How Writing a Novel is like Having a Dog @coop

LUCY BURDETTE: Our guest today is our good friend Mike Cooper. He's too modest to come right out and say this, but his forthcoming novel is the winner of the first-ever Mysterious Press Award, and it's coming our way in September. Today, though, he has an interesting post about his writing process....

MIKE COOPER: Writing a novel is not like driving a car at night (sorry, E.L.), at least for me.  Well, unless the car is stalled, there are food wrappers and empty cans scattered about the floor, and the engine just ... won’t ... TURN OVER.  Also it’s cold and snowing and the troopers have already been by, but only to issue a ticket for a broken taillight.  Oh, and the arrival deadline is midnight.

But that’s not today’s metaphor (salient though it might be to the current work-in-process).  No, today we’re going to talk about why writing a novel is like having a dog.Look, there’s OUR dog!  Isn’t she great?  Her name is Bailey, a black-lab-plus-who-knows-what mix.  Utterly charming, cheerful, energetic, and unfailingly eager to meet new people, Bailey loves the world and everything in it.  (Except a few other dogs, and vegetables, and coming back when called.  I guess she’s not perfect.)

Anyway, she’s been with us for a year and a half, which coincidentally is about how long it takes me to knock off a novel.  And that’s only the beginning.  Here are all the eerie parallels between a dog and an unfinished manuscript.

+  Both require waaaay more time than you think.


Years earlier we got a cat.  Man, cats are EASY.  Show him the litter box –- done!  Scratch his head now and then, provide a few catnip toys, get some dried fish from H-Mart; ten minutes a day tops.  We can even leave him alone for a weekend no problem.

A dog is not like that.  Sure the kids promised to take care of the walks, but you know how that goes.  First thing upon waking, mid-morning, mid-afternoon and before bedtime –- that’s a couple hours right there.  Plus constant demands for attention inside the house, struggles over bed space at night, various medical emergencies.  It’s a wonder anything else ever gets done around here ... including, you know, writing.


+  Paper training is just like a first draft.

It takes forever, you’re constantly cleaning up messes, and it’s impossible to escape the frequent question “why exactly am I doing this??”  And just when you think you’re done . . . you’re NOT.

+  You get yanked around a lot.

A better dog owner would have spent more time training, instilling discipline and obedience, but for better or worse that’s not us.  So walks can be a struggle, with sudden full-power lunges after squirrels and rabbits (and small fluffy dogs led by nice elderly women, a particular peeve of Bailey’s for some unfathomable reason).  Hey, is that a skunk? –- let’s check it out!Developing a storyline is much like that, at least for me.  The characters are constantly jumping away in unexpected directions, going off script, completely twisting up the leash –- I mean the plot.  First rewrites are always a nightmare, as I try to restore order and bring everyone to heel.

Then there’s the whole business side of writing, which is like the worst dog walk ever.

But it’s not all bad ...

+  You make new friends.

Oddly for such solitary business, writing has introduced me to all sorts of people, many of whom I quite like.  In the same way, an hour at the dog park every day has introduced us to a group of other regulars, and we really look forward to seeing them.  Their owners are nice too.

+  In the end, you can’t live without either.

For all the complaining one might do, at the end of the day there’s nothing like a dog curled up by your side, warm and comfy and full of love.  Just like a finished manuscript!

Except for the drool, of course.


Question for writers: Cats famously interfere with the creative process by walking on keyboards.  What has your dog done to help, or hinder, that next novel? For readers: How about some cute dog stories?

Mike Cooper has wanted for years to write a vampire dog detective romance told from the dog’s POV.  His next novel, however, is THE DOWNSIDE, coming in September from Mysterious Press / Open Road.  He lives outside Boston with his family, including one cat and, yes, one dog.  More at www.mikecooper.com.

Mike Cooper: Camping = Reading

Much like we were, only cleaner

MIKE COOPER: When I was a kid, in the 1970's, our family went camping in the summer. Nothing fancy: mostly state parks in the Ozarks, where we could drive the station wagon right up to the campsite and unload our canvas tent, Coleman stove, big cheap sleeping bags and all the rest. We weren't alone. Other sites had more families, older folks taking their summer vacation, college kids down from St Louis, the occasional long-distance traveler with a pop-up trailer. Not so many RVs back then. No one seemed to spend much money -- hot dogs was about as gourmet as the food got, and typical gear wasn't much more complicated than an air mattress.

Campsite with Boston on the horizon

Today it's a different story. We still go camping -- my favorite destination is our annual trip to one of Boston's harbor islands, where we can cook mussels at the water's edge while jets take off from Logan and party boats cruise noisily past. But almost no one else we know does. Instead, there's the Patagonia catalog, with its gorgeous photos of trekking in the world's most difficult and spectacular terrain. Somehow we've gotten to the point that "camping" means thousands of dollars of high-tech gear and a National Geographic destination. If you're not bivouacked halfway up a sheer wall in the Himalaya, or sea-kayaking to remote islands in the Andaman Sea ... well, you can always watch Travel Channel. Something similar may be happening to reading. Decades ago people commonly read books, and they did so casually, without much thought. Sit on the bus, pull out a paperback. Take your lunch in the park, bring along a library book. Wait an hour at the DMV, finish that novel your friend passed along last week. 

The book club meets

I recently read two memoirs of the 1930's, and both mention that old magazines and paperbacks were common in hobo jungles: men who had to beg food and sleep on the ground still had books around them, to read and share. Today, reading a book is moving from "now and then" right through "uncommon" and into "eccentric." I often carry a book to the playground while our children are there, and that draws comments. Our pediatrician was quite struck by our children having books with them, rather than smartphones. What was once utterly commonplace is now almost ... odd. Furthermore, the cost curve is accelerating. Just like "proper" backpacking now requires an Arcteryx pack and Marmot outerwear, reading increasingly requires an expensive electronic device. So is this the end of literacy? Perhaps not. Radio should have been killed off years ago, and yet thrives. Despite cars people still ride bicycles -- more and more of them all the time, in fact. Just because the book is no longer the default go-to for transient entertainment doesn't mean we've given up on it completely. And perhaps technology will be its savior, in the end. Once everyone is wearing whatever succeeds Google glasses, they could watch videos and take pictures of their annoyed friends. But maybe, maybe they'll find something to read while they walk instead. 

  Mike Cooper is the pen name of a former jack-of-all-trades. Viking will release his novel FULL RATCHET, sequel to CLAWBACK, on July 3rd. Mike lives outside Boston with his family.

Note from Lucy: I love talking to Mike when I'm stymied while writing--he either recommends shooting someone or a chase scene. The writing always goes better after that...

SILAS CADE SMOKES 'EM by Mike Cooper

LUCY BURDETTE: I loved visiting with thriller writer Mike Cooper at Bouchercon. Somehow we always gravitate to talking about food. So I thought you'd enjoy his take on something culinary. Welcome Mike!

MIKE COOPER:  My protagonist Silas Cade in CLAWBACK is no gourmand -- he's too busy hunting down armed riffraff along the Greenwich-Wall Street axis.  Here he is at a nice restaurant:

"I sawed away at my fish, which seemed not to have been cooked enough.  Maybe it was supposed to be that way."

Because I'm the at-home parent, on the other hand, I do a lot of cooking.  One place that my interests and Silas's intersect is barbecue.  The grill here runs pretty much all year, and not just the Weber; a few years ago I built a little smokehouse.

The hope was to reproduce my grandmother's kielbasa.  Most years she and my grandfather kept a hog, butchering it in the fall for sausage, bacon, ham and everything else.  I copied her recipe from the scrawled scrap of paper she'd written it on about fifty years ago.

KIELBASA

Grind 45-50 lb pork.  Leave fat in, but you don't have to add more if it's a good shoulder cut.  I use a cast-iron crank grinder.  (BTW, adjust all these amounts down for more typical family-sized volumes; my grandmother was cooking for multitudes.)

Mix in well:
1 cup + 2 tsp salt
2 garlic heads, crushed and soaked in 1-1/2 cup water
1 whiskey glass coarse pepper
3/4 whiskey glass paprika

Stuff the casings (I use the same hand grinder with a stuffing funnel).  1" casings seem best for kielbasa. Twist them off and hang overnight, not touching, in the refrigerator.  I have a cut-open plastic bin for this purpose that just fits into the bottom of the refrigerator.  This is an important step -- to dry the sausage slightly, and make sure the exterior is not at all damp.

Next morning, hang them in the smokebox, get a fire going, and hot-smoke them at around 160 degrees until the interior temperature is also 160. It can take hours, which is a lot of fussing around with the fire to maintain a level burn.

Note that grandma's recipe does not include a "cure" -- the sodium nitrite.  The USDA, along with the rest of the free world, insists that you should put this in to prevent botulism, which certainly seems like a good idea.

As you can see from the photo, the smokebox hasn't seen much use this year (though the morning glory vines will all die off at first frost, quite possibly this weekend).  You will also notice that we live surrounded by neighbors, including upstairs.  October is the best time for smoking not just because crisp cool air is pleasant to work in, but because most people have closed their windows for the season and will be less annoyed by the smoke.

Really good kielbasa is available in the Polish markets in South Boston, but homemade sausage is always a bit better -- even if I've never quite matched my grandmother's.
___________________

Mike Cooper is the pseudonym of a former jack-of-all-trades. Under a different name his work has received wide recognition, including a Shamus Award, a Thriller nomination, and inclusion in BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES. The sequel to his novel CLAWBACK will be published by Viking in 2013. Mike lives outside Boston with his family. Read more at his website.

Where Are the Corporate Hitmen? by Mike Cooper

LUCY BURDETTE: Mike Cooper made all of us salivate when two books were sold at auction to Viking about a year and a half ago. Now CLAWBACK is finally out and we're so happy to introduce Mike and his book. Mike is a superb writer--and I can tell you the plot is jammed with action. And he's visiting today to tell us about his wild theories about corporate crime...take it away Mike!

MIKE COOPER: Because I write thrillers with high-finance themes, I pay attention to the dark side of corporate competition. In a hyperactive, constantly changing landscape, the smallest edge matters. Especially under today’s total-deregulation approach, companies have become thoroughly ruthless. Dirty tricks, hacking rivals’ computers or stealing their code, pernicious lawsuits, patent trolls – it seems like anything goes.

Almost.

Why don’t more CEOs go after their rivals directly … by hiring assassins?

Oh, it happens often enough abroad. Russian biznesmen are notorious for taking such shortcuts (though following consolidation of the crime/business syndicates under Putin, victims now tend to be interfering bureaucrats, investigative journalists, and the like). Countries like Pakistan are almost beyond the rule of law. Even Britain sees the occasional rival-tycoon killing.

And it happens in fiction all the time. Just not in the USA.

Why not? Here are some possible reasons:

1) Because it’s morally wrong. Ha ha ha! Maybe in grandpop’s industries — smokestack manufacturing, mass retail and so forth — but that’s sure not the case in finance, which, we should remember, now accounts for roughly a third of US corporate profits. There’s a reason stockbrokers and bankers rate abysmally low in Gallup’s annual Honesty and Ethics poll.

2) Because you might get caught. Thanks to a justice system skewed in favor of the rich and powerful, that’s not really a worry. Of course there’s no danger whatsoever of jailtime for white-collar offenses except, possibly, insider-trading. But even bloody crimes go unpunished. In 2010 a Colorado fund manager ran over a cyclist, permanently crippling him, and was granted a plea deal reducing all charges to some trivial misdemeanors. “A financial manager for wealthy clients will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardize his job, prosecutors said” – a perfect summary of bankster impunity.

3) Because we’re all in the same club. Top corporate CEO’s are a homogeneous bunch – generally white, male, similarly educated, and by virtue of their vast wealth, living on a plane of existence far removed from what most people recognize as reality. The idea is that it’s harder to shoot someone you probably know socially, and certainly feel affinity for. On the other hand, any number of vituperative, no-holds-barred business rivalries (Ellison v. Gates, etc) would seem to suggest it doesn’t actually matter much.

4) Because it doesn’t work. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Maybe it’s not worth taking out your CEO rival over at your biggest competitor because someone else will just step up. And quite possibly he (rarely ‘she’) will be meaner, hungrier, and even more eager to stomp you back.

I like that explanation the best. After all, elite business managers are supposed to be all about rational decision making, game theory, and unemotional risk-benefit calculation. That’s what MBA school teaches them. So: they’re not taking contracts out on each other because, well, the percentage is too small.

But there might be one more possibility. Perhaps billionaires – being billionaires – can simply hire extremely competent contractors.

The kind who leave no trace. Who can rig any scenario, and make an intentional death as unremarkable as a slip-and-fall. Who’s to say all those skiing tragedies and cardiac events and careless driving incidents were really accidental?

Nah. That only happens in fiction.

LUCY: thanks for visiting JRW Mike! In honor of his new release, Mike is giving away one copy of CLAWBACK to a lucky commenter today.


Mike Cooper is a novelist. In his latest, CLAWBACK (Viking, March), an assassin has begun shooting the rottenest, worst-performing financiers on Wall Street. “Don’t bail them out, take them out!” – it’s a good tagline for a thriller, and Mike rather hopes it remains fiction. More at www.mikecooperbooks.com.

Sources:

Russian businessman-killings: http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/12/contract-killings-antonov-markets-face-equity-russia.html

Pakistan violence: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14391824

British tycoon killer: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-144582/Tycoon-jailed-killing-business-rival.html

“happens in fiction”: http://www.stephenwfrey.com/

finance sector profits: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/30/financial-profits-percentage_n_841716.html

Honesty & Ethics Poll: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions.aspx

Colorado hit-and-run: http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20101104/NEWS/101109939