Just a quick reminder that the competition I’m running is still open  Signed copies of Dark Heart to win!  Chop chop!

Edits underway for Dissolve with deadline of June 8, although I’m shooting for June 1, just for safety reason.

Like Disintegrate, editor/publisher Virginia O’Dine wants “more, more, more.”

And that’s what she’s going to get.

At this point, there will be four new chapters, totalling about 5,000 words. And that’s not including the little injections during chapters, doing more explaining about what’s happening, why is that character thinking this or doing this, why is this happening so suddenly.

It’s hard, of course. After a long winter, I want to spend time outside, not in front of a screen in a semi-dark room, but gardeners are out planting and this is my planting, I guess. At least, that’s what I tell myself while I turn down golf invited and forest hikes.

*Sob*

The sun’s overrated, my excellent 16-year-old daughter tells me, so I heed her advice to an extent.

The reality is more complicated.

I get up early anyway, usually around 530 but I think I’ll need to turn that even further back over the next couple of weeks.

Hello, 430! Let’s go to bed before the sun goes down and get up for three solid hours of writing and editing before getting ready for work.

That’s problematic, of course, since my day job is…..writing and editing.

The challenge is neither suffers.

But it’s just another three weeks, so I’ll climb into my big boy pants and “Git R Dun!”

I saw Larry The Cable Guy last year. He wasn’t that funny.

Well, except for the line about his reluctance to buy his wife an iPad for Christmas because he didn’t see the need to spend $600 on an electronic tampon.

But I digress.

Got a “morning after the night before” scene done with Sam and Lily.

And it has precisely nothing to do with a book. Sorry.

What it has to do with is a dying thing: customer service. (I know, but read on … it’s still pretty dark)

You see, one half of my literary agent team at Andrew Nurnberg Associates, the AMAZING Ella Kahn sold my lovely little book POLTERGEEKS to the lovely people at Angry Robot Books new Young Adult imprint, Strange Chemistry Books. This happened in January. It was an exciting time full of hope and thrills and, okay, it was -30 outside, but still. Contracts arrived in my mailbox, I signed and sent back to England. Strange Chemistry books paid my agent who pays me … except I haven’t been paid yet. No, my agent is not blowing my advance on a trip to France, it’s sitting in their bank account waiting to be released to me …. once the UK Tax Exemption forms are returned to them.

Ella mailed me the tax exemption forms in March which I promptly mailed to the Canada Revenue Agency. They have to stamp them and mail them back to me and then I send the stamped forms to the UK and BOOM! I get paid.

Except, you know, Canada Revenue Agency hasn’t sent me back the forms yet.

Now, depending on which country you live in will depend on how your civil service works. In Canada, our largest employer of human beings is the civil service at all three levels of government – municipal, provincial and federal. It is the feds I’m dealing with on the tax exemption form matter. Originally back in March I thought I could stop by the local tax office here in Saskatoon to get the forms stamped. Uh … no. I was told after dealing with twenty minutes of federal civil service voice mail hell that I had to mail them to Regina Saskatchewan’s tax office – they’re two hours south of me. You see, the public can’t go to the Saskatoon tax office because it’s sealed up tighter than a …. *cough*. \

So, I mailed the damned forms. I’ve received not even a notice from the Canada Revenue Agency that they’ve received the tax forms. So on Tuesday of this week I stirred up my patience and dipped into voice mail hell again only to be transferred to a different department only to find the different department was closed for the day. (It was 3:42 PM at this time. I had to be at work, how come they were closed????)

So I called back on Wednesday. 30 minutes of voice mail hell later I talk to a guy who then puts me on hold for fifteen minutes and informs me that Canada Revenue Agency has no record of receiving the forms. But I sent them via registered mail! How could they not have them??? Canada Revenue Agency guy then informs me he will put forward a request for a search to find the missing forms. I ask how long that will take. He says … “About seven to ten days.” I said, but I don’t get paid if I don’t get the forms back, what would I do if I didn’t have any money at all and these forms meant the difference between my eating and starving.

The line went silent. It literally went mother @#$@ silent. So I said nothing in return and the line remained silent. Canada Revenue Agency guy said not a word for one minute. There was dead air on the line for ONE MINUTE!!!!!

I broke the silence by saying, “hello? Are you still there?”

Canada Revenue Agency guy said, “yes Mr. Cummings, I’m still here.”

So I said, “what if I need the money to eat?”

Again, dead air. (I’m not mad at the guy I was talking to. He’s just a lackey, the real evil people are the bureaucrats.)

He finally said, “I’m sorry but call back in seven to ten days.”

So, there you have it. My dark story of goddamned god-awful customer service at Canada Revenue Agency. They lost my tax forms, not Canada Post. I’m in civil service limbo and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. (But by God, the tax department would come after me with both guns blazing if I owed them money, wouldn’t they?)

I’m forty-four. Modernization like the Internet, voicemail and so forth have completely infiltrated the federal civil service to the point where a taxpayer like me cannot actually go to a local office and talk to a human being in person. You have to go through a 1-800 number and layer upon layer upon layer of voice mail options. In the few places where you can go to speak with a federal civil servant there is a physical barrier between you and the civil servant because apparently they’re terrified we’re all going to postal on them. I’m a veteran. My local veteran’s affairs office is a “buzz to enter the office” “talk to someone who is standing behind three inches of glass” kind of place.

I’m serious.

In closing, I’ll point to the United States as they are our closest neighbor. Who is the largest employer in the USA? The automotive manufacturing sector, even though it has been savaged by The Great Recession, it still employs the most Americans. What do they produce? Cars, trucks and vans to be sold all over the world.

Who is the largest employer in Canada? The civil service. What do they produce? Nothing. Absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Now I’m not mad at the employees of the civil service in Canada. They’re just doing their jobs. But I am angry as hell that they lost my tax forms. I’m mad as hell that you can’t get even a shred of a sense of urgency from dealing with any of them and I’m even madder about that one minute of dead air on the phone.

This is a dark and terrible story. Canada Revenue Agency has got to be my absolute worst customer service experience in my forty-four years of existence. Everything is designed to keep the taxpayer out of the tax department’s office and at home on their phone waiting and waiting and waiting….

I’ll let you know if the forms ever arrive. Today I am sending new forms and I’ll add another level of postal protection to somehow ensure they received them.

Welcome to hell.

Tags: rants

Well, it’s been exactly a year since Dark Heart was released into the wild so I thought it at least deserved a mention. I should also thank Snowbooks for publishing it, and thank each of you who bought a copy, and thank all the bloggers who took the time to read it. Reviews have been unanimously good, going on excellent, and it’s wonderful to see that even a year later Dark Heart is still garnering great reviews. Zoe over at Fantasy Bytes recently said some very generous things about it:

‘…a complete gem of an original… the Bond aspect is utter genius and the retrospectives are great, perfectly timed and beautifully written. A fantastic read.’

You can read the full review here.

All in all, I must have done something right, and Leo Stamp must have touched a few hearts, even with his being a shade on the dark side. We thank you.

So anyway, to commemorate Dark Heart’s first birthday I thought I’d run a little competition, and put up three signed copies as bait… I mean prizes. All you have to do is email me the correct answer to this question (you can find my email address on my website):

Many years ago I used to play a certain sport professionally – a little Google detective work should give you the answer, but if your digital deerstalker no longer fits, here’s a cryptic clue: Spiders rest beneath the table while the hurricane blows above. What’s the sport?

I’ll choose the winners using the technical system of closing my eyes with my tongue poking out of the corner of my mouth and pointing at the screen – and no, if you know me you can’t enter. Closing date is Friday 25^th and I’ll announce the winners on the following Saturday.

And please don’t forget, if you haven’t read Dark Heart yet, it’s still available to buy at your local Waterstones, and if you really must, you can pick up a copy online. I’d love to hear what you think about it.

If you have $120 million lying around, one of the world’s most famous works of art is a good buy.
That’s what Edvard Munch’s The Scream went for at Sotheby’s this week..
We don’t know who the buyer was because when you have $120 million to spend on a work of art, you don’t want to advertise that fact with your name and face.
After all, this is a painting that has been stolen twice in the past 10 years.
Fortunately, four versions of this painting exist so it’s not like it will disappear into the personal vault of some Daddy Warbucks, never to be seen in public again. The other three call museums in Oslo, Norway home.
Put aside The Scream’s pop culture value or artistic merit for a minute and ask a more basic question.
What did our mystery buyer get for $120 million?
Physically, it is a piece of cardboard 91 centimetres (36 inches) high and 73.5 cm (28.9 inches) across. Munch then used oil-based paint with pastels and tempera, a binding mechanism historically made out of egg yolks, to hold it all together.
It makes no logical sense to spend that kind of money on a chunk of cardboard. Even if it was made of solid gold, it would still be worth a fraction of what it sold for.
Among the ultra-rich, there is no experience or product that can’t be bought, which makes everything worthless.
So the search is on for the unique, the rare and the one-of-a-kind. Everyone can own The Scream because the image is not copyrighted and in the public domain but only one person can own the original work, as imagined and made real by the artist. In other words, it’s got nothing to do with art or esthetics or beauty.
Owning something no one else does is what’s going on here but that’s just half of the equation for the buyer (and let’s face it – that kind of an ego is almost exclusively male).
The second part is about power.
It’s the power to spend that much money on something that does nothing except sit there. It is not a financial investment to generate more wealth, it is not a lucrative contract for a professional athlete for services on the playing field, it is not a donation to feed the hungry, protect the oppressed or improve health.
The power to write that cheque is intoxicating, far more than the emotional value of being able to look at the original artwork on your wall.
By spending $120 million, our mystery buyer has declared to the small crowd of other ultra-rich families around the world that money means nothing at all. “I have so much of it that I can spend $120 million on a painting,” is his declaration to the world.
Behavioural economists are fascinated with this kind of spending, particularly since most of modern economic theory is built on the premise that people are rational most of the time with most of their money.
In the context of an auction, it takes two people to drive the price of a painting that high. All the attention goes to the buyer but no one cares about the person who made the second highest bid. There was someone else willing to pay more than $100 million for this painting. What made them stop bidding? How could $115 million be fine for The Scream but $125 million be too much to bid?
A PBS documentary in 2010 called Mind Over Money displayed how this works. They auctioned off a $20 bill with the winning buyer having to pay but the losing bidder also having to pay their final bid. Selling price – $28.
It makes no sense on two levels. First, the winning buyer lost $8 to get a $20 bill. Second, the losing bidder is already down $7 if his bid holds, so why did he stop at $27? If he had bid $29 and won, he would only be out $9, but because he stopped bidding, he spent $27 and got nothing in return.
It’s a mad world when it comes to money, whether it’s 20 bucks or $120 million.

Here’s the cover for my forthcoming YA debut POLTERGEEKS! (After a few minor tweaks.) It’s a gorgeous, GORGEOUS cover and I’m just blown away by the quality of the artwork. Paul Young from Artist’s Partners in the UK is the mastermind behind the cover and I couldn’t be more happy with the results! What do you think? Would this stop you in your tracks at your local bookstore?

Tags: cover art, Poltergeeks

My first writing class ever was a short story class I took when I was maybe twenty. I wanted to be writer, and for every minute of this class, I was 100% invested.

Yesterday I talked about one of my earliest writing efforts in the class and how it failed… how I got wrapped up in an idea and missed an obvious opportunity to reveal character.

Today I’m talking about having to know a character for it to really work. The teacher required that each student write three short stories that would be critiqued by the class under the anonymity of social security numbers.

My first story was titled, Afraid of the Dark. (I have always leaned toward horror.) And I think in general I did a good job—I got a lot of positive feedback, anyway… and a few negative critiques, one of which there was no way I’d understand for years.

The story is about a kid who is afraid of the dark and doesn’t want to go to bed at night. Her mom puts her to bed anyway, kisses her goodnight, reminds her that there is nothing to be afraid of, and then leaves her with a sliver of light from the hall outside. Once alone, the darkness of the bedroom turns menacing, truly terrorizing, the girl’s blanket her only shield—which eventually gets pulled away from her. When she finally screams out, the mom comes, loves her, and then leaves, flipping off the light again. This time though, the mom folds the blanket and put it just out of reach—not in cruelty, just tidying up because it had been left on the floor. The girl is even more vulnerable.

The point of the story is that this terror happens over and over, and will happen again the next night. And also, that the mom is unwittingly complicit, although it’s clear the kid is loved.

Here are the two critiques I remember. First, a description of a table flap (the kind that extends) and how it was unnecessary. I used a table that I knew, but yeah, I could have kept it simple. (The girl hid under a table to avoid going to bed.)

The second critique was my description of the girl. I made her super, uber cute, the perfect little cherub. I remember being frustrated at the critique since I had spent time carefully crafting what this kid looked like so that she would evoke pity in the reader. Alas, I had no children of my own and I wouldn’t for years. I didn’t understand during my critique (or for a long time after) that no kid, no real kid, looks like the one I describe. And that fact made the character distancing. I have two kids now and I know the difference. If I had given her a scab on her nose, or a bit of uneven hair from where her mom had to cut out gum when peanut butter failed, or put old, washed-out marker on her jammies or a sticky spot from honey that collected lint, well, then the kid would have been relatable, recognizable… might seem like a kid the reader knew, might even seem a little like theirs.

It was a character a long time coming, a critique that I had to carry and worry over before I could understand and eventually do better.

Tags: Erin Kellison, On Writing, writing

It would appear that the pressure of winning an Edgar for The Company Man has proved too much for Mr Bennett…

So this is about music but it’s one of my favourite things to talk about and every year at this time, when they make new inductions into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, I get all worked up about who’s still not among the 273 artists already there.

One of this year’s inductees, Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, asked publicly how his band got there ahead of Rush, Deep Purple and Kiss.

Great question, sir.

Rush has sold more than 25 million records in the U.S. alone and is ranked third, behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, for most gold and platinum records by a rock band.

Deep Purple has sold 100 million records worldwide and, like Rush, are considered hard rock and heavy metal pioneers.

Kiss has more gold albums than any American rock band and has also sold more than 100 million units worldwide.

The other heavy snubs Slash didn’t mention include Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy, Motley Crue, Jethro Tull, Slayer, Megadeth and Motorhead.

Along with Guns N’ Roses, the Beastie Boys were inducted this year, but there’s still no sign of Public Enemy.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are in this year, but where’s the Cure?

Tom Dowd is in this year as a producer but where’s Robert John “Mutt” Lange?

Genesis got in two years ago but Yes still isn’t in and neither are Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel for their solo work.

The list of who’s eligible but still not inducted could form its own Hall of Fame:

-         Journey

-         Foreigner

-         Heart

-         Bon Jovi

-         Bryan Adams

-         Hall and Oates

-         Steve Miller Band

-         Roxy Music

-         Dire Straits

-         INXS

-         The Cars

-        Chicago

-         The B-52s

-         Eurythmics

-         The Carpenters

-         Cat Stevens

-         Stevie Ray Vaughn

There are plenty of non-rock and roll people in the hall, cited for their influences.

There’s Hank Williams and Johnny Cash for country, but Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton are absent.

Neil Diamond got in last year, but Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby still aren’t there.

And it’s got nothing to do with sales. Abba didn’t get in until two years ago, despite their 375 million records sold, behind only the Beatles.

And it’s not an American bias, either, since a large chunk of those bands named above also hail from theU.S.A.

Snobbery seems to be at work, with critical darlings like Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Jackson Browne, and Talking Heads firmly installed, while this year Laura Nyro (who?) got the nod.

And watch this – Nirvana will get in during their first year of eligibility two years from now.

One of the greatest rock songs ever on one fine album is their contribution to rock history. That’s it.

Still deserving?

Sure, they are, right alongside the artists listed above.

In the meantime, I’ll give Slash his due, both for the best guitar lick of the 1980s and for being honest about his band’s accomplishments next to the ones waiting for their recognition.

After reading Michael Koryta’s The Cypress House and thoroughly enjoying it, I was keen to get my hands on another of his novels.  When my review copy of The Ridge hit the doormat I started reading immediately.  The blurb positively demanded it:

In an isolated stretch of eastern Kentucky, on a hilltop known as Blade Ridge, stands a lighthouse that illuminates nothing but the surrounding woods. For years the lighthouse has been considered no more than an eccentric local landmark – until its builder is found dead at the top of the light, and his belongings reveal a troubling local history.

The novel starts out well – the steady drip of intrigue, the suitably suspicious death, the mysterious inland lighthouse and a fresh new setting for a story that is the animal sanctuary for wild cats.  Tick, tick and tick.  The character dynamics start off great too:  Sheriff Kevin Kimble, we soon discover, is nursing a bitter-sweet relationship with serving convict Jacqueline Mathis, who five years earlier put a bullet in his back.  Ouch.  But for all the delicious ingredients The Ridge comes out of the oven not tasting as great as it should.  In fact it’s fair to say it comes out a good deal undercooked.

Wyatt French, the eccentric builder of the lighthouse, commits suicide, but not before calling Kimble and leaving him some hefty cryptic clues.  At this stage you won’t be thinking why the hell doesn’t he just tell Kimble the whole thing and save him a whole lot of police work, but you will.  And neither at this stage could you know that old man French is one of the good guys and has built that mysterious lighthouse in the hopes of saving lives and therefore could have told Kimble the whole damn thing and done just that, but you will.  Doesn’t leave much of a mystery to solve, though, and no murders to investigate, so let us move on from the unnecessarily cryptic clues and the needless death.

The unravelling supernatural mystery is dealt with proficiently, as you would expect from a writer with Koryta’s background in crime fiction, but was one of the great disappointments of the novel.  I got the distinct feeling that he was sleepwalking.  Coasting.  The strange blue light in the night, the caged cats sensing something in the dark.  It’s all very much standard fare, a paint by numbers mystery with a supernatural twist – which incidentally I have no problem with, but when you hold The Ridge up to The Cypress House – a far simpler and yet far more affecting novel – you can clearly see why one novel works and the other doesn’t, and most of it comes down to characterisation.

There are many characters in The Ridge, and Koryta gives most of them a voice and a shot at centre stage.  This left all of them underdeveloped and lacking in any kind of depth, and left Koryta relying on expositional characterisations, eye-rolling shortcuts and sappy back stories.  The frustrations converge at the end when he tries to sell us Kimble’s reasons for doing what he does.  It just isn’t believable.

As for the dénouement, it goes the same way as the rest of the novel.  It’s a cheap sell.  It’s hard to care one way or the other about one-dimensional good guys, but when the bad guy is non-dimensional, you have a problem.

Don’t start with this novel if you’re looking to get into Koryta – bypass it and go for The Cypress House – as good a novel as The Ridge is bad.