Show Up for Work

There is a delicate balance between the conscious you and the unconscious you. You don't live with the unconscious so much as you develop a relationship with it, much like you would a wife or husband. A relationship built on trust. In a good marriage, you trust one another. Whereas a bad marriage is full of distrust and disharmony. I'm not the first one to figure this out. Norman Mailer did before me. So have other very productive authors like Stephen King and Hemingway, for instance. Freud figured it out while on a coke jag.

If you tell yourself you are going to be writing tomorrow morning, make sure you show up at your writing desk. Doesn't matter what might get in the way, be it hangover (again, these are Mailer's words), sickness, injury, Apocalypse, whatever. If, before bed, you promise yourself you're going to be working come morning, your unconscious will go to work on the book you are writing while you are sleeping. When you wake up and begin the process of putting words on a page, the product you produce will not have come entirely from the conscious you, but the unconscious you who has been working all night. This is why three hours of writing can whiz by in what appears to be a matter of minutes. Often we're not even aware of what we've written until we go back and read the pages.

Once more taking Mailer's cue, if you can train yourself to be true to your unconscious and show up for work day after day, then be sure to be honest with it when you need to take a day off. Tell yourself, "Tomorrow I'm not going to work. Tomorrow I'm going to have fun." Your unconscious mind will, in turn, take the night off and in the morning you won't be plagued with story ideas and plot points banging around the inside of your skull like a dozen bees that can't get out.

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Libraries Get It

The great Alexandrian Library: "Believe it or not, one day, the scroll will be replaced by something called a mass market paperback book..."




I'm week three into the re-release of five novels along with the release of two new novels: BLUE MOONLIGHT and THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GRACE. The former by a major, Thomas & Mercer of Amazon Publishing and the latter from an indie, StoneHouse Ink. While the "Blue" E-Book edition, especially Kindle, is being pushed in a major way, it's also available in paper and audio, etc. For the time being however, "Grace" is available in E-Book only. In the meantime the new editions of my five previously published novels are moving like crazy. In E-Book primarily.

You see where I'm going with this...

In the past three weeks I've moved more units of my novels than I did in an entire first year with Delacorte. No lie. Much of that has to do with the tremendous author support I am lucky enough to enjoy from Amazon Publishing (They are so good, they even push my independent books, if you can imagine that...), but it also has a lot to do with the changing nature of publishing. E-Books have been and are now becoming the most popular way by which we read. The mass market paperback is quickly disappearing. So is the hardcover while the trade paperback takes over the roll of both.

This leaves me in a bit of a conundrum. I find myself wanting to do some in-person promotion of my books, aside from the stuff I do at several writerly book conferences every year (I never sell many books at these things anyway since they are attended primarily by other writers and all we do is have fun eating and drinking together). But approaching brick and mortar bookstores with the prospect of a book signing in support of paper being published by their major competitor is probably a road I want to avoid. And besides, book signings are always a gamble anyway. In short, they suck.

But there are other avenues to explore. Schools, universities, and hell, even book signings at coffee shops and my favorite, the local corner gin mill. And then there's the holy grail of book venues: the library. I have always been a fan of libraries and the fact that no matter what happens in terms of the evolutionary/de-evolutionary business/retail aspect of writing, the library will always withstand the test of time. A place to store many volumes, both ancient and new, as well as a place to share and exchange ideas. From Socretes to Stephen King, the library has always been a refuge for the intellectual, for the hopeful, the creative, the thinker, and the dreamer.

That clearly in mind, I contacted the head rep for my local library system, the Albany Public Library and asked her about setting up an event much like the one we did for Moonlight Falls back in 2010. This one would be in Dec/Jan in conjunction with yet another new Thomas & Mercer novel, MURDER BY MOONLIGHT, a fictional take on the infamous Porco axe murder case which hit New York's Capital region some years back. She was happy to hear from me for more than one reason. I played drums in her band a while ago, and we are friends. She was delighted to set up an event for "Murder." But just as I was about to tell her how great the trade paperback version of "Murder" looked, she said, "We're really pushing E-Books these days."

I must admit, I was taken a bit back. Me, the king of E-Books.

Libraries pushing E-Books...What a concept.

That said, my library event will more than likely be about the E-Book version of my brand new book and it will take place inside the hallowed halls of an institution older than even the world's most ancient cathedral. But then, E-Books are becoming far more popular than paper and libraries recognize this. Doesn't mean they are about to give up their paper. Just means they are adapting. Can't say the same thing about bookstores. But something tells me they'll get it eventually. Hopefully before it's too late.

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All Your "Moonlights" in a Row

The DICK MOONLIGHT SERIES...in ORDER


















My publisher brought up a good point: Since all the Moonlights take place in sequence but can still be read as stand-alones, perhaps it would be a good idea to give you an idea of the order in which the Moonlights should be read thus far. That is, you want to read them in order. So here goes:



1. Moonlight Falls: In MOONLIGHT FALLS, novelist and photo journalist Vincent Zandri asks the question “If you knew your life could end at any moment, how far would you go to prove you murdered your lover? ” Albany, New York, is the setting of Zandri’s paranoid thriller (in the Hitchcock tradition) about Richard “Dick” Moonlight, former APD detective turned private investigator/massage therapist, who believes he killed Scarlet Montana, his illicit lover and wife of his ex-boss Chief of Detectives Jake Montana. The dilemma ... Moonlight doesn’t remember what happened!
1.25...COMING SOON: MOONLIGHT FALLS (UNCUT): The extended and expanded edition of the bestseller, including dozens of unpublished chapters, interviews, reviews, videos links, A Dick Moonlight's Albany Walking Tour, pictures, and more.

1.5 Moonlight Mafia: In this digital short, the too often unemployed private detective is hired by an anonymous client (“John Smith”) to bring down a Mafia wise guy who’s using a used car lot as a front for illegal gambling activity. At least, that’s what Moonlight is led to believe. According to the job description, he is to answer a want ad for a salesman position at the same used car lot and thereby secretly infiltrate the illegal operation. Sounds like a piece of cake.

Problem is, when Moonlight heads over to the used car lot to answer the ad, he decides to pay a quick visit to the bar next door and have a couple of quick “Jacks” to loosen himself up. But when he opens the big heavy door on his late father’s pride and joy 1978 “Cadi” hearse, it gets away from him and dings the passenger-side of the brand spankin’ new black Dodge Ram parked beside it. What Moonlight doesn’t realize as he pretends to ignore the Ram’s damage is that the door he just dinged belongs to his new would-be boss. And his would-be boss is not only in the Mafia, he’s no stranger to torturing and killing people for fun!

2. Moonlight Rises: Dick Moonlight is dead.

Really dead this time, now that three President Obama-masked thugs dressed all in black and communicating only with hand-held voice synthesizers pressed up against their voice boxes have beat the life right out of him inside a dark, downtown Albany alley. What are the thugs after? A box. Size, weight, description unknown. They also want him to stay away from his newest and only client: a handicapped nuclear engineer of dubious Russian heritage by the same of Peter Czech.

But then, now that they’ve killed him, Moonlight’s problems seem to be over. In fact, as he undergoes an out of body experience, his soul floating above his train-wreck of a corpse inside the Albany Medical Center I.C.U., he feels pretty damned good. Great in fact. To make death all the more sweeter, his one true love, Lola, is standing by his bedside. With her long dark hair draping her chiseled face and big round Jackie O sunglasses hiding tear-filled eyes, she appears every bit the grieving sig other. Nothing could make the dead-and-gone Moonlight prouder.

But then something happens. Something bad. A man enters into the I.C.U. Some young guy. He takes hold of Lola’s hand, and pulls her into him. Together, the two share a loving embrace over Moonlight’s dead body. Now, what seemed like a peaceful death is anything but. Moonlight wants back inside his body so he can face-off Some Young Guy and find out if his true love has in fact been cheating on him. At the same time, he wants to find out the true identity of those thugs who killed him so he can exact his revenge. No doubt about it, Moonlight needs to live if he’s going to uncover some pretty painful answers and take care of business.

Like a little kid dropping down a playground slide, Moonlight slides right back inside his bruised and broken body. Opening his eyes the white light blinds him. He feels the pain of his wounds and the pain of his breaking heart.

Life sucks, then you die.

But Moonlight rises.

3. COMING SOON... Murder by Moonlight

4. COMING SOON...Blue मूंलिघ्त