Dot Dead Diary

Play Casting Director with Me

   In her review Lynn Farris predicted my latest thriller, A Fine and Dangerous Season, is “destined to become a movie.”

   Well, it’s not hard to get us writers spinning off into the realm of unreality – spending time in Cloud Cuckoo Land is what we do for a living. Reading Lynn’s review sent me there in a trice. Upon arrival, I started casting the movie that Lynn promised to “be first in line to see.”

   So what’s Fine and Dangerous about? It turns out that John F. Kennedy spent the fall quarter of 1940 at Stanford as a special student. (That’s true in the real world, too.) While there he meets law student Nate Michaels. In some respects Nate is JFK’s mirror image: secular Jew rather than observant Catholic; San Franciscan rather than Bostonian; son of a crusading left-wing union official rather than of a buccaneering capitalist. Opposites attract and the two become best friends until an irrevocable falling out. Twenty-two years later, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, now-President Kennedy needs Michaels’ help to avert nuclear war.

   So (drumroll)…. Here’s what I came up with in my reverie.

   Casting JFK is the key to the movie. My wife was watching TV the other night and I saw Dr. McDreamy on Grey’s Anatomy. Patrick Dempsey is charismatic, outgoing, attractive to women, and even within a year of the right age.

   

   So now who is going to be Nate Michaels? Intense. Introverted. Intellectual. How about Robert Downey, Jr.? Right age, too.

   

   Back in 1962, Jackie Kennedy was 30 years old. So we need someone dark and glamorous.  How about Anne Hathaway (in middle below)? Fine with me. But she might be a little pricey. Let’s go with someone a little more off the beaten path.  How about Olivia Wilde (bottom)?

   At Stanford in 1940, Nate has a girlfriend he has no right to have. She’s Miriam Coblentz, 19 years old and blonde. Dianna Agron plays someone around that age on Glee even though she’s 26. She's Jewish and from the Bay Area, just like Miriam. Let’s go with her.

 

  What about JFK’s right hand man, brother Bobby? He’s 37, shorter than JFK and toothier too. I haven’t seen Tobey Maguire around lately. Do you think he’s available?

   Whoever plays the cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay, head of the air force, should have the inside track for a supporting actor Oscar. It’s a plum of a part. He’s done with 30 Rock, so let’s give it to Alec Baldwin. (Do you think he's willing to color his hair?)

   Nate’s back channel to Moscow runs through Maxim Volkov, head of the KGB in Washington. There’s no dancing, but I’d still like to make an offer to Mikhail Baryshnikov.

   At the end of the book, Nate finds himself leaping across the roofs of Washington with Russian femme fatale Natalya Leontieva while two agents of Soviet military intelligence give chase. I’ve heard her Russian accent on Castle. Sounded good to me. Come on down, Stana Katic.

 

   Don’t like any of my choices? Fine. Am open to any bankable actors you might suggest.

   And if there are any producers out there with a few tens of millions to spend? Just leave your name and contact in the comment space below. My agent will reach out to you.

 
Keith

(Note: All photos of people above used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.)

Five Fine and Dangerous Novels

My experience, probably not that different from other authors, is that the following three questions come up in just about every appearance I make.

Question 1: Where do you get your ideas?

Question 2:  What are you reading?

Question 3:  What have been your strongest influences?

My answer to the first question is that I have no clue.  It’s a miracle.  My answer to the second is Canada by Richard Ford and Death’s Door by James Benn.  Partway done with both, I recommend them highly. The answer to the third question might take a bit longer to spin out.

Like so many thriller novelists, I write about ordinary people confronted by extraordinary circumstances. The acknowledged master of that genre isn’t a novelist at all.  It’s Alfred Hitchcock, of course, but we’ll save rhapsodizing about North By Northwest, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Shadow of a Doubt, and Rear Window for another time.  (Well, maybe I'll need to come back to The Thirty-Nine Steps before the end of this posting. 

In my latest thriller I’m telling the story of an ordinary man confronted by extraordinary circumstances -- what could be more extraordinary than a Palo Alto businessman given the chance to save a world hurtling toward nuclear war?  What makes A Fine and Dangerous Season different from my other books is that it’s not set in the present day, it’s a historical thriller, and I try my best to fit its action in the interstices of history.  A Fine and Dangerous Season describes something that might well have happened if only we could have had the right vantage point to watch events unfold.

So what novels by what writers influenced me in the writing of the book? Here’s a top 5 list:

1.  The Winds of War by Herman Wouk.  After writing a few chapters of A Fine and Dangerous Season, I picked up this tome to see how a master interweaves history and fiction.  Wouk puts a navy captain on the main stage of history.  FDR sends Captain Henry to weekend with Goering and negotiate with Stalin.  The Winds of War together with its sequel War and Remembrance constitute a big sprawling saga, though, while A Fine and Dangerous Season focuses on a few October days in 1962.  Still, my character Nate Michaels accepts a dangerous assignment from President Kennedy as the country hurtles toward war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Following Wouk’s lead, I did research in archives and primary sources to make sure I got the historical background as right as I could.

2. Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey.  I have Nate Michaels, the protagonist of A Fine and Dangerous Season, carry a copy of the then-bestselling Seven Days in May with him as he flies to the White House in the fall of 1962.  Seven Days unfolds over a week in May.  I try to move even faster in A Fine and Dangerous Season action with the action compressed into five days.  Heck, I even thought of calling my book “Five Days in October.”

3.  The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson.  Unlike the first two books, I did not re-read this one before writing A Fine and Dangerous Season.  Nevertheless, I vividly remember the flashbacks that took suburbanite Tom Rath back to his service in World War II.  Rath behaved irresponsibly in his personal life because he figured it didn’t matter -- he wasn’t going to survive the War anyway.  In A Fine and Dangerous Season, I used flashbacks of Nate Michael’s experience as a B-17 pilot and infused them with that sense of wartime fatalism.

4. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan.  Richard Hannay, just a regular chap who’s stumbled on a deadly diplomatic secret, is chased hither and yon by foreign agents in this 1915 novel.  Because A Fine and Dangerous Season is set in D.C., I have Nate skipping across townhouse roofs instead of the Scottish moors.  Perhaps influenced by Hitchcock’s 1935 movie version where Hannay is handcuffed to a beautiful woman who makes no appearance in the novel,  Nate is accompanied in his leaps between buildings by a beautiful Russian spy.

5. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré.  This one may be a bit of a stretch, but how could I leave it out?  I take inspiration from Le Carré’s theme that the same human emotions and motivations inspire both sides in the Cold War.  While writing my book, I remembered how Le Carré writes characters that operate and even love in a hall of mirrors where nothing is as it seems.

Writing Thrillers That Are Not Too Heavy to Lift

How many words in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged?  561,996. 

Wow. I heard Penelope Lively, one of my favorite authors, talk about book length; she noted that a disproportionate number of her favorite novels were short.  She mentioned William Golding in particular whose Lord of the Flies comes in at 59,900 words.

I take solace in Ms. Lively’s comments.  So many of my thriller-writing friends and colleagues whine that their editors are making them cut their manuscripts from, say, 140,000 words down to 120,000.  Still 120,000 words is a long book.  I think there’s a certain machismo among thriller authors that impels them to write big books, books that take some effort to heft, books that take up lots of room on the shelf.  

When I write, I have the opposite problem. My first draft typically comes in around 50,000 words and then I have to figure out how to lengthen it. One reason for the short length is that I don’t do outlines.  In my hurry to find out what happens next to my characters, I sometimes write too cryptically in draft #1.  I know what’s happening in my head but do not put enough on the page for a reader to follow.  Filling in the necessary details is a chore for subsequent drafts.

Why am I so sensitive about word count right now?  On August 20, my next book, A Fine and Dangerous Season, will be a Nook First selection.  (That means it’s available for download exclusively on Barnesandnoble.com for four weeks.) It’s 61,865 words long, about the same length as Erich Maria Remarque's classic, All Quiet on the Western Front.

I suspect a thriller that length works better as an ebook.  The machismo of carrying around a 500-page tome disappears because a Nook or Kindle is the same handy size no matter how big the book files inside it are.

If I Got To Cast Drop By Drop, The Movie....

Out of the blue, a pair of award-winning screenwriters optioned my second book, Smasher, back in 2010. Reading the actual script last fall, I could just imagine the characters up on the silver screen in the local multiplex. Alas, not going to happen--at least not anytime soon. The option expired a few weeks ago. The screenwriters told me they have picked up assignments from producers who liked their treatment, but Smasher: The Movie was not going to be “greenlighted.” My agent went on suicide watch, but I had expected nothing so wasn’t disappointed (much).

What about my next book? In her review of Drop By Drop, Lynn Farris wrote she “wouldn't be surprised to see this as an upcoming movie. Five stars out of five." So why not Drop By Drop as feature-length film even if not Smasher? Why not go along with the fantasy? After all, I live in the world of fiction. Let’s cast the film!

Here’s a précis of Drop By Drop:

Stanford professor Sam Rockman suffers the crushing loss of his wife in a bombing at San Francisco Airport. Seeking meaning in the ruins of his life, he accepts an offer to work for the Senate Intelligence Committee. What Sam wants out of his stint in D.C. is revenge for the death of his wife. What he gets is danger and betrayal. Secret documents are showing up on his doorstep. Russians are trying to poison him. Sam finds allies among a savvy Kentucky senator, a billionaire investment banker, his wife's old rabbi, and the president's national security advisor. Too often, he finds himself thrown together with his counterpart on the other side of the aisle, the whip-smart, six-footer Cecilia Plant. Mourning still for his wife, Sam steels himself against Cecilia's appeal and remains suspicious of her motives.

So we have to cast Sam and Cecilia first. We know he’s six feet tall because he’s the same height as she is. Other than that we don’t know what he looks like. Kind of nerdy maybe. After all, he is a Stanford history professor in his mid-thirties. Lots of candidates then but I’m going to with Jake Gyllenhaal. He’s six feet tall and 32 years old. Earnest in Love and Other Drugs, driven in Source Code. He should be bankable, too.

Next is Cecilia. Getting this part right is the key to the movie. Readers love her. Joe Hartlaub wrote in his review in Bookreporter.com, “With regard to the characters, Plant almost steals the book from Rockman; if Raffel would see fit to bring her back in a future work, I certainly wouldn’t object.” Here she is in her first meeting with Sam: 

“We need to get the motherfuckers who did that.” She didn’t snarl as she cursed. She spoke in soft tones, as if to minimize the attention that would come unbidden to a foul-mouthed, red-headed woman with a seventy-five inch span between the tips of her heels and the crown of her head.

She’s six-feet tall (the extra three inches are from her heels) and an ex-athlete. Wait, I got it! Adrianne Palicki. She’s within an inch of six-feet. She can definitely handle the bad language--having played bad-girl Tyra Collette in "Friday Night Lights." While in high school she played basketball and ran track. I’ve seen her on the screen as both a blonde and as a brunette; no reason to think she wouldn’t look just as great with auburn tresses. (Calling Clairol!) And even when she played a bad girl, she projected underlying intelligence.

Did I mention I myself worked for the Senate just as Sam Rockman did? One of my colleagues back in those days was Fred Thompson who (much later) showed his acting chops on TV’s "Law and Order." And he actually served as a senator from Tennessee. Not too much of a stretch then to see him playing a member of the upper house representing the neighboring state of Kentucky. (Always glad to help out a former colleague.)

Billionaire investment banker George Fairchild has made the Forbes list of richest people under 40. Here’s where we first see him in the book:

George measured no taller than five-five, an inch shorter than Rachel and weighed in at about 130, only five pounds more than her. No banker’s suit for George. He wore khakis with a crease sharp enough to slice a loaf of bread and a blue-striped button-down crisp enough to crackle like cellophane.

Let’s go with Ryan Phillippe most recently seen on TV in "Damages." A baby-faced 38 he makes the age cut.

 

My own rabbi says she likes the fact that rabbis in my novels are not figures of fun. Can comedic actor Paul Rudd play a serious clergyman? I say yes.

 

The president’s national security advisor is a tough, cigarette-smoking, New York dame. Let’s go with Dianne Wiest of "In Treatment" and Hannah and Her Sisters.

 

And finally, what about President Lucas? Here we see him on TV:

The guy looked so damned presidential. He reached the same six foot four Lincoln had. His hair was swept back in a Reaganesque pompadour. An aversion to ties part of his brand, he wore an open-neck French blue shirt and navy blazer. He conveyed to the voters that he was no empty suit, but the perfect fit of his clothing, the way his jacket hung from his shoulders, distinguished him from Joe Sixpack even more surely than gray pinstripes.

Here’s the casting coup of the 21st century. Mitt Romney was a neighbor of a friend of mine. I met him at her birthday party. Don’t know how good an actor he would be, but from the description of President Lucas above it wouldn’t be much of a stretch, would it? And it’s my hunch that he will be looking for work after the first Tuesday of November. 

 Thanks for humoring me in my reverie. (But if the agents of Mr. Gyllenhaal or Ms. Palicki see this post, please do not hesitate to get in touch.)

Keith

Keith’s Drop By Drop is available for a free download from Amazon.com through Saturday. (Click here.)

Thanks to imdb.com, igossip.com, huffington post, Wikipedia, accesshollywood.com, and mediaite.com for the photos above.

Black Friday

I cannot resist being caught up in the post-Thanksgiving shopping mania.  Here's my deal.  Purchase the ebook original Drop By Drop: A Thriller for $3.99 and I will send an e-copy of Smasher: A Silicon Valley Thriller to you for free!

Here's what Andrew Gross, New York Times best-selling author, said about Drop by Drop:  "No one puts the crosshairs on Washington, terrorism, and intrigue better than Keith Raffel."  Drop by Drop has 19 reviews on Amazon.com, all 5 stars, and not one was written by a relative!

Smasher was a national bestseller and has been optioned for film.  Publisher's Weekly wrote: "“Raffel blends computer world wheeling and dealing with the academic world's lust for glory and fame in his compelling second mystery...."

Details:  Purchase Drop by Drop from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, smashwords.com, or the ibookstore in iTunes by 11.59 PM on Sunday, November 27.  Then forward your proof-of-purchase to keith@keithraffel.com.  Please let me know whether you prefer the Kindle or ePub format and I will email an e-copy of Smasher to you. That's it!

November 22

Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States. Each year since 1963, when November 22 slithers across the calendar, I remember that day and those that followed. The shock. The widow’s blood-stained dress. The riderless horse. The son’s salute.

In office President Kennedy stood for culture, for civil rights. He was a family man and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a student of history. Now we know the truth is far more nuanced in each case. (I visited the Kennedy Library and saw his college transcript: D+ in European History.)

I do yearn for those days when we had heroes. Remember? I did have heroes growing up, but none have lasted. Even if JFK was not the hero we thought, he did perform heroic acts. I’ve read the transcripts of the Executive Committee that met during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There he deserves his reputation. The generals wanted to bomb Cuba and invade it. He did save the world from nuclear war. And I must admit his inauguration address still inspires.

So for me November 22 is more than that horrible day when our president was murdered. In retrospect my listening over the school loudspeakers as a pre-teenaged boy was the beginning of growing up, of knowing how little can be counted on in this world we live in.

Good Review, Bad Review, Does It Really Matter?

The rubescent glow that Lynn Farris's review of Drop By Drop on Examiner.com left on my cheeks has scarcely begun to fade:

"I found Drop by Drop... to be an exciting political thriller as well as a fascinating philosophical political treatise. While the political thriller part offered the reader an excellent whodunit, the philosophical discussion is what makes it a powerful book to read....

"I love the title Drop by Drop because it serves as a metaphor for so much occurring in the book and perhaps society today. Drop by drop we are giving up our civil liberties. Drop by drop we are losing our principles. Drop by drop, our government officials break the law and others ignore it....

"I thoroughly enjoyed this book and believe that readers of all political persuasions will like it as well. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this as an upcoming movie. Five stars out of five."

Now I understand that Examiner.com is not the New York Times, but I don't care. (Well, maybe a tad, but why theTimes doesn't hire Ms. Farris is beyond me.) Any author will tell you the real joy of writing is connecting with that one reader, the one who sends you the laudatory email, the one who leaves you a Facebook message that she is gifting a dozen copies for Xmas. (BTW, I am not a friend of Ms. Farris, except now on Facebook and that doesn't really count, does it?)

Of course, it works the other way, too. Well-known mystery writer and critic Hallie Ephron gave my second book,Smasher, a real put-down in her Boston Globe review:

"We follow the narrator as he caroms among the story lines.... Too bad, because with so much going on, this novel desperately needs a main character with an emotional core that can hold it all together".

I suspect a few more people read the Globe's reviews than read Examiner.com's. While this less than stellar review might have hurt just a little less than committing hari kari with a butter knife, research shows that Ms. Ephron did me a favor. A study in Marketing Science found that "For books by established authors, a negative review led to a 15% decrease in sales." Well that makes sense. But "for books by relatively unknown (new) authors, however, negative publicity has the opposite effect, increasing sales by 45%." This 45% is roughly the same, if not a little higher, than for positive reviews.

Those of us who are not quite selling as many books as James Patterson, Stephen King, or Dan Brown can take heart. A great review warms our hearts. A bad review increases sales. A win-win!

4 Unanswerable Ebook Questions

    Is there one universe or many? What is the meaning of life? What happened to Jimmy Hoffa? 

    There are some questions that just cannot be answered.

    As readers of this blog know, I am undertaking an experiment in e-publishing. My first two novels, both published in trade paper, did fine (and continue to sell). But I couldn't resist climbing aboard the ebook express and so I uploaded my latest effort, Drop By Drop: A Thriller, onto Amazon.com, BN.com, Smashwords, and Apple's iBookstore. Generally, all seems to be going well. While I miss bookstore signings, the fact I have already made more in royalties on Drop than on my last traditionally published book provides some solace.

    But in the world of e-publishing, mysteries abound. There are questions for which I have no answers. Here are four:

    1. How do people find out about an ebook original? I tried a little experimental advertising of Drop By Drop -- sales were not affected. Drop was greeted by a bunch of online reviews which definitely helped. Lately, there have been fewer. Still, sales have not gone down and are even trending upward. My experience is not unique. I have spoken to a couple of friends whose books were made available on the Kindle with little uptake. Only months later did their sales zoom. Why? They don't know. There's an invisible hand at work, I guess.

    2. Living as I do in Silicon Valley, a few miles away from 1 Infinite Loop (Apple HQ), many readers tell me they have purchased their copy of Drop from the iBookstore. I also read about authors selling scads of books on BN.com. So here's the question: Why do I sell 20 times more books on Amazon than Barnes and Noble's BN.com and 9 times more than on Apple's iBookstore?

    3. The United States has about 312 million people. The United Kingdom has about 64 million or about 20% as many. According to estimates, 750M paper-and-ink books were sold in the US in 2010 and 229M in the UK or about 30% as many. I did some Googling. According to these links, US ebook sales were $441M in 2010 and in the UK were £180M or about 60% of the US total. So why am I selling 80 times more books on Amazon.com this month than on Amazon.co.uk?

    4. My second book, Smasher, made it onto a national bestseller list and was optioned for film. Reviews in paper-and-ink newspapers and mystery and publishing magazines were great. Drop By Drop was reviewed only in online publications. Smasher sells for $2.99 and Drop for $3.99. Nevertheless, Drop is selling 14 times more copies than Smasher on Amazon.com so far this month. How come?

    Attention: there may be a Nobel Prize in store for whoever can answer the first question of this post, but all you get for answering any of the four ebook questions is my thanks and appreciation.

Under Cross-examination

I appeared on the TV show Press:Here this morning talking about ebooks and my checkered past. Scott McGrew of NBC, Mike Krey of Investor's Business Daily, and Jon Swartz of USA Today were my interlocutors. What do you think?

Adding Two (Audiobook) Covers to The Mix

The reading world is in the midst of a war over formats. We've all been following the back-and-forth between Kindle/Nook partisans and those who defiantly hold on to their paper-and-ink books. Here's which side I come down on: both.

Don't you think we authors should strive to ensure our novels can be read however our readers want to read them -- whether as words on a paper page or on an LCD screen? And what about those who might want to use their ears rather than their eyes to "read" a book? Fine with me. Let's add one more option to the mix then -- audiobooks.

My first two books have just hit the format trifecta. Dot Deadand Smasher are now available as audio downloads for iPods, MP3 players, and such on both Audible.com andAmazon.com. (You can listen to samples here and here.) Both are still available as ebooks and trade paperbacks. (Readers, pick your poison.) My third novel, Drop By Drop, is currently available only as an ebook, but if it continues to sell well (fingers crossed), I'm hoping it will be offered in print and as an audio book as well.

One side benefit to all these different formats is a flowering of covers. Dot Dead has one cover doing double duty for the ebook and trade paper and another for the audio version. Smasher -- lucky fellow -- has a different cover for all three formats. Drop By Drop is available in just the one format and hence has only one cover at present. If my arithmetic is correct, that makes a total of six covers. I'm pretty fond of all of them, but I do wonder which ones you prefer. Please let me know in your comments below or over at Inkspot!

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