“This is an awesome book. It seamlessly blends the classic pulp private dick character of Raymond Chandler and the darkly humorous science fiction of Philip K. Dick into a wonderful read.”–Mary C. Moore
My dystopian Science Fiction novel, Strictly Analog, is on sale for 99 cents at Amazon.com.
Fans of William Gibson, Jonathan Letham, and Richard K. Morgan will enjoy Strictly Analog by Richard Levesque.
What’s a private detective to do in a future where nothing is private? That’s Ted Lomax’s problem. In the new California, a corporation runs the government, electric cars have drive tones, and a new technology keeps everyone constantly connected to the Internet. Almost everyone.
Disabled in California’s war for independence, Ted is locked out of the new tech. Living on the fringes of society for years, he’s found a way to turn his disability into cash: finding clients who need their info kept off the grid.
But when his daughter is accused of murdering her boyfriend–an agent in California’s Secret Police–Ted has to dig himself out of the hole he’s been in. To save his daughter, he ventures into a shadow world of underground hackers, high-end programmers, and renegade gear-heads, all of whom seem to have a stake in California’s future.
It soon becomes clear it’s about more than one dead agent. Solving the case might save his daughter. And it might get him killed. And it just might open the door to secrets surrounding the attack that almost killed him eighteen years before.
One thing’s certain, though. Ted Lomax will never be the same.
“…a well-crafted story with realistic characters we can root for in a hard-boiled landscape…It’s a story that should appeal to fans of early Gibson or Sterling. And now that our world is much closer to the cyberpunk vision of tomorrow that was forecast decades ago, the story should appeal to contemporary detective fiction fans too. Strictly Analog is highly recommended.“–The New Poddler Review of Books
“This is an awesome book. It seamlessly blends the classic pulp private dick
character of Raymond Chandler and the darkly humorous science fiction of Philip K. Dick into a wonderful read.”–Mary C. Moore
Today Only! Strictly Analog is on sale for 99 cents at Amazon.com.
Fans of William Gibson, Jonathan Letham, and Richard K. Morgan will enjoy Strictly Analog by Richard Levesque.
What’s a private detective to do in a future where nothing is private? That’s Ted Lomax’s problem. In the new California, a corporation runs the government, electric cars have drive tones, and a new technology keeps everyone constantly connected to the Internet. Almost everyone.
Disabled in California’s war for independence, Ted is locked out of the new tech. Living on the fringes of society for years, he’s found a way to turn his disability into cash: finding clients who need their info kept off the grid.
But when his daughter is accused of murdering her boyfriend–an agent in California’s Secret Police–Ted has to dig himself out of the hole he’s been in. To save his daughter, he ventures into a shadow world of underground hackers, high-end programmers, and renegade gear-heads, all of whom seem to have a stake in California’s future.
It soon becomes clear it’s about more than one dead agent. Solving the case might save his daughter. And it might get him killed. And it just might open the door to secrets surrounding the attack that almost killed him eighteen years before.
One thing’s certain, though. Ted Lomax will never be the same.
“…a well-crafted story with realistic characters we can root for in a hard-boiled landscape…It’s a story that should appeal to fans of early Gibson or Sterling. And now that our world is much closer to the cyberpunk vision of tomorrow that was forecast decades ago, the story should appeal to contemporary detective fiction fans too. Strictly Analog is highly recommended.“–The New Poddler Review of Books
I’ve had books for sale on Amazon for more than a year-and-a-half now and have had the good fortune to rack up quite a few reviews, mostly 4 and 5 stars but a few stinkers. I know there are some writers who claim not to read their reviews, but I’m not one of them. I have come to embrace the idea that readers are the new gatekeepers of the literary world–not so much agents any more–and I want to see what my readers think. Even when what they think isn’t so nice.
When I got my first negative review (and it wasn’t entirely negative, mind you), I was incensed because the reviewer made some personal comments about me and what she perceived were my politics based on some characters in my book. I talked to people, who calmed me down, and started developing a new layer of the thick skin I used to count on when waiting for agents’ rejection letters.
And then that review was followed by lots of positive ones, so I felt better again. The balance in my world had been restored.
Or had it?
The negative review, I’ve often found, is motivated by some specific thing that let the reader down. I’ve had readers comment negatively on the lack of science in my time travel novel and the reliance on tropes having to do with virtual reality in Strictly Analog. In those cases, there was something in the books that took the readers out of the plot, caused their suspension of disbelief to falter, and they had a negative reading experience. It wasn’t just that they didn’t “get it”–in fact, they didn’t enjoy it. My fault? No. Just a poor match between reader and book.
It’s easy to write off those negative reviews and bask in the positive ones, but in many cases I’ve found there’s also some bias in the good reviews–a book clicks with a reader because it reminds him/her of events or places or people the reader is fond of; or because the reader was amused or aroused or intrigued or curious. The reader was able to suspend disbelief and was taken to another world populated by characters the reader could care about. Mission accomplished. Does that make me a genius? No. My book found its audience; that’s all.
Of course, if a writer is getting reviews that complain about typos and poor editing, holes in the plot, character inconsistency, lack of interest, a dud ending, etc. then it’s time for that writer to pull the book and hire an editor. Fortunately, I haven’t had any reviews like that, but I would argue that even those can be useful for writers, showing them their shortcomings and motivating them to improve.
I recently ran across a negative review of Strictly Analog on a blog (and was grateful that the blogger opted not to post the review to Amazon) in which the reviewer criticized the handling of technology in the book, arguing that some of it was inconsistent with the other tech in the novel and that there was far too much time spent explaining the technology rather than developing plot and character. Rather than being a knee-jerk complaint based on the reader’s biases, this was actually an intelligent, thoughtful, well-reasoned critique that gave me a lot to think about. The bottom line was still that this reader, I suppose because of his own techie knowledge and lots more reading in the genre, couldn’t suspend disbelief, kept being taken out of the world of the novel, but I was still able to learn something from the review.
Ideally, that should be the function that reviews perform for writers. They may or may not affect sales: most people tend to look only at the overall star rating and maybe read the first one or two reviews, never getting down to the real stinkers. But for the writer, it can be helpful to try reading between the lines of those reviews, to look for the places where a book failed a reader as well as the places where a book grabbed a reader and wouldn’t let go. That’s what we want to do, after all. And it’s good for writers to know how close they’re getting to the mark.
At the same time, it’s important not to be misled by the gushing praise. That may be as biased and knee-jerk as the barbs.
We need to look for the reasoned, analytical, and carefully considered reviews. Those are the ones most likely to shed some real light on how a book is doing. The rest, treat with interest, but not as weighty deciders of one’s fate.
So…I wonder about other writers: do you take it personally when your work gets a thumbs-down? And as a reader, what sorts of things prompt you to write and post a review?
The running man darts past a streetlight, casting a long shadow across the wet pavement. He glances back and then ducks into an alley, pressing himself into the darkness as he catches his breath and listens. He thinks he’s safe, but from the other end of the alley a new shadow moves. There’s a moment’s recognition when he sees her, but his relief fades instantly when he realizes there’s only one reason she’d be here in this alley at the same time as him. He hears someone running up the street toward the alley, and he knows he’s cornered. There’s no choice but to shoot his way out, but who to shoot first? The woman is only a few steps away. He can smell her, can practically taste her. But he knows why she’s here, so he pulls out his laser cannon and blasts her into eternity.
Wait.
What?
Laser cannon? Wasn’t that supposed to be a snub-nosed .38?
Well, yes. If this were a 1940s detective novel or a 1950s film noir, that is. But it’s not. This is science fiction, and yet the story and characters have a familiar hard-boiled, noir tone.
If you’re not up on that genre, it typically follows a protagonist (usually a private detective but not always) who lives on the edge of society—a good guy who sometimes does bad things but always in the name of getting to the truth and shining a light on the darkness that’s just below the surface of seemingly respectable society. Along the way, he encounters a femme fatale, crooked cops, deadly mobsters, lots of dark interiors and shadowy exteriors, and even more disillusionment. For novels, great examples include Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. Of course, the filmed versions of those same books are also great examples of noir storytelling, along with dozens of others from the post-World War II era.
The blending of SF and noir goes back a long way, maybe even to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Most SF fans probably think more readily of Blade Runner, though, or at least the original theatrical release of that film with the Sam Spade-style voiceover. There are a lot of other examples, among them William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” and Jonathan Letham’s Gun, with Occasional Music. More recently, the development of deco-punk and diesel-punk have added to the SF/noir canon.
But why blend SF and hard-boiled mystery? For me, the connection just seems natural as they’re my two favorite genres to read, and because I’ve spent a lot of time reading and writing about LA and Hollywood history and culture. When I started writing, I put my two loves together to end up with Take Back Tomorrow (a time travel novel set in 1940 Los Angeles) and Strictly Analog (about a down-and-out private detective in a near future, dystopian LA).
If you think about it, though, there’s also a logical connection. Look at science fiction from the early twentieth century—the pulpy, genre stuff in Amazing Stories, Astounding, and so on rather than more highbrow SF from Orwell and Huxley and Olaf Stapledon. In those pulp stories, the science fiction hero was a slightly disguised version of the cowboy or frontiersman, the hero of much of the popular fiction from the century before. That Western hero—the trailblazing loner who came into town, kissed a few shady ladies, blasted holes into the bullies trying to boss around the hard-working homesteaders, and then rode out again to explore the edges of the known world—managed to get bifurcated in the twentieth century. In one form, he became the private eye—still righting wrongs, messing with the wrong women, and always ending up alone after risking life and limb to make better the society that had somehow rejected him, or which he’d turned his back on voluntarily. And in his other form, he became the science fiction hero—exploring the galaxy and making future worlds safe for space colonists, taking on aliens and androids alike. Think Northwest Smith in C.L. Moore’s stories, or John Carter in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series. There was a lot less disillusionment in those heroes; they were a lot more like their cowboy granddaddies than their jaded detective cousins. And yet the two are not much different; it’s the settings that change, and the weapons—snub-nosed .38s for one, laser canons for the other.
It only makes sense that the split hero would rejoin himself in the form of the futuristic detective or private eye. Like all good literature, science fiction tends to reflect the culture that creates it. Maybe we’ve reached a point where we’re less optimistic about our future than SF writers in the 1930s were, less hopeful that technology will get us out of our binds or that the monsters (real or imagined) will be defeated with a good right cross and some superior intellect. But if our heroes are growing darker, their situations bleaker, their outlooks more pessimistic, we’re still entertained, caught up in the fantasy that there’s still someone out there with enough guts to do what’s right even at great personal cost.
…The femme fatale drops to the concrete, smoke rising from the big hole in her chest. The hero pauses over her corpse just long enough to say goodbye to the girl he thought she’d been. Then he runs off into the night, knowing his safety is only temporary…like ours.
As part of my participation in this week’s Blogger Book Fair, I am putting all four of my books on sale for 99 cents each.
I am also hosting a Giveaway of a signed copy of one of my books. Which book? It’s the winner’s choice.
To enter, all you need to do is click on the book covers below; you’ll be taken to my book pages where you can read the blurbs. Then come back to this page and enter a comment answering this question:
Based on the blurbs and covers, which of my four books would you most like to read and why?
The giveaway will run until midnight on July 26 (Pacific Standard Time). I will use Random.org to select one winner at random from all entries. That person gets to choose from Take Back Tomorrow, Strictly Analog or the Ace Stubble collection. I will sign the book of that person’s choice and mail it to the winner. Please note that I can ship only to addresses in the United States. If the winning entry is from outside the US, I will send that person an electronic copy of the book but will not be able to send a signed paperback.
And remember: all 4 novels are on sale at Amazon for 99 cents each until July 26th!
Okay, just to get this out of the way first, let me say that I’m not one of those writers who feels the need to respond to every poor or weak review of his work. People can say they don’t like my stuff, and I don’t feel like I have to defend it publicly.
However, (you had to know that was coming, right?) a less-than-stellar review of Strictly Analog last week got me thinking about some bigger issues, so I guess you could say I’m making lemonade out of the lemons that reviewer left me.
The reviewer’s concern was with science fiction books that deal with Virtual Reality and the tendency for characters to turn into Superman once they enter the virtual world, solving with ease all the problems they struggled with in Actual Reality. I think what the reviewer was really trying to say was that this has become kind of cliché in stories about characters entering a cyber world. And he may be right. I can think of a lot of examples where the Virtual World becomes the plaything for the tech-savvy character who’s entered it, kind of like Clark Kent arriving from Krypton.
I will now stoop to defending my book, but only briefly. Feel free to skip this paragraph if such responses to criticism bug you. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that while my character is able to do things in the virtual world he couldn’t do otherwise, he’s also still pretty vulnerable and can’t succeed without help–which is kind of the point of the whole book.
But enough of that.
The bigger question to me has to do with why some SF writers (myself included) have this tendency to paint the virtual world as one in which characters can succeed where they had previously failed. And it’s a question that has a lot to do with science fiction in general as well as the genre’s appeal.
Much of the science fiction written about the advent of a Virtual World–whether it’s cyberpunk or something else–taps into the same desires and fantasies that make the Internet so appealing in the Actual World. We can do things online that we couldn’t do otherwise–from shopping in stores around the world to changing our identities to gaming with people in Kyrgyzstan. And that freedom from limitations is exhilarating, especially for people (like me) old enough to remember a world without personal computers and Wifi hotspots, a world where limitations and boundaries were far less liquid than they are today.
When we take the limitless possibilities of the Internet and project them into the future, creating a fictional world where this fantasy gets exponentially pumped up to a new level, it only seems natural that writers would enable their characters to do all sorts of amazing things in their Virtual Realities. It’s wish fulfillment and appeals to readers of SF in the same way that steamy love scenes appeal to readers of romance novels, and in the same way that science fiction about exploring and conquering other worlds appealed to early 20th century readers who had watched all the exploration and conquering on this world lead to some horrible global conflicts. In science fiction, they could get it right.
William Gibson: Public Domain Photo by Frederic Poirot
Of course, there were clichés in those works as well, and there are clichés in other genres, too. I think the best science fiction takes the themes that appeal to readers’ fantasies, extrapolating from current social and scientific trends, and twists their plots just enough so they’re not pure fantasy, but rather mirrors through which readers can see themselves and their actual society through the haze of fantasy and wish fulfillment.
If we go back to the beginnings of cyberpunk, the narrator of Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” isn’t a Superman, and even if his console cowboy partner acts like he’s got special powers because of his cyber prowess, readers see through him the same way the narrator does, and see, too, the folly of being too full of oneself, of never being satisfied with what one has–a profound and maybe uncomfortable realization that has its roots in reality but needs to be rendered as fantasy for it to be acceptable and digestible for readers.
Science fiction serves many purposes, and one of them is to get readers to think not just about future technology but about current technology and what it’s doing to us. We have to be careful not to let our fantasies run away with us. At least sometimes.
Whenever it’s time to start talking about the art of revision with my college writing students, I usually begin by saying if they want to revise effectively they first need to put some distance between themselves and what they’ve drafted. Being too close to one’s material often causes a writer to see it for what he or she thinks it is rather than for what it really is. This accounts for students omitting words, repeating words, or failing to see that they’ve written the wrong word. I forget the context, but I once had a student who wanted to write the phrase “sex with your partner” but instead wrote “sex with your parent.” Eeew. That student could have benefited from a little distance; a few days between drafting and revising would have allowed the writer to see the words as they were, not what they were supposed to be.
I recently ran into a different sort of problem with my own writing. It wasn’t a misused or omitted word (although I’ve had plenty of those show up long after a book’s been proofread, edited, and published). No, it was more a case of misused tone and emphasis. And it wasn’t in a book or story, but rather in the blurb for my novel, Strictly Analog.
I should start by saying that copy writing is not my strong suit. I really, really dislike it. The same was true of synopsis writing in the days of trying to land an agent. Ick. Having to condense a whole book into a few paragraphs, making it sound compelling without giving too much away, convincing someone to buy or read the book when there are so many other choices out there…talk about pressure.
The downside to being an indie writer is that I have to do all of this myself. No publisher’s budget with a section for copy writing and advertising. The advantage, though, is that if there’s a mistake, I can fix it, and quickly. No waiting for the next print run. I can just go into my Amazon account and tweak the blurb to my heart’s content.
If you haven’t read Strictly Analog, let me say that it’s something of a hybrid, blending dystopian science fiction and hard-boiled noir-style mystery. It’s about a private detective in a near-future California that’s run by a high-tech corporation and where just about everyone–except the hero–is constantly plugged in to the technology that runs society. When his daughter is accused of murdering her boyfriend–an agent with California’s Secret Police–the protagonist has to drag himself out of the virtual hole he’s been in for years in order to save her.
I think of the book primarily as science fiction, but with a plot involving mystery and a tone reminiscent of old hard-boiled detective novels and films. Think The Big Sleep in a high-tech dystopia. It’s science fiction not just because it’s set in the future but because the murder and the case’s solution are linked integrally to future technology and because the novel uses its characters and futuristic plot (including the murder mystery) to comment on today’s social and technological trends. It uses mystery as a catalyst, but that doesn’t make it a mystery per se. I wouldn’t expect military science fiction to be placed on the same shelves as military fiction, nor would I expect humorous science fiction (say, Hitchhiker’s Guide) to be on the “Humor” shelves. Yes, the book is a hybrid, but I’m sure that anyone who reads it would still see it predominantly as science fiction in the same way most viewers wouldn’t confuse Blade Runner (or at least the original voice-over edit) with mystery even though there are cops and missing “persons” and some big questions for the protagonist to answer.
So imagine my surprise to find Strictly Analoglisted with mystery books on a site that I was using for a promotional campaign. The person running the site was apologetic and is making it up to me, but explained that the book’s blurb made it sound like contemporary mystery rather than science fiction, adding that one reviewer compared the book to those of Lee Child and James Patterson.
No way, I thought and went back to the blurb. It screamed science fiction at me. But then I asked other people’s opinions, mostly in writers’ groups on Google+. And just about everyone who commented said they thought the book was a mystery. Aarghh!
Looking at it more objectively, I saw where they were coming from. Words like private detective, murder, case, etc. were scattered throughout the blurb. And while it clearly said “future California” in the first line, if someone were just skimming the blurb, the word future wouldn’t be enough to sound the science fiction alarm. One person pointed out that the the future technology referenced in the blurb wasn’t that far ahead of where we are now, so it was easy to focus more on the mystery elements of the blurb than the SF elements.
I couldn’t believe it. The blurb’s been out there that way since last September. “You idiot!” I shouted at myself in my best Peter Lorre imitation. I’d been too close to the book, too close to the blurb. I may as well have written “sex with your parent.” How could I have not have seen it?
The answer is that there’s a learning curve here, and every now and then I wipe out on it. Writing I’m good at. Marketing I’m just figuring out.
Needless to say, I went back into the blurb and fixed it, doing more to emphasize the science fiction elements of the story. You can read the blurb here. I’d be interested in hearing if it grabs your attention or not. But please, if you think maybe it’s a Western now, or Chick Lit, or an erotic bondage thriller…keep it to yourself. There are some things I’d rather not know.
Looking for a good read? I’ve reduced the price of my dystopian science fiction novel, Strictly Analog, from $4.99 to just 99 cents for Monday and Tuesday June 10th and 11th. If you’re a fan of William Gibson, Jonathan Letham, or Richard K. Morgan, or if you like a bit of hard-boiled mystery blended in with your science fiction, then I’m sure you will enjoy Strictly Analog. And, at just a buck for the next two days, how could you go wrong?
What’s a private detective to do in a future where nothing is private any more?
For Ted Lomax, the answer is to find clients who need their info kept off the grid, and that’s what Ted has done for years, skirting the high tech that runs the new California and living on the fringes of society. But when his daughter is accused of murdering her boyfriend–an agent in the Secret Police–Ted has to dig himself out of the hole he’s been in for years in order to save her.
Before long, he’s pulled into a shadow world of underground hackers, high-end programmers, and renegade gear-heads, all of whom seem to have a stake in California’s future. The further he digs into the case, the clearer it becomes that it’s about more than one dead agent. Solving it might save his daughter. And it might get him killed. And it just might open the door to secrets that reach back to the attack that almost killed him eighteen years before. At any rate, Ted Lomax will never be the same.
“…a well-crafted story with realistic characters we can root for in a hard-boiled landscape…It’s a story that should appeal to fans of early Gibson or Sterling. And now that our world is much closer to the cyberpunk vision of tomorrow that was forecast decades ago, the story should appeal to contemporary detective fiction fans too. Strictly Analog is highly recommended.”–The New Poddler Review of Books
“The main character, Ted Lomax, is strong and believable while the writing style, brisk and no-nonsense fits perfectly with the premise.”–Amazon Expert Reviewer
Still not convinced? Check out the rest of the Amazon reviews here.
Every so often, I get this kind of comment from people: “I’m really enjoying your work. It’s better than I would have expected from an indie writer. Have you ever tried getting an agent?”
It’s quite flattering to hear, and I’m very happy to be getting this kind of feedback from readers.
But on the other hand, there’s just a bit of frustration that I feel as well. The implication is that it would be better to have an agent, better to be traditionally published. And the corollary to those thoughts is that, without an agent and a traditional publisher, my writing isn’t reaching its full potential.
Public Domain Photo by Chaplin62
To which I have to respond, well, yes. That’s true. In a good month, I can sell around 30 books. If I had an agent and a publisher–with a budget and a website and the pull to get my books into libraries and brick-and-mortar bookstores, to set up book tours and signings, to get reviews in Kirkus or Publishers Weekly…my guess is that I’d be selling more than 30 a month.
But maybe I wouldn’t. One does hear stories of writers who get fat little advances from publishers and their books then proceed to sell very few copies. One hears about writers being told they need to develop their own websites, book their own tours and signings, etc. One hears about publishers that budget very little for publicity and only for a very short time…the less well-known a writer is, the littler and the shorter the money and time.
I can’t help but feel that in many ways I’m better off going it alone.
Here’s the thing, though: once upon a time, I did have an agent.
I’ve been at this a while. Before diving into my teaching career 20+ years ago, I tried getting a novel published without an agent. That got me nowhere. And then, about six years ago I decided I needed to get back into writing and got really serious about it, ending up with a pretty solid manuscript for the book that eventually became Take Back Tomorrow. This time around, though, I wasn’t going to mess with the listings for publishers in Writers’ Market. I was going to query agents.
And I did. And I did. And I did.
After a year of trying, I did get one request for the full manuscript and was thrilled. After three months of not hearing back, I started sending follow-ups. These were met with “need more time” replies. I won’t name names, but this guy was a pretty well known agent at the time. Knowing that, I didn’t pull the plug on the submission. And eventually I got the rejection, based on the agent’s overall dislike of time travel stories. Why he’d requested the ms in the first place is still beyond me.
However, still being serious about writing, I’d been at work on a second book, about shape shifting aliens invading 1940s Hollywood. When I was done with that, I started querying agents on both books. After lots of outright rejections and even more “passive” rejections (the kind where the agent just doesn’t bother responding to a query), I found an agent who wanted to read the new ms. She ended up liking the book but “not falling in love with it.” I was tenacious and wrote back saying, “You know, if you kind of liked this one, I do have another.”
She took a look at Take Back Tomorrow, had some reservations about it, but overall felt it “deserved publication.” She ended her email saying that if I was willing to engage in some radical revision, she’d be happy to represent me.
I jumped at the chance. After a few months, the revision was ready and the book went out. It got what I still think of as “positive rejection.” One editor, I think at Random House, called it a “page turner” and another praised my “nimble prose.” But all the major and minor houses that looked at the book found some reason to pass on it.
It was both disappointing and exciting. On the one hand, I’d thought having an agent was like getting my foot in the door; finally, someone in the publishing industry believed in me, someone who knew people in one of those it’s-who-you-know industries. Plus, just about everyone who knew about my finally landing an agent acted as though it was a foregone conclusion: with an agent, I’d get published. So, when it didn’t happen, it was kind of a drag. But on the other hand, I’d had my book looked at (and rejected) by Random House and several other major publishers. Just knowing that was pretty damned thrilling.
At any rate, I continued on, doing a more radical revision on the alien invasion story (converting the aliens to demons), and then that book went out…with the same kind of results.
When I was ready to start the next book, I ran several ideas by the agent to see what she thought would be the most saleable. Aliens? No, aliens were definitely out. A literary SF drug addiction story? No, sounds too dark and depressing. A murder mystery set in a high tech dystopia? Okay.
So it was on to Strictly Analog. I must admit I didn’t like being told which book I should write next, but then again I did ask for advice. Still I had to wonder how many published writers had to get their agents to green light their next project.
I pinned a lot of hope on Strictly Analog, thought it might be the straw that broke the camel’s back if the agent couldn’t sell it. After all, she was in the business of selling books, representing authors whose work she could make some commission off of. It turned out that the book didn’t really have a chance. The agent released me, citing her increased interest in representing non-fiction and dwindling contacts among SF publishers and editors.
She did refer me to several other agents with more experience in SF…but they all failed to “fall in love” with the book, so I was on my own again.
And within a few months I had self-published Take Back Tomorrow and started down the path that’s gotten me here…an indie writer with not a lot of sales, 2 novels and 2 novellas to his credit, and a small but slowly developing fan base.
Am I better off without an agent? Right now, probably. I have control over what I write and how I market it. Am I as successful as I would have been if the agent had been able to make it work? Probably not, but given things I hear about traditional publishing, I might very well be in just about the same position as I am now even if one or all of my books had been picked up by a publisher.
Am I better off for having had an agent? Absolutely. The experience taught me an awful lot about writing…about pacing and development and sub-plots and misdirection, about editing out the passive constructions and adverbs and strings of prepositional phrases.
If nothing else, it gave me just a glimpse into the industry I’d been dying to get into since the early 1990s and showed me that maybe it wasn’t everything I’d hoped for.
Who knows? Maybe with the next book, I’ll query a few agents before self-publishing just to see what happens. At least now I’ve got a fallback position, and those rejections won’t hurt as much. I don’t need an agent to fall in love with my writing for it to be a success…just a few readers, and that’s already happening.
What about other indie writers? Do you wish you had an agent? Have you had one and parted ways? Or are you sticking to your indie guns and going it alone?
I thought it might be interesting for readers of Strictly Analog to get a sense of some of the locales that show up in the novel. Since I haven’t figured out how to travel into the future yet, all I can offer are current and past visions of Los Angeles and a bit of commentary to help set the scene for the future to come…at least the future as it’s envisioned in Strictly Analog.
For those who haven’t read the book yet, here’s a quick set-up: In Strictly Analog, readers are introduced to the Los Angeles of the near future, a future where California has seceded from the economically collapsed United States and is run by a corporate government called Cal-Corp. It’s a future in which the Golden State isn’t quite so golden, where the privileged maintain power in the bright, sexy urban centers and the less privileged are content to journey in from the suburbs to get a check for mopping the floors–anything to get away from the gangs and porn cartels that run the outlying areas. And it’s a future where a down-on-his-luck, one-eyed private detective can scrape by, making a living by skirting the new California’s ubiquitous technology and solving cases the old-fashioned way–by getting dirty when he needs to and letting instinct and guts get the job done rather than relying on internet searches and facial recognition software. At least that’s the way it’s been for Ted Lomax for the last eighteen years. But when his daughter Amy is accused of murdering her Secret Police agent boyfriend, Ted has no choice but to tear himself loose from the fringes of society and embrace the new technology if he’s going to save his daughter.
1. Ted lives in a storage unit in Hollywood, just off of Sunset Boulevard. When writing these scenes, I wasn’t picturing this version of Sunset Boulevard–the Beverly Hills Sunset with the palm trees and beautiful people:
Public Domain Photo by Andreas Bjärlestam
But rather this sort of Sunset Boulevard, the kind of place you’d find at the eastern edge of Hollywood:
Public Domain Photo by Patrick Cates
In the future of Strictly Analog, it’s the kind of Hollywood where one is more likely to have to fight off a street gang rather than a gaggle of paparazzi.
2. Because he’s locked out of the new California’s techno culture due to his war injury, Ted has to rely on his friend Philly, a high-end hacker who uses an old Hollywood movie palace as her front. The theater has been converted into an indoor skate park. Today there are still a lot of beautiful relics of LA’s movie-house glory days on Hollywood Boulevard and on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. Several of these old theaters have been re-purposed, so it’s not too hard to imagine one of them being turned into a skate park in the future.
Public Domain photo by Downtowngal
3. After getting the information he needs from Philly, Ted sets out for the Roosevelt Hotel, a Hollywood landmark that’s been around since the 1920s and isn’t much different in the California of tomorrow–with the exception of an Arabic sushi restaurant on the premises where patrons can listen to a jumping Morraccabilly band.
4. Once he gets deeply involved in solving his daughter’s case, Ted finds he needs more traditional information than can be found in all the technology the new California offers, so he heads to what’s left of the main branch of the Los Angeles library. Here’s how it looked in the past and not much different today:
In the future of Strictly Analog, the library serves as a storage facility for all the old books that no one has bothered to digitize. It’s also a place where the homeless and itinerant congregate for shelter and relief from the summer heat.
5. Armed with information, Ted sets out for adventures beyond Los Angeles, taking him both physically and mentally out of his comfort zone. When he comes back, he’s a changed man in a variety of ways and meets up with Philly once more at her apartment, a swanky building located at the corner of Central and Olympic, just to the east of downtown Los Angeles. Today, the corner is a parking lot in the produce district with a few businesses and a Burger King. For a short time back in the 1980s, I lived in the building that used to be on this corner and so imagined a futuristic reclaiming of the property as something completely opposite what it was and what it now is.
From there, Ted heads out once more, traveling physically and virtually to distant and dangerous places. I won’t give more away or even say where the final scenes take place. I hope, though, that this has given readers, especially those not familiar with Los Angeles, a sense of where the book takes place. And if you haven’t read it, maybe I’ve piqued your curiosity just enough to get you to check it out. The book is available from Amazon in e-book and paperback formats, and if you head over to the Amazon page, you can read a sample for free.
From Amazon
Richard Levesque 