THE ANATOMY OF A BOOK TRAILER

In the beginning, there are the words.

Every novelist secretly dreams of a film option, but those are rarely in the cards.

Book trailers are too often a dime-a-dozen.

Rarely, but sometimes, the stars align and you get something like a cinematic treatment—however short it might be in form—of your authentic vision.

I LOVE my book trailer secured for me by my publisher, Betimes Books.

Joose TV and the brilliant Eddie McCaffrey fully delivered a brilliant book trailer for PERMANENT FATAL ERROR.

In the early going, I was asked to provide a kind of script for the thing. What I delivered ran long—more of a cinematic short film than a proper teaser/trailer.

Eddie sculpted that down, picked up an element or two from elsewhere in the book. The result is the perfect set-up of my novel and distillation of its dark themes. We see the mysterious Everett Hyde, author long believed dead, pounding out a wine-stoked warning email to a prying academic.

The music kicks it into overdrive; the noir setting and lighting? Sublime…

Eddie’s available if you wish to explore the option of your own book trailer with him. His official site is here.

For my part, I just sit back and continue to savor his vision of my novel.

Check it out here:

PERMANENT FATAL ERROR ordering information:

U.S. Kindle Edition

U.S. Trade Paperback

Book Depository

U.K. Kindle Edition

U.K. Trade Paperback

Australian Kindle Edition

Canadian Kindle Edition

THE BIG APPLE (BITES?)

Order Permanent Fatal Error here:

U.S. Kindle Edition

U.S. Trade Paperback

Book Depository

U.K. Kindle Edition

U.K. Trade Paperback

Australian Kindle Edition

Canadian Kindle Edition

So, I’ve got this love/hate thing with New York City.

Put any thoughts of my politics aside as I confess this next: I loved the city under Mayor Giuliani. Post-Rudy, it’s been one big slippery slope into squalor.

Still, there are pockets of the city I love when I come down from my mountain and occasionally venture northeast to NYC.

A lot of my favorite bookstores are gone now, alas.

Time’s Square is just tourist hour all the time on overdrive these days: a blur of light and motion that could send the dead into seizures.

I do have a few favorite places that so far endure, and they’re just off the beaten path of that whole sorry Time’s Square scene.

Got back to the city last month for various reasons; some of it was very wonderful. Made a point of hitting one of my favorite streets for drinking and eating…that made the trip.

The heroine of PERMANENT FATAL ERROR is this young, aspiring novelist named Ashley McKnight.

Confession time: She’s me maybe a few years back.

After a harrowing escape from my current playpen (the Great Smoky Mountains), she makes her way back to the city for a pivotal meeting with her literary agent and a kind of mercenary/author who’s modeled on this gorilla I met at an unfortunate publisher’s party in the city a few moons ago.

The restaurant is this Cuban eatery named Havana Central—it’s got this wicked neon palm tree out front and serves up drinks with these cool swizzle sticks that feature curvy Cuban hotties with windswept hair and hemlines.

The Cuban sandwiches are state-of-the-art and the mojitos the most righteous mixed north of Key West. When I go to NYC, at least one meal happens in that place ’cause I love it so.

Not far from there is an Irish pub named “Connolly’s.” It also features prominently in PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, and not too many pages after Havana Central raises its head. The bartender described in the book is still pulling taps and mixing drinks there, serving them up with a smile and that Galway accent.