Dan Krokos

About queries.

My book is mentioned.

She has good things to say about it. This in turn makes me feel good.

Here’s the link. GREAT interview if you’re querying or thinking about querying or know someone who might be querying or you had a dream about querying.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/09/090930_queryshark_ap.shtml

So I heard my website doesn’t appear on search engines because my name only appears once on the whole site. That, my friends, is about to change.

Dan Krokos.

You see, when I had a blogspot site, it was the first thing to appear. Now I have themes, all right? I have this monochromatic theme for my site.

Dan Krokos

Is this helping or do I appear foolish. Dan Krokos. It’s worth a shot. Dan Krokos. I could always pay the extra eighty bucks to submit this site to every search engine created and some that haven’t yet been created. Dan Krokos. It even does Alta Vista, and who the hell uses Alta Vista anymore?

Dan Krokos.

Does this count as a blog post? I wish. Alas, I will have to come up with something else to blog about before the week is over. Dan Krokos. I was thinking about making a post about the things I had to change in my MS to get signed with an agent. Mistakes you might have in your own MS–easy fixes, really–that are keeping you from getting that Agent/Author agreement.

Dan Krokos.

We’ll see. It’s still hard to talk about the mechanics of writing without feeling arrogant.

That’s all for now.

Dan Krokos

I write crime fiction.

But I don’t consider myself an expert. What is a crime novel, exactly? If it focuses on crime, is it a crime novel? Does it need gangs and contract killers and thieves and guns? Does the main conflict have to revolve around crime?

I don’t know.

But I thought about it the other day, and I realized that almost every novel can be considered a crime novel depending on what criteria you use.

Conflict is the driving force in any story. It’s why we read. We have a character who wants something and we read about how he/she tries to get it. We read because there is fun opposition to keep us interested. That conflict can be anything.

Quite often, it’s crime.

An example from a non-crime book I read recently:

CRACKED UP TO BE by the magical Courtney Summers. This is an edgy YA that focuses on a crime, the rape and disappearance of a girl. There are no cops, no gangs, no guns that I can remember. There was underage drinking, some vandalism.

But the central problem revolves around a crime, and yet it’s not a crime-novel.

So maybe a book needs more than just crime.

What about the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher? PI/Wizard Harry Dresden solves supernatural crimes in each book. And yet the focus is more on the magical world, and how he uses magic to solve crimes. Sure, there’s some conventional criminals like mob boss John Marcone, but they don’t feel like crime novels. You get a taste of magic, not squalor.

So maybe that’s it. Maybe we need to examine the darker side of human nature. The criminal in people.

Continuing down this road, read any swords and horses fantasy novel ever. Chances are the antagonists are doing something that goes against the law of the land. Maybe they’re trying to end the world. That’s a crime, people.

Look at your favorite protagonist. I bet he or she committed some crimes to attain their goals. Know why? Because playing by the rules is boring. We read to watch characters do things we don’t have the guts or will to do.

What’s the point in all this?

Crime is everywhere. It is driving our plots.

My new writer friend, Victoria Schwab http://veschwab.livejournal.com/ , recently did a post on her top five reads this year. It was so much fun I’ve decided to steal the idea and make one myself. But I’m lazy and sleepy, so I’m only doing three books.

1. Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

I can’t say enough things about this book. I could write a book about this book. This book changed my life as a writer. It was the first crime fiction book I read that blew my mind out of my ass, and I mean that in a good way.

It evoked such emotion in me that I had to put it down several times to pace and think about the story. The love story in it will tear your guts out. The action is so crisp it feels like high def. The dialogue rips your ears off and feeds them to you.

The story switches between past and present, essentially two short novels that intertwine and connect by the end. Normally this would be off-putting, but the stories are so equally amazing you don’t mind the switch.

This book opened me up to crime fiction.

2. The Eternal Prison by Jeff Somers

Jeff cranks up the epicness in each installment of the Avery Cates series. In this one we go all over the world and meet cannibals and robots and fallen cops and every flavor of bad guy you can imagine. Futuristic crime fiction at its best.

What makes TEP special is the myriad twists it contains. Halfway through you will go NO WAY! Then at the end you will go NO WAY! Several times you will go NO WAY! So combining its twists with its epic nature gives this one the number 2 spot for me this year.

This is hard. I’m so glad I’m not a book critic. Moving on.

3. Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston

Really, all these books are tied. I am ordering them for the sake of order. I want an orderly blog.

Caught Stealing had as much impact on me as Beat the Reaper. If you read my novel, you will see this. The way Huston takes his protagonist, Henry Thompson, on a trip from helpless failed-athlete/bartender to full-fledged avenger is astonishing. You root for this guy and cheer his victories when they come. He is an everyman with the boring parts taken out.

Caught Stealing is also special because it influenced the way I write more than any other book. Like Charlie Huston, I do not use dialogue tags. I do not use anything. Dialogue gets its own paragraph, forever. A character’s action or voice sets off who’s speaking.

This might sound strange, but after reading it for a page or two it seems natural. There’s nothing to muck up the flow, and the dialogue simply rolls down the page like melted butter.

My novels have better similes than that.

Edit: I just looked at my bookshelf and realized what a sham this post is. There are so many I want to include in my top three. Here’s a small sampling:

Contagious by Scott Sigler (Greatest, most heart-wrenching climax I’ve ever read. I closed the book with so many conflicting emotions I had to drown myself in scotch.)

The Blonde by Duane Swierczynski (Just pure fun. A pace that will literally break your neck or at least give you cramps.)

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (Just a taut taut taut story. YA that doesn’t pull punches.)

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (The most vibrant, original novel I’ve ever read. His sensory details are the best in the business. His capacity to express human emotion makes me feel like a fraud, like I don’t have the right to write.)

Anything else by Charlie Huston. I read all his novels this year and the man has been such an inspiration that I would kiss him on the mouth if I ever met him.

There, I feel better now.

I don’t go out much.

Not anymore, at least. I spend most of my time writing, reading, or watching movies. I submerse myself in narrative whenever I have a free moment. But last night I went to a bar, and it reminded me that getting out every now and then is a good thing.

It reminds you what real life is like. And sometimes, real life is more twisted and entertaining than anything you could come up with on your own.

Some things that happened:

Me and my bestest friend got kicked out of a bar at 10:30 because it was dead. Our first “going out” experience in a few months, and it seemed like forces were working against us. Approximately one person recognized me from the gas station, which is also known as the center of the universe.

We drove across the street to The Dark Room, which was a dark room. They played heavy metal and looped horror movies on flatscreens. The bartender was a 34 year old named Shannon who also manages FedEx operations, and might actually be named Tori. She was in incredible shape except for the crow’s feet. When asked to guess her age, I purposely guessed low because I’m a nice guy.

The other bartender had a laptop open and his face buried in iTunes. Sometimes he would look up and say things to people.

I beat my friend in three straight games of pool because he was hammered and I was not.

A guy younger than me with billowy chest hair told me the entire plot of Ronin, that movie with Robert DeNiro and Jean Reno. He kept calling me dude and shook my hand at least four or nine times.

A girl with short hair and pretty eyes named Deidre said she was going to kick me in the balls. For no reason. She was so drunk there was a delay whenever she would move her eyes to focus on something new.

Another person recognized me from the gas station. I didn’t feel famous.

A man and his son (who was mentally handicapped) walked by the bar around midnight to talk to the drunk smoking assholes about God. They were not well received. The drunk smoking assholes will probably burn in hell.

There’s a point to all this.

Go out every now and then. See people in their chosen environments. If you’re a writer, you’ll automatically try to figure out how to fit these unique traits and personalities into your stories.

It definitely recharged my imagination. And that was just a few hours, close to home.

Since the query for THE BETTER GUY appeared on Queryshark, I’ve received a lot of comments and questions. People admitted that even though it wasn’t their genre, the query itself was pretty strong. I’m inclined to agree since it got me my first pick of agents.

I’ve decided to break the query into its parts and explain how I created it. I do not claim to be a master of queries–I’ve only written two or three. I’m only going to explain what worked for me.

Here’s the query again:

Ford Kelly spends his days driving an ambulance and his nights driving the getaway car for his uncle the contract killer. But when his uncle dies mid-contract, Ford has two choices: also die, or convince his new employers he knows more about taking lives than saving them.

The contract? Snuff out a ring of dirty cops who demand hush money after stumbling across a new drug being prepared for the street. The problem? The last cop on the list is Ford’s wife, who left him after the death of their son a year ago. That’s when Ford discovers how good at killing he really is.

Got that? Let’s look at the first paragraph.

“Ford Kelly spends his days driving an ambulance and his nights driving the getaway car for his uncle the contract killer.”

First sentence, I introduced a character. Not only that, I told you something interesting and conflicty (I know that isn’t a word). He drives an ambulance and a getaway car.

Let’s continue.

“But when his uncle dies mid-contract, Ford has two choices: also die, or convince his new employers he knows more about taking lives than saving them.”

Conflict. We have a main character and what issues he will face in the first two sentences.

“The contract? Snuff out a ring of dirty cops who demand hush money after stumbling across a new drug being prepared for the street.”

Okay. Guess it’s kinda cool. He’s gotta kill some cops of whatever and there’s a new drug, whatever that means.

I included these sentences to set up the next two:

“The problem? The last cop on the list is Ford’s wife, who left him after the death of their son a year ago.”

More conflict. So now he’s forced into the shoes of a contract killer AND his wife is on the list. But she left him? Do they still love each other? Is he going to kill her or rescue her or what? Isn’t that a coincidence, he’s handed a contract his wife just happens to be on?

Everyone who read this query before submission had questions. They were interested. Pile conflict on conflict.

I will admit this part could be better. Maybe other agents wouldn’t have appreciated the vagueness. After all, whether he kills his wife or saves her are two different stories. When in doubt, be as clear as possible.

Then I finished up with a little zinger:

“That’s when Ford discovers how good at killing he really is.”

That’s it. Short and sweet. Was it easy to write? Nope. I revised it while I was writing drafts of the novel. I’d come back to it and move things around and boil away the crap until only the strongest words and sentences remained.

Keep in mind, I didn’t summarize the entire novel. I showed the setup. A summary of the whole novel is called a synopsis, which is an entirely different monster.

This worked for me.

Thought I’d share.

Last night my agent tweeted a link that gave me chills.

http://www.inkygirl.com/scbwi-2009-notes-reasons-why-your-manuscript-got-rejected

7 reasons why manuscripts get rejected. The chilling part was number four:

“4. The writer seems like a difficult person to work with. Wendy always Googles an author’s name before offering a contract. She says she may be prompted to change her mind about signing up an author if they share too much information in their blog, if they tend to blog a lot about how hard writing is, if they blog about being rejected many times, if they publicly bash a book she’s worked on, or if they bash a colleague in the business who is her friend.”

At first this shocked me. Then I went DUH!

Something to think about.

Since I decided I wanted to be a published author, the debate on outlines has been one of the most fascinating to me.

Two sides, both firmly entrenched. Which was right for me? Taking into account I have the attention span of someone who has no attention span at all.

I went with the headlight method, something I discovered in a book called Plot and Structure. It’s a decent book on writing, as far as those things go. I’ve read about twenty books on how to write and learned maybe three things. This was one of those things.

The headlight method means you plot a little bit, then write a little bit. Plot a little more, write a little more. The headlight comes in because you can only see so far into the story. Much like . . . a headlight.

Right now I’m 35 pages into the Ford Kelly sequel. I have enough plotted for the next two or three days. If I don’t come up with more stuff, like FORD TAKES THE HOOKER TO MCDONALDS AND A GUY WALKS IN, I’ll be out of stuff to write.

And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s sitting down with nothing to write. Because it’s too easy to come up with garbage. Just to fill the page up so everything isn’t so white It has happened exactly zero times, because of the headlight method.

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t have an idea of how it all ends. I’m pretty sure Ford is going to win. He’s probably going to beat the bad guys in a really cool way. But maybe not.

I guess the point in all this (I’m rambling here at work, no customers) is that sometimes it’s nice to use things from both sides. Write freely, but have that structure to keep the story moving along. Go on that tangent the story is begging you to follow, but be ready to cut it when it leads to nowhere.

Most importantly, keep an open mind.

Thinking out loud.

d