The advertisement in today’s Publishers Lunch newsletter caught my eye immediately:

Come to Thriller SchoolWant to improve your craft? Focus on dialog. Plotting. Research? Making a continuing character work? Have lunch with an agent? Or 20? (Yes, everyone will have an agent their table.)

Sounds great. Until I read that it’s in New York City during ThrillerFest in July. I’m hoping that ThrillerFest eventually makes it down south. There are scary things in, say, Atlanta or Charlotte.

In my last post, I mentioned that I had abandoned Stephen King’s latest novel, Lisey’s Story, for a debut novel, The Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill.

I received this comment from Robin in Texas:

“Patrick, did you know that Joe Hill is Stephen Kings son? I saw him on [Good Morning America] last week. How funny that you set aside a book by the father and chose, perhaps unknowingly, to read one written by his son.”

I did miss the interview: I’m a Today man, myself. But I do think it’s ironic, and I immediately began wondering why I didn’t know that Hill is King’s son. I immediately looked at Joe Hill’s website. I couldn’t find any mention of the famous father there. Then I looked in the next-most obvious place: the book jacket from the novel:

“A multiple award winner for his short fiction, author Joe Hill immediately vaults into the top echelon of dark fantasists with a blood-chilling roller-coaster ride of a novel, a masterwork brimming with relentless thrill and acid terror.”Joe Hill is the author of the acclaimed story collection 20th Century Ghosts. He lives in New England.”

Even John Scalzi’s recent author interview with Hill makes no mention of Stephen King.

So now maybe the question is no longer, “Why didn’t I know,” but now, “How could I have known?”

That leads me to another question: if you’re a debut novelist and your father happens to be one of the most popular novelists in the world, would you hide that fact? Would you assume from the start that everyone already knew? Do you think it would come up in conversation, at least in the first interviews you did? Wouldn’t you make mention of it on your website? And wouldn’t you think your publisher would be sure to mention it as a selling point in terms of one writer’s work being influenced by such a prolific one?

Not that it wouldn’t cause pressure for the debut novelist. But I would think that pressure would always be there, anyway, even if the world didn’t know who the father happened to be.

I just find it odd that it seems the fact is being either ignored or hidden.

By the way, I am enjoying Heart-Shaped Box so far. I don’t think I’ll be setting it aside because of a lot of inside, meaningless lingo.

For those of you who need that special place to do your writing, especially if your genre of choice is horror or suspense, here’s what could be the ultimate spot: Bran Castle in Romania, (along the border of Willachia and Transylvania), a home that Bram Stoker allegedly used as the inspiration for Dracula’s castle.

Persistent myths have named Vlad the Impaler as a resident, although there’s no evidence that he ever lived there. Still, when it comes to tourism, the castle, which was built in 1212, is still marketed as “Dracula’s Castle.”

Can you imagine writing inside its walls?

You can, provided you can come up with the £44,000,000 — $77 Million Dollars — the current owners are asking.

I think I’ll pass.

By the way, if you’re curious about what it looks like on the inside, visit this site, which included photos of its rooms, including the library.

The International Thriller Writers became embroiled in controversy just before its first convention.

If you read the list of nominees for the inaugural edition of Thriller Awards, (and if you’re looking for it), you’ll notice that all of the nominees are men. At this point, you might come to the conclusion that author Elaine Viets has:

“It’s tough to define an award-winning thriller, but the new International Thriller Writers has succeeded: It’s anything written by a man.”

If I had looked at the nominees list prior to reading about the controversy, I would have recognized some names, recognized some titles, likely agreed with some of the nominations and disagreed with others. But I doubt I would have taken any notice of the gender of each nominee.

Those of you who happen to be females may say to yourselves, “Well sure you wouldn’t notice: you’re a man, so it would seem natural to you to see only men.”

If you look through that list, you can also try to analyze the religions of all of the nominees. Or their geographical location. Or their sexual orientation. Or what kind of thrillers they’ve written. In other words, if you look hard enough for a missing statistic, you’ll probably find one sooner or later. And then will that be more evidence of prejudice?

If I did notice that all of the nominees were men, I still wouldn’t have automatically assumed that it had to be a conspiracy. But you can bet that others who noticed aren’t as quick to rule out that possibility, and they have concluded that the ITW is a “men-only” club that completely ignores female writers.

But here’s another snag in this theory: in certain categories, three out of five judges were female. This means that in some categories, women were in the majority. Yet they still came up with a nominees list of men only. What does this mean? That these women must also be prejudiced against women? Or that the two men somehow managed to convince the women to vote against “their own?”

Could it not mean that these women also just happened to believe that this year’s noteworthy thrillers deserving of an award in the specific categories just happen to have been written by men, with no further message intended that women produce generally inferior work?

I have a hard time believing that there are so many people who really focus on this kind of thing. I’ve read thrillers written by men and by women. When I browse the book store aisles, I look first for authors I’ve heard of. After that, I look for covers that catch my eye. If your book catches my eye, and if the jacket copy and first chapter looks like it’s a story I’d be interested in, I don’t care about the gender of the author. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. A good writer is a good writer: male or female, Jewish or Protestant, Southern or “Yankee,” gay or straight, and on and on. I buy plenty of books that don’t even feature an author’s photo, so in some cases, I literally no next to nothing about the author, and I’m fine with that. If he or she can hold my attention, I’ll appreciate their work, and that’s why I would buy the book in the first place.

It would be one thing if this were a situation like the charges of racism in the publishing industry that Millenia Black has blogged about. (I’ve written about them here, here and here, just to get you started.) Black points to a long-held pattern in publishing that has gone on forever. The evidence she and others provide leaves little doubt that there is an attitude in the publishing industry that forces black authors into niche markets regardless of the content of their stories.

But there’s a difference here: when it comes to the ITW, there’s no pattern: the ITW is a relatively new organization and this is its first awards list. Perhaps it’s not too unreasonable to suggest that it’s a little early to dismiss them as being a bunch of chauvenists.

ITW Co-Founder and Co-President Gayle Lynds, also a woman, says basically the same thing here, and adds a great deal of information about the selection process as well.

But regardless of whether you accept as gospel the notion that the ITW intentionally shut out female writers intentionally, it comes down to this: let’s assume that this list of winners is the result of some kind of gender prejudice. Let’s say you’re in charge of making sure it doesn’t happen again. What do you do?

How many women must be included on the list before the ITW is “cleared” of sexism? If each category has at least one female writer, is that enough, or is that just creating “token girls?” What about a category with five nominees? The world population is more than 50% women, so does this mean that each category of five should feature at least three women to match the demographics?

Must we stop and look at the statistics of the number of female thriller authors published the previous year versus male authors and have the gender makeup of each category mirror that statistic? Or, to be fair, should the second year of nominees be exclusively women just to balance everything out?

Once you’ve decided that the ITW is a bunch of sexist pigs, what — if anything — does it take to change your mind?

According to a post over at the Shocklines forum, Stephen King has named his pick for best outright Horror Novelist: Bentley Little. According to the post, King mentions Little’s The Store and Dispatch as novels not to be missed in a column in the current edition of Entertainment Weekly.

I’ve read The Store and I enjoyed it. Anyone who hates those mega-retailers probably would get a kick out of it as well. I haven’t read Dispatch, yet, but it’s in the book pile.

I’m not sure I’d call Little the best, but there are worst choices for King could have made. Have you read Little? If so, what’s your favorite of his books?

ThrillerFest, a convention created by the International Thriller Writers, Inc., is coming to Phoenix in late June. Click the link for specific details.

Yes, I’d love to attend. No, I can’t make it this year. If it were closer, maybe.

But I definitely like the idea of a convention that focuses specifically on thrillers. One problem with the “horror” genre is that horror always ends up grouped under the umbrella title “speculative fiction,” which, of course, it is. But there are horror writers who don’t write fantasy or science fiction, which also fall into speculative fiction, and yet it’s fantasy and sci-fi that tend to get the most attention.

Years ago — it’s rapidly approaching “more years than I care to remember” — when I attended college as a broadcasting major, my journalism school seemed to operate under the assumption that everyone who was in “J-school” wanted to be a newspaper reporter. Sure, there are elements of journalism that apply to all forms, but there was a definite preponderance of newspaper writing, which is quite different than writing geared for broadcast.

When I attended Ravencon last month, I was surprised to find that there were specific sessions about horror and horror alone. I did attend a couple of science fiction sessions, because the individual topics were of interest. I didn’t attend any of the sessions devoted exclusively to fantasy, because they tended to coincide with horror-oriented sessions I wanted to attend, and because I can’t imagine myself trying to write a fantasy story: I think I’d need to “nail down” so much of the “rules” of the world I had created for my characters that I’d never get the story started. Some say mysteries are the hardest genre to write. I think fantasy would be a lot tougher, but maybe that’s just me.

My current work in progress is a horror tale that involves a vampire. But I don’t intend to write about vampires at all in the next novel I’m planning. In any case, though Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a horror novel, it could also be viewed as a supernatural thriller. If I had to choose a one-word description of the kind of stories I want to write, it would be “thriller,” not “horror.” But some book stores don’t have

I would love to see a thriller-oriented convention much closer to my neck of the woods.

Over at Amazon.com, you’ll see that On Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers Association will be available in November.

The product listing looks comprehensive enough, mentioning articles from authors like Stephen King, Stewart O’Nan and Joyce Carol Oates. But a funny thing apparently happened on the listing’s path to the present. According to Nick Mamatas, when Amazon first posted it, the book’s publisher wasn’t quite right:

“On Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writer’s of America”

The mistake about what HWA stands for was bad enough, but the incorrect pluralization of writers with an apostrophe prompted Nick to do his own “how to” post about the use of the little mark. A while back, I did my own post about apostrophes and the lengths people seem willing to go to misuse them. You can find it here.

I think I’ll take a gamble that the people who wrote the contents of the book aren’t the same ones who posted the initial listing. I’ll probably end up buying the book; by November, I’ll hopefully have read more than a few of the books still waiting in my growing “to read” pile.