Robert Ferrigno's Blog

I just found out I'll be on Hugh Hewitt's national radio show today talking about THE GIRL WHO CRIED WOLF at 2:30 EST. If you want to listen, go to this link and find out what station it will be on in your area.

http://www.hughhewitt.com/find-a-stat...

On Monday this week I posted that my ebook thriller, THE GIRL WHO CRIED WOLF, had gone on sale for the next ten days at 99 cents instead of $2.99. BoobBub is the inet marketing firm responsible, and I was curious to know what kind of results I could expect from real-world authors who might have used them. My agent called today and said in the last four days the book's sales had tripled from the total sales in the previous six weeks. So either BookBub are geniuses or readers are really really cheap. Not that those two things are mutually exclusive.. Regardless, thanks to all of you who bought the book, and even bigger thanks to those of you who also passed on the link.

For the next ten days, NY Times' best-selling thriller writer Robert Ferrigno's new novel, The Girl Who Cried Wolf is on sale at Amazon for .99 cents. (Kindle)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Girl-Cried-...

SEATTLE TIMES 4/14/2013
Ferrigno’s cast of characters, as always, is choice: A smooth-talking environmental terrorist who kidnaps a zillionaire’s daughter and hides her in a wilderness treehouse; two dopes he convinces to join him in the crime; and a rogue FBI agent with her own agenda.

But the kidnapped woman’s boyfriend is implacable in his mission to find her. Just as crucial is the fact that she turns out to be way more resourceful than her befuddled kidnappers expected. The result is a swift thriller and a wickedly funny satire of the more fuzzyheaded wing of the environmental movement.

http://robertferrigno.blogspot.com/ for the photo and the link

A pal of mine is an investigative reporter at the local daily newspaper; guy won a Pulitzer and is the real deal - sent me a note about The Girl Who Cried Wolf. He liked it a lot, particularly the portrayal of the radical Green movement in the Pacific NW, but his point was that he and a colleague had talked about writing a non-fiction account of the Greens, but game it up because they couldn't find any Greens who were that interesting as people. He thought I had an advantage as a fiction writer because I could create characters that were more interesting than the real people. He was right, of course, but I would make the point that the best characters are grounded in reality. Good novelists need to have the ears and eyes of good reporters, otherwise we're just making stuff up. When I know I've done my job as a novelist is when the characters come to life and start coming up with their own dialogue, which is almost always better than the lines I come up for them. The better the work, the more of my own work I get to toss away. The character of Eli in the book, a young surf bum with blonde dreads and a dangerous, sweet innocence, is based on a composite of all the Milk-is-Murder guys I talked to on the beach when I lived in Southern California, same mix of ignorance and insight and not a clue how to separate the two. I love Eli and his fantasies of living in Mexico, surfing all day and living off the land. I love the way he's renamed the constellations to be more meaningful to himself, changing Cancer the Crab to Mecha-Godzilla and laughing the whole time. I love him because he's got Hepatitis 3 and at some deep level he knows the clock is ticking. And if you want to find a piece of Eli, he's right there in real life in this news clip of a free wheeling young hitchhiker who got involved, saved a woman he didn't know who was being attacked. Stopped the attacker cold with a hatchet he happened to be carrying. Yeah, I wondered about that too... guy carries a hatchet and goofy grin. Hey, why not? So check out this link, which is very NSFW, by the way, and listen to his speed rap, the pure poetry. No writer can write this good, but a good writer can absorb it, recast it, use it to create some new character who will take things to a whole other level. Which is why... fiction rules.

http://robertferrigno.blogspot.com/
(for version with fun links)

My favorite character in my favorite Tarantino movie is Joe Cabot, the old, bald-headed tough guy who sets up the robbery that goes so very, very bad and runs the criminal crew. It's Tierney hunched over the table at the diner, his voice sounding like he gargles with razor blades, who insists that Steve Buscemi will keep the nickname "Mr. Pink" and like it. Case closed. Lawrence Tierney is the actor who plays this glowering badass and let's just say the role wasn't much of a stretch. Tierney was a classic, the-world-is-a-dangerous-cesspool film noir actor. He began is career playing the lead in Dillinger, 1945, and quickly becoming the go-to guy when the studio needed a menacing thug or an amoral mobster who killed without raising his pulse.





In the first fifteen minutes of The Devil Thumbs a Ride, 1947, Tierney's character shoots an old man in the back and takes his money, commandeers a couple of honeymooners for a drive up the California coast, insults a gas station attendant - when the man proudly shows Tierney a photo of his baby girl, Tierney sneers "From the looks of those ears, she's gonna fly before she can walk." - and then runs over a motorcycle cop.

In In real life, Tierney, the son of an Irish cop, was a nasty drunk with a rap sheet as long as Tolstoy. In 1948 he spent three months in jail for busting a guy's jaw in a bar fight. That same golden year he was arrested for kicking a cop while being arrested for drunk and disorderly. He beat up another cop in 1956 and dished out another broken jaw in 1958. The day his mother killed herself in 1960, Tierney drowned his grief by kicking down a woman's door and assaulting her boyfriend. None of this hurt his movie career, and we can only assume that film geek, Quentin Tarantino, knew just who to go to for the character of Joe Cabot, a brutal guy tough enough to keep his crew of crooks in line.

What I really like when I researched Tierney is his lack of self-awareness of his own nature. Or maybe he was just lying.

"I resented those pictures they put me in," Tierney told a British newspaper in 2009. "I never thought of myself as that kind of guy. I thought of myself as a nice guy who wouldn't do rotten things. I hated that character so much, but I had to do it for the picture."

Yeah, Larry, you're Tom Hanks.

I am indebted to Eddie Muller and his book Dark City, the Lost World of Film Noir, for filling in the blanks of my knowledge. I thought I knew noir until I read this book..

This morning I was interviewed for a half-hour by Ian Williams for the Catskill Review of Books. He broadcasts from one of those small states in the North East, and I could practically hear the snow gently piling up outside the recording studio and the cold wind rattling the birches. Okay, enough of the Robert Frost routine. Ian and I talked about The Girl Who Cried Wolf and some of my earlier works The radio show is carried on the Pacifica network, but to save you the trouble, you can listen here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tmuf7721d1e...

Ian's a fine host, witty and urbane, a real gent who pronounced my name properly, asked questions that convinced me he had read the book and made me laugh. A good way to start the day.

One of the regular questions I get asked is what is your usual writing day like? So here we go...

I usually get up at 4 a.m., no alarm clock, just wake up and go downstairs, slam down a cup of microwaved coffee from the day before while I make a fresh pot. Then I hang out with the dogs. This one pictured is Olive, our weimeraner. She's seventy pounds of determination, very fast, very much in touch with her inner wolf. Every morning when I let her out she races outside and barks at the raccoons who live in the giant fir tree out back. She hates those guys. Squirrels she chases, but raccoons elicit this deep, guttural growl that is pure killer instinct. She actually caught one once, a big one she cornered against the fence, sunk her teeth into its right leg and gave it a shake. The raccoon did not like this. Not at all. Neither did I. I grabbed Olive by the collar and dragged her away while the raccoon hissed, claws bared and limped away.

Anyway, where was I? Okay, once Olive and the new guy, Archie, a border terrier, come back in, we lie around on the floor in a pile for about twenty minutes, just listening to each other breathe. I respect dogs. They're ravening beasts that have adopted the guise of manners for practicality and a meal... just like us. Then, coffee made, my dog bonding accomplished, I have a fresh cup of coffee while I read what I wrote the day before, making changes and getting into the mental space that I left the day before. Then I write for a few hours while the dogs chase each other around the yard.

If there's reincarnation I want to come back as a dog. I want to write a novel one day from the standpoint of a dog, but not one of those wimpy, wisdom-of-the-pooch books. I did a short story for VICE magazine a few years ago called "Bad Dog," which was a start. Take a read. (http://www.vice.com/read/bad-dog-ferr...) Woof!

The Girl Who Cried Wolf is dedicated to my close friend, Steve Plesa, who checked out of the Hotel Flesh way too soon. We worked together at The Register, a daily newspaper in Southern California, where I got to write about anything I wanted, usually beach culture, fast cars, gun nuts, and petty crooks, and Steve stayed in the office and edited them. Everybody liked Steve and nobody liked me. I thought it was a fair deal.

One day I was standing with Steve in the Register stairwell while he smoked a cigarette and he told me that he hated his job, but having a pal like me there to laugh at the same crazy stuff made it tolerable. I then had to tell him I was giving my two-weeks notice so that I could finish my first novel, The Horse Latitudes. We stayed friends, but he made me promise that I would put him in the book so that in the unlikely event it got published, he would have a bit of immortality.

So I did. I wrote a character, Stevie, who died ugly. Steve thought it was hilarious. He sent a copy of the book to his parents. He told his friends. So in every one of the twelve books I've written, there's a character called Steve, or a variation of Steve - Stevie, Baby Steve, Stefano, Esteban Stephanie - and in each book this character is murdered, often in embarrassing and pointless ways.

Wilson sidled over to Stevie. "Think fast," he said as he pressed the barrel of the .38 under Stevie's jaw and pulled the trigger. The shot was muted by the soft skin, but the top of Stevie's head hit the ceiling with a wet splat.
-The Horse Latitudes


Great White smiled as the bodyguard struggled against him, their faces inches apart, the two of them almost dancing, the surprise on Stefano's face giving way to fear now. Like all strong men, Stefano was used to being dominant in any physical confrontation, and his helplessness now was startling to him. Great White could smell the onions on the hamburger Stefano had eaten for dinner as he bent the man's hand back until Stefano's pistol was pointing at his own face. Great White watched the bodyguard's expression as he slowly forced Stefano's hand to tighten on the trigger, searching for something in the man's eyes, waiting to see what would rise to the surface.
-Flinch

Probably the highest praise I ever got was Steve telling me a few years ago that he had sat with his two teenage sons for a whole evening, reading the passages where his character got whacked.

This one's dedicated to Steve, and the next time I use his name in a book, he'll do something heroic. Maybe.

Got notice at 12:01 that The Girl Who Cried Wolf was released. Released. It sounds like the book was batting its snout against the bars of a cage, slavering fangs bared. Actually, I like that image.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wyZLiwbjxvo...

The Girl Who Cried Wolf, Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Girl-Cried-...
The Girl Who Cried Wolf, B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-g...
The Girl Who Cried Wolf, Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/The-Gi...
The Girl Who Cried Wolf, Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-...The Girl Who Cried WolfRobert Ferrigno