen every episode of season two, and I love the show. It is better than the Sopranos. In the essay (or Bleat, to my fellow fans) linked above, Lileks nails plenty of reasons. I'll add another pair:

MM is in far better control of its arcs and subplots. Good TV dramas unfold like a novel; no given scene should try to do too much, and it's okay (better than okay, actually) for an early scene to serve as a setup for a payoff that comes later - even much later. Viewers (like readers) are willing to be patient as long as they trust that the payoff will come eventually, and that it'll be satisfying. In its later seasons, the Sopranos - perhaps because so many different writers and directors rotated in and out - abused this pact, launching arcs that croaked in the middle of nowhere. So far (I know, it's only season two), MM's setup/payoff ratio is exquisite.
Don Draper is Tony Soprano's better in virtually every way. "One is a cruel man," sayeth Lileks. "The other is a man capable of cruelty." Perfect. I'll add this: The more I learn about Don Draper, the less I like him. But I root like hell for him. I think he knows there's something missing in his life, and part of him understands he won't find it as long as he's ignoring his kids and chasing skirts. I want badly for him to find it. Maybe he will, maybe he won't. What, on the other hand, were we supposed to root for in the case of Tony Soprano? The best possible outcome was a noble death, and the writers cheated us out of even that.

My next problem: Lileks also swears by two other HBO series, Deadwood and Rome. I tried them both when they first hit the air and pronounced: "Meh." Do I owe it to myself to try them again?

119-word movie reviews: Burn After Reading

2008-09-30T15:47:00.002-04:00

1 star (out of 4)

Very very bad - and even worse because it was made by the Coen brothers, who know better.

All characters needn't (shouldn't) be likeable, but if they're not likeable they'd damn well better be interesting. The bitches, half-wits, Peter Principle dolts and pedants played by George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, and Tilda Swinton are not just jerks - they're boring jerks. (The exception that proves the rule is Richard Jenkins, who is excellent as a sad-sack health-club manager who secretly pines for McDormand's Linda Litzke.) You want them all to lose.

Quick note: Just glanced at Pitt's IMDB page, and the last project he was involved in that was truly exceptional was A River Runs Through It ... in 1992. Who says looks aren't everything?