Why I Re-Watch Things (Hat tip to Frank Zafiro)

 The other day, my good friend and fellow writer Frank Zafiro sent a newsletter titled, “Why Do We Rewatch the Same Shows?”

 Most of us have a show or movie we’ve seen more than once. Usually more than once by a lot.

 It’s easy to call that nostalgia, and sometimes it is. But I think there’s more to it than that.

 Some stories become familiar territory. We know the people. We know the rhythm. We know what’s coming, and that’s part of the appeal. In a world that can feel noisy and unpredictable, there’s something to be said for returning to something that already fits.

 Sometimes we revisit stories because they changed us. Sometimes because they remind us who we used to be.

 And sometimes they’re just good company.

  He went on to mention a few of his (the first season of True Detective. Tombstone. Heat) before asking what his readers always come back to.

 For me, that’s a loaded question. I even have a schedule for some movies. For example, the night before the Super Bowl we watch The Drop. On my birthday, Get Shorty. Christmas Eve: The Ice Harvest. (The climax of a run of “Christmas movies” that includes Bad Santa, Bad Santa 2, Die Hard, The French Connection, and LA Confidential, though the latter is subject to review at any time. And, of course, Elf and A Christmas Story.) New Year’s Eve always features The Big Lebowski.

 There are others I re-watch randomly. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Frends of Eddie Coyle. The Wild Bunch. Appaloosa. Open Range. Unforgiven. The Usual Suspects. Miller’s Crossing. Chinatown. In the Electric Mist. The Nice Guys. And don’t forget the cult classics: Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Animal House. The Princess Bride.

 Why do I rewatch these? Some are comfort food, things I know I can rely on for a pleasant evening no matter what else is going on. (Butch Cassidy, The Nice Guys, Monty Python, Animal House, The Princess Bride, Get Shorty, The Big Lebowski, The Ice Harvest.)

 Sometimes I want to remind myself how good stories are properly told. (The Drop, Appaloosa, Chinatown, In the Electric Mist.)

  Sometimes I just want to be swept away in the scope of a story. (The French Connection, LA Confidential, The Wild Bunch, Open Range, Unforgiven.)

 What makes all but the comfort food examples stand out is that every time I rewatch something like LA Confidential, The Drop, Unforgiven – or the greatest TV series ever made, Deadwood – I see things I’ve not noticed before. They’re such layered entities there’s always something to catch, even after repeated viewings. (I’ll include The Wire in there, too.)

 I’ve written about this before, so I won’t go into detail here, but when I was working on my Master’s, one of the best teachers I ever had (Benjamin Zander) told us that, since we had chosen to dedicate our lives to music, we could no longer listen purely for entertainment. That didn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy it – of course we could, and did – but our listening had to be deeper. Why did we enjoy it? Why did we not enjoy it? What can we learn from an artist’s interpretation? I became a much better musician than my meager talent gave me any right to be, thanks to studious application of this admonishment.

 The same is true of my reading and viewing now that I’m a writer. Movies and TV have to pass the So what? Test, and I need to be able to justify why they did, or did not, if only to myself. That’s where the bulk of my repeated re-viewings earned their stripes. I’ll never get tired of them because the more I know, the more I learn; it’s an endless cycle. It may be a point of craft, or it maybe when it’s over I sit back and tell myself That’s what you aspire to. It doesn’t matter that I know I’ll never attain the heights of my favorites; I’m newly motivated.

 One’s reach should always exceed their grasp. That’s why I watch these over and over again. To remind me.

Notes From the Shamus Awards (Or, What Publishers Don't Do)

 

(Disclaimer: My experiences with the publishing industry have not been such I wish to repeat them. Take my comments below as honest appraisals from an admittedly biased point of view, which doesn’t make me wrong.

 

That said, the five books we selected were all worthy of winning the award and might have won in a year when the competition was not as strong.)

 

I was recently a judge for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Awards; the results will be announced at Bouchercon in Calgary. Our panel received 34 novels, several of which reminded me that, while my experiences with small publishers were less than optimal, the big boys aren’t much better.

 

I’ll leave aside marketing campaigns, or the lack thereof. We all know that ship has sailed and sunk. The big boys are sloppy even with the most targeted of marketing, such as submitting for awards.

 

Here are the requirements to qualify for a Shamus Award:

Eligible works must feature as a main character a person PAID for investigative work but NOT employed for that work by a unit of government. These include traditionally licensed private investigators; lawyers and reporters who do their own investigations; and others who function as hired private agents. These do NOT include law enforcement officers, other government employees, or amateur, uncompensated sleuths.

 

Succinct and clearly written. Yet half a dozen publishers sent books that didn’t qualify. One book overtly stated the protagonist was a government employee, though this was left murky until the last few pages. Is reading the requirements too much to ask? Or maybe they didn’t read the book? Or ask the author?

 

The most egregious example of sloppy work came from the publisher of a well-known author whose name often appears on award lists. We were tasked with evaluating books published in 2025; the publisher’s cover letter indicated a January 2026 release. I suspected a typo, so I checked. Sure enough, January 2026. This is your job, people. At least pretend to make an effort.

 

One day each judge received a box, sans cover letter or packing slip, with 12 books in it. Maybe that was all we were supposed to get; maybe not. There was no way to know. Another box arrived the day before the deadline containing two books and a cover letter that mentioned three. I sent him an e-mail to point out the error; he apologized profusely and overnighted the missing book. It worked out, but why wait until the day before the deadline?

 

A friend I trust recently pointed out that my cover descriptions could be better. Since I had 34 examples written by experts sitting in my reading room, I figured I’d not get a better resource.

 

This is why I don’t get paid to figure.

 

Almost without exception they give away too much of the story, including the first big reveal, which spoils whatever tension the author intended. The prose is too often not just purple but lurid, leading people unfamiliar with the author to potentially false conclusions about the style and quality of writing inside. Several have spelling, usage, and grammar errors. I can’ t decide if the people writing them were incompetent, or if the text was produced by AI and not proofread; I also can’t decide which is worse. A publisher’s lifeblood is clever and literate use of the written word. Such amateurish dust jacket blurbs are akin to Weyerhaeuser setting forest fires.

 

Things aren’t much better inside the book. Authors who write hardcover novels are under enormous pressure to meet deadlines and word counts; rarely is what they turn in isn’t as clean as they’d like it to be. That shouldn’t be a problem, as the publisher who pushed them so hard for the deadline has editors and proofreaders to tidy up after them. The author’s job is to be creative and on time.

 

Well, Maxwell Perkins* is dead and his descendants aren’t doing so hot themselves. Many of the books I read were filled with

·         The same word used too often and too close together.

·         Flabby writing. I realize not everyone wants to write as sparely as I do, nor should they; that’s a stylistic decision. Still, the amount of time spent on things that do not matter – say, two full paragraphs describing a waitress who will take an order and never be seen again – is mind numbing. Readers are busy people. Don’t waste their time.

·         Unnecessary repetition. I was taught, if I wrote the same thing three ways in hope of getting through to the reader, to pick the best and cut the others. This no longer appears to be the case, as the practice is clearly endorsed by publishers who must believe their readers are so stupid they need things explained multiple times.

 

The philosopher Tom Waits once said, “The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is ruining the quality of our suffering.” There is a lot of good writing out there. There’d be even more if the publishing industry held up its end.

 

(* - If you don’t know who Maxwell Perkins was, or have not seen the movie Genius, rectify the situation immediately.)

 

Rob Hart, Author of Three Hitmen and a Baby

 Today marks the launch of the third book in Rob Hart’s Assassins Anonymous series, Three Hitmen and a Baby. I’ve known Rob for several years and was a little surprised when it dawned on me I’d never had him on the blog. Today’s interview corrects that oversight.

 

For those who don’t know, Rob worked as a publisher for MysteriousPress.com and was a class director at LitReactor. He is the author of The Paradox Hotel, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award that was named one of the best books of 2022 by NPR; The Warehouse, which sold in more than twenty languages around the world; the Ash McKenna series of private eye novels; and more other woks than space permits, and, since this is the Internet, space permits a lot.

 

One Bite at a Time: Welcome to the blog, Rob. I was at Yonder the night you test drove the first chapter of Assassins Anonymous. Like everyone else there, I was blown away. I know better then to ask an author where they get their ideas, but I need to know how you came up with a twelve-step recovery program for professional killers.

 

Rob Hart: For a very long time I had an idea on the backburner of my brain, about a bunch of assassins in some kind of group therapy setting. I thought it would be funny to take a bunch of characters like that and stick them in a circle to talk about their feelings. One day it dawned on me that I could do that with the recovery process—which includes both steps and an amends process, which creates a bit of a container for the story. As soon as I thought of it in those terms, pretty much the whole thing clicked.

 

OBAAT: The books are violent and laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes simultaneously. How are you able to combine the two without detracting from the effect of either?

 

RH: I just think that’s where my voice falls naturally. I like to have a good time and laugh, but I also like to consider things seriously. Sometimes it takes a little modulation in the editing process, but for the most part, these books are just a joy to write.

 

OBAAT: Among the many things that makes this series special is how Mark keeps finding himself in mortal danger and has to get out of it without killing anyone, yet you never ask the reader to suspend too much disbelief. Do you outline those scenes, storyboard them, rehearse them, consult with martial arts and weapons experts, meditate, what?

 

RH: That part is a ton of fun. I do have a fighting background—I train in Muay Thai, but also previously trained in Krav Maga, and dabbled in BJJ and boxing. So in terms of how to choreograph a fight scene, what happens to the human body, etc… that’s all me just pulling from experience.

 

I do occasionally storyboard stuff, if it’s a bigger action sequence, because geography is important to a good action scene. And I do a lot of research, both on lethal and non-lethal weapons. But that’s the thing: the more limitations you have, the more creative you have to be. Shooting someone in the head is easy; sending Mark into a room full of people wielding guns, and he has to make it out without dying and without killing anyone? That takes some effort. But it also makes things way more fun.

 

OBAAT: On a panel at Left Coast Crime in 2025 you said you do an editing pass of your books working from the last chapter to the first. I’ve done that on my most recent books and now swear by it. What does the back-to-front approach accomplish for you and what made you think of it?

 

RH: I honestly don’t know; I can’t remember if I thought of it, or if someone suggested it to me. But, yes, starting with the last chapter and moving through to the front of the book is something I usually do on the third of fourth pass of editing. It puts fresh energy into the ending, and it helps to see things out of order sometimes, so you can think differently about how the plot fits together.

 

OBAAT: As a PI fiction guy, I have to ask what the deal is with Ash McKenna. The books are clearly collectors’ items, as I see them online with prices ranging from $30 to almost $60.

 

RH: I’m not sure anyone is actually paying that, but god bless ‘em if they are…

 

When Polis folded I held onto the rights. We poked around a little, and a lot of places interested in putting out a five-book backlist also want a new book to go with it. I’m not interested in writing more Ash at the moment—I like the ending I gave him—and my other stuff is already tied up.

 

But also, the books are being developed for TV. The team behind it is brilliant, the pilot script is amazing. So I’m going to hold onto them a little while longer. They’re a scratch-off lotto ticket at this point. If the show moves forward, they could be worth a lot more.

 

Those books will be back eventually. I’m just not currently in a rush.

 

OBAAT: What’s next for you? Will there be more in the Assassins Anonymous franchise?

 

RH: Indeed! So the third book, Three Hitmen and a Baby, comes out imminently. (Editor’s Note: ‘Imminently’ = today.) The fourth is called City of Killers. It’s set in Bangkok, and it’s a very fun premise, plus has a very cool payoff for people who’ve read all the books. That should be out in June 2027.

 

After that, I’m out of contract. If the series continues to do well and there’s an appetite for more and I still have ideas—sure, I’d love to write these characters for a long time. But the market dictates. So if you really want to make sure Mark and his friends stay alive, buy multiple copies, give them as gifts, tell friends, leave reviews… every little bit helps.