This is the last book giveaway of the year – ten copies of Fancy Anders Goes to War and ten copies of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton. Write me at macphilms@hotmail.com with your order of preference. You pledge to write a review at Amazon for these – I specify Amazon because both books are exclusive with Amazon on Kindle and (for now at least) as physical media…you know, books.

If you hate the book, you are released from your pledge to review it, though of course you may anyway. This is a USA only book giveaway. Be sure (IMPORTANT) to include your snail-mail address, even if you’ve won previously.

Here, by the way, is a link to NeoText and their announcement of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton, where you can also buy it.

Anybody out there who reads and likes either of these books, your Amazon reviews are vital this time around. As I mentioned last week, neither book went out to the publishing “trades” – Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal and Booklist. The reason is boring, so try not to let your eyes glaze over: NeoText is an e-book publisher, and fairly late in the game I convinced them (they are good people) to do print versions as well. These are Print-On-Demand books (and they look great). But “late in the game” means we weren’t able to get them to the trade reviewers on time.

Some of the Internet reviewers and a few newsstand magazines will get copies, though. But obviously it’s vital that my fans (both of you) review these books, preferably favorably, and get the word out.

Dave Thomas and I are doing our best to let the world know about Jimmy Leighton. We recorded a two-part Gilbert Gottfried podcast last week, which should “drop” (God I hate that expression) soon. We have done other podcasts together and separately, and some online interviews, too. Some links will follow at the end of this update.

Dave and I have become good friends, which I can hardly believe, stone SCTV freak that I am. He is a great guy, warm and funny but also with a genuine streak of Bill Needle (SCTV fans will understand). While we met a couple of times (unmemorably for Dave) before, during the writing of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton we did not. The plan had been for one of us to travel to the home/locale of the other, before we dug in to the writing – to plot the book, get a synopsis together, in person.

Then Covid came along.

So The Many Lives of Jimmy Lives became a Covid book – developed by Zoom and daily telephone calls (more than once a day, often). Dave did the first pass of each chapter, but called me frequently during the writing – he would read me what he’d written so far, I’d give notes, and we’d kick around where the chapter might go from there. Dave gets bored with just executing the synopsis, so the story became fluid in an interesting and positive way. I have never worked this way, and it was a glimpse into how SCTV and TV writers’ rooms work.

Dave had a bad health scare along the way – not Covid-related, other than the anxiety caused by having to deal with a health crisis when hospitals were overflowing with Covid cases – at a point where we had the first five chapters and a synopsis ready. We had already decided that we would do just that much before taking it out to market.

With Dave in the hospital, quite frankly fighting for his life, I set about to sell our book. I tried a couple of venues where I’ve had some success and got the kind of frustrating responses that longtime pros are used to – glowing enthusiasm and delight leading up to “not right for our list” as the punchline.

I was not prepared for that, though should have been. It is always difficult to sell a genre hybrid, and Jimmy Leighton was exactly that – half contemporary science fiction, half gritty crime novel. I brought my agent on board to try Canadian publishers, because Dave is a national treasure up there – a genuine superstar, as Bob and Doug are among the few Canadian icons. We got nowhere.

My agent was about to take it to other American publishers (only two had seen it) when I mentioned the project to my editor at NeoText, where I had just delivered Fancy Anders Goes to War. He was eager to see the chapters and proposal. The sale came quickly.

Fancy Anders was set up to be published as three novellas, and each – although designed to add up to one book – was a stand-alone. We had brought the great Fay Dalton aboard to do elaborate illustrations for the Fancy novellas, so to give her time to accomplish that, we set up a program whereby the publication of the three Fancy novellas would be staggered over six months at least.

Initially we were going to publish Jimmy Leighton the same way. But first Dave – then I – became concerned that the three sections of Jimmy didn’t each stand alone in the way Fancy did. And we had early on abandoned the idea of illustrations for the book, other than the cover art. So – again – fairly late in the game, we lobbied for NeoText to publish Jimmy as a single book. The novel had been written that way and it began to make sense following that path, not the Fancy one.

It’s cost us reviews, which is (as I’ve indicated) where you come in.

I know I harp on this a lot. But the nature of the beast these days is that you nice people who actually still read books need to support the authors you like with reviews online, particularly at Amazon.

I irritated some readers when I complained about self-professed fans of mine who would (in my view) attack novels of mine that didn’t suit what they wanted from me. On artistic grounds, my hopping around from here to there has a lot to do with me staying fresh and also pursuing various interests, which takes me various places, obviously. But on practical grounds, I write a lot to stay in business and bad reviews from people who only like some of my work, and go out of their way to complain about what they don’t like, costs me money. Worse, it can cost me venues.

This is true for all of us telling stories in the very old-fashioned prose fiction way. Support the authors you like. Don’t just write reviews of my stuff, but theirs, too (I’m fine with me being at the top of your list, though). Even a couple of sentient sentences will do, but longer expressions of delight are good also (very Jerry Lewis cadence there)…even balanced, well-reasoned opinions are encouraged. Those numbers – how many reviews and even just star ratings have been logged – are key for the success of a book, and for an author to continue producing.

Novelists are an endangered species, like the spotted owl. Keep us healthy and fed, would you? Spotted owl is delicious, by the way.

I’ve had some wonderful comments on my ten-part literary memoir, A Life in Crime. I hope to write a few more entries over time, and eventually collect them into a book. Among the things I did not discuss at length in the series are my adventures in indie filmmaking, comics/graphic novel writing, the Spillane novels (Caleb York deserves a chapter of his own), and a bunch of other stuff.

The serialization of A Life in Crime allowed me to focus on the Spillane biography, which I completed my draft of over the weekend. I still have the lengthy “Spillane Files” appendix to work on, although most of that was already put together by Jim Traylor, who has been working on this project literally since Mickey’s passing in 2006.

This will absolutely be the definitive book on Mickey Spillane – the story of his life, and the story of his life’s work. We hope to send it to our publisher, Mysterious Press, this month.

I was disappointed in Halloween Kills. The same writing/directing team who did the much superior Halloween reboot stumbled here, sacrificing a political allegory about Jan. 6 and the divisiveness in America to a humorless and unpleasant gore fest. I understand this is the second of a trilogy and I liked the first film enough to give the third one a try.

Barb and I watched Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, which is flawed but very entertaining and underrated. Halloween Kills could have benefitted from this much unloved non-sequel’s strong but fleeting gore, and heavy-handed but effective satire.

In the Halloween spirit, I showed Nate The Final Girls, the 2015 horror comedy that has a group of current teens getting stuck inside an ‘80s slasher movie. It’s somewhat little known but is well-worth checking out, if you are at all a fan of the Halloween/Friday the 13th genre.

Here’s a great Fan Base interview with Dave Thomas on our novel, The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton.

Check out the Dave Thomas Appreciation Page at Facebook.

Finally, here’s the Word Balloon podcast with Dave about the book (and his SCTV adventures).

M.A.C.