The Fear Conspiracy

Have you ever wondered what makes a thriller work? I mean sure, the better it is, the more it thrills you, but what are its nuts and bolts? What is that basic emotion that the author must manipulate in order to succeed? It all comes down to one dirty four letter word: Fear.

Fear is what pushes us to survive and survival is the chief human instinct. So fear can be no less than the most basic human emotion. I know love is way more fun, but in the human condition our sexual instinct is a poor second. Fear comes first. It might not feel good to be scared, people (like the military) may have made us think that it is something we ought to be ashamed of, but the truth of the matter is that fear is good. Take fear away from humans and you wouldn't have a human race. Take fear away from a thriller and you wouldn't have a thriller.

So when I sit with my laptop in a seaside hotel and make-up a story to thrill you, do you think that it sort of happens that the story will scare you? Would I leave the most important ingredient of my story to chance? Reader, I have a confession to make. Getting you scared is no accident. I conspire against you. I sit for hours on end to answer a single question: How can I make you shit in your pants?

Why pay for an e-book? ---- Part IV: Will books survive?

In parts I and II we have discovered that because e-books are expensive, many people are trying to find ways to avoid paying for them. In part III it was shown that bookstores are already disappearing, and publishers will follow. So if there are no bookstores and no publishers will there still be books? Will we need authors to write them?

We can look at these questions in various ways. The most immediate one is to notice that it's not that books are not being read or not being written. The army of middlemen is disappearing. On an average $15 book, the author makes $1.50, the bookstore $5 and the publisher (who does the editing, the printing, transportation, storage and takes the risk) the remainder. But nowadays an author may write a book on his computer, transfer it to a server, sell it to a customer through his website who will then read the book on his e-reader.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part III: Bookstores and Publishers

In parts I & II we have discovered that some publishers of e-books charge more for an e-book than a paperback copy even though their e-book expenses are practically zero. This has resulted in people attempting to get the e-book for free in various ways. These include downloading the book from dubious sites or buying a single copy, breaking the protection and sharing. When an estimated 60-80% of the population is engaged in these activities I wonder if the word legal has any meaning. Sound familiar?

Of course it does: The music industry. In fact the music industry faced the same problems the book industry is facing today. They too had exorbitant prices (like $20 for 12 songs.) They too paid little to the creator (10-15%). The customer's money funded a feast for an army of middle men. Then the average Joe, armed with a computer and a CD drive made copies of his CDs for his friends and before you know it no one was buying CDs from record stores. It might have been wise for these guys to lower their prices, to make it a burden to copy a cheap CD when you can have the original with the jacket notes.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part II: Everything for Nothing

In my previous article I couldn't explain why an e-book is more expensive than a paperback when it costs next to nothing to make it available. In my attempt to find the same book cheaper I found that most torrent copies available for free are usually full of mistakes and not really worth bothering with. So what happens now? Are you going to pay $11.59 for a 72 page e-book written 60 years ago (Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea), when you suspect that someone is taking more than his fair cut?

Of course not! There's that great institution called the public library. Nowadays you don't even have to go there. Just find one you can borrow from, fill-in a couple of forms and the book is yours for free for a week or two.

But let's say you want to own the book for free. Well, that's not so difficult either. Although most torrent copies circulating on the net are OCR copies of the books that haven't been proofread (in other words worthless), lo and behold there are some websites that have good copies of the actual book.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part I: Something Worth Nothing

You have just bought an e-book reader or a tablet device and enjoy the reading experience. You appreciate that it can actually fit thousands of books which you can now take with you anywhere from your night table to Timbuktu. Now you want to get books to put in it. You've discovered that you can download most books published before 1922 for free from places like Gutenberg. Great, but you can't spend the rest of your life reading Pride and Prejudice or Great Expectations. You want to get on to people like Faulkner, Orwell, Hemingway. Let's say you want to read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. You look it up in Amazon and you discover that something is wrong with the prices. They are selling a 72 page paperback for $8.50 and the e-book for $11.59.

It doesn't make sense, does it? An e-book does not need paper or printing, it doesn't require a warehouse, and it has no transportation costs. It doesn't need a physical store to be sold in or staff to sell it to you. It's sold directly to the customer through an e-store. Hemingway's share couldn't be more than 10-15%, yet the publisher finds it necessary to boost his price a further 36%. What are his extra expenses?

A Book and a Child

"Every book is like a child" a phrase goes and I seem to be hearing a lot of it. It must have been started by people who have raised a child or written a book. But anyone who has done both knows that although books and children are creations, there the similarity ends.

A book is a creation of the author's imagination. The input depends on the author's genetic make-up, his character and his experiences. He has ideas and thoughts, he chooses words and the end result is exactly what he has compiled. A child on the other hand is God's (or nature's if you prefer) creation. The input here is the child's make-up (its DNA), the child's experiences and the parent's guidance. A parent may have ideas and thoughts, he can devise a plan or execute a method and put in his best effort. The end result might be close to what he wants, it might be approximate to what he wants but it may well be the exact opposite.

Roger Ebert: Life Itself

Roger Ebert, America's best known film critic, looks hard in the mirror and at his own life as if it were a movie.

He was the late child of a German electrician and an Irish catholic in Urbana, Illinois. “I turned to books as soon as I could read,” he says. “There was a persistent need not only to write, but to publish”. He started out in public school by writing and publishing the Washington Street News and delivering it to his neighbours. In college he was a sportswriter for The News Gazette and editor for the Daily Illini. He studied English literature at the University of Illinois and went to the University of Cape Town, South Africa for his post graduate studies. He gave up his Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago to work for the Chicago Sun-Times. He envisaged himself as a column writer but one day someone retired and he was named the paper's film critic. “It was not my career goal” he says, and yet even with this random assignment his hard work earned him the Pulitzer price for his film writings. Furthermore his movie reviews with Gene Siskel were televised across America for twenty years. His sheer enthusiasm and intelligence make many of his reviews far more interesting and fun to read than the good movies they criticize.

Michael Caine: The Elephant to Hollywood

Michael Caine's second autobiography (the first being 1992's What's It All About) is like certain Western movie sets: a highly entertaining facade with nothing behind it.

Maurice Micklewhite started life in the London slums (Elephant & Castle) from working class parents and barely made a living in the theatre. Later in life he changed his name first to Michael Scott then to Michael Caine, became a movie star and moved to Hollywood. Mr Caine attributes it all to good luck and then goes on to recite countless stories or anecdotes of his experiences with his famous and very good friends. His language is straight forward and the book is highly entertaining. There is a laugh to be had at the end of every paragraph. The feeling you get is that you are having a quiet chat with him in a coffee shop. And after talking to you for an hour or two, I am sure he will call you his friend, and even give you the recipe of his delicious baked potatoes, which he does, near the end of the book. What a nice man!

If you want a coffee shop chat with Michael Caine, and haven't read What's It All About, I would highly recommend it. It's a longer and perhaps more interesting book. Not much has happened to him in the last eighteen years, and three quarters of this one is more or less an abbreviated repetition of his first one. But if you want to know something about the real Michael Caine, you are not in luck.

Change any book to an e-book

Not everyone relishes walking around with a suitcase of books in their vacation. The latest batch of e-readers have deprived us of the weight, dust and fire hazard of paper. A modern e-book reader can easily fit 3.000 books and needs charging only once a month. Hopefully I have already convinced you that it beats paperbacks hands down. But what if your favourite book is not available as an e-book? No problem. You can easily change any book to an e-book. Here's how:

Step 1: Scan the book (about 1 hr on a flatbed vs 15' on a batch)

The first step is to have a corresponding jpeg or pdf file for every page of the book. If it's a heavy book, it will be easier to photograph each page with a digital camera. If the book is manageable, you can use a flatbed scanner. It takes roughly an hour for your average 200 page paperback. If you don't mind destroying the book, then you can remove the bind with a cutter and feed the individual pages in a batch to a scanner such as the Canon P-150. It will only take 15 minutes in total. When you are done, make sure that you have all the pages and in consecutive order.

'Double Indemnity' doesn't work

In 1944 it was nominated for 7 Oscars. The screenplay was written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. It is the first real Film Noir and it has an atmosphere thick enough to cut with a knife. And it ranks #29 on the American Film Institute's best American films of all time.

Still, it doesn't work on a character level.

Walter Neff (the story's narrator played by Fred MacMurray) confesses: “I killed him for money, and for a woman.” He sees the woman (Barbara Stanwyck) twice. He likes her a lot. The third time he sees her he agrees to plan and kill her husband so that she can get the insurance money. Perhaps after this they make love, we are not shown (we wouldn't be in 1944). Then he tells her that they must never meet again in private to avoid suspicion. He doesn't seem to want the woman. At no point does he ask for a cut, so he doesn't seem to want the money. Half an hour into the movie we know that he doesn't want the woman or the money. He is not shown to be a man of violent nature, more of a cold and calculating persona than anything else. Why then does he commit murder?

A Fake Archaeologist

From the Spring 2011 issue of the CIG Bulletin

Some of us are not just perplexed or confused but all muddled-up. At least it seems that way.

Take me for instance.

I was born in Greece, raised and educated in Canada and now live in Greece. What am I, Canadian or Greek? Let's look at my professional life. I am a practising electrical engineer who writes mystery thrillers. Am I a realist or a dreamer? And what am I doing here, rubbing shoulders with the archaeologists on the adjacent columns of the bulletin? It doesn't make sense, does it?

Most of life's mysteries don't make sense. But as soon as we learn a thing or two, lo and behold, the oddest item suddenly becomes the most natural. I mean heavier than air flying machines didn't make any kind of sense two hundred years ago, but when we discovered the venturi principle and jet propulsion, they became flying buses.

The Kindle vs The Paperbacks

I love books. To read them I've missed most of my lunches in high school and left many a party early. 'He eats books', my classmates used to say when they didn't see me in the lunch-room. So reading is something I know something about. When I bought a Kindle to see how my new novel would look on it, I haven't put it down since. In my book, the Kindle beats paperbacks hands down.

But let's be critical. In a direct comparison, what can the paperbacks do that the Kindle can't?

For one, the Kindle doesn't have a distinct smell. Smell any book and it reminds you of a place or an object--the bookstore you bought it from, your local library, a second hand stall. Wonderful isn't it? All the books inside your Kindle smell the same. How boring. Point two, when you stop reading a book, glance at its cover by your couch or coffee table, and it takes you back to the story and its characters. Stop reading a Kindle and all you see are people like Agatha Christie and John Steinbeck in black & white. Yuck! Point three... well I can't think of a point three. They tell us that books don't need batteries. I charge my Kindle once a month. What's the big deal? Books don't have wires inside. What do I care if the Kindle does?

The Auction of a Fake Athenian Decadrachm

I suppose it comes with the territory. I just love to leave the well-lit avenues of a town that serve as its window dressing and venture down its back alleys where its authentic pulse beats. And by the same token, whenever I meet a well-to-do educated lady of fine manners, I want to peel back the well-perfumed façade and peer into the darkness.

But sometimes I don't have to.

The Athenian Decadrachm is a silver coin minted by the city-state of Athens in c. 466 BC. There are only forty such coins in existence and the last one was auctioned for well over half a million dollars.

The quote above is from my new novel Bird of Prey. In it, the auction of a fake Athenian Decadrachm becomes a struggle without rules. The photograph above announced the auction of an Athenian Decadrachm. The coin was estimated to sell at $875.000 USD. Now who would spend that kind of money for a coin? Why? But wait! Just before the auction, the following announcement was published:

How to write a novel

How would you write a novel? Would you simply open a notebook (a laptop nowdays) without any preparation and start writing? Well, if you tried to write in this way, chances are you'd probably quit!


Writing a novel is a conscious process with a procedure, and the outline of this procedure was the subject of my presentation: The Synthesis of a Thriller, given at the Canadian Institute in Greece last month. I used my latest novel, Bird of Prey, as an example. I am no expert, I have no literary credentials, but I have written five novels, so I could say something about it. Those in-the-know commented that it wasn't far from what is being taught in creative writing courses. It didn't surprise me.


In the past month, many people have asked me for my presentation outline, and I have e-mailed it around. I have always believed that sharing will give us a better world, and what better way to share experiences than by publishing a blog?


If you want to see my procedure on how to write a novel, or more accurately a mystery thriller, just click on the 'Synthesis of a Thriller' tab above and get started!