Brilliant Actors - When bad does not equal bad!

What do you do when your heroine is actually a bad person? Simple: introduce "relative badness".
Calendar Moonstone, heroine of the "Brilliant" books is a diamond thief, plain and simple. She steals beautiful jewelry and extraordinary diamonds. I agree, it is not as bad as our beloved serial killer Dexter Morgan or Cereisi Lannister. Or as heartbreaking as Oliver Twist. But still thief remains thief. She hurts the owner of the jewelry, and it is not an excuse to be rich! She hurts the insurances, and it's not an excuse that the insurance detective has actually built his whole career around Calendar.
Therefore the concept of "relative bad". In the book I have our Calender girl fight against various people who are even more despicable than her:
What is worse? Steal for fun or steal for profit? Clear badness : profit. No passion, pure money in the eyes of the antagonist.
What is worse? Steal out of compulsion or steal out of jealousy? Wicked badness in favor of jealousy. Compulsive behaviour, isn't that a sickness? The poor girl! Jealousy, what a lousy motivation to do harm! Bad bad girl!
What is worse? Steal for reusing the diamonds or steal because it is your job?  How sweet, she is redoing the make and model of the jewelry! And that guy over in New York is the biggest crime czar and stealing is his business. Baaad.



Brilliant Actors - now also out in print

So happy to announce that "Brilliant Actors" now is also globally available in print, exclusively on Amazon (through the ever reliable "Createspace" service).
Small ancedote: the last two covers I created with Photoshop to get the color coding right and have the correct resolution necessary for print. Didn't work this time, like with "Troubleshooter". I had only used a 30-day-version of Photoshop. And my writing earning's do not weight up a 20 $ / month Photoshop license or a 500 $ used license of an earlier version. So I reverted back to my trusted way of working: Powerpoint layout and export as picture PDF with maximum resolution (2999 pixels wide). As the colors are predominantely white, the outcome is amazingly fine.

Brilliant Actors - Calendar Moonstone's second adventure is coming up!

Long time no hear. Been busy finalizing "Brilliant Actors", the second installment of cat burglar Calendar Moonstone's adventures. The editor had done a great job finding my errors and it took the weekend to finalize the script. During next week all is left to do is to prepare the manuscript for publishing.
First channel will be Kindle Direct Publishing, followed by Createspace for the print edition. I'll experiment a little bit with KDP and advertising first, and then will open the other channels later (i.e. Smashword).

Here is the eBook cover as a teaser and the promo-text.

On Writing: when enough is enough is not enough?

In my current work in progress Troubleshooter novella (working title "Private Trouble", I have an interesting 5th act problem:
The story is over, the conflict is resolved and Paul Trouble rides into the sunset (well, to Somalia's war theatre of the early Nineties). However, I have another layer of resolution which I could add.
The regular resolution brings the bad guys behind bars. Paul manages to retrieve the McGuffin. All well. This is the "enough is enough" part.
But now comes another twist: one of the cops who brings the bad guys behind bars, is also a corrupt cop. Paul is the only one who knows. (So there is another conflict and another resolution to be had).
Not enough?

As a writer (God of the story) I have three options:
- I leave it out, to keep the original story mean and lean, like a good novella.
- I put the second ending in (as kind of Act 5.5) and bring another spice into the story
- I weave the storyline in earlier  (which is tricky, as the story is a very quick one with around 40 print pages), so the estate is a bit crammed.

Let's find out which way I go! "Private Trouble" should come out somewhen in summer as a marketing vehicle. And that means for you: free for a period of time on Amazon.  (Otherwise only a buck, equals for the price of a sip of Frappucino.)

Troubleshooter - the influences (Part 3 Donald Hamilton)

Another series of excellent forgotten books is the Matt Helm series by US author Donald Hamilton. The 20-plus books cycle the adventures of a killer in the services of a black-ops problem solving unit. I like them for several reasons, that's why I aspired to emulate some of the elements in "Troubleshooter":

  • A ruthless hero - Matt is uncompromisingly focussed on the success of his missions, killing another agent (foreign or own) is just a collateral damage for an otherwise very sympathetic hero. In one of the books there is a nice scene where Matt runs off a foreign agent from the road, resulting in a devastating car crash for the other agent. Matt drives on without helping to continue the mission. Another agency in pursuit of them stops to help the foreign agent in his car wreck—instead of following the mission protocol—and promptly gets killed. (Soft gets you killed in this job)
  • Independence - In the early books Matt still has a family but has this secret agent / killer past. After that breaks down, he basically moves through the adventures alone, occasionally a fellow agent at his side, but most repeating characters are killed off after a few adventures. Plan is to give Paul Trouble a reverse journey—from loner to social human being—in the following books.
  • Clear right and wrong - Donald Hamilton's spy novels play during the cold war area where things were black and white: red = bad, USA = good.