Nobody Move, this is a review: Chasin' the Wind

For anyone who has visited Key West, or any Caribbean island, the first thing they notice is a phenomenon known as ‘island time’. Things travel at their own pace. If a beer takes 10 minutes to get to you, so be it. If you have to wait in line 15 minutes while the clerk and a shopper chat, life goes on. What visitors don’t realize is that ‘island time’ is just one outward sign of an entire lifestyle which is totally foreign to most Americans and Europeans. While non-islanders see it as rudeness and slothfulness, locals wonder what all the rush and demands are.

Michael Haskins gives us a glimpse of ‘island time’ and island life in his debut novel, CHASIN’ THE WIND, which is set in and around Key West’s ‘Old Town’. With ‘Mad Mick’ Murphy, a freelance journalist, as our tour guide, we are exposed to the sultry lazy days and the laid-back bar hopping island nights that most of us secretly envy. One would almost expect Hemingway to walk through the door and start an argument at the bar.

Mick, who has a supposedly violent past, has spent most of his career writing about Central and South American foreign affairs. He has made Key West his hermitage from the ghosts of his former life in California when he is suddenly confronted with violence and the need for revenge upon discovering the murder of one of his sailing buddies. Haskins takes us on a wild-wind journey of inept local police, mysterious agents from competing ‘agencies’, Cuban espionage and soulless murderers. The story rushes you along the surface so fast you think you are sailing on the Gulf Stream.

The downside to this is that, because CHASIN’ THE WIND is a thriller, Haskins gives the novel the feeling of a New York minute. Mick Murphy is someone you want to get to know, someone you want to relate with; however, we are never really given the chance.

The end of CHASIN’ THE WIND has sequel stamped all over it, and I really hope that that is true. Michael Haskins has the wonderful ability to evoke the sights and smells of the island out of thin air, and it doesn’t hurt that he has Mick drinking Jamesons like most of us drink water. Haskins just needs to give us the same feeling for his characters, and to let the ‘Mad Mick’ Murphy series find some island time, so we can get to know the characters, their interconnections, and the plots better. – Josh Schrank

Posted by Declan Burke, May 31, 2008, at 12:13 AM http://www.crimealwayspays.blogspot.com/

Michelle Gagnon and I will sign at the Mystery Bookstore in LA

On the weekend, Bobby McCue from the Los Angeles Mystery Bookstore called and set a time for my July 19th signing, 2 p.m., and asked if I'd mind sharing the time slot with California writer Michelle Gagnon. I am so honored to be signing in one of LA’s oldest and most prestigious bookstores that I would sign with the devil, just to be included.

Well, I Googled Michelle (and you should too) and found a very attractive young lady and, if reviews are any way to judge, talented too! I am glad she’s not the devil, because I would be happy to sign with her anywhere, any day! That's Michelle to the right, and below is a quote from her webpage:

“Michelle Gagnon is a former modern dancer, dog walker, bartender, freelance journalist, personal trainer, model, and Russian supper club performer. To the delight of her parents, she eventually gave up all these jobs for an infinitely more stable and lucrative position as a crime fiction writer.

“Her debut thriller THE TUNNELS was published in the United States and Australia, and was an IMBA bestseller. Described as ‘Silence of the Lambs meets The Wicker Man,’ the story involves a series of ritualized murders in the abandoned tunnel system beneath a university.

“The following book in the series, BONEYARD, depicts a cat and mouse game between dueling serial killers in the Berkshires. “Michelle is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers.

“In her spare time she runs errands and indulges a weakness for stale cinema popcorn and Hollywood blockbusters. Hopelessly addicted to Scrabulous, she's seriously considering a twelve-step program. She lives in San Francisco with her family.”

I’m reading “The Tunnels” now, but should have saved it for the flight to LA, because, I am told, you can’t be afraid of flying if something else is scaring you! How, I have to find out, did someone who looks so gentle write this book? I have to find out and it is somewhat out of jealousy!

I hope, if you are in the Los Angeles area on July 19th, you’ll stop by and say hi to both Michelle and me.

http://www.michellegagnon.com/

Book-signing tour troubles, thanks to gas prices

This weekend I will need to gas up the Miata and, for the first time, pay more than $4 per gallon! My friend Lee Fairchild is visiting from Ohio, where he said gas prices are still within the high $3 range. I assured him it would be closer to $4 by Memorial Day.

The price of gas has blown my book-signing budget. I knew going into this that signings didn’t pay for themselves in sales, so I budgeted for gas, food, and, where needed, lodging. Signings sold books but, more important, got my name out there for the next book and that was okay, while I could afford the loss. Now, I am not so sure I can.

I am still waiting to hear back from Barnes and Nobel in Ft. Myers, Florida, and Glendale, California. Ft. Myers is about five hours by car. I don’t know what that calculates in gas dollars. I am not even sure how disappointed I will be if the deal falls through and I don’t have to make the drive; that is sad.

I already have my airline ticket for Los Angeles, and three signings arranged and two more possible, so I have to make that trip. I will need to rent a car and gas in LA has been $4 for a while! I am staying with my sister, so that will help cut down expenses, but I hadn’t budgeted for all the local gas increases and that will hurt my pocketbook in LA.

I have filed an application to be in the Vero Beach Book Festival in November and I have already been invited to the Florida Heritage Book Festival in St. Augustine, in September. Fortunately, that St. Augustine festival pays for my gas and hotel and I have a friend, Bob Soos, in Vero.

In today’s Miami Herald, there was a story on how gas prices are affecting food prices and how low-income families are coping; apple sauce instead of apples for the kids, milk at one meal only, etc.

Down here, at the end of the road, food prices have always been higher than in the mainland, but now it’s even worse. Market prices are up, restaurant prices are up; it seems everything but salaries are going up. $4.09, I’m sorry, four-point-zero-nine, and nine-tenths is the average price per gallon here.

What’s up with that 9/10th of a cent? Are we stupid or what? $3.99 & 9/10th isn’t $4? You have to give the greedy-little-bastards credit, because they have stayed way ahead of the public in all this. They’ve know how far to stick the knife in our back and turn it slowly until we said ‘thank you.’ And we are smiling as the blood is siphoned from our bodies, one precious drop at a time.

Like most Americans, I am looking at ways to save money. Less eating out, more planning before heading out in the car, car-pooling on weekend trips to Old Town. We have even talked about staying on the sailboat Friday nights, if there’s a reason we need to be back in town on Saturday. Of course, who would feed the dog and rabbit? It’s always something!

If you are doing something to cut back, so you can afford gas, write and let me know. For now, I’ll just get back to finishing my novel. I am only a couple of chapters from the ending and then there’s a short story I’ve outlined ready to be written, but what do I do after that?

My tribute to the greedy-little-bastards or, why high gas prices are good for writers

I have left my Jeep under the house (I live in a stilt house, I didn’t bury it) and bought a 2001 Miata. The Jeep got 15 mpg, on a good day, and the Miata gets 30 mpg most any day. I have gone from almost $100 a week in gas to about $30. That’s a pretty good savings. I am also a lot more aware of my running around in the evenings and on the weekends and schedule things now, like dinner, movies, a trip to the Hog’s Breath.

According to my friends, and reports on the news, I am not unique in this. People have begun to put the gas-guzzlers in the garage and turned to more gas efficient vehicles. Here in the Florida Keys that includes scooters and bicycles. I live 15 miles from downtown (not much in miles if I were still in LA, but miles and miles here in the Keys) and it’s too far, and unsafe, to ride a scooter on US1, or a bicycle.

Before we all began to support the new robber oil-barons, I might have driven to town and had breakfast on Saturday morning at Harpoon Harry’s and then come home to write. Now, thanks to gas prices and the greedy-little-bastards who bought the White House, I stay home Saturday morning and write or read.

I dislike big cities, but I suppose if I lived that kind of lifestyle, my daily routine may not have changed as much because of gas gouging, since there are so many places you can walk to (and face the possibility of being mugged) when you live in the heart of an overcrowded metropolises.

So, I can thank the greedy-little-bastards who are pillaging our savings, driving food prices to skyrocket and keeping many of us from taking driving vacations, because I am staying home writing the last chapters of my novel’s sequel and catching up on reading. If I had to guess, I’d say I am only about three-years behind in reading, where last year at this time I was five-years behind!

I’ve even stomped around under the house with a cigar and Jameson on the rocks, plotting out a short story built around the recent Key West Songwriters’ Festival and think it is workable! If gas had been less than $2 a gallon (yeah, get real, we’ll never see that price again!) I would probably have driven downtown, stopped at Finnegan’s Wake, Schooner Wharf, and the Hog’s Breath, and maybe not been so far along in the short story idea.

So, this is my tribute, and thank you, to the greedy-little-bastards for keeping me at the computer writing as they rape and pillage the American dream, horde their billions in quarterly profits, eliminate the middle class, while they tremble because they realize it could all come to an end in January ’09.

Of course, if the Democratic Congress lack of cajones is example of what the next administration holds for us, it is the American people who should be trembling, because there is less and less for us to lose and the plundering may not be stoppable.

So, where did the errors come from?

I wrote my book. It took about a year, but if you put my actual writing days together it would have been a full six months. It took a lot of sweat, a lot of rewriting and mental anguish. The publisher sent it to an editor in NYC and it came back to me with a few minor corrections.

I was asked if I really wanted to leave mention of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in the final chapters. At that time, Castor’s illness was all over the print and electric media and, of course, the Cuban exiles in Miami were celebrating his expected death.

I couldn’t avoid mention of Castro and assured the editor that the Washington CIA, who were predicting his death, would have a hard time finding the island of Cuba if they left Key West and headed south. The government’s view of Cuba is tinted by the Miami exiles and, a lot like Iraq, what it knows about Cuba is what it believes the exile community wants to hear.

So, I did a bit of a compromise and assumed Castro would be out of power by the time the book came out. So I referred from the present tense of Castro to something along the lines of “now that Castro was out of the picture,” this and that . . . (you’ll need to read the book, because I am not giving it all away here).

As it turned out, my book’s Cuban segment reads like something out of today’s news!

So then the book was sent to an other editor, who I believe was in Texas, for continuity in punctuation and those things we were supposed to learn in high school English, but didn’t.

Eventually, I received the manuscript back with a gazillion corrections. So much for high school English. I had to reply line item by line item. The editor questioned my use of commas, quotes, and other punctuations. I had to note if I agreed or not and, if not, what I wanted done. My reply filled 20 single lined pages! But, some of that was for mistakes I found and that they somehow screwed up from my copy. For instance, the word “lightning” was italicized throughout the book. Why? I did not send my copy in that way. Also, all Spanish was in italics in my copy, but not in what was sent back to me. Some Spanish was, some wasn’t. I italicized all the Spanish, again.

I did spelled the Bahamian beer Kalik wrong (Kalick), but sent in the correction. In the first half of the book it is spelled wrong and then it's correct in the last half. Go figure! The list goes on, but you get the point.

So, you can image my surprise as I read my author’s copy and found about half my corrections were not made!

In reading other books, especially from the big NY publishers, I am often surprised to find mistakes, but I do find them. I have had good sales in Key West and even my good friend Dick Wagner, once my editor at the KW Citizen, called to say he enjoyed the book. When I asked him about the mistakes that bothered me, he said he didn’t notice. I guess that’s a good thing, but how do the error make it in after two editors and then my own corrections?

Oh yeah, the best one. I misspelled Ronald Reagan (Regan) and no one caught it, so, when speaking at libraries I always get a laugh when I say it is obvious that the editors were Democrats, because no Republic would misspell his name!

What kind of mistakes have you found in your readings?

My Key West book signing

Key West Island Books took out print and radio ads for my signing on April 5. I also had mention in Solares Hill*, Paradise (weekly newspaper art/entertainment supplements) and the Keynoter, as well as interviews on US1 Radio, 104.1 FM; SUN 99.5 FM, and WGMX/MIX 94.3 FM. We don’t really have local TV in the Keys, but if we did, I would’ve found a way to be on!

Of course, I have heard the horror stories from writers about book signings from hell where no one shows up and I lived with that anxiety for about a week! Imagine, my hometown and no one shows. Okay, I knew some close friends would be there, but the public was another story.

I showed up at the store at 4:30 p.m., much to the laughs of Marshall Smith, owner of the shop, as he pointed out to Suzanne, his sales assistant, that he predicted I’d be early. What Marshall didn’t know was that I inherited being early for everything from my father. Suzanne told me people had showed up Friday, thinking the signing was that night. Now that’s being early!

Well, at 4:45 p.m. Tom, an old sailing friend, showed up and bought 10 copies for members of his family who live off island. A good contingent from ROTARY arrived and bought copies, as did Paul Clarin (the man who took my book jacket photo), lots of old friends, and some people who just heard about the book and wanted a copy. There was also a fair turnout from my Monday lunch group, the Luncheonaires.

From years of attending book signings, I know that the average book sale during a signing is as low as 10 - 15 copies. That’s what I expect, at best, when I sign outside Key West, but Saturday the bookstore sold out its 50 copies. I had a box-and-a-half of books in my car and all but six of those sold! Marshall said he sold80 copies! When I asked if that was a good thing, he laughed and said yes.

I know Marshall deserves most of the credit, because I think the radio ads reached a lot of people, since it ran for a week and up until about 4 p.m. on April 5.

It was a high and I enjoyed singing until 7:30 p.m. and then met with many of the book buyers at the Hog’s Breath Saloon and celebrated. I think I still have writer’s cramp in my right hand, and I say that with a smile!

I also want to add that on Friday, I was on 99.5’s "Hoebee in the Morning" show and he paid me a complement, long before I arrived at the studio. Bill told listeners that Thursday night his cable TV went out, so he figured he’d skim the book, so he could talk to me about it Friday morning. Then he said the first few pages captured his interest and he read until 12:30 a.m. and had to force himself to put the book down and grabbed some sleep, since he had to be up at 3 a.m.! Hoebee said he never read a novel (or textbook) in his life! But, he loved “Chasin’ the Wind.”

I’ve known Hoebee for about 10-years and take his comments as my best review to date. The fact that he said this on the air before my arrival, I took as a major compliment. Thank you Bill Hoebee!

I will be signing this Thursday at Murder on the Beach, 7 p.m., in Delray Beach, and on Saturday, 3 p.m., at the Bookstore in the Grove, in Coconut Grove. I will sign again in Key West on April 25, 4-7 p.m., at the Hog’s Breath Saloon. If you are in town for Conch Republic Days Celebration, come on in and say hi.

*You can read the full Solares Hill feature review of “Chasin’ the Wind,” by Mark Howell, on my website: www.michaelhaskins.net.

The AP Stylebook and language

I am up early each morning, to the chagrin of Celine, and usually switch the TV news shows between the local ABC and Fox news programs. I am most interested in the expected weather conditions and both stations give predictions for Key West, even though the stations are in Miami or thereabouts.

I’ve been involved in journalism most of my life and, unlike fiction, journalists have stylebooks that give rules on writing. I used the AP Style Book in Boston and, again, years later, in Key West.

What does early morning TV and AP Stylebooks have to do with one another? I’m glad you asked. On both TV stations, the weather person and traffic reports use the word “towards.”

“The storm is moving towards Miami.”

“The traffic has stalled north bound towards the 95 from the interchange.”

Wondering what’s wrong? I think most people would because, more and more, I hear people using “towards” in conversations.

I wrote a business story a long time ago and the editor at the Key West Citizen, Bernie Hunt, pointed out to me that in American English there ain’t no such word as “towards.”

“It’s a British usage,” he told me and, being an Irishman who grew up outside London, Bernie would know. He also was part of the news team in San Diego, California, who won the Pulitzer for newspaper coverage of a commercial airliner that crashed at the city’s airport.

Since then, whenever I hear someone on the TV news use “towards,” I cringe. Shouldn’t the electric media know better?

It doesn’t end there. The word “over” is another misused word that drives me crazy and this one, I admit, I regularly abused. That is, until copy editor Van Trotter explained the correct used of “over” and “more than.” We were at the Green Parrot Bar on Whitehead Street, a couple of blocks from Ernest Hemingway’s home. A journalism background didn’t hurt Hemingway’s writing and, some would say, it helped him form his unique style.

Somehow, Van and I got to talking about work and he told me every time he drives by a MacDonald’s he goes crazy when he sees the golden arches and the words: over a billion sold (maybe it says 10 billion, but you get my point).

“Over!” Van said, or maybe even yelled and scared some of the late-night drinkers (this was after we put the paper to bed at 11 p.m.). “The cat jumped over the moon, is right, but over a billion sold, is wrong!”

So, what’s the right way? “More than a billion sold,” he said. “If it involves math, numbers, comparison, it’s ‘more than’ not over. Numbers don’t jump over things.”

The AP Stylebook has pages and pages of correct usages for newspapers. So why, as mystery writers should this interest us? I think it is important that we get it right in our stories. And, getting it right might be having a character use the wrong “towards.” It is also a good idea not to have someone educated in England use “toward.”

Idioms change by locations. Sayings that make sense to someone in Boston may confuse the hell of a person in Mississippi. For example, in N. Quincy, where I grew up we called soft drinks “tonic.” When I moved to California, it took me a good year to stop asking for tonic when I wanted a Coke or Pepsi. Tonic, in most other states is just that, tonic water. Gin and tonic, please.

So, if I was reading your story and the character was from Massachusetts, maybe Quincy, and he or she asked for a “soda pop,” I would notice your mistake.

Mystery writers don’t usually kill people or blow up buildings, or do the crimes they writer about, but they do have to research guns and bombs and violent death. It shouldn’t stop there. Maybe Hemingway was not entirely wrong when he said, “writer what you know.”

I would be hard pressed to write a Faulkner story, since I have never traveled through, or lived in the Deep South. Remember, from Key West you have to travel north to reach the South! Honest.

So, know your characters and where they are from. If they are from somewhere you ain’t been, rethink them. Because there are readers out there that will write you every time you make a mistake with a weapon, locale, boat, airplane, or accent!