For the full review, visit: http://popcornreads.com/fiction/a-hole-in-the-ground-owned-by-a-liar-book-review-giveaway/

To listen or download the interview, visit: http://www.adamcarolla.com/daniel-pyne/

Unsurprisingly, the dialogue is stellar in this book, laugh-out-loud funny, dark and sharp and sarcastic. There’s a scene early on between Grant and his parole officer, dialogue only, that was so delightful I wanted to make out with it. The novel’s start was a bit slow for me — the narrative was a bit long-winded at times — but as the story went on, I was hooked, and I couldn’t stop reading. I didn’t want the book to end, either, although I found it immensely satisfying, just what I didn’t know I wanted.

For the full review, visit: http://unabridged-expression.blogspot.com/2012/03/hole-in-ground-owned-by-liar-by-daniel.html

Pyne is heavily invested in the visual, from the characters and their clothing to the Colorado mine country to the hole in the ground itself – a gold mine, purchased by Lee from an anonymous seller on eBay. All of it is described in detail, and often beautifully, and is shot through with an appreciation of and fascination for the history of the place, where Pyne grew up, and the hardscrabble prospectors who peopled it:

“He could see over the treetops, across the valley to the skeletal ruins of the St. John’s Mine stamping plant, once the richest lode on the Front Range, with over three hundred employees and a foreman who had all his teeth capped cold with just the leavings that sluiced out of the placer troughs.”

For the full review, visit: http://therumpus.net/2012/03/a-sense-of-place/

Daniel Pyne is best known for his screenwriting skills. He’s currently writing for that small little show Alcatraz, and because of this is no stranger to mystery and suspense. I was ecstatic that I had a chance to read and review his novel A Hole In The Ground Owned By A Liar. Pyne did not disappoint.

The intriguing title aside (which comes from a quote by Mark Twain), A Hole in the Ground was a book that will have you roped in from the first chapter. It keeps you on your toes through the character development and the story that blends history with mystery and leaves you wanting more.

For the full review, visit: http://www.bookequals.com/2012/02/28/a-hole-in-the-ground-owned-by-a-liar-by-daniel-pyne-review/

For full spread, visit: http://www.lamag.com/culture/books/Story.aspx?ID=1659435

For full piece, visit: http://www.lamag.com/culture/books/Story.aspx?ID=1660236

Author Spotlight: Daniel Pyne

We ask the screenwriter writer about his second novel, A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

In screenwriter Daniel Pyne’s new book, A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar, a middle-aged high school shop teacher up and buys a long-abandoned gold mine in a tiny Colorado town. It sounds like an author’s conceit, but it’s actually based on real life. Years ago, Pyne’s brother bought a mine, providing Pyne, a screenwriter known for such films as The Manchurian Candidate, Pacific Heights, and Fracture, the inspiration for his second book, one of our Critic’s Picks for March. 

How much of your brother’s mining experience made it into Hole in the Ground?
“Inspired by” is the best version. The kind of technical details of it are based on his experience—specific things like my memories of standing outside the mine and smelling the pines. I only went there a couple times to hear stories of things that happened. … It was free research. It was the experience of seeing him, the sort of humorous part of my brother buying this gold mine, that inspired me to write this very different story about a man who buys a gold mine on eBay.

What’s your brother think of the book?
He’s pretty amused by it. He’s been reading it. He wrote me an email saying, “It’s exactly the way I remembered it.” My brother’s very dry. 

Why does the character of Lee buy a gold mine?
Not because of midlife crisis. He does it because he’s looking for mystery that has vanished from his life, the joy of discovery, the joy of the unknown. Everything that’s happened to him over the past few years in terms of his regular life has been kind of a downer for him. He’s stuck in this rut. He buys it not even with the intention of finding gold. As it says in the book, the gold is not the point. The point is the pursuit of the gold, it’s adventure.

WonderCon (Comic-Con’s little brother, if you will) moves from San Francisco to Anaheim this year, and a few of the first panels have now been announced. Warner Bros. Television will be hosting panels for Fox’s Alcatraz and Fringe, as well as the special Cartoon Network programming block DC Nation. Stars Sarah Jones, Jorge Garcia, Jonny Coyne and Parminder Nagra are poised to appear on the Alcatraz panel alongside executive producers Jennifer Johnson, Daniel Pyne, and Jack Bender. From Fringe, John Nobel, Seth Gabel and executive producers J.H. Wyman and Jeff Pinkner will take part in the panel.

For more info, visit: http://collider.com/wondercon-2012-alcatraz-fringe-dc-nation/147793/

Collider: For people who aren’t familiar with what you do, can you talk about your duties are on the show?

JENNIFER JOHNSON: We’re the showrunners, so what we do is everything.

DANIEL PYNE: We work with the writing staff to generate stories for each episode, we cast, we cut, we edit, we spot music. We basically are responsible for the final product, along with our other executive producers, Jack Bender in Vancouver, and J.J. [Abrams] and Bryan Burk at Bad Robot. But, we’re the day-to-day people. Basically, we’re the arbiters of the storytelling, in whatever form it comes, whether it’s through the music, the visuals or the words. That’s what we do, with the help of a staff of writers, great editors, great directors and great actors. It’s like being the conductor of an orchestra.

JOHNSON: The one thing that we are solely responsible for, that is our most important job, is generating the scripts and making sure that we have good scripts ready to film in Vancouver, every eight or nine days.

What was it about Alcatraz that initially hooked you in and made you want to get involved with this particular story for what could be a long period of time?

JOHNSON: For me, it was the science fiction elements and the magical element of these criminals who are coming back, because I didn’t understand them at first. It was impossible to understand what it would be like to be transporting from 1963 to 2012. So, I was intrigued by the criminals and where they had been, and what they might want to do here, in the present-day. Certainly, the mystery of the island and Alcatraz prison intrigued me, with the way it’s situated on an island in the middle of the bay and how isolated it is. There was a feeling that anything could have happened there, and I wanted to know more. It’s a very magical place. It feels like a secret clubhouse that you want to go visit and understand and explore.

What can you say to tease where the show is headed for the remainder of this season, and how many questions you’ll be answering?

PYNE: We’re trying to arc out the first 13, so that by the end of them, people will have answers to many questions rather than just continuing to wind out the same questions, over and over. By the end of 13, we hope that people will see what’s behind the secret door, they’ll understand what is being put into the blood and maybe the reason why, and a little bit more of the architecture of what’s happening present-day with these guys who are coming back. Clearly in the past, they were in prison and that was their life. But, now that they’re coming back, there’s a sense that there’s a master plan afoot, and we’re going to try to answer some of that question.

JOHNSON: Rebecca (Sarah Jones) will finally face off with Tommy Madsen (David Hoflin), her grandfather who killed her partner.

How do you guys keep everything straight between the inmates, the guards and the doctors, and connections between past and present? Do you have a giant room where you can keep trying of all of the connections between everyone and everything?

PYNE: We have many white boards with scrawling on them, like a mad scientist’s laboratory. It keeps shifting and things disappear. It’s tough. It’s actually a huge challenge.

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For the full interview, visit: http://collider.com/jennifer-johnson-daniel-pyne-alcatraz-season-2-interview/146806/

Most of our readers are novelists. What can you tell us about writing for television/film that can help us become better novelists?

My theory, completely unsupported by any empirical evidence, is that the way people read is changing. Maybe it’s always changing, but certainly with the growth of film and television as the dominant cultural expression in the twentieth century, and the rapid rise of blogging and texting in this new century, the way people receive information and express themselves and process cultural mythology must mean that novelists need to adapt to new kinds of narrative.

People have shorter attention spans. They’ve become used to processing information in a scattered, almost holographic way. I have a pet peeve about novelists turning their manuscripts into auditions for feature films, but I do think that the modern novel has to acknowledge that storytelling has been profoundly affected by the way film and television has, (sometimes detrimentally), altered the way we expect stories to engage us.

If there is one lesson you’ve taught to writing students over the years that you want them to GET, that you consider to be a key to writing success, what is it? Feel free to give us more than one.

Get a good chair.
It’s hard. Get over it.
Don’t give up.
Don’t settle — try to write as well as you possibly can. And then better than that, next time.
Write what you love to read.
Be willing to do it for free – because you’ll probably have to.

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For the full interview, visit: http://www.novelrocket.com/2012/02/author-interview-daniel-pyne.html

Left to right: Cecil Castelluci, Dan Pyne, Rick Lupert, Rena Durrand

]]> http://danielpyne.com/daniel-pyne-at-tongue-groove-reading-series/feed/ 0 http://danielpyne.com/pictures-from-daniel-pynes-book-launch-at-skylight/ http://danielpyne.com/pictures-from-daniel-pynes-book-launch-at-skylight/#comments Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:51:14 +0000 Dan http://danielpyne.com/?p=254 ]]> http://danielpyne.com/pictures-from-daniel-pynes-book-launch-at-skylight/feed/ 0 http://danielpyne.com/hollywood-reporter-interview-about-hole-in-the-ground-owned-by-a-liar-and-alcatraz/ http://danielpyne.com/hollywood-reporter-interview-about-hole-in-the-ground-owned-by-a-liar-and-alcatraz/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:52:36 +0000 Dan http://danielpyne.com/?p=209 EXCERPT:

The Hollywood Reporter: Where did the idea for the novel come from?

Daniel Pyne: I never get single inspirations. The most obvious one is my brother actually bought a goldmine back in the nineties near a ski area. For some reason he decided to buy this gold mine and he opened it up and he sort of puttered around inside, he didn’t mine, but the mechanics of it and finding relics of things was cool. I went to visit him and went up there and saw and it sort of stuck in my mind that it was an interesting idea for a story. Then I read a few years ago, there was a guy down in Thailand, a gold speculator who tossed himself out of a helicopter on the way to examine one of his gold sites that turned out to be fraudulent and they didn’t know if he was tossed out of the helicopter or pushed out of the helicopter, and that was. So I kind of take disparate elements and shove them together, but it was a little bit of a homage to my brother and a little bit of a story about brothers, although it doesn’t resemble our relationship at all. But it’s that kind of complicated relationship that people have when they love each other, but they’re also incredible rivals.

THR: In some ways A Hole in the Ground calls to mind the work of David Mamet. Was he an inspiration?

Pyne: I didn’t think of that. But the voice that it pulls with it is a slightly ironic voice that’s a slightly muscular, macho voice that he loves. I didn’t think of him as inspiration, but I can see how you would think that. Anytime time you’re writing about men in real relationships he’s one of the masters of doing that. It still has the twisty caper element to it and the woman caught between two men.

THR: The Colorado setting of the novel functions almost like another character in the novel. Is that a familiar part of the country for you?

Pyne: I spent the first 18 years of my life in Colorado, never leaving. Growing up, my brother’s a lot older than I am and he would take me jeeping, so I knew that territory, I know it really well. It has a very specific feel to it. Not like anywhere in the world. And the altitude, it’s so high, and you’re just overwhelmed by the size of those mountains.

When I write I like to locate things. It’s very important for me to put my stories in a place. The place becomes a part of the story. Because I think that’s true, I think we’re affected by our environment and where we grow up. There’s this whole thing in the book about how people who grow up in Colorado, me included, and certainly my family, there is a boom-bust mentality that you grow up with, that you think you’ll strike it rich. And it’s weird, you don’t think about it until you leave, then you realize ‘oh this is the personality that has personified this place for 150 years.’ It was founded by people who think that way, who think that they’re just one shovel full away from that strike that’s gonna make them rich.

For the full interview, visit: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/alcatraz-daniel-pyne-novel-287250

For the full post, visit: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/news/announcement/869-2012-daniel-pyne-hole/

It hasn’t been that difficult for me to move between the different disciplines. I think, however, ironically that it took many years of screenwriting to prepare me for novels. The concision of a screenplay, the momentum, the architecture have all bled across into my prose storytelling more than I ever would have believed possible. Initially, the hardest thing was letting go of the rigid discipline of “showing and not telling.” The internal life of a character in a film, or on television, is the product of indirection and suggestion. You can never know what they’re thinking, you must express it with an action, or through dialogue, or in the spaces between the action and the dialogue, like a kind of bastardized free verse poetry with its own syntax and shorthand.”

For the full guest post and excerpt, please visit: http://thediviningwand.com/2012/01/guest-daniel-pyne-what-i-write/