Thriller Writer Mike Pace

Thriller Writer Mike Pace

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Oceanview Publishing
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ISBN: 978-1-60809-135-5

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Recent Posts

  • The Scariest Part
  • 6 Reasons Why You Should Read Stephen King’s IT
  • Taking a Mulligan in the Game of Life
  • Uncertainty + 24-hour News Cycle = Wild Theories of Missing Airplane
  • Rocket Cats (Need I Say More?)

Recent Comments

  • Anne Pace on True Horror: Island of the Dolls
  • DPReader on Use of Profanity in Writing Thrillers
  • Paul Pace on Launching a New Mike Pace Website!

Archives

Déjà Vu

February 4, 2014 by Mike Pace Leave a Comment

Déjà Vu is a Classic Rock album by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young featuring such iconic songs as: Woodstock, Our House, Carry On and Teach Your Children. It’s also a weird phenomenon that has rattled most all of us.

 

Déjà vu, is French for “already seen.” It’s that dizzying, momentary flash of, “I’ve been here before” when we “know” we’ve never been there in our life. Spooky, surreal, maybe a little unsettling, déjà vu has been the topic of dozens of horror/thriller books, most conceiving a parallel world where our clones roam and only now and then accidentally dip their toes into our world. There certainly couldn’t be a scientific explanation, right?

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Out-of-the-Box Characters

January 22, 2014 by Mike Pace Leave a Comment

The traditional plot model–setting, setup, lots of rising action all culminating in a story’s climax and resolution—is not too different from how many of us see our lives; we are the protagonists of our own narrative.

 

Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound, and postmodern writers including Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Beatniks showed the world that clean and linear narratives are not always the most accurate depictions of life as we experience it.

 

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La Zona del Silencio

January 9, 2014 by Mike Pace Leave a Comment

Have you ever had a strange feeling about a place you couldn’t immediately identify? Perhaps you felt it at that eerie abandoned plaza of a once-bustling town, or maybe you had a general sense of foreboding when you hit a particular stretch of land while walking through the sprawling acreage of a wilderness.

 

You can’t put your finger on it; there’s just something different about that spot. Perhaps it’s all a neurological phenomenon. Experiences such as déjà vu, for example, may simply be little more than brain quirks.

 

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Wildies

December 27, 2013 by Mike Pace Leave a Comment

Some of the best movies of the past three decades came from the successful writing partnership of Joel and Ethan Coen, responsible for “No Country for Old Men,” “The Big Lebowski,” and “Fargo,” among an impressively long list.

 

When discussing their writing process in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, they mentioned an interesting factoid from the days of silent movies. Some screenwriters set up brainstorming conferences that included a participant called a “wildie,” someone from the local asylum who’d sit at the story table and offer insane non sequiturs, which might actually make it into the plot of a story.

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DETROIT SCHADENFREUDE

December 11, 2013 by Mike Pace Leave a Comment

A federal judge just recently approved Detroit’s use of the bankruptcy laws to deal with the city’s staggering financial problems. This ruling will allow the city the freedom to pay pennies on the dollar to its creditors, and to significantly reduce its current and long term employee pension obligations. The decision is but the latest chapter of the fall of what just a few decades ago was one of the most thriving American cities. Detroit’s population has been shredded—not just white flight but green flight as more and more people with even a modicum of wealth fled the crime, corruption and breakdown in city services. What remains is a skeletal population made up of a disproportionate number of residents living below the poverty line with no jobs and no prospects.

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4th Grade Lesson

December 3, 2013 by Mike Pace Leave a Comment

When I was in the fourth grade, I was asked to help write a short Christmas play. (This pre-dated the ban on the reference to Christmas in schools). I fell in love with storytelling.

 

This affinity for simple, straight-forward narrative has helped me throughout my professional and personal life.

 

When I served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, I prosecuted many jury trials, including cases involving murder and rape. Unlike TV versions, real trials don’t proceed in time sequence like frames on a movie film. At best, they can be a confusing mish-mash of competing facts, scattered bits of evidence and conflicting testimony. My job was to distill that hodgepodge into a simple narrative a jury could understand—my job was to tell the story.

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The Day After

November 22, 2013 by Mike Pace Leave a Comment

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Future social historians will look back at the 20th and early 21st Centuries and identify three socially transforming events in America: Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy Assassination, and 9/11. The day after Pearl Harbor, Americans realized they were no longer protected by two oceans and the Nation’s collective sense of security was transformed. The day after 9/11, Americans realized they were destined to be involved for the foreseeable future in a new kind of war, not based on territory, but on ideology and hatred for our freedoms, a war without boundaries fought by religious fanatics who had no reservation killing innocents and themselves. Every facet of our everyday lives was changed.

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Would You Believe Mayor Rob Ford as a Fictional Character?

November 20, 2013 by Mike Pace Leave a Comment

Deep-sea creatures like the Anglerfish; string theory, which revealed through mathematics the possibility of multiple dimensions; the unlikely reality television careers of Gary Busey and Bruce Jenner – all these things might qualify for that wonderful Mark Twain quote:

 

“Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”

 

Enter Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, easily the biggest train wreck of a politician today – a man who makes the shamed Anthony Weiner, the former New York Congressman repeatedly caught sexting his genitals to young women, seem like a choir boy.

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True Horror: Island of the Dolls

November 13, 2013 by Mike Pace 1 Comment

Sometimes horror ideas come too easily.

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Julian Santana Barrera was a hermit living alone on the Xochimilico canal, 17 miles south of Mexico City. One day, sadly, he discovered the body of a young girl had washed up onto his shore. A few days later, a doll washed up on shore at the same location and Barrera was certain the doll manifested the spirit of the dead girl. He hung the doll from a tree overlooking the swampy canal as a memorial to the child.

 

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Cronenberg Smacks Down Kubrick in Article

November 6, 2013 by Mike Pace Leave a Comment

Stanley Kubrick continues to be a lightning rod of film-industry controversy nearly a decade and a half after his death. This time around it’s coming from one of the most cutting-edge filmmakers in the sci-fi/thriller/horror/weirdness game, David Cronenberg.

 

Here’s what the Canadian director recently told The Toronto Star when asked about how his film adaptation of Stephen King’s “Dead Ringers” compared with Kubrick’s adaptation of King’s “The Shining”:

 

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