Brent Hartinger's Blog, page 5

In our latest Media Carnivores podcast, Erik Hanberg and I take on a subject near and dear to my heart: twist endings! What are some good (and bad) examples of twist endings in books and movies, and how do you write them? I also discuss my theory that almost every story should have a twist ending of some kind.

Check it out!

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A lot of people assume that the most important thing a reader can do to support an author they like is to buy their books.

The truth is, the single most important thing you can do is to leave a nice review and/or rating at Amazon.com and Goodreads.com (assuming you like the book!).

Book sales are nice, but let’s face it: we authors only make a couple bucks per book anyway.

Meanwhile, it’s kind of impossible to overstate how important Amazon reviews and Goodreads ratings are to an author. They don’t just help spread the word about an author or a book; they literally affect the algorithms those sites use to determine which books get more prominently featured.

Basically, a book sale is only one sale (and I always appreciate it!). But a nice review on Amazon and a high-star rating on Goodreads will lead to many more sales. And that’s how we authors pay our rent, and are able to keep writing books people like.

Just sayin’.

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In my latest Media Carnivores podcast with Erik Hanberg, we discuss … movie adaptations of books!

Why does Hollywood do it? When it works, why does it work? Why does it not work? What has been my own experience with book-to-movie adaptations?

A good discussion. Check it out here.

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After a brief delay, I’m pleased to announce that my latest book, The Road to Amazing (book #3 in Russel Middlebrook: the Futon Years), is now available as an audio book!

Once again, the great Josh Hurley narrates.

(If you’re a book reviewer, contact me for a review copy.)

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In our latest Media Carnivores podcast, Erik and I return to the age-old question: Should You Self-Publish?

What are the new challenges for indie publishers? What the biggest mistakes to avoid? Plus, Erik and I both reveal how much money we’ve both made self-publishing.

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My original screenplay, Decked, has been optioned by the Chinese animation companies Dream Factory and Popoko Studios, for development as a movie for the Chinese and international markets. I couldn’t be happier!

Here’s the logline:

Decked (Family/Animation): In the four kingdoms of Spades, Hearts, Clubs, and Diamonds, where people are ranked by numbers, a group of lowly “twos” tries desperately to stop the Queen of Spades from overthrowing the other kingdoms.

Basically, Decked is the “real” story behind a deck of playing cards. I confess it was my open attempt to go “four quadrant” — to write something openly commercial and mainstream. Which isn’t to say that I sold out; I actually think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written. It’s a family movie for sure, but also says something about prejudice and, yes, even income disparity.

Anyway, I’m thrilled my attempt to go “mainstream” seems to have worked.

When my reps and I received an offer from these Chinese companies back in December, my first thought was, “Maybe we should hold out for Dreamworks or Pixar.” But my rep immediately said to me, “An American studio will develop it for ten years, and they’ll end up not making it anyway. These days, the Chinese market is where it’s at. The financial terms here are right in line with an American company. But you go with these guys, and you could have a finished movie in a year or two. Also, there is a huge demand for more material in China right now, so they’ll be very, very interested in more of your work. And if something does well in China, an American version is always a possibility.”

This is one of the most interesting things about being a writer in 2016: the opportunities are endless (and usually not at all what you expect).

Anyway, for those keeping score at home, that makes four screenplays I currently have under option with various film producers. Here are the other three:

Project Sweet Life (Family/Caper): When three teen friends are forced by their parents to get summer jobs, they decide to invent fake jobs, then embark on a series of get-rich-quick schemes to make the money they should be earning. But the “sweet life” proves much more difficult than anticipated.

The Starfish Scream (Teen Drama): Unable to accept that his best friend has committed suicide, a teenage boy searches his memories of their past together for an explanation that makes it make sense.

Dead Enders (Romantic Comedy/Black Comedy): Two near-death survivors join together to kill themselves in order to return to heaven — but suicide turns out to be more difficult than they thought, especially when they fall in love.

Will all these projects actually become movies? Probably not. But I can say that at least two of them are very close to production, and there is top-notch talent involved. I can’t wait to share more details!

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Get this! I wrote and recorded a song for my latest book, The Road to Amazing. Here it is, set to some footage of Russel and Kevin from the old Geography Club feature film:

 

What’s the story behind the song?

Back in 2003, when I wrote the summer camp book The Order of the Poison Oak (the second book featuring Russel Middlebrook), Otto Digmore sang a song around the campfire. Originally, that song was going to be “Landslide” by Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac. But when HarperCollins contacted her, she said: no, we couldn’t have the rights to the lyrics.

Yikes! Panic time!

Thinking fast, I sat down and wrote my own song, “Is It Okay If I Need You Tonight?” (HarperCollins even included the music to the song in their original paperback edition). And, of course, it ended up being much better than if Stevie Nicks had given us the rights to use her song.

Flash forward to The Road to Amazing, the latest book featuring Russel Middlebook (just released!). Otto Digmore is back for Russel’s wedding, and he has a new song to sing. Once again, I decided to use an actual song I had written (this time, with some help from my friend Danny Oryshchyn).

The difference? I decided to also actually sing it (with more help from my uber-talented musician-friend Jeremy Ward), and release it out into the world.

Keep in mind that I don’t flatter myself a singer. I’m not even really a musician (I know about three chords on the guitar, like Ringo Starr).

That said, I do know my characters. I love trying new things. And I’m generally pretty good at faking it.

(A reminder that if you like my book, please don’t forget to review it on Amazon and/or Goodreads.com. It’s the single most important thing you can do to support an author.)

P.S. It’s possible that the lines “Cause this time and place, you’re here with me” took me about fifteen different takes to get right. And even then we may have had to splice four different takes together!

 

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My 2008 novel, Project Sweet Life, has officially been optioned for the movies!

Better still, I’m personally writing the screenplay. In fact, when the producers decided they wanted to develop the movie project, they had only read my screenplay — they didn’t even know it had originally been a book!

What’s the book and screenplay about? Here’s the logline:

Project Sweet Life (Family/Caper): When three teen friends are forced by their parents to get summer jobs, they decide to invent fake jobs, then embark on a series of get-rich-quick schemes to make the money they should be earning. But the “sweet life” proves much more difficult than anticipated.

So when will this actually be a finished movie? Well, having a project “optioned” for the movies is just the start of the development process. Now the producers (Crossbow Studios) need to see if they can raise the money and hire the talent to actually get it made.

But I’m very optimistic!

For those who are keeping score, this is the third movie project I currently have in development. Here are the other two, both based on my screenplays:

Dead Enders (Romantic Comedy/Black Comedy): Two near-death survivors join together to kill themselves in order to return to heaven — but suicide proves more difficult than anticipated, especially when they fall in love.

The Starfish Scream (Teen Drama): Unable to accept that his best friend has committed suicide, a teenage boy searches his memories of their past together for an explanation that makes it make sense.

(Both these projects have had really interesting development processes so far, with some fantastic people attached, including some very familiar names. But alas, I can’t share any actual details just yet.)

Better still, I think I’m on the verge of finalizing a fourth movie project that is also very interesting. Details soon!

 

 

 

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The Road to Amazing, the third book the Futon Years series (and the seventh Russel Middlebrook book in all), is officially released!

Buy the book here!

(A reminder that if you like the book, please don’t forget to review it on Amazon and/or Goodreads.com. It’s the single most important thing you can do to support an author.)

I first wrote about the character of Russel Middlebrook in my 2003 novel, Geography Club. The story of a gay teenager, Geography Club was subsequently adapted for both stage and screen (co-starring Scott Bakula and Ana Gasteyer) and spawned a successful four-book series, the Russel Middlebrook Series.

Last year, I “rebooted” the character in a new trilogy, Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years, about Russel in his twenties. The first book, The Thing I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, featured 23-year-old Russel living in Seattle, trying to make sense out of life and love. In Barefoot in the City of Broken Dreams, Russel and his boyfriend moved to Los Angeles. Now in The Road to Amazing, he’s getting married.

This feels like an ending to a character you’ve been writing about for a long time. Is it?

Yes and no. It’s definitely the end of the Futon Years, the latest series featuring Russel Middlebrook [in his 20s]. I did try to really wrap things up.

But is it the end of the character? Honestly, when I finished the first series [about Russel as a teenager], I never thought I would keep writing him.

This time around, I’m pretty sure I will revisit him in the future, in whatever I decide is the next stage of his life. First, I think it’s a really interesting experiment, following a character as he grows up over the course of his life, especially given all the changes that have happened to gay people over this same period of time.

But it’s also incredibly gratifying to write books that people really seem to enjoy reading. So many people have told me they grew up with Russel!

Why a wedding?

It has something to do with all the attention that same-sex weddings have gotten these past few years. But it mostly had to do with the character. It seemed like a natural progression to the story.

But it goes back to what I said before, about how I’ve been able to explore all the really interesting stuff that’s going on in the world through the eyes of this particular character and his friends.

Is Russel’s wedding anything like you’re own?

Ha! Not surprisingly, yes. My husband and I did exactly what Russel and Kevin do: back in 1997, we rented a big old house on Vashon Island, very much like the Amazing Inn in the book. And we invited all our friends to spend the whole weekend with us, then had the wedding itself on Sunday.

Of course that was only the first of our four weddings. We also got “domestic partnered” in West Hollywood in 1998, then “civil partnershiped” in Washington State in 2009, then finally legally married in 2013.

Talk about living history, right?

But those last three things are just pieces of paper. Michael and I were married on Vashon Island back in 1997, whether the rest of the world wanted to acknowledge it or not.

Vashon Island, where the book is set

Is the town of Amazing, Washington, real? Did the dead killer whale happen? Is Vashon Island that funky?

Amazing, and the whole mystery behind it, is entirely from my imagination. And we didn’t have a dead killer whale wash up, but there was a dead seal, which also smelled pretty bad.

As for Vashon Island, it’s all true, especially the part about how they want to become the Napa Valley of legalized marijuana.

Russel’s friends are all back for the book, and most of them have storylines of their own.

That was important to me. I used to say that the most important relationship in the books isn’t between Russel and his fiancé Kevin, it’s between Russel and his friends Min and Gunnar. That’s still true of the earlier books, but these later ones have become a bit more about Russel and Kevin, which I think is true to the character: when you’re in your mid-twenties, you’re looking for potential life-partners.

But that doesn’t mean Min and Gunnar aren’t still really, really important to Russel! I definitely wanted to bring them back, especially after they didn’t appear in Barefoot in the City of Broken Dreams [when Russel moved to Los Angeles]. I wanted to give their storylines a kind of closure too, especially Min, who has had the worst time with relationships.

As for Vernie Rose, she’s always a fun character to write! Plus, I love the idea that Russel, at age 25, considers Vernie one his best friends, even though she’s 74.

Otto is a famous TV star now, but he’s also dealing with some pretty heavy stuff: a negative online reaction to the fact that he’s a burn survivor. What’s that based on?

Well, I love writing anything about Otto. I first wrote him in 2005, as a love interest for Russel, but even now, there just haven’t been very many disabled gay characters, in really any media. I also like the fact that a lot of gay guys become really good friends with their exes—more than straight people do, I think. So I wanted to explore that too.

Why the online cyber-bullying? Because I think that is literally one of the most important issues facing the country and the world right now. I love the Internet—I really really do!—but it’s opened a Pandora’s Box in a way that simply has to be dealt with in some way. I loved Monica Lewinsky’s Ted Talk on the issue.

But cyber-bullying is only part of the issue. The Internet, as great as it is, has also created a de-personalization that pervades everything, even though a lot of us aren’t really even aware anymore that it’s doing it.

What’s the answer? I think Otto stumbles upon it in the book.

Anyway, I hate to keep harping on this, but this is what’s been so great about writing these books—that I’ve been able to explore the ideas and issues that interest me, the things that are happening in the world today.

Buy the book here!

   

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When I was a kid, I was certain of three things: (1) I would have my own annual Christmas special, (2) I would win an Oscar for both my acting and screenwriting (and be nominated for producing and directing), and (3) I would record and release a top-40 hit.*

See how realistic I was being? I didn’t consider myself a real singer, so wasn’t insisting on a top-10 hit, only a top-40 one!

Anyway, even with these extremely reasonable goals, I may be a little behind schedule.

Fortunately, I spent this evening recording my first potential top-40 single, “This Time and Place.”

What’s the occasion? In my next book (The Road to Amazing, out March 15th), a character, Otto, writes a song. I decided to write a real-life version of the song (with a very talented friend, Danylo Oryshchyn), then record and sing it, and release it as a video at the same time as the book.

I am a terrible singer, and a mediocre songwriter (I know about three cords, like Ringo Starr). But a complete lack of talent has never stopped me from doing anything in the past!

Today, I recorded the song with another extremely talented musician friend, Jeremy Ward. Basically, this involved me singing the song over and over again, until Jeremy would say, “Wait! That five seconds was in tune and on beat! I think we can use it!” Then he’d move those five seconds into a master file.

Oh, and even with the good five-second segments, he also used a lot of Autotune.

By this process, the three and half minute song took about fourteen hours to record.

Suffice to say, I will not be doing many “live” performances.

In the end, I was happy enough with the song that I don’t think I’m going to completely embarrass myself when I release the video in three weeks.

Even better, I had a really, really fun time, both writing it and recording it. In fact, it was so much fun that won’t even care if it doesn’t hit the top-40.

Anyway, look for the video of my version of the song, “This Time and Place,” in March! Hey, I think I’ll put it on iTunes too. (Brett Every, you may need to help me with this.)

Now I really have to get to work organizing those Christmas specials, and winning those Oscars…

* People were shocked when I came out as gay. Seriously. (Okay, some people were. Bill Middlebrook, you shut up.)

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