Mince Pies and Cigarettes. And a Skull. And a Seance...

Mince pies and Cigarettes

I should wait until Christmas to post this, but I have to say it's the most wonderful alien story I've ever read.  Think of it as an early Christmas present!

Jean Hingley and her husband Cyril lived in a small council house in Rowley Regis, near Birmingham, England. On January 4, 1979, Cyril went to work, and after he left, she saw a light in the back garden. She figured it was the light in the car port, but when she went to turn it off, she saw an orange light hovering over the garden, which gradually turned white while radiating a sound that she described as "Zee...zee...zee..." Then "three beings" floated past her and went through the open back door of her house. The winged creatures glowed with a bright light and hovered about a foot above the ground. They were wearing silvery-green tunics and silver waistcoats, with transparent "fish-bowl" style helmets over their heads. They had no eyebrows or ears. Their faces were corpse-white with glittering black eyes.

Sketch based on Hingley's description of her callers.

Amazingly, Mrs. Hingley did not run screaming around the neighborhood with her apron over her head. Instead, she petrified with fear, as did her Alsatian dog, Hobo. But then the fear went away, and she "felt as if I were lifted up...I felt as if I were a different person; as though I was in Heaven although I was still at home. I seemed to float into the lounge." There she saw the 3 attacking her little artificial Christmas tree, shaking and tugging at it, and when they were done, they floated around the room, touching everything.  

She asked them, "What are you going to do? What do you want with me?" (My note:  I'd have been pitching a fit right about now.)

They replied by manipulating something on their chest, and voices emerged from it saying, "We shall not harm you."
"Where have you come from?" Mrs. Hingley asked.
"We come from the sky."

The trio went back to shaking the tree. Then they started bouncing on her couch.  (My question:  Were they three year olds?) Anyway, she said she was "happy" in their company. "Do you want a drink?" she asked. They asked for water, and when she  brought it, they lifted the glasses, and a blinding "power light" came on around their heads. "I didn't actually see them drink but when they put the glasses back on the tray the water was gone." 

She asked them if she should tell people about them. "Yes. We have been here before. We shall come again. Everybody will go to Heaven. There are beautiful colours there." The beings said they had already visited Australia, New Zealand, and America. "We come down here to try to talk to people but they don't seem to be interested."  (My Note:  Try it these days and someone will call ICE.)

Then Mrs. Hingley went into the kitchen and brought out a tray of mince pies. "They each lifted a mince pie from the plate as though their hands were magnetic." But when she lit a cigarette, they leapt back and floated to the back door, carrying their pies. She followed, apologizing, and saw "an orange coloured glowing thing" in her back yard that appeared to be a space ship. It was eight to ten feet long and four feet high, with several round portholes. The ship had something like a "scorpion tail" at the back, and a wheel on top."  The creatures floated into the ship, flashed its lights twice ("as if to say 'Goodbye,'") and disappeared into the sky. Mrs. Hingley's dog finally came back to life and began looking for the creatures.

Her visitors left Mrs. Hingley feeling "warm and happy," as though she had been "blessed." When she told a neighbor what had happened, they advised her to call the police. She did, but the police didn't know what to make of the story. She also called her husband and told him that she'd had "visitors with wings." 
"Birds?" he asked.
"No. Men with wings."
"Why don't you go and have your hair done and tell the girls about it."  (My note:  it's hard to get much more British than that, unless he'd told her "why don't you just put your feet up and have a nice cuppa tea.")

Mrs. Hingley said that her eyes were sore for a week after the "close encounter," and she felt too unwell to work for some time. Cassette tapes handled by the aliens were ruined, and for a time her radio and TV ceased to work. But she loved it, saying, "Some people have written to say that they think the visitors were elves or beings from the Fairy Kingdom, or even robots, but I don't know what to think. I know I shall never forget them if I live to be a hundred."

Sources:  #1 the main source is from Undine's Strange Company:  A Visit to the Weird Side of History (LINK)  AND  #2 from Slacktivist (LINK).  I cannot urge strongly enough that you subscribe to one or both of them.

The Skull

"A million year old human skull may have belonged to a relative of the mysterious Denisovans and provides clues to the rapid evolution of Homo sapiens in Asia. It suggests that our species, Homo sapiens, began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study.  It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we've come to believe, they say.

"Genetic evidence suggests it existed alongside them, so if Yunxian 2 walked the Earth a million years ago, say the scientists, early versions of Neanderthal and our own species probably did too.  This startling analysis has dramatically shifted the timeline of the evolution of large-brained humans back by at least half a million years, according to Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, a co-lead on the research.  He said there are likely to be million year-old fossils of Homo sapiens somewhere on our planet - we just haven't found them yet.

"The earliest known evidence for early Homo sapiens in Africa is 300,000 years ago, so it is tempting to conclude that our species might have evolved first in Asia.  But there is not enough evidence to be sure at this stage, according to Prof Stringer, because there are human fossils in Africa and Europe that are also a million years old that need to be incorporated into the analysis."  (LINK1 and LINK2)

(MY NOTE: My deep genetic tests via the National Geographic Genome Project show that I am definitely Homo Sapien but also have Neanderthal (4.6%) and Denisovian (2.1%) DNA. My ancestors - and probably everyone's ancestors - fooled around with each other. A lot.)  

Now I have been practically popping opening champagne bottle over this news

because I have been postulating (if not preaching) for decades that intelligent hominids have been around for at least a megaannum (that's one million years, folks), mainly based on the fact that as soon as the last ice age (The Younger Dryas) ended around 11,700 years ago, humans started right up domesticating animals and plants, irrigation, pottery (the oldest so far is 20,000, from a cave in China), building, and erecting megaliths, and what may be (so far) the oldest temple found on earth, Gobekli Tepe, just as if everyone "knew" what to do to get what we would call a major civilization going again.  Same myths, stories, and "inventions".  And haunted memories of a paradise lost and/or a perfect city shattered by natural disasters.

It's almost like the ice melted, and humans were racing to get back to the Old Days, but without the Old Ones (read your Lovecraft like the rest of us).

But let's move on to the really weird stuff.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon

I think I've mentioned this book before, but I want to mention it again.  Seance on a Wet Afternoon was written in 1961 by Mark McShane, and a movie was made of it in 1964, which is about the time that I read it on my grandmother's front porch in Kentucky on a rainy afternoon from the paperback pictured to the right.  I've never seen the movie.  I don't want to see it, because I know they gave the movie a Hollywood ending, which the book (actually a novella) definitely didn't deserve. (As if, and this will become more relevant later on, CoPilot offered to finish the movie off for them.)  I consider the book (actually a novella, but back then you didn't have to write 100,000 words to have a novel) a masterpiece of suspense.  

Myra Savage, psychic, truly can see into other people’s minds, and can even sometimes sense the future, but her real goal is communicate some day with the Other Side, mainly because she knows that this would finally give her the fame (and fortune) that she deserves. So she concocts The Plan with the help of her husband Bill, unemployed due to his asthma, and will do anything Myra tells him to do.

The Plan is simple: Bill will snatch a child from her schoolyard and paste together a letter demanding ransom. After a few days of citywide panic, Myra will lead the police to the child and the money, and all of London will know her name. What could possibly go wrong?

If you can guess the ending, the real ending, you're more of a psychic than Myra, because this does not go where you think it will go...  

BTW, I hope that if the aliens ever come back, they don't encounter a Myra.  May it always be a Mrs. Hingley and her mince pies.

****

PS:  I am ecstatic to announce that I have finally found the way to get rid of that #*$%&@&* CoPilot on Microsoft 365.  You know, the one that keeps offering to write my essays or finish my sentence?  Well, the last straw was that one morning I was writing my dreams into my dream diary, and it offered what it thought should be the way the sentence went, and I blew my stack because my dreams are my dreams and I don't need anyone to tell me where my dreams, my stories, my plays, my essays are gonna go, and don't even TRY to tell me what I'm going to or should say next, dammit!

So, this is what you do, for those of you who don't know yet:  open Microsoft Word.  Hit "File".  Go down the column on the left to "Options" and click on it, and turn CoPilot off.  

Oh, what bliss...  

Crime Krewe

 

Swag.  I paid for one of these books.

When Donald E. Westlake accepted the MWA Grand Master Award at an Edgars ceremony he said "You're my tribe!" That's how I felt at Bouchercon last month, but since it was in New Orleans let's call it my krewe.  Some random highlights.

Sociological  Observation.  We attended the World Science Fiction Conference last month and my wife, the SF fan, noted that the mystery crowd is friendlier.  She was right.  For example, standing in line you were much more likely to get into conversation with the strangers around you at Bcon than at Worldcon.

My Busy Weekend. I was only scheduled to be on one panel (on short stories. Surprise!) but I said I would be happy to take on more so, sure enough, I was asked to moderate another panel (on short stories, who would have guessed?), and then invited to be on a third panel, this one on turning ideas into stories.  Happy to do so.  I feel like one reason I was in demand was that so many people seemed to be dropping out at the last minute.  I personally know five people who cancelled due to health or other reasons.

My Librarian Hat.  But I had another job to do.  There was a big event in support of libraries and against book-banning and the like.  I was one of three librarians invited to speak.  The whole shebang deserves its own report so you can read about it here if you wish, including (lucky you) my speech. 

I Love a Parade. The opening ceremonies were held at the World War II Museum.  To get there something like a thousand conference-goers proceeded in a second line, marching behind a brass band, with the guests of honor in pedi-cabs.  It was great fun but the drivers on the side streets must have hated us.  Bonus: I walked much of the distance with Linda Landrigan, editor of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

Photo by Tracee L. Evans

Most Surreal Moment.  At the opening ceremonies I had the honor of handing out the Derringer Awards.  I was on the stage looking down at the front row where the guests of honor were seated and I spotted Craig Johnson, author of the Longmire novels.  Then I saw, sitting next to him, A. Martinez, a fine actor I recognized from L.A. Law and Longmire.  I was looking at him and he was looking at me.  I don't think I lost my place.

Sign In, Please. The first time I had a story in a Bouchercon anthology, back in Raleigh, there was a book signing event with all the authors neatly arranged by the order their stories appeared in the book so purchasers could just move down the row to have their volumes signed.  The same thing was supposed to happen here except anarchy prevailed.  Purchasers noticed authors down the line with no books to sign yet and jumped in.  Some started at the end of the book, so to speak, and others started in the middle.  I'm sure some of them wound up missing authors but I just scribbled on whatever was put in front of me. (Oh. see the photo of me signing. Can you guess the title of my story?)

photo by Diana Catt

Disappointment. I attended the Anthony Awards, ready to speak on behalf of editors Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman if Murder Neat: A SleuthSayers Anthology took home the prize but, alas, it was not to be. Had a good time though.

Second Sociological Observation. It must relate to some mathematical law.  There were several writer friends -- Josh Pachter, Alan Orloff, Stacy Woodson, Bonnar Spring, Andrew Welsh-Huggins, to name a few -- who I was happy to run into again and again during the weekend.  On the other hand when I got home and checked Facebook I saw reports from other friends who I had never spotted even once.  Random results...

Ah well.  Next year in Calgary.  Does that make the krewe a posse?

Transformations

Back in the dark ages when I was first writing, most mysteries from the major houses appeared in hardback, destined for what was called the "library trade." Libraries were huge consumers of mysteries, and their book orders guaranteed a modest but reliable profit for the writer. 

Back then, our hope was to go into paperback, the new mass market offerings that promised a wider audience and, possibly, real money. Of course, this market was competitive, and even more competitive for women writers, because the big publishing houses were leery of supporting too many female authors.

With a few sterling exceptions, mysteries and thrillers were thought to be male territory, and I remember my then agent reporting that a major New York house had turned down my work on the grounds that "they already had their female mystery writer."

Times change. Now there are vast numbers of notable – and published – women writers, and ebooks, print on demand, self published, and trade paperbacks have joined mass market paperbacks. While the big movie deal remains as elusive as ever, the voracious streaming services have provided new possibilities.

In the process, outlets like Netflix and HBO have come up with a new way of delivering mystery entertainment: serials consisting of six to eight - or more- episodes that the producers hope will be binge worthy. I have enjoyed several of these lately, but significantly, all were based on unfamiliar authors and books.

The Netflix series, The Survivors, was a different matter. I have admired Australian writer Jane Harper for her clever plotting and efficient style. She also has a real mastery of setting, especially in her descriptions of the devastating fires that ravage the continent. As I had somehow missed the novel when it was released, I was eager to see the series.

I lasted two episodes. Had I not been familiar with the author, I think I would have found the video series diverting. The sea off Tasmania looks suitably threatening, the cast is attractive, and the actors are decent, with Robyn Malcolm and Damien Garvey doing especially good work as the protagonist's parents. Long happily married, Brian is slipping into dementia, leaving Verity, his devoted wife, grieving and raging and unable to stop blaming their visiting son, Elliot, for his adored older brother's death. 

Malcolm and Garvey have been given meaty rolls, and they dominate every scene they are in. They get the big emotions and the sometimes outrageous behavior, while the central characters, Elliot and his partner, Mia, come off as rather passive and colorless.

I was curious about that and when I secured the novel from our local library, I understood why. In the novel, Elliot, returning to the island after a number of years away, is our window into events. He is our observer and also, because of a grim past history, the catalyst for reminiscence, nostalgia, hostility, and grief. In print, with a slow but relentless build up of unease and unpleasantness, he works fine. 

The video is another matter. A series, just like the old time Perils of Pauline, needs an eye-catching opening, preferably for each episode. I must admit the initial scene in The Survivors, a swimmer trapped in a sea cave, is impressive. A successful serial also needs a cliff hanger at the end of each installment, dual requirements that give the episodes their characteristic rhythm.

This is perhaps why I found The Survivors, and a number of its competitors, a curious mixture, at once faster and slower than print. On the one hand, the action and the emotions are ramped up, on the other, the pacing often seems slow, with scenes needlessly elongated or clearly inserted as filler before some twist or revelation.

Of course, visibility on a major streaming service opens up a range of possibilities for a mystery writer, but at the risk of sounding terminally old fashioned, I suspect some books–and some writers– are better served by print.

Want a Story Prompt? Deliver the Mail

Jim Thomsen is a writer and editor—and mail carrier—who lives in a small town in western Washington state. He edited the Seattle-centric crime-fiction anthology The Killing Rain. This is the second time he wrote a piece on Facebook that was so fascinating I asked him to expand it for SleuthSayers. Enjoy.

— Rob

---

Want a Story Prompt? Deliver the Mail

by Jim Thomsen

I rang twice.

She opened the door, wrapped in a towel with not much beneath but a bathing suit.

“Good morning, ma’am,” I said. “I’m your mail carrier. I have a certified letter that needs a signature.”

I showed her the screen on my blue USPS handheld scanner and handed her the stylus attached to it.

She reached for the scanner as well, but the towel started to slip, and she snatched at it.

“Could you hold it for me? I’ve only got one hand free.”

The towel? I almost blurted out.

“The screen thing, I mean,” she said with a self-conscious laugh.

I did so, meaning that I had to stand less than two feet away from her.

She scrawled, and sighed in frustration as the combination of slippery stylus and small screen teamed to make her signature less than legible. Every now and then, she looked at me. At last, she handed it back. “I’m not sure that’s very good,” she said. “I might have to do this inside.”

“I can wait,” I said from the doorway.

“You can come in.”

“Um. I’ll wait here.”

She gave me a long look, then sat in a living-room chair, re-tucking her towel, and bent over the scanner. A moment later, she got up again and handed it back to me.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

I looked at the scanner. Illegible scratch, but the signature field was filled. I smiled. “That’ll do.”

I turned to go, sensing that she was watching me as I started to retreat down her porch steps and back toward where my mail van was idling.

“Wait,” she said.

I turned back, heart beating a little bit faster.

“My letter?”

***

I am a mailman. I don’t particularly want to be. But, much like Stephen Starring Grant, author of the recent hit memoir Mailman, I’m forced into it by financial circumstance. For the last sixteen years, I’ve made my living as a book editor, following twenty-five years as a newspaper journalist. At least, I did, until my business abruptly collapsed at the time of last November’s election. I spent months trying to revive it, but after sputtering along and slowly draining my modest savings along the way, it was, sadly, time to find a “job-job.” It was dismaying to find that there wasn’t much I could do—or would want to do, a few months shy of my sixtieth birthday. I briefly explored taking a part-time newspaper gig, but the company wouldn’t budge off its barely-above-minimum-wage wage. The job listings on Indeed were bleak—lots of openings, but mostly for Amazon delivery drivers, night security personnel, and home healthcare workers.

Then I came across an Indeed listing for mail delivery workers in my small town on Puget Sound and, with a heavy sigh, filled out the application. I soon got a call. The job was not with USPS, but for a contractor called USA Mail, with an offer for a job with a flat daily wage: $150 a day, whether the day was six hours long (rare, but it happens once in a great while) or nine hours (less rare).

But the work had some appeal. I could come into the post office as late or as early as I wanted (within reason, though I usually show up between 6:45 a.m. and 7:15 a.m.). And from then on, there was a comforting routine: case the mail, sort the packages, load everything in a battered minivan repurposed with-right-hand-wheel drive, and deliver along the route. When I’m done, I’m done, and every next day is a new day. I don’t much have to deal with office politics, and I can dress as shabbily as I want (and I want).

Plus, it’s a profession that was practiced by some of our finest creative minds. Charles Bukowski delivered mail in LA, and even wrote a novel about it, Post Office. So did one of my favorite musicians, John Prine, not coincidentally one of our finest observers of the American human condition. Walt Disney did it, as did William Faulkner. Maybe this would be the salt-of-the-earth experience that would get my own novel off the ground. As Bukowski wrote in his novel: “Well, you had to work somewhere. So you accepted what there was. This was the wisdom of the slave.”

So, after passing a drug test—after being told, told my relief, that they were more worried about meth and heroin use than the CBD gummies I take to help me sleep—and a criminal background check, I started work in mid-April of this year. (Apparently, passing those tests is a high bar here, and my supervisor regularly laments not being able to scrape up recruits of sufficient pristinity.)

It’s been … not bad. A little stressful, as the bar is high for accuracy of service—tracked by the aforementioned scanner, which must be used on every package I deliver, and god help you if there’s a discrepancy between what the scanner thinks you should have delivered and what you actually delivered, which can lead to long and sometimes sharp discussions after the route with whoever sits in the postmaster’s seat.

It speaks to a baseline sense of pride in doing the job right, which I share with my coworkers; the same pride I take in catching every error in a client’s novel manuscript. It’s a big deal, and no less than a national trust: Getting what people want and expect into their hands when they want and expect it, and never letting them see how elaborately that particular sausage is made along the way.

But mostly it’s mundane, soothing routine.

***

What I like best about the job, as someone who works in the creative writing world, is how each day is a well-primed firing pin for the storyteller’s imagination. The route itself sets that particular table: my town has a dual nature, not unlike that of good and evil, and it’s easy to see only the good until you scratch beneath that shimmering surface. The waterfront is packed with high-end homes with highly serendipitous views. My mail route touches on a sliver on that, and a larger slice of sightly-above-middle-class basic-suburban neighborhoods. But, go inland a few miles, and I enter a Pacific Northwest edition of Deliveranceville: a world of long twisting dirt lanes, deep woods, dead vehicles, flapping tarps, sagging fences, lichen-crusted sidings, and dogs whose vicious barks may not be worse than their bites. There’s always stacks of lumber and mechanical parts. Rusting appliances. Aggressive PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. And American flags. Always. Lots and lots of American flags.

In addition to The Bath Towel Woman, I’ve encountered:

• A man who always jogs out to my mail van the minute I pull inside a fence and holds up a hand—go no farther!—and takes his packages before I can step out of the truck for an approach to his porch. There’s always the squalling of compressors and saws and pressure hoses in the deep background, and he aways seems to position himself in a way that seems meant to minimize what I can see. After taking the packages, he always points to a dirt-track turnaround so that I don’t advance an inch further onto his land. What he’s doing—and what he doesn’t want me to detect—are open questions that pinball around in my brain pan the remainder of the route. I always get images of the meth lab being built beneath the industrial laundry in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
• A farmhouse that always makes me think of the Clutter family home from In Cold Blood. It’s shabby but well-kept in a way that calls to mind a vacuum-sealed corpse. I deliver packages here maybe twice a week, and every single time, as I approach the weathered porch steps, I see a curtain twitch in an upstairs window, but never a face or even a silhouette. It brings to mind a line from a 1970s horror movie: “Why is Grandma’s room locked from the outside?” Or maybe, I think, it’s a real-life Flowers in the Attic. Should I try to break in and rescue the children?
• The Hamptons House. At the very end of one of those deep dark winding lanes is a tall, ornate wrought-iron gate, with a locker for parcels off to one side to which I deliver perhaps every other day. The approach passes almost nothing but tarpatoriums, as I call them. But, by peering through a tiny break in the evergreens, I catch a glimpse of a sprawling manor on at least twenty acres that wouldn’t look out of place on a Kennedy compound in Kennebunkport. Who are these people? What do they do? And why did they build here in my county’s version of West Virginia?
• The War of the Roses House. I rarely deal with actual residents on my route, which I understand—why come out to make excruciating small talk with a stranger on your front steps?—but on one occasion, the door flew open as I delivered a package and the next thing I knew, I was almost nose-to-nose with a man who was almost purple with rage, who looked like a cyst ready to rupture. For the next few minutes, I’m slowly backing away from a man who thrusts a pile of mail in my face, screaming that his ex-wife doesn’t live here anymore, g**dammit, and it’s very upsetting to get mail addressed to that f***ing c**t, and why am I rubbing his nose in his pain?

Tell me that line isn’t a launching pad for at least a million suspense-story permutations.

***

Like Stephen Starring Grant, I may not last a year in this job—if that. My book-editing business is coming back, and my days—and nights and weekends—are loaded with work. But can I trust that it will be sustainable? I can’t, at least not yet. So I will probably stick with the route and its guaranteed monthly check at least until after the holidays, a stretch of the year that my post-office colleagues speak about in a roundabout way in singularly intimidating tones.

But I’ll admit that, however long it lasts, when I finally stop delivering the mail, I’ll miss it in many ways. I’ll miss getting paid on a regular timetable, miss getting to listen to audiobooks for the five or six hours a day I’m on the road. I’ll miss the soothing properties of pure routine, and the mentally sonorous feeling of getting to surrender the critical-thinking part of my brain to the perfection of pure process execution. And I’ll miss getting a rare window into how others live, where they live, and how they can’t help but reveal something of their most genuine selves in a way you wouldn’t get from seeing these people in public.

Home is where the heart is, but hone is also, perhaps, where the heart is darkest. Especially if I ring twice.

I like that. As, I imagine, any storyteller would.

Living the HI Life

This one may ramble a bit, folks, and the connection to writing mystery fiction may be a bit oblique--except in the sense that what I'm concerned about is, in part, the state of essentially all reading and writing. Earlier this month I had the chance to take a scenic train ride through the Rocky Mountains. It was breathtaking, and inspiring (in no small part because of the stories of the fierce, ongoing efforts by a lot of dedicated people to minimize and mitigate the ecological damage humans have done in that region).

One of my favorite things about it? The parts of the trip when the train was remote enough from any town, or deep enough in some canyon, that there was no Internet service. This seemed to cause some of my fellow travelers a touch of consternation, but I found it to be an almost physical relief. Being online started out as a luxury, then became a convenience, then a necessity, and now it's basically, for most people most of the time, an obligation.

For me, it was a pleasure to just sit back and watch the world go by, unconcerned with the digital "life" I was mercifully cut off from.

This experience got juxtaposed, in my mind, with the growing evidence that the use of AI is actively making people dumber. A lot of people are getting very concerned about this; there's more and more reason to think that becoming dependent on AI substantially reduces people's critical thinking and creative skills, and that it does so pretty quickly and pretty substantially. If you need a connection to writing, that's a pretty good one. People need critical thinking and creative skills to write. They need them to read, too, and the last thing we need right now is yet another reduction in the ever-shrinking percentage of the population interested in (or capable of) reading for pleasure.

I'm fifty-five years old. It seems to me that these have been, and continue to be, the dominant political and cultural trends of my lifetime, the things that have transformed the world I was becoming aware of fifty years ago into the world (and most specifically the US) that exists today:

• A massive redistribution of wealth upward, at the expense of education, healthcare, the environment, workers' rights, social mobility, infrastructure, and the arts.
• A movement away from direct engagement with the world and toward engagement with computer-driven simulations--first video games, then the internet (particularly social media), now AI, and, looming on the horizon, virtual reality.
• Skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, particularly among young people.

These aren't really separate things. They reinforce and magnify each other. Depression and anxiety can start to seem like awfully rational reactions to a world in which your chances for real economic success are severely limited and you spend basically your entire life staring at screens.

I don't think there will be any real effort to mitigate the intellectual cost of AI. There's too much money to be made.

More importantly, the fact that it actively makes people stupider is, from certain points of view, awfully convenient. Critical thinking skills are inherently threatening to those who benefit from manipulating and exploiting the populace. Critical thinkers are less likely to vote against their own interests– or to choose not to vote at all. Critical thinkers don't support policies that further enrich the obscenely wealthy because they anticipate, for no coherent reason, someday being among them. Critical thinkers don't blame their problems on others because of their racial, political, sexual, or national identities.

Critical thinkers understand that fascism is not the same thing as patriotism. I'm as guilty of falling into the traps as anybody else. I, too, have the nasty habit of reaching for my phone in any idle moment. I have to actively resist buying video game systems because I know how addictive they can be for me. I know the endorphin rush of social media– something else I've learned to try to avoid, with only partial success.

Some days I swear I can feel my attention span shrinking. There's nothing I can really do to reverse all this on a cultural or collective level. All I can do is try to make decisions and take actions that move me, personally, in a different direction. All any of us can do is, whenever it's possible to do so, choose HI– Human Intelligence– over Artificial Intelligence.

So I'll go for a walk instead of falling into YouTube rabbit holes. I'll reach for an actual, physical book instead of my phone. And I'll keep writing, and have faith that there are people out there who still want to read things written by actual people. I'll try to choose, as much as I can, to lead a HI life.

I'm Pretty Sure This Book Tried to Kill Me: Writing the second book in a series

What is it about second books?  Anne R. Allen and I got musing about that, and this blog post was the result:

The second book of the Merry Widow Murder series, The Silent Film Star Murders, came out this year.  I'm pretty sure this book tried to kill me (some might say, rather appropriate for a crime series...)

It's not as if I'm a virgin to series.

 (Probably, I should reword that; I am a happily married woman, after all.) 

What I mean is,  I've done this before.  The Merry Widow is my 4th series.  The first three didn't kill me, so why should this darn book?

The trouble with second books is four-fold:

1.  The Expectations are HUGE.

We all dread the following review: "It was okay, but not as good as the first book."   

Everyone - and I do mean everyone -expects the second book will be just as good or better than the first.  In fact, they demand it.  You've set their high hopes with the first book.  If you didn't, then they wouldn't buy a second book in the first place.  And if they don't buy a second book, your publisher won't want a third.

I was lucky with the Rowena Through the Wall series.  The second book (Rowena and the Dark Lord) garnered better reviews than the first.

And I was even luckier with The Goddaughter's Revenge.  That novella (part of The Goddaughter series) won the Derringer and the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence.  Several more followed.

But will that luck hold?  I have no idea how Silent Film Star will do, compared to the first book, and the suspense may just kill me.

2.  You have to be a bit of a magician.

Meaning, you have to weave in enough backstory about the first book so that people who read this book without having read the first will not be lost. At the same time, you have to weave backstory in a way that is quick and lively, so as not to bore the people who read the first book.  

It's a learned skill you get better at with practice.

 3.  You lose an important suspense element of stand-alone books.

The trouble with a crime series is your protagonist must survive to be in the next book.  Whatever happens, your protagonist must live through it.  And if your reader knows this is a series, they know this part. 

 For some readers, it's why they like series books.  They WANT the reassurance that they are not reading for four hours, just to find out their beloved protagonist kicks the bucket in the end.  I'm in that category.  I don't like books that end badly for the main character.

BUT - it also means an important element of surprise has been eliminated from the story.  In a stand-alone, when you start reading, you won't know the reason it's a stand-alone.  Could be the main character didn't survive to be in another story.  That adds suspense.

4.  What about Character Arc?

If you study how to write a novel, you will probably come across the concept of Character Arc.  Basically, it means that by the end of the book, your protagonist should be changed in some way by his experiences in the story.  

A classic example would be:  A woman is a very nice, kind, unassuming mother.  But then her child is kidnapped and she becomes a fierce fighter in his recovery, finding violence in her that she didn't know possible.

That's an extreme example. You can probably remember a popular sci-fi movie with this theme.  

Our problem with series books: some lit courses teach that every book should have a character arc.

Trouble is, if you have six book series, is your character going to change six times in six different ways?  That becomes impossible, if not darn silly.

So in a series,  I try to make my characters become even more what they are.  As the series grows, they become even more determined in their goals, more devoted to their individual causes.  And in The Merry Widow Murders series, more determined to see justice done, whether inside or outside the law.

 SO WHY DO WE DO IT?

By now, any reasonable person must be wondering why anyone would want to write a series, taking into the account above.

For that, I can come up with two reasons:

1. We're insane.
2. We cannot leave our beloved characters behind.

I don't know about the first, but the second is me.  I'm a suck.  I love my characters like wayward children.  They stay in my mind for years and years, begging me to write more about them.  I've had readers tell me that reading the next book in The Goddaughter series was like revisiting old friends.

So forgive me now if I leave this post.  I'm just finishing up book 3, and my characters are calling.
 

 

Compared to Agatha Christie by The Toronto Star, Melodie Campbell hopes to survive book 3. In the meantime, you can see how she survived the above by ordering book 2, The Silent Film Star Murders.  Available at all the usual suspects (Barnes&Noble, Chapters/Indigo, Amazon, etc.)

I'm Only Here To Steal Your Stuff

20th Century Fox

Everyone remembers the burglars from the Home Alone movies. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern scope out a tony Chicago suburb to see who's going to be gone at Christmas. Pesci even disguises himself as a cop stopping by to warn neighbors of a burglar in the area. This is a clever variation on the murderer who joins the search party for his victim. Of course, little did they realize one eight-year-old boy would get left behind and have to fend for himself. Macaulay Culkin is an early Millennial, raised the same as most Gen X'rs. As a Gen X'r myself, I must warn potential criminals how we were raised on a lifetime of Warner Brothers cartoons, specifically Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the Roadrunner. You, oh would-be felon, are not even Elmer Fudd in this equation. You are Wile E. Coyote. This is the part where you hold up a sign that says, "Yikes!"

Up until Joe and Daniel get their asses handed to them by a Warner Brothers-trained kid who's already had to fend for himself for a week, they're actually quite the professionals. Joe brazenly impersonates a police officer to get potential victims to reveal their holiday plans, and they methodically hit a list of homes on the list. But...

Burglars aren't always the brightest bulbs in the bunch, both in fiction and in real life. Daniel Stern decides to stop up the kitchen sink in each house and leave the water running. He says it's their calling card. "We're the wet bandits!" Uh huh. You're leaving a trail of evidence, my friend. Never mind the kid in one of your target houses who would grow up to have a fine career in Acme's R&D department. All they needed was the attempt to clog little Kevin's kitchen sink before the kid unleashes cartoon Armageddon on them, and police can go back to every house with flood damage in the neighborhood.

But it seems to be a regular occurrence. Full crews of burglars work with amazing precision. Recently, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow was burglarized while he was playing. Here in Cincinnati, where he lives. I've been by his house before, long before he owned it. The houses in that particular neighborhood are not easy to get to nor easy to penetrate. But penetrate they did. And this crew worked methodically. They had already gone through homes in Indian Hill, where Cincinnati's wealthy live. Burrow was a ripe target because it's a big house. But...

Joe Burrow is a high-profile target. Rob the vice president of marketing for Proctor & Gamble, and while the Indian Hill Rangers will do their best to catch the culprits, it's not going to make the news. Rob a Bengals player who played in a Superbowl and is frequently featured nationally on ESPN and Fox Sports, and all four local news stations and probably national news outlets, and suddenly you find out why La Cosa Nostra has a strict code of silence. Attention brings the law. 

Worse, we are in an era hostile to foreigners. The burglars in question were from Chile. Make of that bit of nonsense what you will. But now, in a case that might have involved a state bureau of investigation or a sheriff's department to coordinate among difference forces, and probably the FBI, you have now attracted ICE. Good or ill, that's most definitely unwanted attention. 

And then they took selfies with all the swag they stole from Joe Burrow. Nice. Because posting to social media means you don't have to pay for all that flood damage. 

I'm currently working on a short story where a drywall crew is robbing homes in a tony lakeside village. They have access to their victims' homes, so they use the victims' own tools to raid the houses, then lock the doors behind them. But...

Most of the victims have Costco memberships, and a lot of recent hauls from the warehouse store disappear, along with all the beer in the fridge. It unravels when one crew member tries to disable an electrical substation on the night of a thunderstorm to cover their shutting off the power to the houses. Unfortunately, there's this thing called arc flashover that can reduce a person to a blackened cinder while another is pulled over with boxes of snacks in nice Costco-sized boxes and several cases of beer. Oops.

Burglary is proof clever and smart are not exactly the same thing.