Every writer dreams of having their book picked up by a Hollywood studio and eventually seeing their baby come to life on the big screen—or as we’re seeing more and more these days, appearing on the wide screens in our living rooms. James Patterson’s Zoo will soon join another newcomer, Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines trilogy. Of course, the odds of that happening for most writers are about the same as winning the Powerball lottery. But many bestsellers find their way to screens large and small each year with results ranging from awesome to head-scratching confusion.

I started thinking about this when CBS blasted us with a battery of promos for season 3 of Under the Dome. As a Stephen King fan I anxiously awaited the premiere of the first season and became hooked by the strange story of Chester’s Mill’s internal struggles to survive the turbulence caused by the mysterious dome, which turned the town into an artificial pressure cooker.

Not having read the book, I enjoyed the various plot twists propelling the story through season one, leaving viewers hanging and wondering if the residents of Chester’s Mill would ever get out from under the dome. I guess we’re still wondering about that.

Midway through season two, however, I feared the series had jumped the shark, moving the story from the mysterious to the ridiculous. That’s when I decided to read King’s original story. After only three or four chapters I saw significant differences between the literary version and the television series. That’s not at all unusual since books seldom make the transition to film or television intact, and when a single storyline is expanded to fill more than one season, then the original story can scarcely be seen, diminishing episode by episode like a distant figure in a rearview mirror.

I certainly knew the difference between books and movies going in, but when I read Under the Dome and learned one of the main characters in the TV series is killed off in the first few chapters of the book, and another stumbles around with a growing brain tumor for much of the book before being killed, I just couldn’t keep watching the show and set my DVR free to record other programs of interest.

Some of you will disagree with me, but I’m sure you’ve had your own disappointments because Hollywood has a way of dumbing down complex stories and characters to make them more accessible to mass audience tastes. That’s not to say that there haven’t been some outstanding successes. A few of the movies have even turned out better than the author’s original work. One that comes to mind is The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola transformed Mario Puzo’s mafia potboiler into a classic tale that grabs me every time I see it.

Another film that improved upon the original is The Shawshank Redemption, based on Stephen King’s novella, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. While King’s story was well crafted and intriguing, it was pretty much a straightforward tale of banker Andy Dufresne’s imprisonment for a double murder he didn’t commit, and how prison changed him and he in turn changed the other prisoners. Of course, there was the escape from Shawshank prison using his little rock hammer.

Writer/director Frank Darabont (who also did a masterful job adapting The Green Mile, another King prison story) added his own twists to Shawshank, and made it one of the most frequently televised movies on cable year after year, and another film I never tire of watching.

A few other good film adaptions come to mind, including The Fight Club and No Country for Old Men. On the negative side I’d point to the newest version of The Great Gatsby and The DaVinci Code as stinkers.

Television has had some recent successes adapting books. Several I particularly like include Dexter, Game of Thrones, Justified, and Sherlock.

I can think of a few more books that would make great movies, including a thriller set in the little town of Cedar Key. I think it was called Hurricane Island. Hmm, do you know any Hollywood producers?

Anyway, you’ve read my list of hits and misses, what are some of yours?

Hurricane Island has been on the market for about three months now, and it’s still drawing interest from reviewers and readers. The Florida Times Union is the latest newspaper to review my new thriller, and reviewer Tim O’Connell gave it a very good review indeed. Read the review here.

Hurricane Island is my most fast-paced story yet, with all of the major action taking place in 24 hours. With interest growing, I’ve had several successful signings and talks, including at the Barnes & Noble at St. Johns Town Center in Jacksonville, and most recently at The BookMark in Neptune Beach where a nice crowd heard me talk about the book, my writing process and answer questions. Here’s a photo from that talk. Check the Appearances page for my upcoming appearances.

I am available to speak to book clubs, libraries or other organizations needing a speaker, so please feel free to contact me at authorparkerfrancis@gmail,com.

I like to believe readers of mysteries are intelligent people with a thirst for knowledge. They expect more from their mystery novels than crime and punishment. That’s why I try to sneak in bits and pieces of the history of the area where my books are set. In Matanzas Bay readers learned about the settlement of the nation’s oldest city, and the fact that Matanzas is Spanish for “place of slaughter.”

Quint certainly had his troubles in that first book, but he managed to outlast his antagonist and lived to fight another day when I sent him to Allendale, SC to track down the “Heartthrob Bandit” in Bring Down the Furies. This book embroiled Quint (pun intended) in a town targeted by a serial arsonist, as well as a cultural war between an archaeologist and an ultra-conservative minister. Along the way, readers learned about the area’s history and how Sherman’s troops burned the original town as it stormed toward the state capitol.

My research always turns up a wealth of fascinating background material, much more than I can use if I don’t want the book to read like a history text. For instance, in Hurricane Island, which is set in Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast of Florida, I learned that the Cedar Keys were used by the Seminole Indians, also by the Spanish as a watering stop for ships returning to Spain from Mexico. And pirates like Jean Lafitte and Captain Kidd dropped by from time to time to count their stolen loot.

The US Army established a permanent base on Depot Key, later known as Atsena Otie Key, during the Second Seminole War around 1839. Led by General Zachary Taylor (history buffs will recall him as the 12th President of the United State), this became the headquarters of the Army of the South. The base, known as Cantonment Morgan, was used as a troop deployment and detention center for Seminole Indians captured during the war. It all came to an abrupt end on October 4, 1842 when a hurricane with a 27-foot storm surge crushed the Cedar Keys and wiped out Cantonment Morgan.

According to the website HurricaneCity.com, Cedar Key has been hit by 36 tropical storms and 15 hurricanes since 1870. Winds have ranged from 46 mph in a slow moving 1896 storm that killed 100 people, to a 1950 hurricane with winds of 120 mph that destroyed two-thirds of the homes on the island.

Perhaps now you can see why I titled this book Hurricane Island. You can read the first few chapters by going “inside the book” on the Amazon product page. Enjoy!

From time to time I’ve turned this blog over to a guest in order to introduce you to some of my favorite writers. Today’s guest post is an interview with Ken Pelham, one of the award-winning authors you’ll find in “The Prometheus Saga,” an anthology of short stories examining a single premise from many different angles. Ken is not only one of the authors, but the co-creator of The Alvarium Experiment, our consortium of writers, and recruited me into the hive.

Ken is the author of the thriller Place of Fear and Brigands Key. During the interview, Ken explains how The Alvarium Experiment got started, and where it’s going. Please welcome Ken Pelham.

1. What inspired you to launch/join the Alvarium Experiment?

For years, writers have been hearing, “Avoid the short story! There’s no money and no future in it! Write only novels, dammit!” But there’s been a sea change, caused by online publishing. Short is GOOD again. I’ve always loved short stories and have always wanted to be included in an anthology, so over the last year or two I’d been thinking about submitting work to an anthology somewhere.

I’d been following some of the cool things authors like Hugh Howey were espousing, taking advantage of the amazing flexibility of the Internet as a publishing platform, and it occurred to me that, heck, I didn’t need to search out a multi-author anthology, I could build my own!

I started scratching out some ideas about how it would work. I didn’t want to be “The Publisher,” responsible for everything and seeing that everyone gets paid. So I thought each author should self-publish, simultaneously, with a common premise and common brand. All for one and one for all.

I’d met Charles A. Cornell a few years ago, and had recently read his dieselpunk war novel, Dragonfly, and the related horror short story, “Die Fabrik.” From the lengths he’d gone to build a fully-illustrated universe, even inventing entirely new retro aircraft and war machines, I knew he was a guy that thinks outside the box. Way outside the box. In fact, he’s quite mad. I pitched the idea to Charles and he pounced, and over the course of a couple of weeks, we’d laid the groundwork for both The Alvarium Experiment (the writers’ consortium) and The Prometheus Saga. The next task was to trick other writers into joining.

2. What are some of the benefits and challenges of writing “into” an existing framework for Prometheus as a character? How did that shape your creative process for your story? Is it different from your usual writing process?

We wanted the Saga to be wide open, story-wise. So the challenge for Charles and I was to create a theme and character that essentially had no bounds, but made some sort of logical sense. The character has some limitations, of course. Superheroes are stupid and boring.

I think, for many authors, we already work within existing frameworks we’ve built. Doyle, for the obvious example, built his world for and around Sherlock Holmes, and played by Holmesian rules. We encouraged the Alvarium authors to incorporate their own outside projects and characters into this.

3. Tell me more about your other work(s).

I’ve built my own little universe of characters to populate my suspense fiction. They’ll continue to interact and piss each other off. Brigands Key, my first novel, zeroes in on the fictional Florida island of the same name, and the horrific events that come raining down on it. The prequel, Place of Fear, takes my BK protagonist, Dr. Carson Grant, and plunks him down in the middle of the Guatemalan rainforest. You can see why he’s developed a reputation for surliness. Both of these novels won first-place in the Royal Palm Literary Awards, I’m happy to say.

Brigands Key, the island, kind of got under my skin. So after finishing the novel, I wrote three short stories, “Tales of Old Brigands Key,” set in the past. I have no doubt I’ll write about that island’s dubious and unsavory past again. I released a pair of short writers’ guidebooks in 2014, one on viewpoint and the other on building suspense.

4. Tell me more about your short story in The Prometheus Saga. Why did you pick that episode in history?

Long answer: “First World War” involves our Prometheus very early in life, 40,000 years ago, give or take a few days. This gave me a chance to write about the human condition of today through the lens of our Ice Age ancestors. Human evolution is a complex story, and people today seemed surprised to learn that multiple species of hominids existed simultaneously on Earth at that time. I’m not talking about different races; I’m talking actual different species. And yet only one survives. I doubt that the ones that disappeared did so willingly.

Short answer: I like prehistoric stuff, what with the cavemen and all.

5. What are your writing plans for 2015? What does the new year hold in store for you?

Prometheus, obviously. Beyond that, I’ll continue work on my third novel (another Carson Grant thriller), and possibly release a nonfiction book about suspense fiction. The audiobook edition of Brigands Key will be out early in 2015, so I’m quite excited by that.

Following Ken and Charles’ lead, 10 other authors have rallied around “The Prometheus Saga,” and all stories go on sale tomorrow, Monday, January 26 at Amazon.com. To learn more about the authors and their stories, visit the website. And be sure to drop by for the launch party starting at noon tomorrow and chat with the authors. You’ll find the party here. And if you’re so inclined, you can find “The Strange Case of Lord Byron’s Lover” right here.

Many thanks to Ken Pelham. I hope you’ll drop by the launch party for a chat. I’ll give away a free download of my Matanzas Bay audiobook, so come on down.

Most of us know that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, thought to be the very first science fiction novel. The book was published in 1818, and quickly became a cult classic. But did you know that between 1910 and 1994 there were more than 70 major feature films made based either directly or indirectly on Shelley’s legendary character? You’ve probably seen some of them including, Young Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, but how many of us are familiar with Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster? Or Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie? I kid you not.

My Frankenstein mania came to a head when I was asked to be part of The Alvarium Experiment, which I blogged about last month. Fourteen award-winning authors riffing on a common theme about an alien race visiting earth 40,000 years ago, and leaving behind a human-like probe to keep track of the progress of the crude pre-historic creatures that were our ancestors. Each author had  the freedom to place their story anywhere in that time span up to the present, using the “Prometheus” probe as one of the characters. Maybe because I tend to take things more literally than other people (just ask my wife), I thought about Mary Shelley and her famous story, which is titled Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.

This led me to dig into the circumstances surrounding how Ms. Shelley came to write Frankenstein. Amazingly, there was a wealth of historical information online about Mary, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their holiday on Lake Geneva with Lord Byron which over many a glass of wine resulted in her story. The meeting of these literary giants was memorable in many ways, and the idea for my story soon blossomed into a fascinating tale I titled The Strange Case of Lord Byron’s Lover.

Mary and Percy were not married at the time, though she’d taken to calling herself Mary Shelley, and they were married about six months after that June 1816 gathering at Byron’s Villa Diodati. She was 18 at the time, and quite a progressive woman considering this was the Victorian Age. Here’s one of the many portraits floating about the Internet of young Mary Shelley.

The Strange Case of Lord Byron’s Lover is told in Mary’s voice as she writes in her journal about some rather mystifying events which took place that summer. This is how the story begins:

My memory isn’t what it once was, but my past is written large within these pages. I beg you to indulge me as I recount a series of perplexing events occurring both before and after I wrote the Gothic opus for which I am known. My work achieved popular success, and even the indomitable Sir Walter Scott congratulated me for my “original genius and power of expression.”

            However, lest you believe the story I’m about to share in the final pages of my journal is a prideful, self-congratulatory boast, let me assure you that I, Mary Shelley, have a far stranger tale to tell than the man-made monster of my fiction. And like the creature dredged from my nightmares, these events haunt me to this day.

The story is over 9,000 words in length and will be released for only $0.99 as a Kindle ebook, as will all 14 stories in the collection. Each story will have its own cover created by one of the authors, the singularly talented Charles Cornell. Here’s a sneak peek at the cover so you’ll know what to look for when you search for the story on Amazon.com next month.

Until then, here’s wishing everyone the very merriest of Christmases, the happiest of Hanukkahs,  best wishes for us all for a more peaceful 2015, and may all of your monsters be of the literary variety.

There’s a new reading experience on the horizon. We call it The Alvarium Experiment. An alvarium is a beehive, a colony working toward a common goal. In this case, the goal isn’t sweet honey, but an anthology, a collection of stories built around a common theme.

The stories will begin rolling out near the end of January, 2015, so it’s a bit premature to lift the curtain on all the innovative details. What I can tell you is that I’m excited to be one of 14 award-winning authors selected to participate in this anthology. And when I say award-winning, I mean Award-Winning. We’ve calculated that among the 14 authors we’ve been the recipients of 64 writing awards. That’s an amazing total, but you wouldn’t expect any less from these outstanding writers.

The stories will span many genres, settings, and time periods. I’ve just completed my story, a 34-page mystery in which you’ll learn the secret behind … Sorry, I almost let the cat out of the bag.

Stay tuned for the rest of the story, and mark your calendar for January when these tales begin flying out of the beehive onto an electronic device near you. In the meantime, if you want a taste of my short story writing, some of them award-winning, check out my collection of dark tales titled Ghostly Whispers, Secret Voices. At $1.99, it offers hours of good reading.

For beginning writers feeling overwhelmed at the thought of writing a novel, here’s some advice I once gave to my sons when they faced the dreaded SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT.

My two sons were nothing like that teen prodigy who invented a revolutionary pancreatic cancer detection tool, but they grew into clever, creative men. There were times though, when I wondered if they’d ever make it past the sixth grade. This was driven home like a sledgehammer to the kneecap when we were faced with the one school assignment every parent has come to dread. I’m referring to a fiendish exercise that stretched parental emotional stability to the breaking point. You know it as the Science Fair Project, a rite of passage in which science teachers encourage their students to expand their minds and test the limits of endurance for their parents.

I’m not sure how it worked in your house, but our oldest son waited until Friday evening to tell us his project was due on Monday. Which meant the weekend was lost in a frenzy of poster boards, Magic Markers, clipping and pasting, and creative plagiarism.

After enduring this painful process with Number One Son, I was determined not to repeat it with his younger brother when he entered the sixth grade. So when he told us his project was on the fungi and mosses of NE Florida, I asked him how much research he’d done.

“Research?” he repeated, looking at me as though I was quacking like a duck.

“Yes, research,” I answered. “We have a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and a very good library in the neighborhood.”

He continued to stare at me until I thought maybe I was quacking like a duck.

“Also,” I added, “if you walk outside and look at all the trees, you’ll find dozens of examples of fungi and mosses in your own backyard.”

His eyes began to mist as his gaze shifted from me to the bookcase where the encyclopedias were gathering dust on the bottom shelf, and finally out the window where a huge water oak festooned with Spanish moss shaded the backyard so thoroughly no grass would ever grow beneath its mighty branches.

“But … but,” he stammered. “Where do I start?”

I looked down at my son, the child we’d loved and nurtured for over twelve years, and said simply, “Take it one moss at a time.”

This little snippet of  family history came back to me when I recently picked up my well-worn copy of bird by bird, Anne Lamott’s classic book on writing. I believe this was the very first writing book I ever purchased. The pages are yellowing and brittle, but as I reread her deeply personal and humorous insights into the writing life, all the reasons why I wanted to be a writer came flooding back. It’s not about becoming famous and rich. Well, maybe it starts that way until we realize few writers attain such heights. Yet, we keep at it mainly because we don’t have a choice, and the writing becomes a goal in itself.

The title of Lamott’s book comes from a story she tells about her brother’s school assignment on birds. Like our son’s fungi and moss project, her brother was overwhelmed about how to tackle such an all-encompassing task as cataloguing the avian world. Her father stepped in, putting an arm around his son’s shoulder, and told him, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Lamott tells the story to illustrate how writers, particularly beginning writers, panic when they think about writing a 300-page book. The task does appear to be overwhelming, akin to building a skyscraper, a seemingly magical feat to the rubberneckers watching through the fence.

E. L. Doctorow once said, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make it the whole trip that way.” My guess is Mr. Doctorow is a seat-of-the-pants writer who doesn’t need to know the route his story is taking or his final destination. That’s one way of writing. The other method is outlining, which I’d recommend for beginning writers who can use a roadmap to help guide them from the beginning to the end of their writing journey.

But let’s go back to the bird by bird anecdote, and my advice to my son about his mossy science fair project. To keep from feeling overwhelmed, break it into bite-size chunks. Lamott writes that she keeps a one-inch picture frame on her desk to remind her to write only as much as she can see through the frame. “Short assignments,” she calls them. That way, even if you’re writing a historical saga spanning three generations, you can build up to it by giving yourself a short assignment: a single page. Maybe even a paragraph. Write just those few feet you can see with the headlights: a description of the charter fishing boat your protagonist owns; the swell of the ocean during a storm; how your character feels when she walks into the room and sees the family dog and her child curled up together on the couch.

Starting with short assignments provides confidence and a springboard to longer assignments. The words will surely flow, and pages will grow into chapters. Before you know it you will have completed the first draft of your Magnus opus. Of course, you know what they say about first drafts. Lamott even has a chapter titled “Shitty First Drafts,” acknowledging that all good writers spin out first drafts of poor quality. “This is how they end up with good second drafts, and terrific third drafts,” she says.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we. For now, let’s concentrate on the short assignment. Take it one moss at a time.

From time to time, I like to introduce my readers to fellow mystery writers as guest bloggers. I met JC Gatlin at a writer’s conference several years back. JC lives in Tampa, and has written two mystery-suspense novels, The Designated Survivor and Prey of Desire. He also maintains his own blog about the art  of spinning nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat mysteries at www.jcgatlin.com. I want to thank him for exchanging blog posts with me (you can read mine by clicking here), and providing writers with some excellent advice on how to kill your novel.

Want to kill your novel? Give it a weak opening

A weak opening is a novel killer. And, there are quite a few suspects standing in the line-up.

The first in line is a serious, serial novel killer: the clichéd “starting with a dream.” It seems like a good thing — kicking the story off in high gear with some dramatic scene that engages the reader, or a daring action scene that has the reader on the edge of his seat. Then the character wakes up and we realize it was all just a dream. This culprit really only serves one purpose and that’s to trick and aggravate your reader.

Next in the line-up is another cliché that describes someone getting out of his car in the first sentence of the book. It’s obvious why this novel killer appears to be helpful and serving to the plot: the main character and the reader are arriving at both the scene and in the story together. There’s action happening, which is also a good thing. Unfortunately, it’s been done too many times and some agents and editors will actually decline a book based on that opening. Why take the risk when the heart of te scene – and probably a great opening line – is just a few paragraphs away?

The third novel killer in the line-up is the lengthy description of the location and scenery. The hazelnut hues of the carpet and the dust aintings of various family members hanging on the wall or the sun peeking through gathering white clouds above the lush forest of majestic pine tres may be pretty sentences and provide many details that you find interesting, but it’s not necessarily interesting to your reader. Scenery description must play hand-in-hand with action and dialogue. It should never stand alone as the opening paragraph(s) of your novel.

The fourth killer is a tricky one, because – like the femme fatale who plays both sides of the law – sometimes it works with the author and sometimes it works against. This deadly tightrope is known as “opening with dialogue.” Strong, dramatic dialogue can be engaging, provide a shocking and memorable first line, and swiftly move the reader from the opening line into the opening scene. It can be a powerful ally. However, be warned. If not used correctly and handled with the utmost care, it will drop the reader into the middle of a muddled, confusing conversation. A confused reader who doesn’t understand who is talking and what they’re talking about will close the book faster than a lid on a coffin, and *BAG* the book is dead.

Finally, in this line up, we have the worst offender to open any book. This is the novel killer that spells certain doom, and that’s “The Boring Opening.” This culprit comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, including the lengthy back-story, a history lesson about the time period or the location, a flashback or a character biography. Authors generally fall into this trap because they want to provide information that they feel is pertinent to the story. They’re attempting to set it up, and dumping loads of information in the process. And that’s exactly what it is – a process. It’s often the result of hours of painstaking research or worldbuilding on the author’s part. It’s good stuff – to the author – and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Cut it from the opening and skip to the chase.

The opening must hook the reader. It must start with something happening. That doesn’t mean James Bond-style adventure. Nothing has to blow up. It simply means it must be interesting and entertaining to the reader.

The sun peeking through gathering clouds? Boring! A diatribe of the sleuth’s grandparents arriving in America in 1812? Tedious! Recognize these five culprits in the line-up and avoid them as you’re writing. Their job is to kill your novel.