Wait, what?

by Alexandra Sokoloff

I’ve been a bit sick and rather distracted these last few weeks so this whole “Long Goodbye” has had a dreamlike quality for me. I keep thinking, “Did we really say we were going to do that? Surely not.”

But now it’s my turn, and it’s all starting to feel alarmingly real.

I’ve been with Murderati since, well, let’s look at the archives. Friday, December 8, 2006.  That would have been just after my first book, The Harrowing, was published.

I switched from screenwriting to writing books so quickly I really knew nothing at all about the book business, and even less about book promotion. I’m a pretty quick study, though, in general, and I jumped into the Internet research. And in 2006 it was pretty clear that blogging was the thing for authors to do, and pretty clear to me that Murderati was the mystery blog to beat.

So I became a frequent commenter. I came from theater, I know how to audition.  I figured I’d just be so sparkly and irresistible and indispensible that they’d just have to ask me to join. Which apparently worked, because they did.

It’s been a long time. I blogged here every week for several years.  I was quickly so sick of talking about myself (within a month, I’d say…) I started blogging on story structure instead, and ended up writing almost my whole Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbook here, one blog at a time. That’s a pretty amazing thing, right there.  A lot of what I’ve written has been scribbled (typed) frantically at the end of long days when I’ve simply forgotten what day it was, an occupational hazard of a full-time writer. Other times I felt inspired, or felt like I had to top some tour de force of Steve’s, and I ended up feeling like a real writer of other things besides books.

I don’t have to tell any of you this, but a blog becomes a kind of PLACE, where people know they can stop by and find other people of like mind, a whole batch of regulars. Sometimes fun, sometimes comforting, sometimes confrontational, often emotional.  You actually work with your blogmates, so this is feeling like leaving a long-loved job.  As well as, as others have already said, like a favorite restaurant or bar or club closing down.

Only we did it to ourselves.  Why?

Honestly, it’s not the bi-weekly blogging that’s so hard – it’s the turnover.  Anyone leaving throws the balance into turmoil and the rest of us have to scramble to get back on track. I've done that scramble more times than I want to count over these six years. And the truth is, writers don’t seem to have enough time to blog any more. It feels like diminishing returns, when there’s a fast and easy alternative conversation on Facebook. The technology has changed. The conversation has moved.  We’re having to reinvent.

I used to run a huge cyber bulletin board of 2000+ screenwriters.  In many ways I’ve never been as comfortable with the blog format as I was with the bulletin board format. On WriterAction, ANYONE could start a thread. It was perfectly egalitarian that way. Some of our beloved backbloggers here on Murderati have been confessing that they had hopes of joining the lineup here. My feeling is that you often WERE the lineup – it just didn’t appear that way to a casual visitor because of the hierarchical structure of a blog. But on a bulletin board, you guys would clearly have been the lineup. I can’t help but feel that’s a better way.

Facebook eventually made our bulletin board unnecessary. It’s possible that it was mostly Facebook that made Murderati unnecessary as well. I’m an intensely social person and I need my social contact, but I see so many of you regularly on Facebook that I may have been lulled into feeling it’s not goodbye, just a change of venue that seems better suited to the times. I guess I’ll never know how many people regularly read my blogs here, but it’s easy to see that I’m getting massive traffic from my Facebook mini-blogs and random silly or profound comments there, because I get so many comments back.  More people take that time to comment on Facebook.  It feels more real, and I can be political, or brief, or cryptic, or completely idiotic. I like the informality, and I love the pace of conversation when it gets going.

In previous years I would have taken on the burden of reinventing Murderati as a bulletin board community or something similar. But I’m getting what I need out of Facebook, and I’m providing anyone who cares to drop by my FB page with the same thing I’ve done here, whatever the hell that is! - and with MUCH less time investment, leaving me more time to do what I’m supposed to be doing.  And we all know what that is. We all keep saying it.

We need to write books.

I know I'll still be seeing a lot of you as much as ever, elsewhere.  But because Murderati is a PLACE, I am already missing and mourning it. It’s the end of an era, and we all take change hard. 

Please keep in touch, or it's just too unbearable.

- Here’s where I am far too often on Facebook.

- I will be blogging regularly on my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors blog – I teach a college film class, now, and will be doing a lot of movie breakdowns in the future.  I would love to have people come by and talk.

- My website is regularly updated, and you can join my mailing list there to get book news (no more than four updates a year.)

- And I am going to make a point of checking the Murderati Facebook page every day and posting/responding there.

And… I have to let you all know, since I have shared so much of my e book journey here: Huntress Moon was just nominated for a Thriller Award in the International Thriller Writers’ brand new category of Best E Book Original Novel.

That's partly down to you, you know.

Thanks for everything.  I love you all.

Now tell me. Am I just an idiot for thinking Facebook is the modern alternative to blogging, and that it could ever be the same? If so, what WOULD be an alternative?

- Alex

Be sure to tune in on weekends, too this month for posts by alumni.  J.D. Rhoades is first up, tomorrow! 

Beginnings and endings

by PD Martin

I’ve been overseas the past three weeks and literally landed at Melbourne Airport four hours ago. I was planning on writing my blog for today while I was on holidays, but with everything that’s going on with Murderati, I found myself changing my mind constantly about subjects.  

Originally, the blog I had in my head for 11 April was going to be about my holiday. The family and I headed to Ireland for three weeks. My husband’s Irish and I lived there for a year and a half, so we spent our time catching up with friends and family. But there was also a very important purpose for this visit. You see, this was our first trip to Ireland since we picked our son up from Korea last year and this trip would celebrate his arrival into our family with his christening. In fact, we managed to get a wedding and two christenings in during our three-week holiday.

Anyway, then I thought I could blog about christenings and maybe even other non-religious birth celebrations. You know, even research the topic a bit plus talk about my personal experience. Even though I’m not a religious person, I found Liam’s christening incredibly moving.

But then I thought, no…I can’t blog about holidays or Ireland or christenings as part of my long goodbye. Can I? Maybe I can. I mean, the two subjects are tied together by the related themes of beginnings and endings. While I was in Ireland celebrating a wedding (the birth of a new marriage), two christenings (the birth of two beautiful boys), I was also in mourning. In mourning for Murderati. Births and deaths. Beginnings and endings. This is what's been going around and around in my head the past few weeks. 

I have to confess, when I logged on briefly from a borrowed phone to read the Monday 1 April blog and the comments I DID start to wonder…are we doing the right thing?  Do we have any other options? I think I speak for all the current Murderati gang when I say it’s been a tough choice. But for me personally, since we picked up Liam my writing time has been drastically cut. I have enjoyed blogging at Murderati immensely, but with my time so limited I did have to question whether it was the best possible use of time. I need to write more books. That really is my bottom line at the moment. And I need to do it with less available time than ever before. But it’s still sad…really sad to say goodbye to Murderati.

My last blog here at Murderati will be Thursday 25 April and that will be my official goodbye.  But for today I wanted to share everything that's been going on in head re beginnings and endings -- and why. And I guess I also wanted to explain why Murderati coming to an end breaks my heart but also seems like the most sensible thing to do. At some point in time, something's gotta give and I think it just so happens that more and more of the Murderati gang seem to be in this position right now. :(

AND THEN WE CAME TO THE END

by Gar Anthony Haywood

Okay, picture this:

There's this great dinner club.  It's run and attended by some of the smartest (and of course, most beautiful) people you know.  Successful, funny, generous people.  For years, you've hung around outside the club, just outside the red velvet rope, sharing a word or two with the men and women entering and exiting just to get a sense of how cool it would be to be one of them.  And then, one day . . .

They invite you inside.  Offer you membership.  Give you a key to the front door.

Now you're at the club every other week, meeting new people, making new friends.  Telling stories your audience finds fascinating, cracking jokes everyone laughs at (well, almost everyone).  Slowly but surely, you're finding your place in this rarified crowd, developing a sense of actually belonging here.  Life is good.

Now picture the club owner choosing this exact moment to shut the joint down.

Say what?!

Welcome to my Murderati experience.  Just when I was starting to really have fun, the lights go out --- for good.

Was it something I said?

This has been a fantastic writers' blog, and it was one long before I ever came onboard.  One thing I think has always set it apart is its almost total lack of a promotional focus.  For all the writers, big and small, who have held a place on the Murderati roster over the years, few have shown more than a passing interest in salesmanship.  The emphasis here has always seemed to be on telling great stories about the writing life, rather than hawking literary merchandise.

I'd be lying if I said holding up my end of the Murderati bargain every two weeks (plus again every eight weeks for Wildcard Tuesdays) has always been easy.  It hasn't.  I spent more than a few nervous Tuesday and Monday nights banging my head against the wall seeking to shake a post topic that didn't suck loose for the next morning.  But overall, I had a blast, and I think I wrote a post or two I can be proud of.

In fact, I think that's how I'll leave you all: With a brief list of my favorite Murderati posts:

LIES MY FATHER TOLD ME (THAT TURNED OUT TO BE TRUE)

THAT'S INCREDIBLE! (AND THAT'S THE PROBLEM)

NO PAIN, NO GAIN

THIS I DO BELIEVE

YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP

DECEMBER 14, 2012

SORRY, OUR MISTAKE, WON'T EVER HAPPEN AGAIN

Thanks for the memories, people.  And a special shout-out to Pari and J.T., who threw this party in the first place.  You guys are the best.

Take it away, Dandy Don.

GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

By Tess Gerritsen

Blogging is hard work.

It starts off as a labor of love, but labor it truly is -- a fact that becomes more and more apparent as you pound out your twentieth, fiftieth, hundredth blog post. As novelists, we use words as our tools of trade, and we struggle to choose the right ones to tell our stories. Like the carpenter who's been swinging a hammer all day, at the end of the workday, many of us are weary and ready to put down our tools.

But no -- for some of us, it's time to write another blog post. A task that started as a pleasure becomes just another responsibility. Week after week, we struggle to come up with some fresh topic that we haven't yet addressed. After you've shared everything you know about writing and publishing and marketing, what next? Do you write about kittens? Can you make it funny and engaging and thoughtful? At the same time, can you avoid being too controversial, so that your site won't be flooded with angry comments by dog lovers?

There is a natural life cycle to blogs. I've seen it with my own site. I've watched other writers leap into the blogosphere, bursting with a thousand things to say. Or they're lured into it with the promise of greater exposure and better book sales. Over time, though, the entries become less and less frequent. Or they start to repeat themselves. Or they touch on a sensitive subject that launches a flame war of comments, forcing the blogger to go silent, just to maintain her sanity.

For years, the wonderful exception has been Murderati. With its rotating panel of contributors, it's been able to draw on multiple voices, and over the years the insights have been funny, moving, and thought-provoking -- sometimes all at once. Through these writers, we've watched the industry evolve, lives change, and careers thrive ... or not. We've had an inside look at what it really means to be a writer, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Thanks to visionaries JT Ellison and Pari Noskin Taichert, Murderati, has seemed like the party that would never end.

Only now it is ending. I am truly sad about it, because it's one of the best writers' blogs around. I also understand why it's folding up its tents: because writers get tired. Because everyone's lives are demanding. And because, sometimes, it's just the right moment to move on.

Thank you, JT and Pari for launching Murderati and for so lovingly keeping it alive all these years. Thank you to all the writers who've contributed; I've learned something from each and every one of you. Since everything is saved to the archives, not a single word here will vanish.

Murderati may no longer be active, but it will be immortal.

ALOHA

by Robert Gregory Browne

"Good bye may seem forever. Farewell is like the end, but in my heart is the memory and there you will always be." ~Walt Disney

I figure the above quote is only appropriate, because when I left Murderati a while ago, I left to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song.

When I look back over the last few years, I'm amazed at how much has changed since JT first asked me to blog for Murderati. The industry is now in turmoil, the transition from print to digital happening much faster than anyone anticipated. Publishers have dug in their heels and refused to offer better terms for midlist authors—in fact, the terms are much worse than before. I'm sure if I were still blogging for Murderati I'd be ranting about this, because more often than not my posts were a chance to get whatever was bugging me off my chest.

I admit I was surprised that Murderati survived without me. I was, after all, the heart and soul of this place and...

Okay, maybe not so much. Most of the time I was a guy in search of something to say, and I'm thankful that even when I posted nonsense, many of you came by to cheer me on and start a lively conversation in the comments.

I realize that this place has become a kind of after school playhouse for a lot of people and I know how sorely you will miss it now that the playhouse is being torn down. It's a sad moment, but probably an inevitable one. Blogging is a time-consuming task and the authors who have remained are very busy people, indeed. I can't blame them for deciding to move on. I did it myself. So thank you to all of the wonderful hard-working authors and readers who helped make Murderati the wonderful blog it is.

Now it's time to say goodbye To all our company...

Rob

Hey, guys - this is Stephen here.  Just wanted to let you know that Pari will return next Monday, April 15, and then again on Monday, April 29, to finish out the month as well as the blog.  JT will be joining us on Friday, April 26, to give her farewell.  We'll be having other past members of Murderati joining us all month, mostly on Tuesdays and weekends.  Tomorrow, Tess Gerritsen will have the floor.  Please come by and say hello!