Christopher Rice

New York Times Best Selling Author

  • Books
    • Christopher Rice
      • Erotic Romance
        • The Desire Exchange Series
          • The Flame (2014)
          • The Surrender Gate (2015)
          • Kiss the Flame (2015)
        • The Chapel Springs Series
          • Dance of Desire (2016)
        • Other Erotic Romance
          • Desire & Ice (2016)
      • Supernatural Thrillers
        • Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris (2022)
        • Decimate (2022)
        • Blood Victory (2020)
        • Blood Echo (2019)
        • Bone Music (2018)
        • Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra (2017)
        • The Vines (2014)
        • The Heavens Rise (2013)
      • Suspense & Crime
        • Blood Victory (2020)
        • Blood Echo (2019)
        • Bone Music (2018)
        • The Moonlit Earth (2010)
        • Blind Fall (2008)
        • Light Before Day (2005)
        • The Snow Garden (2001)
        • A Density of Souls (2000)
      • Short Fiction
        • MatchUp (2017)
        • nEvermore! (2015)
        • Thriller (2012)
        • Los Angeles Noir (2007)
    • C. Travis Rice
      • Sapphire Sunset (2022)
      • Sapphire Spring (2022)
      • Sapphire Storm (Coming Soon)
  • Biography & Photos
  • Events & Tour Dates
  • Blog
  • The Dinner Party Show
  • Erotic Romance
  • Suspense & Crime
  • Supernatural Thrillers
  • Short Fiction
  • All Books

Blog

You are now free to buy my new book. Here’s how I got the idea…

October 21, 2014 by Christopher Rice 4 Comments

My new book THE VINES went on sale today in both the U.S. and in the United Kingdom. For me, the line between an idea and a finished novel often zig-zags across different periods of my life, passing through different fictional landscapes as it goes, so rather than just writing the words – ‘Please buy my new book THE VINES’ over and over again (which is pretty much what I’ve been doing on Facebook for months now) – I thought it would be fun to trace the line that ultimately brought me here, to publication day, October 21st, 2014.

Twelve years ago I moved to Los Angeles. With one bestselling novel to my name, my film agent had no trouble setting me up with two well-liked producers who were eager to mount a new take on a classic novel. This is something film producers do a lot. But this novel (and the producers) shall remain nameless for the very obvious reason that Hollywood is a small town and yesterday’s nemesis might be tomorrow’s paycheck. (Also, they didn’t do anything terrible, which is more than can be said for most movie producers.) Because a majority of the films making a profit at the time were set in an American high school, they’d chosen one to be the setting for their “new take on a classic story”. Was it a terrible idea? I don’t know. My friends thought so. I thought it was a potential job, with some folks who had pretty impressive credits, so I went for it. The project already had two scripts. The producers didn’t like either one. The first was shallow and sloppy, the second loaded with wildly clever dialogue and snappy situations that lacked any real narrative spine or satisfying conclusion.

Being new to Hollywood and the film development process, I didn’t yet have the sense that movies are made not through writing, but through talking. Lots and lots and lots of talking. We’d done a fair bit of talking one afternoon when the producer called in her assistant and told me to practice a pitch on her. And I choked. It was not one of my finer moments. I still cringe when I drive by the office building where it happened. The problem was this. I had this chip in my brain that said, “If you’re going to write something good, you don’t just tell people about it beforehand! That’s like showing up for the first date naked.” People who are going to spend millions of dollars trying to produce your idea don’t agree.

If I was going to salvage my role in the project I had to act fast. So I wrote maybe one of the most voluminous treatments I’ve ever put to paper. If you don’t know, a movie treatment is supposed to be a short synopsis of an unwritten script. Preferred length is somewhere in the area of three to six pages. Mine was thirty. In my desperation to compensate for my choking incident, I had included not just details about the story’s high school, but its town, its secondary characters, its terrain, its precise position on a map of California. And an ancient Native American cosmology I’d put together to explain the supernatural forces involved. It wasn’t a bad treatment. My agent liked it. The producers, unfortunately, thought it was too dark. (I don’t know. Maybe they thought I was Nora Ephron’s son.) We had a few meetings about how to “lighten things up”, but a new manager ushered me quickly off the project because he thought it was going nowhere. (The movie was never made, so maybe he was right.)

During the process of writing this treatment, however, I’d churned up an image that stuck with me. It wasn’t right for the movie. I didn’t actually put it in the treatment at all. But still, it haunted me. It went something like this. In the early 1800’s, several Spanish soldiers come across a recently abandoned mission covered in monstrous tangles of vines. They know something’s wrong, but they approach anyway, because they’re soldiers and that’s what soldiers do. And then the vines eat them. I had a vague sense these otherworldly plants had been driven by a powerful shaman who’d been enslaved by the missionaries and these vines were the result of his supernatural revenge. But that was it.

And that was all I had for about twelve years. This idea went to the dustiest drawer in my  idea bank, the same place my “gay dude hires Marines to kill the men who fatally gay bashed his secretly gay Marine boyfriend” movie idea sat for a while before it became my novel BLIND FALL, the same place my “psycho puts poisonous snake in car of parents he hates” idea stayed for about ten years before it became THE HEAVENS RISE. Last year, when I published THE HEAVENS RISE, my first supernatural novel, I was excited by the enthusiastic response, and the fact that it was nominated for a cool award (which I lost to Stephen King, an event which caused me to post my first nearly naked selfie, a selfie I’ve just now stopped linking to because I have a modicum of shame) Now that I had written something supernatural that seemed to work, that giant-vines-eating-soldiers idea started calling to me again.

So I started futzing with it. I started reading books about the California missions. And I started, without much success, to come up with a title. This proved to be a huge challenge. How could I formulate a spare suggestive title that both referred to something innocuous – a plant – while also conveying that this innocuous something had been terribly altered inside the framework of my story? My first attempts were awful, each one calling to mind possibilities that bore no relation to my developing plot. BLOOD FLOWERS. (He’s a vampire florist who sends lovely bouquets to the families of his past victims. Will he ever be able to make amends for his bloodsucking past?) THE BLOSSOMS (My best friend and Dinner Party Show co-host Eric Shaw Quinn commented, “Is it about a Christian singing group that murders people?”)

The list of crappy titles went on and on.

Somewhere along the line of crappy titles I had a realization – I was in the wrong state! I was trying to write a California story. But for some reason, the town I’d set out to create wasn’t coming together and as a result, the story felt fragmented and loose. Its monstrous flowers felt real; its human residents did not. Still, I was wedded to the Native American thing. I mean, where else in history could I find a level of atrocity where large groups of people were treated as property and …I know, I know. I actually asked myself this question. Worse, I grew up in the Deep South and I still had to ask myself this question. As soon as I saw the obvious answer, I wound up at Spring House, a beautifully restored plantation house just outside my hometown, New Orleans. And my vengeful Native American shaman became Virgine Lacroix, an African slave with the power to make plants do dangerous things.

I didn’t realize I was about to write a ghost story. To be honest, I’m not a ghost story fan. I need ghosts to do things. Not just clomp around in attics or write weird stuff on mirrors. I need them to have real weapons at their disposal besides the ability to produce fear in the humans they haunt. Enter the vines of the title. (And the bugs, but those come later. My mother hates bugs. I literally had to convince her the bugs didn’t look like roaches before she would agree to read the manuscript.) And enter – I hope – some characters you can root for. And some characters you won’t root for at all.

I’m not sure how I finally settled on the title. Trust me. It has nothing to do with the fact that my friend Blake Crouch published an excellent thriller called PINES right around the time I started fleshing out the story. I love Blake’s books and I was very relieved he liked my latest one. I express my relief in this interview we did over at Kindle Daily Post. But for some reason, THE VINES sounded liked the creepiest plant-related title I could come up with. Maybe it’s just that big, sharp-tipped V. I don’t know. Sometimes the choices we make as writers are gut-level and primal and we waste too much time trying to make them seem airy-fairy and super sophisticated or about some horrible episode from our childhood.

So that’s the zig-zag line that brought me from a pitch meeting I bombed to a new novel you can actually buy now. If you’re one of the folks who got an early copy and you were kind enough to leave an honest review on Goodreads, I’d be eternally grateful if you’d consider posting that review on the Amazon sales page now.

I should probably close by answering some questions I’ve been getting a lot of lately. Yes, in the U.S. this book comes to you from the exciting new world of Amazon Publishing, and no, there are no plans for a hardcover edition at this time. Certain physical retailers choose not to stock titles published by Amazon so you can’t find it any bookstore, but it will be available for sale at the in-store events I’m doing with my mother over the coming weeks. That said, for the physical book lovers out there, the trade paperback edition is very handsome. I’ve got a stack of them on my table. The British edition is also lovely and you can buy it here.

It’s finally midnight on the West Coast as I type this. Time to go see if the buy button has gone live yet. Oh, what brave new world that has such widgets in it.

Filed Under: Blog, The Vines

Conversations With My Trainer: Episode 1 – Bench Presses

August 1, 2014 by Christopher Rice 12 Comments

This is the first in a planned 6,578 part (or until I get bored with it) series called CONVERSATIONS WITH MY TRAINER. It’s like Neal Donald Walsch’s famous spiritual meditation CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD only shallow. For the most part, this is an excuse to post really hot photos of my trainer. These photos are an attempt to get my trainer more clients. Getting my trainer more clients is my attempt to console him over the fact that I’m still his client, even after eight years of conversations like the one you’re about to read. (Also, it will occasionally serve as a good excuse to re-post what the gay press referred to as “my nearly-nude selfie“, and my friends now refer to as “my mid-life crisis”. Because, you know, fitness…or whatever.)

My trainer’s name is Adam Sprein. He is straight, married and the father of a newborn baby girl. These three facts will either enhance your sex fantasies about him or detract from them, depending on your level of self esteem. But that’s really none of my business. And as you’ll learn, fitness is about the illusion of self esteem. If you want real self esteem, volunteer at a soup kitchen and stop cheating on your taxes.

What is my business is ensuring that each “conversation” in this series contains an actual, tested and proven fitness tip of some sort. The rest of it will be a lot of sarcastic bullshit and completely fabricated exchanges designed to make me look like I’m not a desperate narcissist. I’ll also do my best to make Adam out to be a total hardass who doesn’t spend half of our sessions talking about Xbox (which he totally does). You’ll know when you’ve reached the actual fitness part of the conversation because I’ll set off that portion of the text with this phrase: THIS IS THE ACTUAL FITNESS PART OF THIS POST.

The hot picture of Adam will come at the end. Initially, I chose this layout because I thought it would force you to read the post. Then I realized that if you’re capable of reading anything, you’ve probably figured out how to scroll down to the bottom of a webpage.

CHRISTOPHER: Are you there, Adam? It’s me, Margaret.

ADAM: Who’s Margaret? Is she actually going to work out today?

CHRISTOPHER: Judy Blume humor is just lost on you, isn’t it?

ADAM: Who’s Judy Blume? Another one of those women who writes gay romances?

CHRISTOPHER: I swear to God…

ADAM: So are we actually going to work out today? Or are you going to give me another thirty-minute lecture on the changing nature of digital publishing?

CHRISTOPHER: You’re not interested in the changing nature of digital publishing? I thought it was important to meet clients on their level.

ADAM: In that case, I better get super-interested in Latino gay porn stars.

CHRISTOPHER: That’s just inappropriate.

ADAM: Says the client who keeps telling me to make extra cash by dancing in my underwear at a gay bar.

CHRISTOPHER: This is a city of big dreams, Adam.

ADAM: And big gay bars. Let’s lift some weights.

CHRISTOPHER: What are those?

ADAM: I give up.

CHRISTOPHER: I know what weights are, jackass. I’m asking about the little marks on the bench-press bar. Right here. Is that where I should hang my shoulder bag?

ADAM: No. You should just get a new shoulder bag. I hate that green one.

CHRISTOPHER: I’ll make a note of that. Back to these marks. Is there maybe, like, a TV tray or a cup holder that’s supposed to go here?

ADAM: If there is, we’re not using it. Nine out of your last eleven Facebook posts have been about doughnuts.

CHRISTOPHER: That’s bullshit. They were about my cats.

ADAM: And doughnuts.

CHRISTOPHER: Doughnuts are loaded with Omega-3.

ADAM: If by Omega-3, you mean bullshit.

CHRISTOPHER: Bullshit, it turns out, is also loaded wi —

ADAM: Stop talking. It’s time for some bench presses.

CHRISTOPHER: What are those?

ADAM: That’s the exercise where you lie on a bench and press the weight-bar directly up in the air above your chest while I spot you. If you do it right, which you never do, your chest gets bigger.

CHRISTOPHER: And for our audience at home, what do you mean by spotting?

ADAM: There is no audience at home. We’re at Equinox, one of the best gyms in Los Angeles.

CHRISTOPHER: Indeed. Where else can you watch Paris Hilton walk nose first into a mirrored wall while curling a 5-pound weight?

ADAM: Spotting is where I stand behind the bench in case you need assistance reaching a full extension with both arms. It’s also the part where I turn my face slightly to the side so I don’t get half of your lunch in my face because you thought somewhere in between reps eight and nine was a great time to give me your complete critical analysis of the second season of HOUSE OF CARDS.

CHRISTOPHER: I also like to sing along with the theme music, which is funny because the theme music doesn’t have any lyrics and it’s really kind of dull and —

ADAM: HOOOOOOUSE. HOOOOUSE OF CAAAAAARDS. Yeah, I remember.

CHRISTOPHER: Stop! You’re embarrassing me.

ADAM: No. Those – quote, un-quote – tricep extensions you did upstairs are what’s embarrassing you. Bench presses! Now!

CHRISTOPHER: OK. So obviously the point is to lie down with my back flat on the bench.

ADAM: NO!

******THIS IS THE ACTUAL FITNESS PART OF THIS POST************

ADAM: No. You do not lie with your back pressed flat to the bench during a bench press. In fact, you should have a slight arch to your upper back, and your chest should be slightly raised. Both of your feet should be planted squarely on the floor on either side of the bench so you can drive through them while you press the bar upward and retract it smoothly and with control. The most important thing to remember about all chest exercises is that if they’re done incorrectly, the stress will be felt in your shoulders and not in your chest. Bad form will result in overdeveloped shoulders and minimal muscle growth in your pectorals. So with each bench press, make sure your upper back is slightly arched, your chest slightly raised and you can actually feel your chest muscles squeezing together as you extend and retract.

*****THIS IS THE END OF THE ACTUAL FITNESS PART OF THIS POST******

CHRISTOPHER: Thanks, Adam. I think that will really helpful to the five people who read this post for the fitness portion.

ADAM: It might also be helpful to my client who’s always bitching about how he doesn’t have a big chest.

CHRISTOPHER: That girl from GLEE?

ADAM: Leave Jenna out of this.

CHRISTOPHER: Wait. You’re talking about me? You said it’s hard for tall people to develop big chest muscles quickly.

ADAM: I said that eight years ago during our first session. Define “quickly”.

CHRISTOPHER: Since when are you such a wordsmith? And when are you going to finish that website Jenna linked to in her Seventeen Magazine article about you?

ADAM: Stop deflecting. You still haven’t done a bench press.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh, yeah. Give me some incentive. What will I look like if I do?

ADAM: Well, now that you mention it….

 

Adam Sprein, Trainer to the Stars

CHRISTOPHER: Are you the guy on the left or the guy on the right?

ADAM: I’m leaving. The treadmills are over there.

Filed Under: Blog

Official Announcement: THE VINES, October 21st from 47North

June 30, 2014 by Christopher Rice 1 Comment

THE VINES Final Cover

47North Acquires Four Books from New York Times Best-selling Author and Bram Stoker Award Nominee Christopher Rice

 

Original supernatural thriller, The Vines, and three additional novels to publish in October 2014

(PRE-ORDER Now!)

 

SEATTLE—June 30, 2014—Today, Amazon Publishing and 47North announced the acquisition of The Vines, an original supernatural thriller, and three additional novels from New York Times best-selling and award-winning novelist Christopher Rice. Set outside New Orleans, The Vines is a dark, elegant, southern gothic thriller about a young woman who brings to life a vengeful force from beneath her family’s antebellum plantation home, and the lives left shattered in its wake. The Vines will publish in Kindle, print, and audio editions on October 21, 2014, while new editions of three of Rice’s previously published New York Times best-selling novels (A Density of Souls, The Snow Garden, and Light Before Day) will release with new covers in November 2014. The deal was made by Lynn Nesbitt of Janklow & Nesbit Associates and Christine Cuddy of Kleinberg, Lange, Cuddy & Carlo LLP.

 

“I was thrilled with the positive response to my first supernatural thriller, The Heavens Rise, last year. Being nominated for Bram Stoker Award alongside Stephen King is one of the happiest memories of my life, and it left me eager to return to the Deep South with another atmospheric and scary thriller,” said Christopher Rice. “To say I’m just excited about teaming with the incredibly smart and innovative group at 47North would be a massive understatement indeed.”

 

Rice is the author of four New York Times best-selling thrillers, has received a Lambda Literary Award, and been named one of People’sSexiest Men Alive. He is also the host of the popular live Internet radio show and podcast “The Dinner Party Show,” with his best friend and co-host Eric Shaw Quinn. His most recent novel, The Heavens Rise, was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novel, and praised by Publishers Weekly (starred review) as “a masterful coming-of-age novel…Rice’s characters are complex and real, his dialogue pitch-perfect, and his writing intelligent and strong.”

 

“The Vines is a terrific novel, a dark, supernatural tale full of arresting action, a deep sense of antebellum history, dramatic twists, and a gorgeous ending,” said Jason Kirk, Senior Editor at 47North. “Christopher Rice is a natural fit for 47North, and we jumped at the chance to team with him. His fans will love his new novel, and we’re excited to help continue to build his audience, particularly in digital.”

Filed Under: Blog

Every Paradise Has Its Amazing Paperback Cover From The 80’s*

April 12, 2014 by Christopher Rice 3 Comments

photo

This week, the arrival of this small, slightly tattered paperback was heralded with great fanfare around these parts, if by fanfare, you mean yelling at the cats to get out from underfoot as I tore the package open in a frenzy while walking into the kitchen. Here are the reasons why:

1. How freaking amazing is this cover? Remember? Remember when books had covers like this? When the characters inside your favorite steamy novel were brought to life with the wild sense of color and coy literalism typically attributed to artists like Patrick Nagel. Of course, this was a pre-Photo Shop era – the mid 80’s – when most movie posters looked like this!

Goonies-poster

When being a celebrity meant you had the privilege of routinely being transformed into a giant plasticine version of yourself so flawless and blemish-free, it looked as if raindrops could pool atop the high, prominent cheekbones of your painted likeness for a full five minutes before their combined weight would cause them to slide down the sides of your face in shiny, unabsorbed rivers. But on the covers of mass market paperbacks, this treatment was given to gorgeous, imaginary people in lavish and preposterous circumstances, and that makes it all the more wonderful and delicious and reminiscent of a time when the best desk phones were advertised as having “9 foot long curly handset chords!”

2. RETURN TO EDEN was the basis for one of the first “epic, sweeping, sprawling, sensuous” television mini-series I can remember watching with my family (i.e. my mother, after my father politely left the room to go worry about something while he sketched.)  The plot in a nutshell: A wealthy heiress falls in love with and marries a handsome tennis pro. In order to get her fortune, the tennis pro feeds the heiress to a bunch of crocodiles. Unbeknownst to him, the crocodiles fail to complete the task. (Are Australian crocodiles unionized? Maybe they didn’t get paid.) And theeeeennn, wealthy heiress survives, and thanks to the dutiful (and absolutely ridiculous and totally impossible but totally amazing) work of a sympathetic plastic surgeon, is completly transformed into a beauty so beautiful she can bring about an end to all treacherous beauties. Hence, the return to Eden part of RETURN TO EDEN.

3. The scene in which one of Eden’s housekeepers realizes the heiress has returned with a new face and a new body (and in the mini-series version, a new actress) affected me so deeply I routinely act it out in my living room, which is challenging because it involves a horse. (I refuse to write about it  until I have a chance to read (and see) it again. I want to make sure I didn’t imagine it. Maybe it was a moose instead of a horse. I don’t know. Do they have mooses in Australia? And what’s the plural of moose? Moosi? Meese**?)

4. Rosalind Miles, the novel’s author, appears to be, or at least believes herself to be,  a more “serious novelist” now, as evidenced by her website, which includes one of the longest and most detailed author bios I’ve ever seen, and which also makes clear that her Australian Quartet, of which RETURN TO EDEN is the first hefty installment, are the only four of her books which are currently out of print (and by print, I also mean e-book editions.) Hence, this slightly browned used paperback I had to order from Barry’s Bargain Bin.

*If you’re scratching your head over the title of this post, allow me to explain. The subheading on the back of the book reads, “Every paradise has its serpent..” And I’d post a picture of it but I have to actually go work on writing that might get me a paycheck now.

**This joke is actually stolen from VICE VERSA, a 1988 comedy in which Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage play a father and son who switch places. While also made in the 80’s, it is not anywhere near as fun and amazing as RETURN TO EDEN as there are no scenes involving crocodiles and plastic surgeons.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blog, Books, Personal Rants, Stuff I Love Tagged With: Australia, Australian Quartet, Christopher Rice, crocodiles, plastic surgeons, Return To Eden, revenge, Rosalind Miles

(UPDATED) What We’re Really Asking For When We Ask For Writing Advice (*includes picture of hot guy(s))

April 9, 2014 by Christopher Rice 33 Comments

My previous (and first) blog post was about how I was eleven years late in starting a blog. So I thought it was only fitting that my second blog post be a contribution to a trend I’m equally late for. A List Of Self Serving Pieces Of Writing Advice That Makes Me Look Super Published And Important And Like A Real Author This Jerk Might Represent. 

OK. I’m not just equally late for this task. This is a storied, venerated tradition, dating back to an era when women were forced to write their M/M erotica on clay tablets and Stephen King was but a glimmer in Cthullu’s sixth or seventh eye. So technically, I’m about 600 years late for this task, not 11. (And technically, writers, I’m supposed to write out the number eleven because it’s under one hundred. See? That’s writing advice.) And to be honest, I get blocked whenever I try to come up with a list like this because there are so many other lists that seem sorta related that I’d rather come up with first. Like a list of colleagues who were epically self-important douchebags on panels when someone asked them for broadbrush writing advice. Or a list of writing professors who work tirelessly to piss on the dreams of their most eccentric students, only to watch them grow up to be someone like this guy (who happens to be God, and if you disagree with me get the hell off my blog because you’ll never be a real writer.)

Before I go any further, let me bottom line a few things for those of you who won’t have the patience for all the jokes I’ve stuffed into the following paragraphs. It’s very to hard to make a practical and pragmatic list of writing tips because when people ask for writing advice, they’re usually asking two questions – 1. What will make me a “real writer”? and 2. What will make me “a success”? Unfortunately, it’s impossible for any writer to answer either of these questions, ever, under any circumstances, especially if the person asking is someone the writer doesn’t know very well.

No one can tell you what it takes to be a “real writer” because no one knows what a “real writer” is. What I am sure of is this: the people who are usually falling over themselves to define the term “real writer” are usually not folks the majority of people would consider “real writers”. Fire-breathing professors who’ve never tackled long form fiction but have intractable opinions about how to do it, “writing coaches” – what are those? – and “developmental editors” with suspect resumes and manipulative methods for breeding a sense of dependency in fledgling writers because they’re planning to to invoice them a whole bunch. And yes, I know. I’m singling out the bad apples from larger groups with members who can, in many cases, be very helpful to a writer’s process. But the one type of rot these bad apples all have in common is they want to tell you what a “real writer” is.

And no one can tell you how to be a successful writer either, because that assumes there’s a fixed, universal definition of success. Actually, they’re about a dozen, ranging from the spiritual to the commercial, and it’s your responsibility to find the definition that clicks easily into place within your soul. For me, it’s this. My goal is to support myself with my writing so that I can stop asking my mother to cover my bills with the proceeds from her S & M erotica.

Just kidding. Sort of.

Actually, my personal definition of success is pretty clear. I want to sell a shitload of fucking books. I am unabashedly commercial and I am relatively shameless about marketing and promotion. My goal is to sell as many copies of what I write as possible, despite the limitations others place on my work because many of the characters are gay and as an author I have a tendency to tilt towards the very, very dark. I only believe in suffering for my art if I’m eventually going to get paid for my suffering. So in other words, I believe in suffering for my marketing.  (Which, I submit to you, is suffering for my art. But many others disagree.)

But some people don’t need this and that’s fine. You might be the writer who is perfectly content to sell a limited number of copies, earn the respect of other colleagues and critics you’ve always admired, develop a close connection with a small number of readers who were deeply impacted by your book, and so on. And this is wonderful and fine and no one should judge you for it, including me. But it’s just one more reason why it’s impossible for most writers to answer the questions people are really asking (or not asking directly) when they ask for advice about writing.

But back to see these big shaming lists of douchebags I somehow never get around to writing…

For starters,  if another writer wrote a list of Colleagues Who Have Been The Biggest Douchebags On Panels, there’s a very good chance I’d end up on it, especially if that writer had ever been on a panel with me. (There’s not a video of what I’m about to describe so I’ll just link to this instead because most literary panels are just like this.) I had my own…how shall we put it?…moment on a panel at Bouchercon a few years back. Somebody asked me to describe the difference between genre and literary fiction and I described literary fiction thusly: “Nothing happens for three hundred pages and then, at the very end, there’s a catastrophic turn of events from which no one will recover.” One of my fellow panelists responded, with the cocked head and narrowed eyes one typically reserves for a barfing baby they’ve just spotted on the other side of a crowded restaurant, “Perhaps we shouldn’t speak of them the way they speak of us,” and I responded by mumbling something semi-defensive about how professors in masters programs were actively discouraging their students from pursuing genre material which was sort of true but not really relevant and anyway…

The point is, if you’re going to pursue this writing life, get used to panels. Get used to lots and lots of panels. In the mystery world, the topics can get super fun. Like PASTRY CHEFS: CULINARY WIZARDS OR UNDER-APPRECIATED SLEUTHS? and SETTING: ARE WE SICK OF TALKING ABOUT IT YET?

That’s actually not the point. The point is —  oh my God! Has the video for Aqua’s Barbie Girl really been viewed over 110 million times? No, that’s not point either. It’s true, sadly, but not the point.

The point! Panels open the door to posturing and pretentiousness the same way a blog does, the same way doling out writing advice does And I’m just as guilty of posturing and pretentiousness in this area as anyone else. (That’s writing advice numbers 203 and 204, by the way.  I’m forgoing a numbered list here, folks, but if you go back through the above with a fine-tooth comb you’ll uncover over 200 pieces of writing advice. For free!)

There’s really only one thing all writers have in common; their absolute, stone-cold conviction that eighty percent of the other writers on earth are absolute hacks who don’t deserve to live. The ability of most writers to examine other successful writers in objective terms that reach beyond their own competitiveness and insecurity is usually very, very low. (Me, included. Don’t get me started on the catastrophe that was THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. I don’t care if he’s dead.) And that’s why it’s almost impossible for writers who have reached a certain level of sales to articulate a coherent behavioral path towards success for the emerging writer; they believe, on a fundamental level, that their colleagues aren’t doing as good a job as they are. And there’s very little that will dissuade them of this. The notable exception being if one of the other writers they can’t stand suddenly gives them a kick-ass blurb. Or sleeps with them.

Speaking of sleeping with people, isn’t Logan Lerman (a.k.a Percy Jackson) really cute? He knows this post is long but he’d like you to keep reading. I have it on good authority.

Logan-Lerman

Thanks, Logan. Call me if you ever want writing advice.

Anyway, competitiveness between writers goes beyond the old literary cliche that says if you’re a bestseller, you’re a sell out. This is bullshit shoveled mostly by people who are deeply frustrated the type of fiction they’re moved by doesn’t enjoy a greater share of the marketplace. As one accomplished editor once assured me, the idea that a writer like Mary Higgins Clark is secretly sitting on her own version of MOBY DICK while churning out crowd-pleasing romantic suspense year after year is a cozy lie. “Literary” novelists who feel deeply marginalized by the marketplace often indulge the opiatic fantasy that Mary Higgins Clark and her ilk truly want to write like them but they just don’t have the guts to get paid less. This is nonsense but it brings me to the only quality I see all financially successful writers as having in common; they write what they truly enjoy writing and this allows them to pursue their craft in an almost frenzied and compulsive way. (Cases in point: Stephen King’s 2,000 words a day, every day. The average output of a romance novelist, which in this new digital age, is expected to be somewhere around 6,546,789 novels and novellas a month. You can’t write like that, with that kind of output, unless you’re deeply enamored with the type of material you’re writing.)

And now I’m going to come dangerously close to doing what I just condemned hacks and literary snake-oil salespersons for doing. While I’m not going to tell you what a real writer is, I am going to identify the one quality that indicates someone will never reach any level of success as a writer.

They won’t fucking write.

Nine times out of ten, when a friend asks for my advice on writing,  I’m usually floored by the request because the person in question has never said one word to me about books, mine or their own. And more often than not, we’ve barely taken our first sip of Earl Grey before they start rattling off what sounds suspiciously like a series of complaints, as if somehow over the years I’ve needled them into broaching this subject with me and the talk we’re about to have is going to be serious in tone and include multiple mentions of personal boundaries. They’re convinced that writing is really just being a good daydreamer. Coming up with “good ideas” is something they do all the time. But the writing part seems really, really hard and cumbersome and they want to know if  I have a secret weapon, like a prescription version of speed that won’t make them rend their garments or rewire the television, or maybe a scented candle that will relax them into unleashing their inner novel. 

What they’re really saying is, “Convince me. Convince me to join your club. I know I’m good enough. I mean, it’s really just making stuff up, right?  But please, writer person, tell me why it’s worth my time. There’s just so much typing and my fingers get sore!”

My answer is a polite version of this: “If someone needs to convince you to do this, then this is not for you.”

Because there’s really only one ingredient a writer needs to have a shot at achieving any version of success in this field.

Obsession. That’s it. That’s my one piece of writing advice. Be obsessed.

Should you memorize Strunk & White?  Should you indie publish or send query agents to letters? Should you join a writer’s group or poison one? Hell, I don’t know. And honestly, I can’t speak to many of those issues because I was published when I was and the way I was because I was Anne Rice’s son. But what I can speak to is how to cultivate the endurance you need to have a shot at reaching your personal definition of success. What I can speak to is how you pick yourself back up and brush yourself off after a career-endangering sales drop like THE MOONLIT EARTH.

Obsession.

No. This does not mean you should be pumping out 10,000 words a day every day or else you’re not a real writer. Instead, make sure your bookshelves, digital and/or physical, are overloaded with books about the topics, cities, crimes and historical figures you want to write about. Make no apologies for the fact that part of you is always dancing in your dreamworld and looking for ways to externalize it through words.

And ask yourself this. If the act of putting pen to paper, or fingers to keys, destroys your fantasy life instead of invigorating it, then maybe daydreaming really isn’t enough to be a writer and you should  try a paintbrush. Or some charcoal. Because when people say to me, “I don’t know how you write you all those books!”, I respond with, “I can’t not write those books!” But I don’t mean in it in a self important or grandiose kind of way. What I’m trying to tell them is, “HELP! I HATE REALITY SO MUCH I CAN’T STOP TRYING TO GIVE IT DIFFERENT ENDINGS. DO I NEED A HOBBY? DO YOU KNOW ANY KNITTING CLUBS???”

Be obsessed. If those two simple words strike you as  melodramatic and pretentious, just set them to the tune of this song when you hear them in your head. You’ll sell like Mary Higgins Clark. Promise.

(UPDATE) Social media being what it is, there was an immediate response to this blog post as soon as I shared the link. One of the comments went something like this. “We go to your mother for advice. We go to you for something to look at.” So I responded with this:

Photo on 4-9-14 at 1.14 PM #5

In keeping with the overall theme of advice giving, another user suggested my response wasn’t witty enough. (He was either a “user” or a slinky back cat with amazing computer skills, depending upon the accuracy of his profile photo.) At any rate, I amended my response as follows:

Photo on 4-9-14 at 1.20 PM #3

See? Anyone can be a real writer*.

(*Interesting side note. Another Facebook follower was quite amused to see I’d closed the door in between taking the the first and second shot, given that I planned on posting the end result on a very public Facebook profile. Which brings to mind another key element of becoming a successful writer most people overlook – the lighting.)

UPDATE UPDATE: As you can see from the comments, one of the “users” I referred to is actually named Brandon and he was only teasing me and we’ve worked things out. (I hope he knows I was only teasing when I offered to let him nurse from me like a little baby. Isn’t social media fun?)

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blog, Books, The Moonlit Earth, The Writing Life Tagged With: Anne Rice, Christopher Rice, Logan Lerman, Mary Higgins Clark, Stephen King, writers, writing advice

11 Years Late* (*includes a picture of a hot guy)

April 7, 2014 by Christopher Rice 16 Comments

Four score and seven versions of Windows ago, just about everyone I knew was starting a blog and I was the guy on the sidelines, not taking them very seriously, choosing instead to focus on rageful anonymous Amazon reviews of my first few novels because I was in a period of my life when bathing myself in criticism from people I hadn’t met – people who, in their anonymity, could be transmogrified into every bully or ex-boyfriend who haunted my obsessive late night thoughts – made me feel like a real artist. One guy in particular, a friend and colleague, for whom I’d worked briefly at a now defunct gay men’s lifestyle magazine, kept going on and on about this strange Internet project that managed to combine photographs with his thoughts on the latest headlines and at the time it all seemed very niche and weird and like a giant distraction from the noble goal of writing books in which you turn the hot bartender you’re crushing on into a highly trained assassin. Well, now my friend’s weird Internet thing is this and he’s this. (And if it seems like I’m going crazy with the hyperlinks in this entry, you are right because, as this post will hopefully make clear, I am enjoying writing my first blog entry even though I’m about eleven years behind the curve.)

But despite my seemingly literate objections to the whole blogging thing – I had books to write, godammit, and I was also a heavy smoker and now that I’ve quit I can see in retrospect how much time it truly took to be a heavy smoker – there was actually a very simple and unflattering reason I didn’t want to join in. I simply couldn’t stand it when people disagreed with me. Really. I couldn’t. I outline (i.e. inadvertently reveal) these feelings in more detail in this recent piece, which I now realize was a blog entry, albeit on a blog owned by Arianna Huffington.  Here’s a clip:

I wrote a regular column for The Advocate for several years, doing my best to express contrarian and well-reasoned arguments about disturbing trends inside the community. Instead of a comments section, we had letters to the editor, where I was met toe-to-toe by such impassioned arguments as, “That column was crap!” from Luther S. in Sioux City, or, “Christopher Rice is a narcissist. Why is he still talking?” from Betty M. in Seattle. They weren’t technically anonymous like the Internet commenters of today, but it wasn’t like you could just walk into your editor’s office and say, “Could you give me the contact information for Betty M. from Seattle so I can throw a cup of my own urine at her?” The upside to the anonymity thing, though, is that writers can delude themselves into believing a jealous bitter ex wrote every negative word posted about them online.

Then social media happened. And unlike the blogging craze of the early 00’s, nothing about the social media craze felt optional for writers. So it was a good thing that, after avoiding Friendster, and for the most part, My Space (which, if you don’t remember, was in it’s final days little more than a maddening loop of blaring pop songs that would start roaring out of your computer’s speakers whenever you opened someone’s profile, causing you to grope for your computer’s volume control like Sigourney Weaver opening the airlock at the end of ALIENS), I had accidentally wandered onto Facebook when the site was in its infancy and become hopelessly ensnared. You see, the story goes something like this. For about two months, I had been dating a guy who basically looked like this…andy-taylor.1394653961

As the picture suggests, he was too young for me. (No, this is not actually a picture of the guy I was dating. This is Andy Taylor, the porn star who should play the guy in question if anyone ever makes a porn film about the story I’m about to tell, which they won’t because the story only involves sex in the past tense and it’s boring.) Anyway, the guy was technically too young for me, but because I’ve always had what people call an “old soul” (which means I am a neurotic hypochondriac who’d rather sit on the phone all night with my best friend Eric Shaw Quinn than visit what the other kids call a “club”) I usually ignored this whole “too young for you” business. From the age of seven on everyone felt too young for me. (Now I pay attention because I’m 36, which in the eyes of most West Hollywood residents, means I’m this.) Anyway, the guy dumped me. Hard. But a few days before, when it had seemed like everything was going great, he’d cheerfully informed me that he’d just opened a Facebook account and listed me as his favorite writer. So naturally, in my post-break up miasma of feelings (translation: unrequited horniness) I decided the best course of action was to go explore this Facebook business and see if the little heartbreaker had deleted me from his “favorite writers” section. Because if he hadn’t, clearly we we’re going to get back together/ have sex again.

Big mistake. For one, he had deleted me. (Small consolation. No one replaced me in his ‘favorite writer’ category. He was the kind of guy who no longer felt compelled to pretend he enjoyed writers after he stopped dating one. Welcome to L.A., kids) And two, Facebook somehow accessed my address book and alerted everyone I’d ever met or shaken hands with or crossed the street to avoid talking to that I had launched a Facebook profile. It was an experience similar to peering through your ex’s bedroom window only to have someone tap you on the shoulder and tell you there’s a production of Shakespeare in the park happening right behind you and everyone you know is in the audience.

So I was caught, is what I’m trying to say. Trapped, if you will. And ever since that moment, there’s been no looking back, and Facebook, and my interaction with my – ahem – rather large following there has become an entirely public experience. My posts are visible to anyone who accesses my page and everyone is allowed to comment. Except for the people I block and delete for acting like enormous, gaping assholes. My criteria for this is if I read your comment and it makes me think you’re an enormous, gaping asshole.

I could write a really long, meandering blog post about all the lessons I’ve learned on social media. Correction: I could write another really long meandering blog post about all the lessons I’ve learned on social media. But the most important one is this – important in that it freed me up to finally start a blog, 11 years late – I don’t take myself so seriously anymore. Social media has exposed me to such  a perpetual grinding wheel of hollow, manufactured outrage over mostly imagined slights in which the outraged have, in the absence of any meaningful understanding of context, endowed the outragee with a preposterous storyline based in their own deep insecurities (to say nothing of social media’s vast soup of baseless, boiling hatred from people who consider themselves revolutionaries while hiding behind indecipherable cartoon profile pics) I stopped being the person who feels personally done in by every cruel or insulting word written about them on-line. (Read that last line closely. I stopped being done in by every cruel or insulting word written about me on-line. Every other cruel and insulting word is still fair game for a total, irrational meltdown.)  That said, I still have an inclination to write sketches for my Internet radio show that play like this:

http://www.christopherricebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/0113_FAT_PROMO.mp3

But little by little, with each post, with each cavalcade of attacks from self-deluded bigots who have gone from saying homosexuality is sinful and depraved to declaring it “no big deal” and “not worth talking about”, I stopped being quite so caught up in what other people thought of me that I couldn’t allow for moderated comments on my blog.

I know.

Epic personal growth, if I do say so myself.

So all this is to say, with a stiff(er) upper lip and a thicker skin, I give to you, The Christopher Rice Blog. This will be a  special place for me to put stuff that’s way too long for Facebook and twist insignificant episodes from my life into an excuse to post pictures of  my favorite porn stars. I am a real artist, after all. What else could all those one-star reviews from “a customer” mean?

Social media has also taught me that sarcasm is an effective tool for a. battling sanctimony in others and b. battling sanctimony in myself. And it’s great for responding to bullshit. I know, I know. People dismiss sarcasm as just another form of hostility. That’s true. But I find hostility to be an effective tool for fighting hypocrisy, lies and manipulative sanctimony designed to silence people who disagree with you. Simply put, there are situations in which good manners are not called for and when plaintive calls to “rise above” are really just the pleas of those too frightened or lazy to stick up for themselves or their friends.

That said, I also still write books and I’ll be talking about them here, along with The Dinner Party Show. This is also where I’ll make clear which jokes and snappy one-liners I’ve stolen from this guy, and which enormous leaps forward in my career were largely the result of this lady. ‘Till then.

xo C

Filed Under: A Density of Souls, Blog, Books, Light Before Day, Love, Personal Rants, Sex, The Writing Life Tagged With: A Density of Souls, Andy Taylor, Andy Towle, Anne Rice, Christopher Rice, Light Before Day, The Dinner Party Show, Towleroad

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