Amazing review of FIRE SEASON popped up on Google alerts today (yes, I've Google alerted myself).  It's by the extremely intelligent and articulate Doreen Sheridan at criminalelement.com, with whom I may be a little bit in love.  I'll do a fair use quote of four paragraphs, but the whole thing's worth a read.  If you're me, anyway. 

It’s not often that you find a solid police procedural couched in dialog that makes you laugh out loud every few pages, but Fire Season by Jon Loomis is just that. Loomis leavens the criminal—and sometimes tragic—events he writes of with snappy patter and the occasional dose of absurdity.

A less accomplished writer might be seeming to undermine the seriousness of the subject at hand: rampant death and destruction are no laughing matter, after all. Loomis, however, juxtaposes the dramatic with the humorous in a way that serves to enhance each. His deliberate, and masterful, use of this technique is a neat reminder that even in the most dire of situations, a little humor can help anchor us in the long view. When used in a crime novel, it’s a nice nod to the fact that this technique is also a coping mechanism not unfamiliar to police officers and others in similarly stressful occupations.

And while the crimes—beginning with the grisly slaughter of seals in captivity, and escalating to multiple arsons, a murder, and international drug trafficking—are depicted with the gravity each deserves, the human relationships are usually laced with levity and warmth, such as between the protagonist, Acting Police Chief Frank Coffin, and his partner, Sergeant Lola Winters:

"Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Lola said, after they’d found five hollow ducks.
“I’m thinking I wish we had a drug dog,” Coffin said.
“So, smuggling?”
Coffin nodded. “Not a lot of volume, so something pricey—high quality heroin or coke, maybe.”
“Could be some other smuggling thing,” Lola said. “Diamonds. Krugerrands.”
“And any minute now Cary Grant could jump in through the window,” Coffin said.
Lola punched him in the shoulder.

There have been some other very nice pre-pub reviews, but it really doesn't get any better than this one.  Thank you, Ms. Sheridan.  

Taking a class at Globe

So, because I'm a bit of a loon, I thought it might be interesting/instructive to try to take an online creative writing class at Globe University--our for-profit "competitor" school here in Eau Claire.  Who knows?  Maybe I'd get an essay out of it, or a novel chapter.  Turns out, a single, four-credit creative writing class costs $2000 (including about $160/worth of books, evidently).  That's, like, a new Stratocaster!  So, ain't gonna happen.  It might be fun, though, to go in and take the test to see if I can skip the prerequisite (I wonder how many people pass the test).  I asked if my prior professional writing experience counted, and they said no.

The funny part (okay, it's all funny) is that a 3-credit intro to creative writing course at UWEC would cost a little more than half that.  Taught by me!  Also, I looked up the guy that teaches their online CW classes.  I'm sure he's a great guy.  He's one of our alums!  From 2003!  He has a master's from UW-Madison in Linguistics, and hasn't actually published anything yet, as far as I can tell.  But his class costs $1000 more than mine!  And of course he gets paid a fraction of my salary, with no benefits.  I don't know that for a fact, but I assume he makes roughly what our adjuncts make.  And that, folks, is your for-profit higher education model at work.

Here's the dirty little secret about for-profit higher ed: without the federal student loan program, it wouldn't exist.  There's no business model without taxpayers ultimately being on the hook.  Can you say, "corporate welfare?"  Sure you can.     

Starred review from Booklist (subscription only, so no link):

Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof
Issue: June 1, 2012
Fire Season.
Loomis, Jon (Author)

Jul 2012. 304 p. Minotaur, hardcover, $24.99. (9780312668136).
A virtual crime wave in Provincetown, Massachusetts, starts with the slaughter of the seals kept at a
seaside restaurant. Then arson-induced fires escalate in size, and authorities don’t know whether to look
for thrill-seeking teens or a business owner after insurance. When the disembodied head of the local
nursing-home director—who just told acting police chief Frank Coffin he was kicking out his dementia afflicted, troublemaking mother—is found in the lobster tank of another restaurant, it’s almost enough to
make Coffin start smoking again, except that he’s trying to get more healthy for the sake of his pregnant
girlfriend, Jamie, and their unborn daughter. Through sleep deprivation and stress, the intuitive Coffin and his sidekick, Sergeant Lola Winters, persevere, continuing their lighthearted yet caring bantering. In
Loomis’ P-town, cross-dressing male tourists are called Tall Ships (after the annual festival), and the noise of reconstruction of the aging town hall causes the female town manager to move a high-powered meeting to the ladies’ room. The third in this series is fulfilling the promise of the earlier books (High Season, 2007, and Mating Season, 2009), with its sharp dialogue, keen sense of place, and a protagonist who’s reminiscent of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser but more of an everyman. Great entertainment.
— Michele Leber

It's always nice when they compare you to somebody really famous.

Nice review of FIRE SEASON from Publisher's Weekly:

Fire Season

Jon Loomis. Minotaur, $24.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-312-66813-6

An arsonist, a pregnant girlfriend, a troublesome mother with Alzheimer’s, and a cousin afraid of UFO aliens all plague acting police chief Frank Coffin in Loomis’s enjoyable third mystery featuring the Provincetown, Mass., cop (after 2009’s Mating Season). When a human head turns up in the lobster tank at the Fish Palace, and the arsonist graduates from dumpsters to larger targets, Frank’s problems really get serious. Goofy supporting characters and situations involve some of Provincetown’s many LBGT visitors, a parrot whose salty words cause a commotion at Billy’s bar, the new but balky equipment of the volunteer fire department, and Episcopal priest Father Brian’s personal struggles with God. Coffin handles everything with a weary patience and much ingenuity, assisted by Sgt. Lola Winters—and hindered by irrepressible Rodolfo Santos (aka Uncle Rudy). Those who like their murders served with a hearty helping of whimsy and humor will be rewarded.

Reviewed on: 05/07/2012

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FIRE SEASON available for pre-order on Kindle.

These are pretty funny.

Not sure where these come from or why they were done, but for whatever reason "Deer Hit" has become a poem that a lot of high school teachers find "teachable" and "relevant." I thought both of these videos were pretty great/funny/inventive.

Eleven Things I Know About Fiction Writing

Eleven Things I Know About Fiction Writing

1.Just show up.  At least half the battle is getting your ass in the chair when you’d rather be hanging out with your kids or drinking or playing guitar, or when you’ve got stuff to do for work that’s really, really important.  Go into your room, shut the door, sit down.  Turn on the computer.  Write something.

2.When you have a good writing day, reward yourself.  Have a cocktail!  Smoke a cigar!  When you have a bad writing day, seek comfort.  Have a cocktail.  Smoke a cigar.  At least you tried, and there’s always tomorrow.  If you beat yourself up over the bad days, you’ll never finish anything.  Most writing days are bad, but you need them to get to the good days.

3.Forget writing what you know.  Most of us don’t know much of anything first-hand that isn’t boring.  We know working in a cubicle, we know walking the dog, we know going to the supermarket, we know sleeping and watching TV.  Instead, write what interests and entertains you.  If it doesn’t interest or entertain you, it’s going to bore the hell out of everyone else.  If it does interest you, there’s a chance it might interest other people, too.

4.Do a little research when you have to.  Google makes it incredibly easy to find out practically anything.  Also, travel!  Talk to people!  I’m lucky because I can get student researchers to work for me for free, but it’s really not that hard to do it on your own, and it can add a lot of texture to a book.

5.Don’t get too hung up on research.  You can always tell when a writer’s fallen in love with a piece of information they’ve discovered—they’ll describe how a gun works in minute and boring detail, or walk you through a complex legal or technical process they obviously find fascinating, but which interrupts the story and leaves the reader flipping pages, looking for the next bit of action or dialogue.  Use only those morsels of factual information that can make the story funnier or more interesting or more real, and that keep it moving forward.  Never stop the action to tell the reader an important fact.  Don’t let your characters talk like technical manuals unless they’re the kind of people that talk like technical manuals.  

6. If the weather plays a part in the story, or if your story’s set in a place that has interesting or atmospheric weather, go ahead and write about the weather.   If the story’s set in southern California where it’s always sunny and seventy-five degrees, only write about the weather if your main character yearns for snow.

7.If you’re good at description it’s fine to spend a bit of time on it.  Tuck it in where there are pauses in the dialogue.  Think cinematically—the long shot, the close-up, the panoramic view.  Keep it short, though—the reader’s waiting for the characters to say and do something interesting.

8.Don’t confuse plot with story.  Even though I write crime fiction, I don’t really care about plot: plot is just the calendar of events—what happens in what order.  Story is what the characters do—what they think about, what they say, what they eat, who they have sex with, who they fight with, whether they get what they want. 

9.Story is born from character and conflict.  Get the characters right, give them an interesting conflict, and story takes care of itself.  Sometimes you won’t really know who your characters are until you’re a hundred pages in—that’s fine.  That’s what first drafts are for.

10.Stories are made of scenes.  A good scene needs a monkey.  Which is to say, two characters talking while standing (or sitting) in a room, or walking down the beach, or riding in a car, aren’t usually enough to make an interesting scene.  No matter how funny or interesting or important the dialogue is, the scene will still be boring if that’s all that’s going on.  But if your characters are driving down the freeway and trying to talk about something important and there’s a monkey leaping around the car’s interior, flipping the headlights on and off, honking the horn and pooping in the ash-tray—then you’ve got a scene.  Of course, not every scene can have a literal monkey in it, so you have to find the particular “monkey” that’s right for your particular scene—something for your readers to look at while the characters talk. 

11. Great writers write great sentences.  If you can write a good sentence, you can write anything.  If you can’t write a good sentence, everything you write is going to suck on the most fundamental level, no matter how great your ideas are.  You can write bad sentences—and horrible, stilted dialogue—and still get rich as a writer (I won’t name names here, but you know who I’m talking about), but that will be your legacy.  You’ll be that guy who was essentially a hack but lucked into a formula that happened to sell at a given point in time.  Don’t be a hack.  Write good sentences.