The Story is Writing Itself

I got a story on my computer writing itself. It started as a title, an idea forming into a sketchy plot. Once the characters arrived, they jokeyed for screen time and we off and running and I tagged along to report what they did.

Couple of characters woke me up this morning at three o'clock and I realized I'd better get this down before I  forgot the scene they were playing out. The cats came into my home office to see what the hell I was doing at that time of the morning and I had to stop and give each treats or they'll lie across my keyboard.

The older I get the more I learn about writing. All of us write differently. My style has changed, evolved, and it doesn't always flow but when it does, I hustle to keep up. The characters often take the story in another direction, ducking into dark alleys on occasion, doing nice things I wouldn't do because I'm not that nice before they stop and the story's over.

Obviously, the bulk of the work involves getting from the opening to the ending. What steps are necessary?

As for inspirations, I have photos of my main characters on my computer. I get them from websites (almost all are face shots) and looking at those faces inspires me when I write.

Since we work together here at Big Kiss Productions, I come up with the cover of most of our books and layout the cover of my books before I start writing the novel like my newest novel GOLDEN DANDELIONS. I've come up with the cover of the next Lucien Caye private eye novel (second draft finished) and the next novel in line, a LaStanza crime novel. Looking at the cover inspires me while I work on the book.

The strange things we do in the creative process.

That's all for now,

www.oneildenoux.com 

Shelley Duvall in Three Women: An Homage to Ambiguity

Shelley Duvall died in her sleep (apparently from complications of diabetes) on July 11, at age 75. She was quirky, different, hard to peg down, and an incredible actress, producer, director, and writer. And she made it seem effortless.

Think The Shining. Kubrick made everyone do endless takes in almost all his movies, and he was especially hard on Shelley, in order to "break her." Jack Nicholson told Empire magazine later he thought Duvall was fantastic and called her work in the film, "the toughest job that any actor that I've seen had." She later said that "For the last nine months of shooting, the role required her to cry 12 hours a day, five or six days a week, and it was so difficult being hysterical for that length of time".

She could also do a performance simple as a folded napkin: see her journalist in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Or Dixie in Roxane.

I think the director who understood her best (other than herself in Faery Tale Theatre) was Robert Altman. He cast her in seven movies: Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, Buffalo Bill & the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, 3 Women and Popeye.

Pinky Rose: I wonder what it's like to be twins.
Millie Lammoreaux: Huh?
Pinky Rose: Twins. Bet it'd be weird. Do you think they know which ones they are?

3 Women is my favorite Altman movie. I love the cast, the weirdness and the dreaminess coexisting with the banal reality of so much of the dialog, and so much of working-class life. Harassing and nit-picking bosses, indifferent and cliquish coworkers, and a full-time job that pays so little you still need a roommate to pay the bills and keep food on the table in a one-bedroom apartment. Whatever car you're driving, you'll be driving it until it finally gives up the ghost, and then no one knows how you'll replace it. That, my friends, is real life.

Duvall's Millie Lammoreaux wants more. She reads all the magazines on how to dress, how to decorate, how to act, how to be more attractive to men, and tries to make all of that real. She has no idea that she's trying too hard, is more desperate than she knows, and is a shallow bore. Her coworkers at the health spa (and yes, there are twins there) and the doctors she "lunches with" in an attempt to find a boyfriend ignore her; her fellow apartment dwellers make fun of her (especially when she slinks down the stairs to hang out at the pool in a long, hooded cover up…). Only she and Pinkie Rose think she's wonderful.

Pinky Rose: You're the most perfect person I've met.

Millie Lammoreaux: Gee. Thanks.

Sissy Spacek's Pinkie is an awkward, naive, Southern girl, who latches on to Millie like a limpet, if a limpet could flatter, adore, and imitate. Until the accident, when Pinkie nearly drowns, and when she finally returns, her personality has changed completely.

And then there's Willie. To me, Janice Rule's Willie is the real mystery of the movie: so heavily pregnant, so thoroughly clothed, almost entirely mute (but what she does with her eyes!), painting endless murals of alien-looking naked humanoids with massive penises and / or assaulting, screaming, murdering and dying on all the pools in the area – including her own. As for why she's still with Edgar, that drinking, swaggering, target shooting, womanizing has-been Western stunt double… Well, sadly, that isn't that weird. We've all seen Willie and Edgar in real life.

"Do you think they know which ones they are?"

I don't know. Do any of us really know who we are? Deep down? Remember when you were young, and you ran with a pack (or were kept or rejected from running with the pack) – and the pack really looked, talked, acted all alike so that the adults often couldn't tell one from the other. Could the pack individuate, or was that the point of keeping the pack pure? To drown in the collective?

NOTE: Speaking of drowning, there's a lot of water in 3 Women, and you can interpret it any way you like. Millie and Pinkie work a spa where they spend most of their time providing water exercise and baths. Everywhere has a pool. Dreams begin and end with water. Jung's collective unconscious? Life in the womb? Ursula LeGuin's "The Social Dreaming of the Frin"? You pick.

Some people have said they find the movie misogynistic. I don't see it that way. Each woman in 3 Women has their own character, and the actresses themselves were allowed to develop them. Altman let Spacek and especially Duvall improv a lot of their dialog. Duvall wrote Millie's diary and planned her recipes:

"I got this whole book of recipes that I'm keepin'. And I list 'em by how long they take to make. You know, if you only have 20 minutes, you just look under 20 minutes... and it tells ya all the kind of things that you can make in that amount of time."

I have heard versions of that conversation in real life.

And Millie's dress, always caught in the car door. It started off as a mistake, but Altman didn't reshoot the scene, and kept as a signature through the whole movie.

"Do you think they know which ones they are?"

I don't know, any more than I know what happened to Edgar, or how / why / when the three women end up the way they do. That's half the fun of watching 3 Women more than once. It's a mystery, like dreams...

And I like dreams. And ambiguity. Knowing your version of the ending, but also knowing it could be something else. Also from the "your guess is as good as mine, but I'll probably stick with mine" list:

• 2001 A Space Odyssey – We've only been arguing about what the hell it means for 56 years and counting...
• Solaris – (the 1972 version by Tarkovsky, PLEASE)
• High Plains Drifter - 1973, is he real or is he a ghost?
• Picnic at Hanging Rock - 1975, One of my top ten ever since the first time I ever saw it. Been watching Peter Weir films ever since.
• The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey - Australian, 1988 - another one of my top tens.

What's on your list?

Many Happy Birthdays

 

I wish to celebrate an important birthday today.  This piece has little to do with crime or writing, except for the odd fact of some things not being crimes, and the interesting differences between real life and storytelling.  What I mean by that, is that this true tale will take some turns very different than they would in, say, a movie about the events.

Frances Oldham was born 110 years ago today, July 24th, 1914, in Cobble Hill, British Columbia. In an era when few women attended college, she got Bachelor and Masters degrees in pharmacology.  In 1936 she applied for a job at the University of Chicago and was hired by a boss who assumed "Frances" was a man's name.  In that non-existent movie about her life this would no doubt provide many dramatic scenes about her battles with sexism, and some probably happened, but I found no record of them. 

The next year her boss worked with the Food and Drug Administration on a strange case, involving an antibiotic called sulfanilamide.  It worked fine as a pill but many people in the south preferred to take medicine in liquid form so a chemist found a liquid that would dissolve the drug.  Unfortunately, the liquid was poisonous and more than one hundred people died.

Elixir Sulfanilimide

The owner of the company said "I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part."  The chemist apparently felt differently, since he killed himself.

Here is the strange bit: the FDA had no authority to force the drugs off of store shelves. At the time the  FDA could only deal with false labels, and the labels were completely accurate.  This resulted in a law passing in 1938 giving the agency control over the drugs themselves, not just the packaging - the beginning of all those pesky federal regulations some of us complain about.

Besides her experience in this field, Oldham also acquired at the University of Chicago  a Ph.D., an M.D., and a husband.  So she became Dr. Frances Kelsey.

In 1960 she got a job at the FDA reviewing drugs.  She was quickly assigned to check a trnquilizer/painkiller  the Richardson-Merrell company wanted to sell, called Kevadon.  It was already in use in almost two dozen countries, including Kelsey's beloved Canada.

But Kelsey said no.  She insisted on seeing the  clinical trials.  The FDA could only hold up a drug for sixty days but she kept getting two month extensions, while the pharmaceutical company ranted and complained.

In our imaginary movie this would be the part where she battles furiously with her boss.  In reality Kelsey said the FDA higher-ups supported her.  Good for the nation's health, but lousy for drama.

More than a year after Kelsey's holding operation started the news began pouring out of Europe: Kevadon, under its generic name Thalidomide, was the factor connecting the births of many malformed babies. A drug which had been specially promoted for pregnant women was causing horrible birth defects.  

Because of Dr. Kelsey's firmness and demand for scientific rigor, there were only seventeen such cases in the United States --  and those were because Richardson-Merrell had distributed "experimental" doses, which was allowed under the current law. 

Again, in our pretend drama, this might be the point to lament Kelsey's contribution being forgotten, or else attributed to some man. In real life that didn't happen.  Kennedy gave her the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civil Service.  

But we get into more dramatic territory in 1966 when a new FDA commissioner, apparently resenting her fame and believing drug company complaints that Kelsey had refused the approval out of laziness, demoted her.  But when that commissioner left she returned to her role as Director of Scientific Investigations.   She retired at age ninety.  The FDA gives out an annual Drug Safety Excellence Award, named in her honor.

It seems fitting that on her birthday we remember Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, who was responsible in the early sixties for so many birthdays being happy.

Olympic Ode

 The Olympic Games are nearly upon us. At my household, we're pulling out the American flags and getting geared up.

            We love to watch the Olympics. There are a tremendous number of sports that we wouldn’t concern ourselves with if they were televised every week. (I've yet to catch the professional cornhole league.) But make it an international competition, pit the USA against the rest of the world, and only show the sport for two weeks every four years; my traveling companion and I get totally sucked into sports from archery to wrestling. (Okay, not rhythmic gymnastics, but almost everything else. I’ve never gotten the thing with the ribbons.)

            One of the things we enjoy best is the opportunity to become instant experts on sports that are not regularly watched in the United States. We'll tune in to the gymnastics events, have Tim Daggett give us a five-minute tutorial on women’s uneven bars, and we will confidently evaluate the verticality of the athlete's handstand and the degree of leg separation during her transition moves.

            We can learn a lot in a short period of time.

            This past May, the New York Times ran an article in preparation for the upcoming Olympics. The brief article was fascinating to read. I learned that the modern games have not always been exclusively about sports. For many years, the Olympics awarded medals for painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature, in addition to those for athletic prowess.

            Baron Pierre do Coubertin, the founder of the modern games, envisioned artistic competitions as an essential part of the Olympics. Richard Stanton, the author of The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions, writes that Coubertin was “raised and educated classically, and he was particularly impressed with the idea of what it meant to be a true Olympian—someone who was not only athletic but skilled in music and literature."

            The Baron could not convince the earliest local Olympic organizers that artistic competitions were necessary. In the 1912 Stockholm Games, however, he managed to make the arts part of the Olympics. As noted, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature, The Pentathlon of the Muses, were the artistic events.  Every submitted work had to be inspired by the idea of sport. 33 artists entered, and a gold medal was awarded for each category. Afraid that the Olympics would not get enough entrants, Coubertin submitted a poem, "Ode to Sport," under an assumed name. He took home the gold.

            An American, Walter Winans, won the first-ever gold medal for sculpture. The winning bronze statue, An American Trotter, showed a bronze horse pulling a chariot. His gold medal in the sculpture event went alongside the silver medal he earned in sharpshooting. (He'd also won the gold medal in shooting in 1908.)

            The Olympics were canceled in 1916 during World War I. Following the war, the games did not really get going full speed until 1924 in Paris. Today, no one is quite sure where all the panels of the winning painting, a triptych by Jean Jacoby of Luxembourg, are located. (Two thirds are stored in the archives of the Olympic headquarters.) The silver medal work, The Liffey Swim, an oil painting by Jack Butler Yeats (William's brother), hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland.

            From 1912 to 1952, 151 medals were awarded for the arts. The math doesn't exactly work. In some years, not all the medals were awarded if the jury did not find the submitted pieces worthy. In the 1928 Amsterdam games, the literature category was subdivided into lyric, dramatic, and epic categories. They were later consolidated back into one category and then split apart again. 

Public Domain

            Following World War 2, the Olympics returned. However, the climate for including the arts had changed. There was a renewed emphasis on amateurism. Because artists live by selling their work and since winning an Olympic medal might enhance marketability, purists increasingly viewed the art competitions with skepticism. Avery Brundage, the president of the International Olympic Committee, led the campaign to have the arts removed. Curiously, Brundage had submitted a piece of literature to the 1932 games and earned an honorable mention.

            As the Olympic sporting events blossomed, the artistic contests waned. They were not compatible with television. Judging artistic competitions always involves subjectivity. Unlike the 100-meter dash, there may not be a clear winner. Facing these problems, the International Olympic Committee voted to end competitions within the Pentathlon of the Muses. The 151 medals given out were officially stricken from the Olympic record. Today, when a country's medal count is displayed, the artistic awards are not included.

            But what if the artistic competitions were still around?   

            1924 represented the high water mark for the Olympic art competitions. On the 100^th anniversary, the games return to Paris. It is an apt time to remember the old events and, as a thought exercise, to reimagine them.

As mentioned above, the literature category showed elasticity in the Olympic competitions. Organizers subdivided the category at will. If the competition included the mystery genre, who would slip on the Ralph Lauren-designed uniform and represent the United States? Great Britain? The Nordic countries? Japan? Would your Dream Team consist of established heavyweights, or would you be bold and pin your nation's hopes on a fresh voice? 

Consider it while you dig out your national flag and prepare for the opening ceremonies.

(I'll be traveling on the day this posts. If you comment, I may be delayed in responding.)

Until next time.   

In It For The Long Haul

As every writer of short crime fiction knows, the fabled Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, matched only by its sister publication Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as a market, is notorious for the interminable amount of time between submission and response. The reason is simple: editor Linda Landrigan reads every one of the immense number of short stories submitted herself, and, as I've heard from her own lips, admits to being "a slow reader." No matter how many times I and other experienced writers share this explanation with the short story community, it's so unfathomable to some that they keep trying to figure out a system, like gamblers who don't believe in the laws of probability.

Does she read writers she knows first?
Will I get penalized if I send too many stories?
It's been a year, and I haven't heard. Does that mean it's more likely to be an acceptance than a rejection?

None of the above. My most recent wait for an acceptance was from submission on February 18, 2021 to March 25, 2022 (400 days). The story was published in September/ October 2023. My most recent wait for a rejection was from August 13, 2022 to November 14, 2023 (458 days). The latter more lengthy wait time matched the experience of other writers for both acceptances and rejections of 2022 submissions.

Publication in AHMM (and EQMM) can be the crowning glory of a short mystery fiction author's career and/or a stepping stone to awards and other kinds of recognition. It certainly bestows great credibility and respect with on the writer with peers and readers. If the only reason you write mystery short stories is that you're too impatient to write mystery novels, something's wrong. Writing is not a quick fix. Not even for a poet. Not for a writer of flash. Not even drabbles. Or haiku. If you're a writer, one way or another, you're in it for the long haul.

My relationship with AHMM is not the story of my longest waits. If you want to count my writer's journey as a whole, I first said I wanted to be a writer at age seven and didn't publish my first novel till my sixty-fourth birthday. Death Will Get You Sober took three years to sell. I joined Mystery Writers of America hoping to make connections, queried 250 agents, and had an agent for a year who wanted to change the title and failed to sell the book. A friend, trying to be helpful, gave the manuscript to his editor at St Martin's—-a non-fiction editor. It sat on the guy's desk for two and a half years. The third time I attended MWA's annual Agents and Editors party (a useful, beloved, and now vanished Edgars Week institution), I had finally overcome enough shyness to approach a St. Martin's editor and say, "May I tell you my sad story?"

A week later, Death Will Get You Sober reached the hands of a mystery editor who loved the book but wanted me to rewrite it, turning my second first person protagonist into a sidekick. Three weeks later I emailed him to say, "You were right. I did it. You'll love it."

He wrote back, "I'm so sorry. I'm leaving publishing to go to law school." Before he left, he gave the ms to legendary mystery editor Ruth Cavin, then pushing ninety, and two years later, it was published.

As an example of a wait I didn't wait for but the publisher seemed to believe I would, here's a story about my second poetry book, Gifts and Secrets, published by New Rivers, a respected small press, in 1999. We still sent paper manuscripts with an SASE (stamped self-addressed envelope) in those days. Three years after the book was published, I got a scribbled postcard from another press I'd sent it to, rejecting it and suggesting that I change the title. The editor proposed various random lines from my poems, missing the point that the theme of "gifts and secrets" held them all together. He'd probably steamed the stamp off my SASE and used it to pay his phone bill.

I turned eighty this year, so I have a right to say I'm in it for the long haul, whether "it" is writing or life in general. I had a conversation with book blogger Aubrey Hamilton not too long ago about poet Rupert Brooke, whose reputation is becoming tarnished as his letters, long suppressed, get published. We talked about how Brooke, who died at 28, and the other World War I poets and the Romantic poets, like Keats, dead at 24, never got to write the poems they might have if they'd attained maturity. I'd say the same of Sylvia Plath, who killed herself at 31, and even Anne Sexton, who did the same at 46.

Women poets like these influenced my own work as the earlier male poets did not. But I write very different poems now from the poems I wrote at forty or fifty. I’ve just completed and begun submitting my first poetry book in twenty-five years. The title: The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle. For fiction writers too, life experience adds depth and breadth to what we have to say and gives us the patience and self-control to take our time.

Brother, WTF Art Thou?

Today, I invite you to read a eulogy. No need to feel sad, nobody you know and the in memoriam is deliberately humorous. As Chris Knopf has pointed out, nonprofessional writing includes many examples.

The day after the 4^th of July celebration, my middle brother Glen was killed in a fire. His house burned. Emergency medical services arrived and attempted resuscitation before, during, and after transport. As big and as strong as he was, he didn’t make it. Our hope he died of smoke inhalation and not the fire itself may have some foundation.

Glen’s granddaughter, Paris, is our heroine. Once again she stepped up and made ‘the arrangements’, as the phrase goes.

In the inevitable remembrances, she hadn’t heard some of the childhood mischief stirred up by Glen, so I jotted notes, which became the eulogy outstandingly read by our youngest brother Ray.

— Leigh

 

Glen, in Memoriam

by Leigh Lundin, read by Ray Lundin

 

Visitors today face an urn they will refer to as Glen. That’s wrong. There’s no way a talented mortician could pack Glen’s personality into an urn. His ego alone would require a container the size of a school bus. He wasn’t merely bigger than life, he might be bigger than death.

Let’s view Glen from the outside inward. No doubt he hopes we mention his dazzling good looks, and indeed we begin with his Sartorial Splendor.

A Friend of Fashion

Between Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village¹

‘Sartorial’ is not a word we Hoosiers often use, a derivative from Mrs. Lord’s Latin class referring to exquisite tailoring and fine clothes.

Unlike most men, Glen liked pink shirts, not every day or every week, but occasionally. Women loved it, but some males frowned upon the practice. Whispered rumors floated of an unlearned gomer or two upbraiding his choice of shirts once, but never ever twice. Challenging a muscular 6’3 guy with steel-blue eyes was not one of life’s smartest choices. Besides, if a man didn’t have enough XY testosterone to overpower a pink shirt, he ain’t much of a man.

When Glen started factory work as in industrial electrician, he initially tucked his long hippie hair under a ball cap, but that didn’t last long. Shortly after he let his hair out, a half dozen guys cornered him. Glen sneered and moved in on them. “Only six of you?” He soon became a legend.

I’m here to tell you pink shirts were a mild evolution, a compromise of sorts. In recent years, the 1959 song ‘Pink Shoe Laces’ appeared in the television series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, in video games, and last year became a Tik Tok sensation. The song’s hero wears tan shoes with pink shoelaces, a polka dot vest and man, oh man, a big panama with a purple hat band. That dude was nothing compared to Glen.

For a couple of centuries, highlights of farmers’ hues were chicken egg écru and cow patty puce. The brightest of colors in our palette consisted of God’s sky blue and DeKalb yellow. If you don’t know DeKalb yellow, ask the grownup farm kid next to you. You were never a six-year-old swimming in a bin of shelled corn.

Genetic foods chemists at Monsanto and ConAgra brought us new colors of day-glo green, luminescent lime, and iridescent indigo, but they hadn’t met the likes of Glen. Ninety-nine percent of the time, Glen wore work boots and slim jeans with a JC Penney shirt for a touch of class. But once in a while, he would erupt in a Peter Max explosion of color.

About the 6^th grade, peacock blue became a fad. Our Aunt Rachel made the mistake of giving Glen a blinding turquoise snap-brim cap to cover his white-blond hair. Uh-oh. Aunt Rae, artist, author, and professor, was a part of New York’s fashion world, but she didn’t anticipate what she started.

Our parents were surprisingly tolerant when Glen began wearing mismatched socks. He found a tie-dyed pink T-shirt and weird knee-length shorts in chartreuse, yes, that bizarre alien planet neon yellow-green. He stuck a tiny American flag on his snap-brim cap. Looking at him required welding goggles. As we strolled through the Garden of Gethsemane, we boys denied knowing him. “My brother? Nope, no way, never seen him before.”

So you see, a simple pink shirt is quite a mild departure. But we’re not done.

The Grand Necktie Ban

Private schools and a few public ones require neckties. Oddly, one educational institution in America banned neckties, tiny Arlington High School. The blame– or credit– goes to a high school sophomore, Glen.

Dad had inherited a collection of wide and colorful ties from the 1940s that he hadn’t bothered to discard. Enter Glen. His offbeat imagination took in the array of hues and patterns, and a lads’ revolution in fashion was born. He wore one of Dad’s ties to school.

He tied it correctly with an ordinary collared shirt, but the fact any student voluntarily wore a necktie startled fellow students. The impact was doubled because of the tie’s wide and blazing effect.

The next day Glen wore a hand-painted tie with equally blinding patterns. Other kids raided their fathers’ closets. Initially, they wore neckties as intended, and then one or two students wore them with T-shirts. Others including a girl or two belted ties around their waists. A handful of boys wore two and three at a time. Soon, a majority of students were experimenting with wild throatwear.

Most fads descend through the ranks, but Glen’s fashion moved up to the 11^th and then the 12^th grades. One boy wore a white T-shirt printed with a bow tie and a day or so later wore it with a standard tie – that is, a necktie over a T-shirt with a printed bow tie. Cravats caught on and ascots became a fad with seniors. During class breaks, the halls of higher learning swam with fluttering neckwear of silks and satins.

Unfortunately, Arlington’s principal possessed all the humor of a bad-tempered musk ox with jock itch. For this narrative, we’ll refer to him as Mr Ox. He realized his bloody school was out of control and Mr Ox didn’t like losing control. Worse than that, this was an insurrection, a rebellion against authority. Surely they were mocking him, and that damn Glen was behind this latest assault on his nervous stomach. Principal Ox would put an end to this nonsense. Imagine, daring to wear unauthorized menswear to school! If he could rule girls’ skirts too short, he sure as hell could deal with malefactors flaunting neckerchief disrespect.

So like a peptic walrus with a toothache, he shot out a memo, posted it on the board, informed teachers and coaches, and announced it over the intercom:

Neckties will henceforth be banned. (signed) —
The Honorable Grand and Respected Principal Richard J Ox.

Neckties! That’ll teach them!

The 1966 AHS yearbook featured a number of photos of the necktie craze, but sadly, not one of that style-setting sensation, Glen Lundin.

The Wild and the Woolly

If you spotted a guy communing with wild creatures, it probably wasn’t Noah or St. Francis or, if you recall local literature, not even Balser Brent. Glen forged an affinity with animals large and small.

When he was a child, Glen was crushed he didn’t have an entry in the Morristown Soapbox Derby Day Pet Parade. Mom trundled out to the garden and captured a garter snake for Glen to carry in the procession. There among doggies and kitties and budgies, Glen proudly carried his snake. Later that day he released his ‘pet’ back in the garden.

That summer, he caught a turtle in the ford at Greenfield Riley Park and named it Churchie after a character in the Pogo comic strip, the same cartoon that inspired the name Albert for our alligator. Churchie lived with Glen more than thirty years before shuffling off this mortal coil.

The farm hospital otherwise known as the ranchhouse kitchen, patched up wild rabbits, squirrels, and odds and ends of other creatures. When a cow entered labor in an excruciating breech birth, Glen knelt and soothed the girl, talking softly as the vet figured out how to extract the stuck calf. Both survived and thereafter adopted Glen as their human father figure.

Glen facing off against fierce man-eating cat.

Glen gathered feral cats and, ignoring deep scratches on his forearms, coaxed them quietly until they relaxed. He could be abrasive with people, but he had a Doctor Doolittle way of communicating with creatures of the Earth.

But that ain’t nuthin compared to his most awesome feat. Glen could step into his back yard and raise his hands skyward. Moments later, a hummingbird, and then two and three and four, would alight upon his outstretched fingers. Not many wonders can top handfuls of smitten hummingbirds.

Glen versus Trees

Glen could be intimidating but women, infants, and small animals loved him. Unfortunately, he had a problem with trees.

For instance, Glen and Leigh built a treehouse in a huge maple. Glen kept comic books and an alarm clock there. One afternoon, he lounged under the tree reading a comic when the alarm went off. Unwisely, he ignored it.

The chronometer shook and shuddered, quavered and wavered, tremored and trembled and traveled across the treehouse floor and out the door. Isaac Newton merely dealt with falling apples. This timepiece literally clocked Glen on his very hard cranium. Glen saw stars.²

After that, parents instructed us to stay out of trees, much like telling dogs not to chase cats and cars. It soon came to pass that Glen and Ray climbed another maple, one so tall we could see miles in the distance. Glen hung from a limb like a sloth. As Ray tried to maneuver past him, he misstepped and trod on Glen’s fingers.

The landing bounce was rough and injured Glen’s arm. It hurt for days, but he didn’t dare tell our parents.

On Sunday, he was still in pain but he soldiered on. And then… after church, when he tried to slam the car door shut, his upper arm went one way and his lower arm another. Glen had managed to break his forearm radius and ulna. No doubt our parents contemplated keeping Shelbyville Major on retainer.

Yes, this is Glen.

PB&J (Paris, Bonnie, and Jesus)

Paris and Bonnie were the great loves of his life. Glen met his future wife at his workplace. During the night shift, obnoxious male workers frightened women crossing the dark parking lot. Glen wasn’t having it. He faced off against the men.

Despite Glen’s reputation, they laughed, saying, “There’re eighteen of us and only one of you. You can’t hope to win.”

Glen said, “You’re right, but in the meantime I’ll hospitalize four or five of you. Who’s first?”

The amazing part is that an absolutely fearless Glen believed it and his utter certainty made others believe, thereby avoiding fights. Soon after, Glen found himself surrounded by ladies at work. I’m not certain who asked whom out, but Glen and Bonnie became a thing and then they became a married thing.

Glen mellowed after taking in his granddaughter, Paris. She was a darling, charming everyone including our parents, her great-grandparents. God love her. Glen found joy attempting to teach her music and grade school Spanish phrases.

⚡⚡⚡   News Flash   ⚡⚡⚡

Just a moment, audience members, one moment please. CNN interrupts this memorial, where we take you outside the Gates of Heaven. In a rare jurisdictional dispute, Charon³ from that place down below is confronting St. Peter as we listen in.

“You take him.”

“No, you take him!”

“No, you…”

“Hey, folks. Keep it down out there. What’s going on?”

“Sorry, Lord, it’s…”

“Glen! We’ve been waiting. Rock on, dude. Did you bring all these hummingbirds?”

This has been a CNN News moment, Hugo Hackenbush reporting.

Blessed Be

My friends, thank you for your patience. May you have fond memories of Glen and please love one another.

---

¹     I sketched a couple of hippie days cartoons for Glen, an attempt at an R Crumb tribute.

²    At the description of the alarm clock during the reading, a grandfather clock in the funeral home began striking the quarter hour. Brother Ray paused, glanced at the clock and said, “And that is synchronicity.”

³    Pronounced, as you know, like ‘Karen’.

Transparent, Proactive, and Incentivized

  

Let me begin with a confession.

This post is of very little literary value, and required no research and no knowledge. It's just a venting of my annoyance with certain words and phrases that I think have been overused and/or misused to the point that I truly don't like hearing them in speech anymore, or reading them in the writing of others. I guess I should call them cliches, but mostly I just call them irritating. 

The following is my current list of those expressions. It'll probably change by tomorrow.

1. It is what it is

2. Go for it!  

3. My journey (everything in life these days is a journey)

4. If you will

5. I'm all about . . .

6. Iconic

7. Problematic

8. You've got this!

9. At the end of the day

10. No problem (when used instead of You're welcome)

11. Feeling badly

12. Stunning video

13. A sense of closure

14. Bro

15. Let's do this!

16. I could care less

17. Awesome 

18. Reach out

19. To die for

20. Serious as a heart attack

21. No can do

22. Pushing the envelope

23. Giving 110%

24. Utilize

25. Irregardless

26. Amazing (as in My amazing husband, wife, etc.)

27. Towards

28. Have a good one

29. Be back in a few

30. Athleticism

31. Physicality

32. Transparency

33. Granularity

34. Impact (when used as a verb)

35. Know what I'm sayin'?

36. Come with?

37. You feel me?

38. Incentivize

39. Sounded like a freight train

40. Looked like a war zone

41. Penned (as a synonym for Wrote)

42. 24/7

43. Own it

44. True that

45. As it were

46. Take it to the next level

47. Proactive

48. In point of fact

49. At this moment in time

50. Outside the box

You might have noticed that some of the above are favorites of news anchors, and especially (for some reason) sportscasters and weatherfolks. I agree that teeth can be impacted, and colons can be impacted, and the earth can be impacted when struck by a meteorite--but how many times have you heard that rains will impact the coastline, or high temperatures might impact the I-95 Corridor? Is a word like affect not forceful enough anymore, for our action-charged news broadcasts? And have you noticed, by the way, that their "breaking news, as we come on the air" might've broken several days ago? Personally, I want to see the stunning video. Politicians are also full of phrases that aggravate me. For one thing, they keep saying the American people want this or that. Well, that's a big assumption. I'm an American person, and I often don't want what they think I want. 

Words and expressions I didn't include above are the many that I used to hear a lot in my job--things like synergy and paradigm shift and value-added solutions, which are just as bad as, or worse than, the fifty in my list. By the way, on the political-correctness side of things, I'm also weary of hearing people say, "I find that offensive." It seems that almost anything we say or write is offensive to someone, somewhere. Maybe what I'm saying is, I find "I find that offensive" offensive.

Sometimes the silliest or most pretentious expressions wind up being more funny than irritating. During my IBM years I was once at a client location (it was a bank--I spent most of my workdays in banks) when their newly-installed computerized teller system developed response-time problems. When one of the programmers and I drove to a nearby branch to see exactly what was happening, the unhappy head teller pointed to her slow-as-molasses computer terminal and said, "This has left my team emotionally devastated." Strangely enough, they didn't look devastated, or even emotional, and we promptly fixed the problem, but that two-word phrase became one that we remembered, and used over and over at the bank's operations center for years afterward. I ran into one of those programmers not long ago, and when I asked him how he was doing, he grinned and replied that he was emotionally devastated. Some things stick in your memory.

What are some words and phrases that you consider to be overused, misused, frustrating, or just tiresome? Are you sick of hearing or reading those? Do any of yours match the entries in my list? (I won't find it offensive if they don't.) 

A final note. Even though I've been unusually critical in this post, I do not pretend to be guiltless in the misuse of our language. I often find that I like using some expressions that I already know are wrong or ill-chosen. As a kid, I clearly remember my mom asking me why my friend Boyd, whose grandmother didn't allow dogs in her house, was crying so loud we could hear him bawling all the way down the street. "Snoopy snuck in," I explained to her, "but she drug him back out."

Hey, that still sounds correct, to me.

Crime Scene Comix Case 2024-07-023, Red Dye

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

Dog Days of Summer

Happy Mid-July! Hot enough for ya?

Funny story- I grew up in a literal suburban cul-de-sac. But Instead of a couple of split-level ranch houses at the endpoint where our little slice of suburbia eventually expanded into the inevitable dead-end circle, there was a large corral that served as a home for several llamas.

The cloven-hooved, Inca-pack-animal-kind. Not the robe-sporting, enlightenment-spewing kind.

This kind.

So of course the residents of our court (it wasn't a "street," or a "place,' or a "drive," but a "court.") had to accustom themselves to a seemingly never-ending, slow rolling procession of people out for their daily walks, who liked to come down and look at the llamas. It could make our quiet side street pretty busy, especially in the summertime.

Now, this was the late-‘70s/early ‘80s. The time of the After School Special, Kool-Aid commercials, and Bert Convey hosting Match Game. To say, “It was a different time,” would be a massive understatement. 

And not least because we never ever locked our front door.

Ever.

Well, okay. Maybe when we were going out of town.

Because it was the ‘70s?

Nah.

Because three of our neighbors on our cul-de-sac were cops.

Yep. The guy to our right, and the guy to our left, and the guy across the street.

One patrol officer. One detective. One long-time undercover operative.

Lived next to all three of them for a couple of decades. I guess that this experience has helped hone both my tastes as a reader and my writing style when it comes to crime fiction.

I’ve said it before elsewhere and it certainly bears repeating: Ubervillains BORE me. Unrealistic. Usually a crutch fir laaaaaaaazzzzzzyyyyyy writing, and just not at all my thing.

Turns out the same holds true for me when it comes to cops. Or for all law enforcement types, for that matter. Superheroes BORE me!

Is this because the neighbor who worked undercover as a fake biker, sitting in biker bars and eavesdropping on biker gang members doing drug buys looked an awful lot like a young Wilford Brimley unless he had a week’s worth of beard going? Or that the beat cop on the other side was a lousy gardener who took inordinate pride in the hedges he mutilated? And that his son was a stiff-necked jock who barely tolerated his dad, his wife detested him and his elder daughter was kinda messed up? Or that the detective across the way never touched either coffee or cigarettes? Or that all three o them were certainly scofflaws when it came to the 4th of July, and the county-wide ban on fireworks such as M-80s?

Maybe. Or maybe, like my Vietnam War hero helicopter pilot father, I just have a hard time suspending disbelief when seeing something in a story, fiction or otherwise, that directly contradicts my own lived experiences? (For my dad it was stuff like seeing Jan-Michael Vincent turn on “whisper mode” in his stealth helicopter in the 80s TV action-adventure show Airwolf. Boy did that crack him up!).

I like to think that my lived experience has helped make me a more discerning reader and a better writer. For me, the character has to be believable. The guys who lived around me were hardly Dirty Harry. But they also weren’t cops from the “Files of Police Squad,” either.

And I guess that’s how I like my characters. Realistic.

Anyway, that’s it or me this go-round. Happy Dog Days to you!

Anaaaackronisms

I hate anachronisms.  They do nasty things to the suspension of one's disbelief.  One of them can yank me right out of a story and make me want to shut the book or turn off the TV.

I remember the first time I heard the term: an English teacher in high school gave the example of a charioteer in the movie Ben Hur wearing a wrist watch.  You can see the suspect scene here; looks to me like a metal wrist band, not a tick-tock.

Recently I read two stories that suffered from anachronisms.  I only remember one: a nineteenth century character using the word "zillions."  That struck me as unlikely so I went to the Google Ngram Viewer which lets you search for words or phrases by year. 

I found several nineteenth century uses of zillion but most of them turned out to be AI misinterpreting a badly printed million.

As for the others, well, it turns out that Zillion is a family name, although I haven't run into any of them in my travels.

An 1894 issue of St Nicholas Magazine, a publication for children, features a highly offensive cartoon of an elderly African-American using the word "zillions" as an indicator of his ignorance.  Charming.

I also found a 1934 play in which a character says that, since M is the 13th letter and Z the 26th, a zillion is twice as big as a million.  

The Oxford English Dictionary did better, finding that in 1926 the Detroit Free Press said "We are willing to be most anything except an incubator for zillions of germs."

So, it is clearly an anachronism to put the word in the mouth of a nineteenth-century character.  And that could have been the end of this piece, except that I happened to be in the process of editing a story I wrote, one set in 1910.  (It's a sequel to this one.) 

In my story a character said: "If they come after that they can pound sand.”

And in my editing process I thought: hmm... Would that have been said in 1910?  Back to the Ngram viewer.  

It was easy to find early examples of the phrase being used in an industrial context, but I was looking for the colloquial meaning: get lost, drop dead, go soak your head, take a long walk off a short pier, go pound sand...  

By 1888 people were using it as an insult: "He doesn't know enough to pound sand." (Often followed by "...down a rat hole.")

But I found that in an 1898 issue of The Medical World, Doctor J.G.L. Myers complained about doctors lacking the patience to let the afterbirth come out naturally.  "If you haven't time to wait and give Nature a chance, go and pound sand.  You can safely hurry that job -- and let some doctor with a conscience have charge of the case."  But he doesn't mean drop dead; he means go twiddle your thumbs.

I almost stopped there but I found a British site called Phrase Finder which changed things.  It said that the phrase was an Americanism (check) and may be an abbreviation of "go pound sand up your ass."  Ohh...  The author of the site, Gary Martin, found a source much older than mine. From The Saint Paul Globe, August 1886:

I have always umpired base ball from the grand stand… Nothing affords me more pleasure now than to sit on a hard board in the grand stand and devote my time yelling, “Kill him!” “Cut his feet off.” “Aw, go pound sand” and other rhetorical gems at the umpire.

So, what do you know? My character back in 1910 could have used that phrase.  But I took it out anyway. Because this may be the worst thing about anachronisms: Even if a word or phrase really was used in the time your story is set in, if your reader thinks it wasn't, or pauses to wonder about it, it takes them out of the story. And keeping them engaged is worth zillions.

 

Art and Artists

There’s an ongoing conversation about separating the art from the artist, a topic that resurfaces each time negative information surfaces about an artist, musician, writer, or other creative person, and I usually view the concept in the abstract because I don’t know the person named and don’t engage with that person’s work.

This is a topic I cover during presentations, when I discuss the need for writers to act like professionals—do the work; deliver it on time; respond promptly to contracts, edits, and page proofs; and so on. During these presentations, I emphasize the need to not let personal actions and beliefs interfere with the business relationship between writer and editor, and I note there are writers I’ve published that, based on their social media, I would not associate with outside of the writer/editor relationship. That their beliefs and life experiences differ from mine does not negate their ability to deliver a well-written story.

My belief that it is possible to separate the art from the artist was shattered this past week when a writer I’ve known since Bouchercon Toronto—a writer I’ve published, dined with, hired as a speaker, and with whom I’ve shared hours of conversation about writing and publishing—was arrested and charged with a crime so horrendous that my world shattered.

He had just spoken at a conference I created, and my co-organizers and I had to issue a formal statement. He also contributed to an anthology I co-edited, and my co-editor and I had to ask the publisher to postpone publication until we are able to replace his story.

Not until after I dealt with all this, did I realize the impact these revelations had on me. I have not read any new submissions. I have not edited any stories. I have not completed the final round of corrections on an anthology that’s almost ready for the publisher. I look at all this writing and ask myself: What do I know about these writers? What secrets are they hiding?

And yesterday, as I write this, I participated in a Zoom call with a small group of mystery writers to discuss what we knew about the arrest and how we were dealing with the news. I kept my video turned off because I didn’t want them looking at me and I mostly kept my eyes closed because I didn’t want to look at them. These were writers and editors I’ve published, who’ve published me, with whom I’ve dined, and with whom I’ve shared hours of conversation about writing and publishing.

But how well do I know them? What secrets do they have? How do I trust that next week, next month, or next year, some revelation about one of them won’t shake my world?

I don’t.

I hope to soon return to work reading and editing but it may take a while to again trust in the basic goodness of people.

Amadeus

Some of the best writers I know have never published a word, nor have they tried. They don’t think of themselves as writers, and I only know of their brilliance because they write me letters (these days emails).

Concordantly, there are many professed and professional writers I’m aware of who are, to put it charitably, not very good.

I think this random sorting of talent is true with any of the arts. I like to refer to the guy who’s never joined a band sitting on his bed ripping off guitar solos like Eddie Van Halen. And clunky wanna-bees who keep starting bands and disappointing people like me when they attempt a lead. We all know both these types.

One theory for why my talented correspondents are so good is they feel no pressure. They’re just writing to a friend, and having fun with it.

They’re under no deadline (journalist, novelist, copywriter, attorney, academic) so the stakes are zero. They also have an audience of one, or just a few, and aside from the pleasure of entertaining each other, no other purpose.

I worked with a guy, a Brit, whose charm was apparent and irresistible. Occasionally dazzling. But put a camera in front of him, and he’d suddenly turn to stone.

The words wouldn’t come, and the lively grace demonstrated in casual conversation would dissolve away. I guess this is called performance anxiety. The same malady often affects talented musicians, actors, circus acts, and writers.

I can understand this when the artistic expression needs to happen in front of a live audience. If your show goes off the rails, you know it immediately, even if the people out there don’t start throwing tomatoes, storm out, or just sit in stony silence with confused looks on their faces.

With writing, chances are good the critical reader is in another room, long after you’ve written the piece, and far, far away.

There’s another more important distinction. While no one is expected to sing on key, everyone is presumed able to write at least a little, and virtually everyone does so at one time or another, even if it’s a note to the postman to stop sticking your neighbor’s catalogs in your mailbox.

So we all get a lot of latitude. The difficulty comes when you decide that you want to write well, and tell people of that intent.

Then the fear of rejection begins to creep into your heart. And by extension, once you’ve declared yourself, you assume tolerance for your failings will turn into ruthless judgment. So now you feel compelled to demonstrate your facility at every opportunity, or that’ll be the end of such foolish ambitions.

For most writers, this feeling never goes away. I remember how long it took to get the boss’s birthday card out of the copy department.

You can imagine the paranoia, the competitiveness, the relentless revisions, the magic marker-sized well wishes, the collapse of self-esteem when one of us would really hit one over the fence.

Back to my clever, officially non-writer correspondents, they are very, very good. And it is such a delight to read their work. Aside from their misspent school years (one never made it to college, though his father was a certified genius, which counts for something), no one told them how to do this.

It just happened through some natural bent toward eloquence and wit. I know these people about as well as you can know anyone, and none of them ever aspired to write professionally, because they simply didn’t want to. They had other fish to fry. I’m sure they’d sell their God-given talent to the highest bidder if such a market was available.

I once chatted with one of my father's close colleagues. They were executives in a huge, international corporation involved in engineering and technology. I knew my father was a consummate gearhead, but this guy told me, with a hint of reverence, something no one ever said to me, before or since.

“Your dad was the the best writer in the company.

His memos were legendary. They would piss off a lot of people, but only because there was no getting around how well he made the case.”

I never knew. He was long gone by then.

---

The Anatomy of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A tragic lesson from Alice Munro's daughter

On May 14^th, 2024, the Canadian Nobel laureate, Alice Munro, died at her home in Port Hope, Ontario and her publisher said at the time,"Alice Munro is a national treasure — a writer of enormous depth, empathy, and humanity whose work is read, admired, and cherished by readers throughout Canada and around the world… Alice’s writing inspired countless writers too, and her work leaves an indelible mark on our literary landscape.”

Regarded by many as one of the greatest short story authors, Munro’s legacy was changed completely last week by her daughter, Andrea, who revealed that her stepfather sexually abused her at the of age nine and that Munro knew this and stayed with him.

This is the first layer of the abuse of Andrea. Unfortunately, this is common in childhood abuse where the initial sexual abuse is compounded by the abusive actions of the family. The victim is often blamed, ignored and the abuse is hidden from the outside world – all of this takes a crime and makes it a prolonged tragedy of abuse.

The study of anatomy teaches us that each structure, each layer, has a purpose – skin, muscle, nerves, blood vessels and bones - all work together, allowing the body to function. The anatomy of abuse is the same, where layers of abuse support each other, each with their own function.

When Andrea told her father, Alice Munro's ex-husband, Jim Munro, that her stepfather was abusing her soon after it began, her father didn’t tell his ex-wife.

To date, little attention has focused on Andrea’s father, a prominent member of the literary community and the co-founder of Munro's Books in Victoria. Andrea’s father’s actions were a layer of abuse. He knew of a crime committed against his nine-year-old daughter but he didn’t report it to the police and he failed to get Andrea counselling and help to deal with what she had gone through. For a young child looking for solace and justice from her father, Andrea’s father failed miserably and pushed her abuse into a vat of silence.*

In 1992, when Andrea was in her twenties, she wrote a letter to her mother and stepfather outlining the sexual assault. In response, her step father “wrote letters to the family... in which he admitted to the abuse but blamed it on her. “He described my 9-year-old self as a ‘homewrecker,’” … and accused her of invading his bedroom “for sexual adventure" in one of the letters he wrote to the family.”

These letters are another layer of the abuse of Andrea: a perpetrator blames a child for their illegal actions, treating a nine-year-old like an adult having an affair rather than being a victim.

Then Alice Munro heaped on more abuse, saying that “she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

Reinforcing her husband’s abuse, Alice Munro again treats her daughter as if she were an adult involved in an affair with her husband rather than a child who was sexually abused by an adult. Munro also clearly puts her love of her husband above her love of Andrea and her responsibility as a mother to protect her own child.

Andrea’s family also heaped on the abuse of silence to protect Alice Munro, while failing to protect Andrea. “Munro’s children have been clear that their silence, their father’s silence and that of people who knew the family, was maintained to protect Munro’s reputation.”

When Andrea broke this silence and used her stepfather’s own letters to charge him with sexual abuse of a minor, Detective Sam Lazarevich’s reaction provided the first glimmer of decency in the abuse of Andrea:

“Retired Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sam Lazarevich remembers a very angry Munro accusing her daughter of lying when he visited Munro’s home in 2004 to inform the husband that he was going to be charged. In an interview with The Associated Press, Lazarevich said Munro was furious, defended her second husband and the detective recalls being “quite surprised” by her reaction. “‘That’s your daughter. Aren’t you going to defend your daughter?’” he recalls.”

This moment of decency did not last and silence reigned again. From 2004 till the death of Alice Munro on May 13^th, 2024 there was no news of Andrea’s abuse. In fact, the story only broke last week and we are finally seeing how breaking through the silence is the only road to justice.

Readers are weighing in with essays on how they cannot look at Alice Munro’s work as they once did and her legacy – as a genius whose short stories provided insight into women and girls – is now damaged. Academia is reeling as well, pondering how to continue to teach Munro’s writing in light of this abuse and Western University announced it paused a chair created in her honour.

The abuse of children is rarely limited to the initial sexual abuse: family often adds layers of abuse of their own. Andrea’s story, dissected, teaches us a great deal about the anatomy of childhood sexual abuse, the power of silence and how blame and denial compound the abuse of the initial crime. If Andrea's father had reported the crime of her abuse and he and the family spoke about it publicly, then Andrea's stepfather would not have written the abusive letters blaming Andrea for the abuse. Alice Munro would have had to publicly deal with this and it is unlikely she would have had the abusive conversation with her daughter, treating Andrea as an adult involved in an affair with her husband. And the world would have had a reckoning with Alice Munro – who knows how that story would have gone?

*Addendum: After reading comments to my article on  this site and various social media sites, I would like to stress this fact: sexually abusing a child is a crime and cannot be treated as a 'family matter' anymore than learning of any other crime, such as murder, can remain a 'family matter'.

I say this because the patients I treated who have been sexually abused all were subjected to the initial sexual abuse and then the abuse of silence and shouldering the blame of the abuser and their family. None  of my patients had their initial sexual abuse reported to the police, therapy immediately and their family encircle them to protect them from further abuse. Why? Because those who had those things probably didn't need prolonged therapy as adults. Some might, but far fewer than those subjected to the prolonged abuse of silence. This is not just a physician's anecdote: the research bears this out. 

We need to charge people who fail to report the crime of childhood sexual abuse. 

How to Nashville

Nashville. I can't blame you if you just pictured somebody toting a guitar under some spotlight. The travel guides, the airport swag, the TV coverage and dramas, you would think what goes on here is a-pickin', a-boozin', and a-Goo Goo Clusterin'. And in fairness, that does go on. But, having lived decades here, I can offer a perspective for writing like a local--or, if you're coming to the Nashville Bouchercon next month, to glimpse past the hoo-hah.

MUSIC CITY

Nashville gets called a holy city for music, and it is. But to tackle the obvious, there are not jeaned-up folks ambling around with guitars slung over their backs. Paying dues involves driving for Lyft or waiting tables or having an office job. It's darn impractical to be spreadsheeting with your Gibson slung over your shoulder. Getting it scratched up, too.

I've had aspiring artists as co-workers and once a caterer. A retired top 40 artist has lived next door. Some guy in my current neighborhood has a gold record conspicuously placed where no passerby will miss it. It just happens here. Sometimes.

And there isn't one music scene but several. Blame the Nashville Sound– or lack thereof. Since Music City's very beginning, label executives have watered down talent for country radio. If it'll play, it plays– no nuance, no vision, no women artists twice in a row.

The music sub-scenes are thriving. Americana, alternative, second-act rockers, the works. A wonderful part of living here is experiencing the musicianship. Live acts in restaurants aren't as common as they used to be, but when you stumble on one, it's gonna be good, even when the style might not be your cuppa. The few of those artists who break out are 100% committed to their craft– or 100% lucky.

Or you can write the Nashville with no music angle at all. The music industry contributes about $10 billion to Nashville's GDP. The tourism industry adds another $10 billion. Nashville's total GDP is $200 billion. Healthcare, manufacturing, and increasingly high-tech contribute far more to the economic high times. No local over thirty goes to Lower Broadway anymore. Preds games and concerts, sure. But Lower Broadway? That's for tourists.

FRONT OF HOUSE

Rockers come here to record when they're hot, and they come here to live when, well, they're not (I blogged about this back in March). A big reason for that is Nashville's quieter life. It's an unwritten but firm Nashville rule: It doesn't matter who is ahead in line at Kroger. Do not approach. Don't. They're just there for Hot Pockets, same as you.

The exception: You own the business or work front of house. Around many local dives or dry cleaners or even the HillVill Post Office is that obligatory wall of autographed headshots, everyone from country gold names to wannabes who probably tacked it there themselves. An interesting Nashville character is someone rubbing those transactional elbows.

Letting people do their thing is the phenomenon known as…

NASHVILLE NICE

Nashville folks are super friendly. We dole out praise and thank yous for the slightest things. We will hold doors, tongues, and spots in line. We refrain from horn honking, even when the light has been green. Nashville Nice is the slang term.

The nice is real. But, like most Southern hospitality, it can be lipstick on a pig. This is, after all, a city with a problematic history on civil rights. Courtesy can mean avoiding such uncomfortable subjects. Kindness means having to fix them.

Nashville Nice is complicated in practice. This being the Buckle of the Bible Belt, take for example the Christian set's "have a blessed day." It works a little like "bless your heart" except (1) it's a goodbye and (2) it can actually be sincere. The person may wish you only the best, or they may have attempted a singsong-y parting burn. You know, like Jesus would've done.

OH, THERE WILL BE BACHELORETTES.

Break out the White Claws, y'all. Downtown Nashville is the U.S. capital of bachelorette parties. 30,000 parties a year, my friends, or more than 500 downtown on any given Saturday. They flock from all over, these young white ladies and their boundless desire to celebrate treasured bonds ahead of a friend's sacred event get very, very drunk. Sloppy drunk, the stupid drunk laced with questionable decisions no one dares risk where everyone knows your name.

They're called the Woo Girls, for the species' distinctive hollers above the Nashvegas honkytonk sound assault. And while drinking, they ride any tavern that can be pedaled, driven, or tractor-pulled. Some of the contraptions even have licenses. To be a local, you've come to grudging terms with transportainment spectacles– and traffic jams.

Downtown is slap-happy to rake in the Woo bucks. It's just Broadway's latest wave in sin and itinerants since Fort Nashborough put up the first shacks. Writing a local who'd seen wild times? Happens seven nights a week and afternoons, too, at the neon spectacle of Lost Edge Hat Act's four-story, booze and boot-scoot emporium.

THANKS A LOT, CALIFORNIA

Housing costs have been a growing issue already, with more demand than supply. What's happened lately is a second-wave influx, tens of thousands of West Coast and Florida buyers resetting the market. The expats get a larger house for less money. The sellers get a short-term windfall, if they can afford a replacement. Younger people looking for a first home get left behind. A realistic Nashville character these days wouldn't live near central Nashville unless they had a significant source of income or a crash pad of multiple roommates.

UNIQUELY NASHVILLE, THE LIGHTNING ROUND

• Jell-O.It's officially a vegetable here, as is macaroni and cheese. It's a meat-and-three culture thing.
• Pancake Pantry: The breakfast and brunch institution, as televised. Now with other places to dine and be seen, locals don't quibble about the food (legit good) but about whether it's worth the line. It mostly feeds tourists and hangovers.
• Parthenon: Yes, we have our own Parthenon. A whole World Exposition thing. Most people go to Centennial Park for craft fairs and dog meet-ups. The swans there are vicious and shameless.
• Smashville: Believe it or not, the Preds hockey team generates legit buzz around town, almost as much as the Titans. Every game night is part of the downtown party.
• Little Kurdistan: Nashville is home to many, many folks from Latin America, South Asia, and also one of America's largest Kurdish communities. If you get off the beaten path, you'll see an unexpected diversity, and Nashville is better for it.
• Cityscape: Officially, the most distinctive feature on Nashville's skyline is the AT&T Building. No local calls it that. It's the Batman Building, for its bat-eared radio towers.

THE ULTIMATE TEST: CAN YOU SAY… DEMONBREUN

A certain major street cuts from the Midtown knolls over the Gulch and on downhill for the Cumberland. Demonbreun Avenue is the name, but whether you can pronounce it is the question. Failure brands you a rube. Success keeps you in the game, at least until you question Jell-O as a vegetable.

This didn't used to matter as much. Demonbreun used to be the seedy shortcut downtown, a lesser traveled run past aging motels and strip clubs. These days, Demonbreun is a glossy strip with some of Nashville's top attractions: The Frist Museum, the Bridgestone Arena, the Music City Center, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center– and all of that built since I moved here. Demonbreun is Nashvegas now, the natural habitat of Woo Girls on wheels.

Ready to practice? Here you go:

dah - MUHN - BREE - uhnn

Work on it. You'll get there. But hey, don't worry too much about mispronunciation. We're still nice to rubes, bless their hearts.