Author Spotlight: Layton Green

We’re fortunate all sorts of intriguing authors visit us here. We choose them carefully to enlighten and entertain you. We’re very appreciative not only for our authors’ taking the time to join us, but for you, our readers, doing so too. We can’t say that often enough. We’ll grab this opportunity to say it again now as we bring you the latest installment in our Gazalapalooza Author Spotlight series, this time featuring the considerable talents of Layton Green. Green stops by today to share some insights about himself and his writing, and to shed a bit of light on his brand new paranormal thriller, The Diabolist.

Some Greenian background is in order. Green is a recovering attorney, deeply afflicted by wanderlust. In addition to writing, Green graduated from law school in New Orleans, and spent several years practicing law. He has traveled through more than 50 countries. To his enduring credit, many of them would let him return if he asks nicely enough. Besides lawyering and writing, Green has earned his bread and board in activities as disparate as interning at the United Nations, being an ESL teacher in Central America, tending bar in London, selling cheap knives on the streets of Brixton, and delivering telephone books door-to-door. After that point on his long and winding curriculum vitae, Green says, "the list goes downhill from there."

In his writing, Green combines his incisive descriptive skills with his plethora of travels and employments. The result is a lucky reader who can’t avoid finding herself sucked into the twisted geographic and psychological vistas Green creates in The Diabolist and his other books, whether in the Dominic Grey series, or otherwise.

The Diabolist is the third entry in Green’s deservedly well-received series of enthralling paranormal thrillers featuring Dominic Grey and his partner, Viktor Radek. In it, the duo combat a fearsome, ancient evil driving a seemingly super-powered madman's scheme to wipe out all competitors in uniting the world's Satanist factions to displace humanity's major religions.

How freaky is that? Trust us, it’s very freaky. And it’s very good, too.

Our esteemed guest is already sitting on the hard wooden chair under the unforgiving glare of our klieg light army, chomping at the bit to get this Spotlight fired up. See him fidget? We like his eagerness. Without further ado, let’s get this edition of the Author Spotlight underway. Our fingers are tightly crossed Green doesn’t summon anything underwordly to pop in for a spell while he’s under our care. Our interrogation room’s not sufficiently spacious to accommodate that.

Gazala:    In my omnipotence, I've sentenced you to be stranded alone on a desert island for offenses best left unnamed. In my beneficence, I've decided to allow you a limited amount of reading material to make your stay a little less bleak than it would otherwise be. I'll spot you your religious text of preference, and the collected works of William Shakespeare. In addition to those, name the one fiction book, and the one nonfiction book, you'd choose to take with you, and why you choose them.

Green:    A lot of really cheeky answers ran through my mind, but I’ll go with the following: for fiction, even though my favorite novel is The Magus, by John Fowles, I’m going to go with 1,001 Arabian Knights for its sheer volume and entertainment value. For nonfiction, I’m going with the amazing book Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, by Jim Holt. This is probably my favorite work of nonfiction, and, well, the name pretty much says it all. I think it would take me a lifetime to fully absorb and ponder the contents of this book.

Gazala:    Your latest book is an excellent and gripping novel titled The Diabolist, the third entry in your deservedly well-received series of intriguing paranormal thrillers featuring the private investigative team of former Diplomatic Security Agent Dominic Grey and his partner, religious phenomenologist and cult expert Viktor Radek. I've read it. I enjoyed it immensely, and recommend it highly. Shockingly enough, however, from time to time my bare recommendation doesn't always motivate a book's potential reader to become a book's actual reader. Tell us something about The Diabolist, and why its potential reader should make the leap and become its actual reader.

Green:    Well, Richard, let’s hope your powers of online persuasion move mountains of readers! And I sincerely appreciate the shout out. I write books that I would like to read, and the reason I would pick up The Diabolist is because it contains elements I love in my novels: suspense, exotic travel, mystery, romance, action, history, philosophy, occult esoterica, quasi-supernatural happenings, and religion. And with this particular novel, I wanted to explore the themes of the origin of evil and the history of the Devil. In particular, I was fascinated by the question of theodicy, which, simply put, is this: if we accept that evil exists, then either God is omnipotent and responsible for evil, or someone or something else is.

Gazala:    What are books for?

Green:    I think books serve different purposes for different readers: entertainment, education, enlightenment, and escapism seem to be the most obvious suspects, and the ones I can vouch for. I recently read something (I can’t remember where) that said that the classic novels are a one on one conversation with some of the greatest minds in history. I loved that and think it is true.

Gazala:    W. Somerset Maugham said, "There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." Do you agree, or disagree, and why?

Green:    Ha ha, I love that one. Completely agree. I’ve never had a (fiction) writing class and quite honestly, though I made good grades, I was not a good student. But there are many ways to skin a cat, as they say (though I confess I don’t know why they say that), and I think everyone’s journey to becoming a novelist is different, whether it’s an Iowa MFA, being a lifelong reader before spending 15 years tearing up drafts and studying authors far more talented than myself (my journey), or sitting down and rattling off a great work of literature and then calling it quits, like Harper Lee.

Gazala:    A shadowy, black-robed figure is peering through my window, and I best go see what he's up to before something heinous happens. Ask yourself a question, and answer it.

Green:    Q: The question is, what have I been involved in to warrant the attentions of such an ominous, mysterious figure? A: I search my memory but can’t recall anything out of the ordinary. Then I remember that antique shop I visited in the Garden District of New Orleans, with my friend Lou. Lou is a linguist and was asked to examine a piece of unknown origin for the owner of the antique shop. The owner was a little off, to be honest. He kept his shop dimly lit and had a bunch of religious and occult pieces scattered about. The piece he had Lou inspect was a small wooden box with a flowery, rune-like script flowing down one side. Lou recognized the runes as Ogham, a long-forgotten Celtic language, and a few days later he translated the inscription as, roughly, “God Path.” (Ogham contained no prepositions.) The problem was, nothing else about the box suggested a Celtic origin. I had forgotten about the box and the inscription, though the owner’s assistant, a young East Indian woman with an accent I couldn’t quite place, had lingered in my mind. Didn’t matter. I could figure it out later. I ran to grab my cell in case I needed to call 911, but when I returned to the window, the only thing I saw was the cemetery brooding across the street, silent and empty.

See? It’s like we said earlier, very freaky, and very good. And that’s without anything underworldly popping in for an authorial assist. (At least, none we noticed…) Now you’ve had such a tasty sip, we know you’re thirsty for more of Green and his writing. We’ve made that easy for you. All you need do to grab yourself a copy of The Diabolist from the good folks at Amazon.com is click here. You're welcome.

The Proper Use and Care of Writing Prompts

I'm asked often about a writing prompt -- what one is, how it works, is heeding one a worthwhile endeavor? In my estimation, so long as its definition is sufficiently stretchy, I'm a writing prompt's ardent fan.

Back at creation's dawn when I was in school, a slew of teachers and professors insisted a writing prompt was a thing that lived in fairly tight borders. This was particularly so in my assorted English and writing classes, where we were instructed that such a prompt occurs solely in the form of a short question designed to spur authorial effort about a specific topic for a given writing task. Nowadays, I believe that's called "teaching to the test." Regardless whether theirs was a sound definition for a writing prompt, it surely served my teachers and professors well when reading and grading writing assignments so narrowly prompted. If nothing else, it was a time-saver for my eternally overburdened educators. Say, just for a random hypothetical example because certainly this could never have actually happened, I was asked to write a thoughtful exploration in response to the prompt, "Why can a woman's patience endure?" Say, also, my plainly brilliant responsive submission focused instead on something infinitesimally (if at all) off-topic. For example, perhaps on whether a drunken myopic chimpanzee could maneuver a clown car skillfully enough on Manchester's streets to pass the same road test that resulted in my idiot friend Rudolfo's obtaining a driver's license before I got mine from the geniuses at the New Hampshire DMV. It didn't take Professor Sally Shakespeare too long to slap a big red F on my answer, not much reading required.

As I would have hypothetically explained at some length to my disgruntled parents, this big red F was in no way my fault. It was the fault of Professor Shakespeare's writing prompt being obliged to toil under harshly restrictive definitional parameters.

(You see, Rudolfo and I had the same road test administrator. She was a surly woman named Helga. From her indecipherable command of English, Helga was very likely imported into New Hampshire late one stormy Cold War night from some profoundly slipshod village called Nastygrad, deep behind the Iron Curtain. In any event, Helga's patience was clearly as unreasonably skimpy in my case as it was unflaggingly generous in that grinning fool Rudolfo's.)

(Hypothetically, mind you.)

Am I digressing? I can never tell.

So what is a writing prompt? With due deference to Professor Shakespeare, a writing prompt is anything that incites a writer to write. It can be anything at all, from a whispered welcome on Wednesday to a shrieked midnight curse to the impossibly small "My Little Pony" tee shirt on that improbably fat guy with the wheelbarrow and shovel over there in the bulk candy aisle at Whole Foods. A writing prompt can be a song, or a cloud, or the ragged murder of crows winging slowly west over your roof at dusk. It can be the first sentence from your favorite book, or the last one from a book you hate. It can be a lyric from some terrible song you heard at the drug store, or an epitaph. It can be the strange smell you recall seeping from beneath the door of that apartment next door that wasn't supposed to have anybody living in it. It can be a simple photograph, like this one:

Yeah, I know. How much fun can you have with that? It practically writes itself.

Once you've got your writing prompt, what do you do with it? Well, that's not unlike staring at a weight at your favorite gym -- the answer depends on what kind of a workout you've got in mind. Maybe you're in the mood for something light and brisk, or quick and dirty. Then you'd use your writing prompt to spur a short burst of authorial glory, such as a pithy tweet. Perhaps you're in the mood for a more robust challenge, where your writing prompt is the spark you seek to fire up a short story, or a one-act play, of a few thousand words. Or you might be hankering for some real heavy lifting, where the very same writing prompt launches you on the long and winding road that's end is a novel 100,000 words long. A writing prompt is what you make it. The choice of what to do with it is yours alone.

Sure, the deceptively plain "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." were the dozen simple words that vivified one of the greatest and most enduring works of English fiction, Charles Dickens' 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. But that phrase could serve also to inspire a one-act tragicomedy about a Kardashian wedding at the foot of a feisty volcano, or a philosophical rumination on the Boston Red Sox winning the 2004 World Series to kill a curse 86 years old that was only trying to mind its own business.

And what about this similarly-inspired tweet? "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. My life will be sucky unless and until verily I learn to distinguish between those two."

So much delicious angst in only 140 characters, birthed by a classic turn of phrase. Thanks be to Dickens.

Do you see? Viewed correctly, anything can be a writing prompt. Now it's your turn. Not to cramp your style in the hunt for writing prompts particularly inspiring to you, I've assembled below a modest array of prompts to get you started. See where they take you, or where they don't. Have fun.

Gazalapalooza's Writing Prompts Volume 1, Number 1:

It started after I went down to see Madam X, and let her read my mind.

He told me there's one thing you've got to learn, and that's not to be afraid of it.

"It's not so simple as she'd have you believe," she said, "separating fact from friction."

I thought about marrying for love, but marrying for help paying my student loans seemed wiser.

There, painted on the stone in ancient red so faded it was hardly visible in the dusk, was the face again.

He was very wrong, thinking there would be a next time.

When's the last time you made a bank teller blush like that, with just a wink?

She bit her lower lip a little harder than she had intended, and tasted raw anticipation.

Getting my kids to school on time is like organizing a lunar landing for feral cats.

Eye contact is more dangerous on some nights than others.

I keep a diamond ring in my glove box for exactly these situations.

She shook her head and looked at her watch again, but the second hand was still ticking backwards.

Sometimes, the person you'd take a bullet for ends up being the one behind the gun.

If there's not a play or an essay or a novel or two in this collection of prompts, then you're not writing freely enough. Take your time, breathe deeply, and whatever you do, don't wait for your muse to show up. Let the prompt be your muse. That will make her jealous, and there's not a lot more inspirational to an author than a jealous muse in a huff.

Uh-oh. I think I just came up with another writing prompt...

Author Spotlight: David Morrell

Let's say you're assembling your authorial curriculum vitae — not for any particular reason, just something to tickle your fancy in a moment of periodic self-reflection and personal professional assessment. Keeping up with your inner Joneses, if you will. On your clean sheet of paper, you jot down your professorship in the English department of the University of Iowa for a decade and a half. You list your extensive training in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and anti-terrorist driving skills, plus your FAA pilot's license. You note the 1972 publication of your debut novel, First Blood, the book introduced the world to iconic Vietnam War veteran John Rambo, a character later featured in a quartet of international blockbuster movies starring Sylvester Stallone. After writing down the titles of 28 novels, six nonfiction books, 40 published short stories, and numerous analytical essays for film magazines, you'll find yourself with hardly any room left on your formerly pristine sheet of paper to squeeze in that you're a co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization, which honored you with its prestigious career-achievement Thriller Master Award. With a satisfied sigh, you realize your piece of paper would have to be a scroll to contain all your other career highlights, only some of which are being an Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity nominee, and a three-time recipient of the distinguished Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. Oh, yeah, plus you have 18 million copies of your books in print, in 26 languages.

None of that even includes the release today of your brand new thriller, Murder as a Fine Art, a work as eagerly anticipated as it it is highly acclaimed. Early reviews of Murder as a Fine Art include the Associated Press deeming it, “A literary thriller that pushes the envelope of fear.” The Providence Sunday Journal declares the book "a masterpiece." Publishers Weekly calls it "brilliant." Suspense Magazine says, "This is one thriller that is beyond thrilling.”

David Morrell is the only author whose curriculum vitae the foregoing could be. And we're pleased that Morrell has joined us today at the Gazalapalooza Author Spotlight. Without further ado, let's get Morrell seated under the Spotlight's blazing klieg glare, and get this interview underway. 

Gazala:    In my omnipotence, I've sentenced you to be stranded alone on a desert island for offenses best left unnamed. In my beneficence, I've decided to allow you a limited amount of reading material to make your stay a little less bleak than it would otherwise be. I'll spot you your religious text of preference, and the collected works of William Shakespeare. In addition to those, name the one fiction book, and the one nonfiction book, you'd choose to take with you, and why you choose them.

Morrell:    The non-fiction book is easy. Thoreau’s Walden contains a wealth of wisdom that deepens with each reading. I never fail to marvel at how he compares the veins in a leaf to those in a human hand to those in a cliff side to the Milky Way. The interconnection of the universe. As for fiction, my interest in Victorian history prompts me to choose Charles Dickens’s Bleak House from 1853, one of the many Victorian novels that I read during my research of Murder as a Fine Art when I was trying to trick my mind into believing that I was actually in London in the 1850s. Dickens’ complex plot and period details become more fascinating with each reading. 

Gazala:    Your latest book is an excellent and gripping thriller titled Murder as a Fine Art, where gaslit London becomes a battleground between controversial Victorian literary star Thomas De Quincey and a demented murderer whose lives are linked by secrets long buried, but never forgotten. I've read it. I enjoyed it immensely, and recommend it highly. Shockingly enough, however, from time to time my bare recommendation doesn't always motivate a book's potential reader to become a book's actual reader. Tell us something about Murder as a Fine Art, and why its potential reader should make the leap and become its actual reader. 

Morrell:    Murder as a Fine Art is based on the first publicized mass murders in England, the infamous Ratcliffe Highway killings in London in the early 1800s. Because of improved roads and the newly invented English mail-coach system, London’s 52 newspapers spread news of the murders throughout England within two days, terrorizing not only London but the entire nation, rivaling the fear caused by Jack the Ripper much later in the century.  My novel’s main character, Thomas De Quincey, was a brilliant author who wrote obsessively about the killings in the third part of an essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” He invented the word “subconscious,” and anticipated Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis by a half-century.  He was the first person to write about drug addiction in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He influenced Edgar Allan Poe who in turn influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. Put all this together, and the reader will experience a detective of a rare type. Going to 1854 London is like going to Mars. The era is so weird that the details alone are worth reading the novel.  For example, how much did a middle-or-upper-class woman’s clothes weigh?  Thirty-seven pounds—because the hoop beneath the dress needed to be covered with ten yards of ruffled satin.  No wonder women kept fainting. 

Gazala:    What are books for? 

Morrell:    Horace said that the purpose of literature was to teach and delight.  Let’s focus on fiction.  Its vividness can take us out of our every-day lives and spark our imaginations. If our lives are dull, we are transported to a more interesting place. If our lives are burdened with pain, a novel can provide distraction. Beyond that, the characters in novels can help us to understand human nature, which is a form of teaching as well as delighting. Important novels change the way we perceive the world. 

Gazala:    W. Somerset Maugham said, "There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." Do you agree, or disagree, and why? 

Morrell:    The rules keep changing.  During the 19th century, there was an accepted way of writing novels. Then Flaubert, Henry James, Hemingway, and other writers came along and changed the rules. Dickens was fond of the 3rd person omniscient narrator, a technique that is hardly used anymore, because fiction writers are taught that showing is better than telling, which is what the omniscient voice does. But sometimes telling is in fact better than showing, and I work with that concept in Murder as a Fine Art. Providing my version of a Victorian novel, I began each chapter with an omniscient narrator (a sin in some creative writing classes), mixing it with a first person narrator (a combination that is also a sin in some creative writing classes). But Dickens used both in Bleak House, and the combination worked wonderfully.  London in the 1850s was so strange that I decided the only way to express its strangeness was by providing a guided tour throughout the novel. 

Gazala:    A long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter coming from the heavy fog pushing against my front door seems an ominous thing worth my immediate attention. Ask yourself a question, and answer it. 

Morrell:    Q: What’s your favorite Thomas De Quincey story? A: Because of his compulsive book collecting and his opium use, De Quincey was constantly in debt. One of his landlords held him prisoner for a year (that’s right — a year), forcing him to keep writing until he paid his lodging bill. De Quincey described his room as becoming snowed over with manuscript pages. He asked his publisher to smuggle in some laxative salts with his weekly supply of ink and blank pages to write on. Overdosing on the salts, he spent two days in the lodging house’s privy, prompting the other lodgers to complain to the owner, who reluctantly set De Quincey free so that his lodgers could use the privy. 

Wow. We're not sure how to comment appropriately on that anecdote, other than to say that clearly, Morrell's research for his excellent new book left absolutely no stone unturned. You've no need to take our word for that. Find out for yourself by getting your very own copy of Murder as a Fine Art. To order yours from Amazon, all you have to do is click here, and then settle back to enjoy the read.

Author Spotlight: Marvin H. McIntyre Returns

There are several reasons Gazalapalooza is pleased to welcome today to the Author Spotlight Marvin McIntyre, who graciously has agreed to submit to our interrogation in connection with the release of his new thriller, Inside Out. He’s a graduate of The Citadel, and a Vietnam veteran. In certain circles, he’s earned the nickname "Financial Wizard," and it’s always awesome to be some sort of a wizard. He has been a steady friend of our blog since its inception. He spins compelling, intelligent and timely fiction, like Inside Out and its predecessor, Insiders. He’s a very interesting and worldly man, blessed with a twisted sense of humor.

And way back in October, 2011, McIntyre was the very first author to bite the bullet, damn the torpedoes, throw caution to the wind, warn us against stringing together too many clichés in our blog, and venture boldly into the Gazalapalooza Author Spotlight’s glare.

So please join us in welcoming back to our Spotlight the valiant Mr. McIntyre. We’ve been extremely fortunate to bring our readers the thoughts of many fantastic authors since we kicked off our Spotlight feature two and a half years ago. That said, nothing great ever happens until someone goes first, and in our case, it was McIntyre. For that we were, and remain, appreciative.

But that doesn’t mean we have to be nice to him. Accordingly and without further ado, we’ll get our guest seated on our unforgiving wooden chair beneath our even less forgiving battery of blazing klieg lights, and kick off this edition of the Author Spotlight.

Gazala:    What is the most surprising occupational hazard to being a novelist?

McIntyre:    When you donate all of the profits to charity, you soon realize that publishing a novel can be hazardous to your wealth. Even though my clients in my "real job" are well aware of my charitable intent with my books, I still get asked to send out free autographed copies.

Gazala:    Your latest book is an excellent and gripping thriller titled Inside Out. It's the second entry in your "Mac McGregor" series, where we find McGregor's brutal nemesis Jeremy Lyons hacking a path of murder, betrayal and corruption toward snatching a Florida senatorial seat. I've read Inside Out, enjoyed it immensely, and recommend it highly. Shockingly enough, however, from time to time my bare recommendation doesn't always motivate a book's potential reader to become a book's actual reader. Tell us something about Inside Out, and why its potential reader should make the leap and become its actual reader.

McIntyre:    I have yet to meet a person who is happy with “politics as usual.”  Sprinkled throughout what I hope is an interesting meal for readers and possible indigestion for the squeamish, are perhaps a few tasty tidbits about the sadly novel idea that a politician should think first about the health of our country. For dessert eaters, I have even offered a few humble thoughts on actual change that would help the public.

Gazala:    Have you ever killed off one of your characters only to greatly regret the death later? If so, whose death do you regret, and why?

McIntyre:    In my first book, Insiders, my friend David Baldacci said that the character Max leaped off the page. I was very flattered, but the town was not big enough for Max and the malevolent Jeremy Lyons.

Gazala:    If you could take credit for writing any one book not your own, which would it be, and why?

McIntyre:    I assume that I am not allowed to use Blood of the Moon. This is a great question and begs the real question—who thought of it? I guess it would be Pat Conroy’s Lords of Discipline. A fellow Citadel graduate, his story vividly brought back a rather traumatic time for me, and his descriptions are breathtaking.

Gazala:    If you had to empower one person unrelated to you by blood or marriage to read your thoughts for a day, who would you choose, and why?

McIntyre:    Someone who does not understand English. An overload of depravity can damage a weaker mind.

Luckily, we at Gazalapalooza have strong minds. If yours is too, there's no need to turn yourself inside out (do you see what we did there?) to get your own copy of Inside Out. All you have to do to order your copy from Amazon is click here.

Author Spotlight: Mark Alpert

If you assumed something called "Supreme Harmony" would be a thing benign, if not delightful, no one would fault you for thinking so. A rose by any other name, right?

Not so fast. In the skilled hands of thriller author Mark Alpert, our guest for this edition of the Gazalapalooza Author Spotlight, Supreme Harmony is a terrifying misnomer. You want a second opinion? Fair enough. Supreme Harmony plays a major role in Alpert's new book, Extinction: A Thriller. And none other than Author Spotlight alumnus James Rollins says of Extinction, "As intelligent as it is frightening, a riveting journey to the next stage of evolution." For good measure, Rollins also throws in, "A chilling punch to the gut."

Clearly, Alpert's book is not your mother's notion of anything remotely like Supreme Harmony.

Instead, Extinction tells the story of a hybrid life form wrenched from a hellish brain-machine interface by military scientists who lose control of their creation when its artificial intelligence power evolves into self-awareness. That's scary in itself. What's scarier is that the technologies underlying Alpert's book is as much a product of current science fact as theoretical science fiction. So it's understandable that Douglas Preston anoints our guest as, "Truly the heir to Michael Crichton."

Alpert has the chops to write such a thriller as Extinction. Alpert majored in astrophysics at Princeton University. His undergraduate thesis applying the theory of relativity to a two-dimensional universe was published in The Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation, and has been cited in over 100 scholarly articles. In you need additional bona fides, Alpert not only writes for Scientific American, but also serves on the magazine's board of editors.

At this point you might be conceding he has his science chops down, but can the man write engaging fiction? Yes, he can. After Princeton, Alpert earned an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. He's been a journalist for The Clarement (N.H.) Times and The Montgomery (AL.) Advertiser, he's written for Fortune magazine, and his debut novel, Final Theory, was acclaimed as one of the best novels of 2008 by Booklist, Borders, and the American Booksellers Association.

So yeah, the man can write.

Can Alpert withstand the heat of the Author Spotlight? That's another question entirely, the answer for which isn't revealed by his impressive curriculum vitae. The only way we're going to figure that out is to train the blazing white glare from our army of klieg lights in Alpert's face, and get this Spotlight underway. 

Gazala:    In my omnipotence, I've sentenced you to be stranded alone on a desert island for offenses best left unnamed. In my beneficence, I've decided to allow you a limited amount of reading material to make your stay a little less bleak than it would otherwise be. I'll spot you your religious text of preference, and the collected works of William Shakespeare. In addition to those, name the one fiction book, and the one nonfiction book, you'd choose to take with you, and why you choose them.

Alpert:    Okay, I have to be strategic here. I want as much reading material as possible, so they have to be relatively long books. I love The Great Gatsby, but I don’t want to read it another forty-three times. So for fiction, I’m going with Ulysses. It’s long, it’s funny, it has some damn good parts. And I’ll finally have enough leisure time to figure out the parts I never understood. For nonfiction, my choice is another long, good book, Shelby Foote’s The Civil War. It’s the best work of history ever. Did you know that Jefferson Davis eloped with Zachary Taylor’s daughter? Or that Robert E. Lee lost the Battle of Gettysburg because Jeb Stuart was having too much fun pillaging the countryside? It’s all in Foote’s book.

Gazala:    Your latest book is an excellent and gripping novel titled Extinction: A Thriller, featuring American soldier-cum-scientist Jim Pierce confronting Chinese anti-terrorism software with highly sophisticated quasi-human artificial intelligence that starts thinking for itself. I've read it. I enjoyed it immensely, and recommend it highly. Shockingly enough, however, from time to time my bare recommendation doesn't always motivate a book's potential reader to become a book's actual reader. Tell us something about Extinction, and why its potential reader should make the leap and become its actual reader.

Alpert:    Every English-speaking Earthling should read Extinction because it’s a ton of fun. The novel focuses on a secret Chinese government project called Supreme Harmony, a surveillance system that uses swarms of cyborg insects -- ordinary houseflies equipped with minuscule cameras and radio controls -- to spy on dissident groups. (Real-life scientists are developing this technology for military reconnaissance.) To analyze the glut of video collected by the swarms, Chinese researchers lobotomize a group of condemned prisoners and insert electronic implants into their brains, turning them into a network of zombie-like "Modules" who are wirelessly linked to one another and to the swarms. But the project goes disastrously awry when the Supreme Harmony network develops its own intelligence, a collective consciousness that takes control of the Modules and sets out to exterminate its creators.

You have to admit, it’s a pretty fun premise. But that’s not all! The novel also features bionic arms, artificial eyes, a gun battle on the Great Wall, a helicopter dogfight above the mountains near Burma, and an apocalyptic war between China and America. As Stefon of "Saturday Night Live" fame might say, "This book has everything!"

Gazala:    What are books for?

Alpert:    Besides providing me with countless hours of entertainment, books have taught me a lot of useful things. When I was working as a newspaper reporter in the Eighties, I learned about journalism and politics by reading Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. When I was traveling across South America, I got a view of the cultural landscape by reading A Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. And when I was navigating the channels and shoals of marriage, I got some guidance from reading the collected works of John Updike. Now that I have kids, I see the effects that reading books has on them. After an hour of watching TV or playing on the computer, the kids are hyper and agitated and sometimes impossible to deal with. But reading calms them and stimulates their minds at the same time. They want to talk about the books they’ve just read.

Gazala:    W. Somerset Maugham said, "There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." Do you agree, or disagree, and why?

Alpert:   I get the same feeling sometimes, that I know how to write a novel but can’t describe exactly how to do it. I’ve written seven novels so far, three published, four unpublished. I usually start with a cool idea -- say, a secret discovery made by Albert Einstein (that was the premise of my first published book, Final Theory) -- and then try to imagine the characters who will be involved in the story. Then I try to map out a plot -- for thrillers, the basic structure is usually a chase or a hunt -- but the outline is very rough. I don’t want to predetermine everything because I like to be surprised while I’m writing the book. For me, the whole effort is a leap of faith. While I’m writing the novel I have no idea whether the book will actually come together. I was three-quarters finished with the first draft of Extinction before I figured out how the novel would end.

Gazala:    There's a fly buzzing round my desk begging for a big hit from my can of Raid. Ask yourself a question, and answer it.

Alpert:    Q: Mark, do you have to know a lot of science to enjoy your science thriller Extinction? A: I’m so glad you asked that question. No, you don’t have to know any science at all. The novel is self-explanatory. As you ride the rollercoaster of the plot you’ll pick up everything you need to know. Many people shy away from science because they had a bad physics or chemistry teacher in high school. I see it as my job to fight those bad impressions and encourage people to love science. It’s an endless source of entertainment and awe. 

Perhaps we need harsher klieg lights, since Alpert has emerged a little overheated but otherwise fairly unscathed. Will you emerge so splendidly from your reading Extinction? The best way to find out is to snatch a copy of Alpert's new thriller and start reading. We'll make it easy -- all you have to do to get your copy of Extinction from Amazon is click here. Have fun, and read safely.

Barnes & Nowhere

Numbers are crunchy. They're good for you, too, like broccoli for your brain. For those craving numerical nutrition while watching Barnes & Noble's current shuttering of many of its stores across the country and abroad, there are all kinds of fresh, delicious numbers out for you to digest. Scads of publications are rushing to analyze Barnes & Noble's poor sales performance during the last holiday shopping season. The company's same store sales were down pretty much across the board, and stats for selling Nooks and e-books in the fourth quarter of 2012 were largely unimpressive.

The fallout from those disappointing numbers, and the bad numbers that preceded them earlier in 2012 and in recent years past, isn't hard to see. From the vantage point of the Gazalapalooza nerve center near our nation's capital, we're watching B&N mothball stores in Washington, D.C., and northern Virginia as we type these words. When they're asked to comment on the store closures, mouthpieces for B&N's executive suite in Manhattan quickly cite numbers. They use all kinds of numbers to to explain, justify and soft-pedal B&N's inexorable death march down the well-trodden path beaten by Borders not so long ago. Incidentally, in a tasty karmic twist of fate, it's also the same path that in the last two decades of the 20th century the company forced countless local independent bookstores all over the country to tread as the Riggio brothers expanded B&N into every retail nook and cranny they could find, both via B&N stores and through B&N's acquisition of the (now defunct) mall-based B. Dalton Bookseller chain.

Shall we examine the numbers? Well, Bob Dylan said you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Similarly, you don't need an accountant to see where B&N's heading, and why. All you need is your eyes, and a passing familiarity with certain recently demised icons of American retail.

The "why" is straightforward, and it has been beaten to death in innumerable reports for the past 20 years. The Internet is why. We needn't spend valuable time on that. If you need a refresher, think back to how you and your family, friends and colleagues conducted much, if not most, of your holiday shopping a couple of months ago.

It's more interesting to put aside the numbers for a bit, and think about what you see when you venture into a Barnes & Noble store. For present purposes, forget the ubiquitous coffee shop. Think instead about what else you see.

Whether you realize it or not, you see ghosts. You see the ghosts of retail past. You see the ghost of B&N's imminent future.

Remember all the Blockbuster stores? At its peak, Blockbuster had many thousands of stores. Today they number in mere hundreds, and disappear by the month. Blockbusters were everywhere. Blockbuster tried to keep up with changing times, switching from VHS tapes to DVDs when the market evolved. Nonetheless, like the VHS home rental model that spawned them, Blockbuster is pretty much nowhere now.

You can buy DVDs at Barnes & Noble. They have a section for that.

That's where you'll find Blockbuster's ghost at B&N.

Most folks order physical DVDs online, from Amazon. The ones that don't stream their video entertainment from Netflix.

Remember all the Tower Records stores? At its peak some years prior to its second and final bankruptcy filing in 2006, it wasn't too hard to find a Tower Records store in almost any American city. Tower was everywhere. Tower is nowhere now.

You can buy CDs at Barnes & Noble. They have a section for that.

That's where you'll find Tower's ghost at B&N.

Most folks download their music purchases online, from Apple's iTunes store, or from Amazon. The ones that don't stream music over the Internet from services like Pandora.

Remember e-readers? That should be an easy one to recall even for you whippersnappers. Kindles and Nooks, right? Well, old-school single-purpose Kindles and Nooks inevitably will share the same technological fate as 8-track and cassette tapes. Tablet computers do anything e-readers can do, and do it just as well with a lot more additional functionalities, in a small package. Those single-purpose Kindles and Nooks used to be everywhere. Very soon they'll be consigned to the same nowhere that Polaroid cameras hang out.

You can buy Nooks at Barnes & Noble. They have a big section for that.

The Nooks are in their death throes, though. It won't be long till they're ghosts, too. B&N is no technology wizard, and no Nook will ever be a great tablet or smartphone. Tablets and smartphones will dance on the Nook's grave as surely as digitally downloaded tunes now waltz among the dusty tombstones of 8-track tapes.

What's left? Oh yeah, books. You can buy books at Barnes & Noble. That's the ghost of Borders, not to mention the spectral residue of B&N's own bygone B. Daltons subsidiary and its growing roster of closed and soon-to-be-closed stores.

More than anything else, Barnes & Noble is a haunted house of retail. Strive as it may to stay open and relevant in an Internet world, its struggles will prove for naught. In this Internet era, the book selling world B&N conquered no longer exists, and so too will B&N cease to exist in any iteration like its present one.

That's not to say we're sounding the death knell for physical books. There will always be people who want physical books, people for whom e-books simply won't do. We hear from them every day. And when those people want actual books, they'll order them online, most likely from Amazon for the foreseeable future.

But, if they're fortunate, they might also have a good local independent bookstore to visit where they can buy those physical books. There are still some independent stores around, battle-scarred though they may be, and after B&N's demise we think might well be more of them. Not that those small shops will have acres of shelves teeming with tens of thousands of books -- the economics of independent book retailing won't permit it. The stores will stock only a few hundred books at a time, likely current and perennial bestsellers. But what economics will permit over the next few years is small bookshops to have Espresso Book Machines, like the one nicknamed "OPUS" at the independent Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. EBMs, which can print, collate, cover and bind almost any book in (or out of) print in just a few minutes, are relatively new technology, and accordingly large and expensive. So were computers, printers, facsimile machines and cell phones not that long ago. Nevertheless, as recently as last summer there were more than 50 EBMs in libraries, universities and bookstores around the world, with more on the way. Like other new technologies, EBMs will become ever smaller and cheaper as time flies. And when EBMS become sufficiently so, your local independent bookstore will have one ready, willing and able to whip up a high-quality copy of nearly any book that has ever been in existence, at your demand. This is the future of local independent bookshops in a post Barnes & Noble world, and it's a good one.

Barnes & Noble never bothered to mourn the beloved independent community bookstores it vanquished during its remorseless rise to power. Nor will the resurgent independent bookstores waste breath praising B&N when they join with Amazon to bury it next to Borders, in the shadows thrown from the battered stones marking Blockbuster's and Tower Records' unlamented graves.

"Le roi est mort, vive les princes."

~~Lise-Marie Jaillant~~

I Sing the Book Electric

Hold on a sec. Just getting my stuff together before I leave the house.

Let's see... My cell phone. Check. My music player. Check. Where did I leave my still camera? I'm sure I put it right here. Or was it over there? Here it is, next to my video cam. Can't forget my handheld gaming machine, either. Man, I need more pockets.

How often does that little vignette happen at your house? Not a whole lot since about 2007, I'm guessing. All right, maybe 2009 or so with that bit about the video cam. Still, the bottom line is when you shove your smart phone in your pocket, you're also grabbing your music player, your still and video cam, a game console, an untold array of apps and the entire Internet in your pants before you saunter out the door to start your day.

Admittedly, there are professionals, aficionados and die-hards who'll never abandon the latest or favorite iterations of a given purpose-specific technological tool. For one among their number, the new Nikon Coolpix S800c is simply de rigeur, just as Ashton Kutcher says.

But for the ever-growing majority of us, convenience trumps all. Why pay for, attend to, and lug around a handful of devices when we can enjoy all those devices' disparate functionalities in one compact, pretty machine?

The answer is, increasingly we don't. Nor should we. Unless you're making your living as a professional photographer or videographer, the photo and video features on your smart phone serve perfectly well for all your creative visual imagery needs. The music player works great. The apps and the Internet are always at your twitching fingertips. Oh yeah, and it's a phone, too.

One machine that does many things well is what you want. And there's nothing wrong with that. It makes perfect sense. And there's a vast global community of hardware and software engineers, designers and programmers who toil constantly to invent and refine your phone and what it can do for you, giving you opportunities to use that pretty little machine in ways you never knew you wanted to until you knew you could.

So when's the last time you bought a stand-alone camera, regardless of Kutcher's pitches?

Exactly, and that's also the fate of dedicated e-readers, for the same reasons.

Consider the burgeoning popularity of reading books in electronic format. Last December, a study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that the number of Americans choosing to read e-books escalated from 16% to 23% over the course of 2012. The same study said the number of adults who read printed books declined from 72% to 67% over the identical period.

That's intriguing. But what's more intriguing, particularly for authors and publishers, is this: in 2011, nine out of ten e-books were read on dedicated e-readers, such as Amazon's Kindle or Barnes & Noble's Nook. In 2012, that declined to only three out of four. In other words, in the 24 months from January, 2011 to December, 2012, reading books on dedicated e-readers declined from 90% of the e-book market, to 75%.

Where did the e-book reading migrate to from Kindles and Nooks? You guessed it -- to tablets. This is a trend that will accelerate for a long time before it decelerates.

Amazon sells a whole lot of books, and it wishes to continue doing that, so it recognizes and accepts this trend very clearly. Thus its introduction of the Kindle Fire, which is a sophisticated, multifunctional multimedia tablet device rather than strictly an e-reader. The Fire is designed to compete with iPads, Google Nexuses, Nook HD+, and the like, tablets all.

Remember, the iPad was introduced to the world not even three years ago. Technology research firm IDC predicted that when the 2012 sales numbers are finalized, over 122 million tablets will have been sold worldwide. That's up from 65 million tablets sold in 2011, and barely 17 million in 2010.

How will that affect the dedicated e-reader? Let's go back to our friends at IDC. They estimate 2012 global e-reader shipments declined 28% from 2011, from nearly 28 million e-readers in 2011 to less than 20 million in 2012.

What do these statistics foretell? Lee Rainie over at Pew says, "We haven't reached this point yet, but there are reasonable thoughts that the book experience of the future will be dramatically different than today. It will be multimedia, highly social and maybe even incorporate a wiki experience."

Gazalapalooza agrees. As a matter of fact, we agreed quite some time ago, in a post called "The E-lluminated Manuscript" that we published here in October, 2011. Now would be a great time for you to pop over and read that post, as it ties in directly to this one.

The bottom line is that as readers hustle from e-readers to tablets, a significant portion of them will expect, if not demand, that the books they buy to enjoy on those tablets take advantage of more than one of the machine's features. This will be true particularly for younger readers, who've been inundated with multimedia machines since (if not before) they escaped their cradles.

One thing is sure -- these newfangled books will be costly to produce, and so costly as well to purchase. It won't be easy to make an interactive, multimedia e-book on a typical book budget, rather than one usually associated with producing a video game, much less a movie. Talent other than authorial will have to be recruited and paid, and rights to audio, visual, and imagery elements will have to be secured without violating copyrights. But that's not stopping publishers from venturing into this largely undiscovered literary terrain. Penguin says it plans to release about 50 fiction and nonfiction "enhanced e-books" this year. Simon & Schuster has around 60 of them slated for publication in 2013, and Knopf and Random House also have enhanced e-books heading toward a tablet near you before this year's end. Of course, Apple is jumping into the deep end, though its concentration is on enhanced, interactive e-textbooks.

The question is, are these interactive, multimedia tale-telling things "books" in any true sense? They spin stories and impart information, which are the most essential functions of books in their traditional paper iterations. But they also incorporate one or more of music, 2- and 3-D photos, maps, videos, games, puzzles, social media, and wikis. Is it a book, or is it a digital app, or is it a video game? And if it's more than a book, is it really a book at all, or is it something other? If nothing else, the evolution forced on authors and book publishers by readers armed with tablets will twist the definition of the word "book" in ways unforeseen just a few years ago. It may well twist just as profoundly the definition of "author."

And all this enhanced e-book noise may be just a passing fad. Book publishers have stumbled down a path not unlike this one before, when they experimented with multimedia books on CD-ROMS a few years back. To put it charitably, the experiment was not a success. Or, as e-book publisher Open Road Integrated Media's CEO Jane Friedman said recently, "The consumer is not asking for this. It takes it from being a reading experience to something else..."

Still, despite what she says, Friedman's company is dipping its toes into the enhanced e-book market. This spring Open Road is set to release Gift, a novel by Andrea Buchanan for young adults that incorporates original music, graphics, diary entries and a music video by Swedish YouTube superstar FreddeGredde.

All this swirls in my fevered brow as I'm writing the hotly-anticipated sequel to my thriller, Blood of the Moon. For enhanced e-book purposes, am I an author, or a producer? Seemingly the latter. If so, I'm thinking Dave Grohl does the soundtrack. Maybe I can get Steven Spielberg to direct. And a holographic appearance by Marilyn Monroe would surely boost marketing and sales, don't you think?

"Simplicity is the glory of expression."

~~ Walt Whitman ~~