Back in the "W" Column

"Big Blue in action, taking all the right winning chances."

I'm watching the New York Giants play in their first playoff game since 2008 (Don't quote me on that). I haven't gotten the chance to watch much pro football the past few years because usually I spend much of the Fall in Italy. But this year I spent most of the summer in Europe which freed up the football season. Still, work got in the way and I didn't see many games, and then when my team, The New York Football Giants began to lose consecutive games, I figured they'd never make the playoffs anyway. So why worry about watching? Hell, I don't even have a TV.

But then something strange happened. Well, not strange, but important all the same.
The Giants started to peak late in the season.
They regrouped, took a good look at their mistakes, made attempts to correct them, healed their injuries, placed the past in the past and started looking towards the future. And in doing so, they started to win.

Life is like that.
Sometimes when things look like they will never be repaired or healed, you suddenly find yourself back in the winner's circle. I played football for eight years so I guess I feel comfortable with the football metaphor, and after getting my head banged up for all those seasons, I feel like I've earned the right to use it.

But to get back to my point...
Five or more years ago when I was writing the first drafts of my suspense/thriller, SCREAM CATCHER, I had just separated from my wife. I didn't have a new publisher and was barely making a living as a freelance journalist. It was during this time I took a step back and tried to reassess my life. Where had I gone wrong after having scored a major deal with a Random House imprint for two novels (THE INNOCENT and GODCHILD) and at the same time, married the love of my life, only to lose them both?

Curiously, I couldn't point at any one thing I'd done wrong, only that they had gone wrong. So how would I repair my life and get back to my winning ways and perhaps even win my love back? I didn't have the answers. But I did know this: If I made a renewed commitment to hard work and to writing the best books I could in the shortest amount of time, my publishing losses would take care of themselves and begin turning into wins. In other words, instead of brooding and reaching for a quick fix, I started behaving like a winner. This past Spring, when I sold over 100,000 e-Books of The Innocent in 60 days and it resulted in a 7 book "very nice" deal with Thomas & Mercer, I knew that I had indeed taken the necessary steps in order to get back to my winning ways.

All professional success aside, I still had my personal life to think about. My love life. I'd enjoyed some very nice and fulfilling relationships with some very good, if not exceptional women. But for some reason, none of these relationships were working out in the long term. What was going wrong? Like I did with my professional life years earlier, only very recently did I take a step back, reviewed some game tapes as it were, and decided to start becoming a new man. A man who could not only be trusted, but who could trust himself to do the right things. No one wants to be a Facebook or Twitter flirt forever, and frankly, by the time you hit your mid forties, if you still gotta rely on FB "pokes" and "winks" for your jollies, you deserve to be alone.

In the wake of my dad's sudden death, I've started spending some time with someone who used to be very close to me. Very close. We've had some very good times amidst some seriously stressful and sad situations. We're both finding one another as single, free adults with open hearts. That we are becoming friends again and more is plainly obvious. That we are taking it slow and careful is also obvious and smart of us. We're older now. More mature. But we're still very much attracted to the same things that attracted us in the first place all those years ago. You can see it and feel it whenever our eyes connect.

I guess we have every reason not to take a chance on this. We have a history together. A history that went bad. But then, love isn't sometimes risky. It's always risky. So is the writing game. The New York Giants have only inches to go in order to nail a first down. Problem is, it's fourth down. They can take a shot and "go for it" or they can play it safe and kick it away.

They're going for it.

The big bull running back barrels his way through a very mammoth and angry Falcons defensive line.  

They've gone for it and they got the first down.

They took a shot, that now is resulting in a touchdown and the game lead.

Sometimes all that's necessary to becoming a winning player again in life and love is to not only learn from your mistakes, but to simply start living your life like a winner.

GET ZANDRI NOVELS: WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

Video Games

"Lana Del Rey is a Gamer."

My sons play video games.
Ok, that's an understatement. Not only do my sons (Jack 21 and Bear 17) play video games, they own literally thousands of them. They also own every gaming system available, both TV adaptable and hand-held, and they collect retro systems from the '00s, 90's 80's and even an Atari "Pong" system from the 1970s. The games they purchase and play often arrive to our home in strange packages wrapped in brown butcher paper, postmarked Japan or South Korea and even China. These games will be designed and presented entirely in an Asian language that somehow my sons understand.

The games they play range from G-rated to Mature to Violent with names that have become entirely familiar in and around video gaming circles: Final Fantasy, Mario, Tekken, Street Fighter, and lots more, 

The gaming doesn't stop there.

As many gamers do, my sons are also into the tangental aspects of gaming like graphic novels, video anime, feature length straight-to-video movies, and more. They also maintain a special allure for Bruce Lee, who's early Kung Foo movies curiously follow a video-game-like plot-line of "level's" of battle or fighting, despite their predating practical video game development by a decade or more.

Lately my boys have been designing their own video games starting with humble miniature games in order to educate themselves to the complications and nuances of the art. One day they hope to make their mark on the industry with big games that will be distributed throughout the world.

I grew up with video games which back then in my early teens, were mostly located in video game parlors. Back when you could find records in record stores and books in bookstores. Nowadays it's getting harder and harder to find a video game parlor since just about every household owns some kind of video game system like a Uii or a PlayStation. Certainly just about everyone has access to the Internet. But I never really got into them since I more or less knew that once I was hooked, I would forever be dedicating half my life to sitting in front of a whole bunch of computer generated pixels.

But video games still fascinate me. Especially the ones gamers refer to as "Kill Games."
These first person kill games put you the player in the position of the chaser while you hunt down a series of victims which more often than not assume the form of Zombies (that way they can't ever really be killed). But there are other kill games in which you hunt enemy soldiers or bandits or rednecks driving fast cars. I was curious about what goes into the design of these games and designers who might become so obsessed with making them so realistic and life-like they might go to extraordinary lengths to create them. Like murder for instance. So fascinated in fact, that I decided to wrap a stand-alone thriller around the idea.

The plot I had in mind was not just a simple murder. But an elaborate hunt and chase which would culminate in a murder upon which the chaser would record the victim's screams prior to perishing. The screams would then be used in the design of a Violent First Person video game that would closely resemble the actual hunt and chase that inspired it. That in mind I created a video game designer who is a master of disguise and a serial killer. A man who never stays in the same city for very long and who operates under as many different aliases as he's had facial reconstruction and voice enhancement surgeries. He is a man who will stop at nothing to observe how another human being reacts to a hunt and chase, and he's determined to translate the experience for the video game as accurately as possible.

Even though my sons were able to provide me with almost all the research material I needed for the novel (minus the murder part!) it still took me almost three full years to write the psychological/suspense/horror thriller, SCREAM CATCHER. It's now coming at you in e-Book, trade paper and in a matter of a few weeks, audio, screams and all. It's my contribution to an entertainment genre that has not only fascinated me for a long time, but become an art form unto itself and a way of life for my sons. And even, a living.

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

THE BIG THRILL: SCREAM CATCHER

THE BIG THRILL:

Scream Catcher by Vincent Zandri

This is how your life ends: Not with a whimper, but a scream!

Jude Parish is afraid. The former violent crimes cop turned bestselling true crime author has a fear-filled demon lodged inside of him. A demon so real he can only imagine a slimy reptilian beast with scaly skin, black eyes, and razor-sharp fangs having taken up residence inside the place where his once confident and fearless soul resided.

Now, in the wake of his literary success, the ever anxious Jude is hoping to lead a quiet, peaceful life in the idyllic Adirondack vacation town of Lake George, New York with his new pregnant wife, Rosie, and Jack, his young son from a previous marriage. But when Jude becomes the accidental witness to a bizarre “kill game” in which the killer, video game designer and master of disguise, Hector “the Black Dragon” Lennox, insists on recording the screams of his victims prior to shooting them dead, the ex-cop’s life is turned upside down.

When Lennox is arrested by the L.G.P.D. and Jude is asked to act as the state’s “star witness,” he has no choice but to fight his demon-fear and take on the role. But what he doesn’t realize at the time, is that the killer’s arrest is actually the first level in what is a carefully designed and scripted first-person video kill game that will involve his entire family as “players” and “victims.”

How will the kill game end?

Like all violent video games, it will end in death. But it won’t be “Game Over” until Hector Lennox catches the screams of his tortured victims.

*****

“Scream Catcher has the classic Zandri flair, short chapters, cliff hanging chapters, twists and turns, non stop action and page turning suspense. However, this had more drama, less quirky, quip dialogue and more of a psychological thriller plot. Masterful!!!!” –CMash Loves to Read Book Blog

“Readers will be held captive by prose that pounds as steadily as an elevated pulse… Vincent Zandri nails readers’ attention.—Boston Herald

*****

Vincent Zandri is an award-winning, bestselling novelist, essayist and freelance photojournalist. He holds an M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College and is a 2010 International Thriller Writer’s Awards panel judge. His novel As Catch Can (Delacorte) was touted in two pre-publication articles by Publishers Weekly and was called “Brilliant” upon its publication by The New York Post. Zandri currently divides his time between New York and Europe. He is the drummer for the Albany-based punk band to Blisterz.

To learn more about Vincent, please visit his website: WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

How To Keep Going the Next Day

Richard Moonlight doesn't always know precisely where he's going, but he somehow always gets there.


I'm often asked how is that I'm so prolific?
The answer is simpler than you might imagine. And it came to me not in college or MFA writing school, but instead by reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. It was inside a cold water flat five or six flights above a square in the Montparnasse district of Paris that the would-be Papa wrote some of his first short stories. Stories that would come to change the literary world as we knew it.

He was able to write his stories with confidence day in and day out by following one simple rule. He would write a certain amount of words everyday and then complete the session by ending in a place where he was sure to go on the next day.

While this took severe discipline it was also liberating to know that come the next morning, you wouldn't find yourself staring at a blank piece of paper knowing that the day before you shot your wadd, as it were.

So then, I'm not Ernest Hemingway. But I do write a lot of novels, and the way to do that is not only to sit your butt in the chair and write whether you feel like it or not (this is your job after all), but also to always make sure that you end in a place that will allow you to continue the next day. The best way to do this is to simply make some small notes right on the page below your last sentence. If your character is about to enter an apartment with his ex-girlfriend in order to steal a zip-drive containing secret nuclear information her new boyfriend is about to sell to the Iranians, you might make a note about what route they take in order to get to the apartment, and the steps they take in order to get there without being spotted. That should be enough to get you moving come the next morning. The rest of the chapter should reveal itself organically for you.

Thanks Papa for making my writing life just a little bit easier. I wish I could say the same for writing school.

GET ZANDRI BOOKS: WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM