Extraordinary People

Everyday New York midtown crowd

A lot of crime fiction writers I know describe their process as one of taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary circumstances. Such prototypical ordinary protagonists are jolted out of their comfort zone into sudden danger. The writer keeps putting the pressure on and raising the stakes. Their characters must be resourceful to survive. All they want is for things to return to normal. They want those they love to be safe and their lives to be exactly as they were before. But circumstances change them. Either they rise to the occasion and become heroes, or they are sucked into violence and criminal behavior from which there is no way back.

In cozies, the stakes are less dramatic than in thrillers—a domestic murder, a group of people under suspicion. Again, the premise is that the characters are ordinary people. The amateur sleuth is a divorcee with kids, a bakery owner, a book club or knitting circle member. The law enforcement antagonist and/ or love interest is a police chief, sheriff, or detective, also an ordinary person doing their job. The story starts when the amateur sleuth’s circle is thrown out of their comfort zone by the murder. The death has consequences, and the investigation stirs up suspicion and uncharacteristic behavior in a community that may have seemed untroubled on the surface.

Define Normal, Central Park

It has never occurred to me to say that I write about ordinary people. The great John Floyd has affectionately called my characters "zany." But John lives in suburban Mississippi, and I live in New York. My characters, like New Yorkers in general, don’t seem zany to themselves. They range from interesting to extraordinary, which is how I like them. How else could they leap off the page crackling with life and feeling? How else could their dialogue sizzle with wit? My favorite characters are clever, but they're also long on empathy. They have heart as well as humor. Like other writers’ ordinary characters flung into danger, they're resourceful survivors. But my premise is that they survive and triumph against odds because they're extraordinary from the start.

My first series, the Bruce Kohler Mysteries, has a protagonist and two sidekicks to begin with, his friends Jimmy and Barbara, and eventually a third, his girlfriend Cindy. Bruce is a recovering alcoholic with a New York attitude, a smart mouth, and an ill-concealed heart of gold. He is in the gutter in the first novel, and by the twelfth and latest short story, he's almost ten years sober. He's never relapsed, and he's grown up. He's become a mensch, as we say in New York. That's extraordinary. Barbara's a nice Jewish girl, smart and funny and a born rescuer. She's never met a needy person she didn't want to help. At first, she was a lot like me. But as a writer, I realized that didn't work. So did I tone her down? No. I took her over the top. Unlike me, Barbara never learns from her mistakes. She has to help. She has to investigate. She sniffs out murder like a bloodhound. She drags Bruce and Jimmy into danger. She's extraordinary—and hilarious. Jimmy, another alcoholic, has "been sober since Moses was studying for his bar mitzvah." He's a computer wiz, an obsessed history buff, and a New Yorker who freaks out if he has to leave Manhattan. Not ordinary. Nor is Cindy, an NYPD detective who gets her gold shield before she's ten years sober and has also done a lot of growing up.

Sultan Bayezid II welcomes Jews to Istanbul

My second series, the Mendoza Family Saga, is about an extraordinary Sephardic Jewish family. My real-life family is Ashkenazic, ie Eastern European Jews, but they inspired the Mendozas to some extent, as did Louisa May Alcott's fictional March family from Little Women. In 1492, young Diego Mendoza sails with Columbus on the same day the Jews are expelled from Spain. A year later, he and his sister Rachel join the second voyage. The family ends up in Istanbul, where the Ottoman Empire welcomes the Jews. Rachel marries the last surviving Taino and has a family. She is arguably the best traveled woman of her time. By 1520, she is working as a purveyor to the ladies of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent's harem. She is also solving mysteries in partnership with the Kizlar Agha, the Chief Eunuch of the Harem.

Esperanza Malchi, a kira who sought 
wealth and power and was murdered 
by sepahis in 1600

Rachel is my favorite character, but all the Mendozas are extraordinary. They have intelligence, resilience, flexibility, compassion, and integrity. The family's outsider perspective as dispossessed Jews allows me to explore the theme of cultural relativism in an age of absolutism. Rachel's children are brought up to be at ease with both Judaism and Islam. As Rachel tells them, “If we had not learned to tolerate a great deal of inconsistency, not a single Mendoza would have made it out of Spain alive back in 1492, much less reached Istanbul to prosper and produce such cheeky children.”

Kizlar Agha, 17th c painting
by J-B Vanmour

The Kizlar Agha, the Chief Eunuch of the Harem, is an extraordinary character in himself. Rachel's—and my—Kizlar Agha is fictional, but the office existed from 1574 until its abolition in 1908, carrying a range of ceremonial and practical duties and political power in different eras.Other than women and the Sultan himself, only he and the black eunuchs under his supervision were permitted to enter the royal harem. In my portrayal, he is a figure of great intelligence, magnificence, and gravitas, but very lonely. It is not surprising that he and Rachel begin by matching wits and come to enjoy each other's company—and their investigations—immensely.

Being the first woman to do the job doesn't mean they'll like you.

Normally, one starts a story at the beginning, but this is best understood by its ending. In 1930, Frederick Griffen wrote about a funeral in Hamilton Ontario that may still hold the record for the largest, most flamboyant funeral the city has ever seen with over 20,000 attendees.

The article seems, at first glance, full of over the top descriptions but, history has confirmed the accuracy of the details.

"She had lain in state, like a princess, for three days and nights while ten thousand people filed in to see her… The massive coffin of bronze, with heavy silver steel trimmings, was scarcely to be seen, hidden, as it virtually was, with flowers. What flowers! I am not an expert in funerals but, personally, I never saw anything to equal them."

Her two daughters "had to be borne aside in a semi-comatose state of bewilderment and woe." and from the cellar below, her German Shepherd bayed loudly.

"At the head of the coffin was a magnificent pillow of mixed flowers, orchids, roses, gladioli and other blooms, literally hundreds of them, [with] a wide ribbon of gauze. And on it in letters of gold were the words, “To my wife.”

The man who organized and paid for the funeral, Rocco Perri, sat, overcome with grief between her daughters but he was not the father of her daughters nor, despite the gold inscription he wrote on the ribbon, was the woman his wife and, although the funeral he organized and paid for was a Jewish funeral, Rocco was not Jewish but, rather, an Italian immigrant.

The woman he was burying was Bessie Starkman, the first female Canadian organized crime boss. She was gunned down, at the age of forty, in the garage of the home she shared with Rocco, who was referred to as "Canada's Al Capone" and was one of the most prominent Prohibition-era crime figures in Canada.

Bessie Starkman was born into a Polish Jewish family, immigrated to Canada at about the age of ten. At age eighteen, she married Harry Tobsen, a driver at a bakery, and had two daughters. In 1912, they took in a boarder named Rocco Perri. After a brief romance, Starkman left her husband, children and Jewish faith for Perri. They lived in St. Catharines, Ontario, where Perri had a labourer job, and then moved to Hamilton. Perri worked as a travelling salesman until the couple opened a small grocery store.

They went from ordinary, low paying jobs to becoming mob bosses with a lavish lifestyle, including diamonds and expensive cars, because of the Ontario Temperance Act of 1916; boot legging became a new money maker. Perri became the 'King of the Bootleggers' and, ignoring the rule that women can't join the mob, he made Starkman the first female crime boss. She negotiated orders of liquor and beer, laundered money and dealt with other gangs. They operated in Kitchener, Toronto, Windsor, Hamilton and Niagara, ran bootleg liquor to Detroit, Chicago and New York State and were involved in prostitution. When prohibition ended in 1927, the couple then moved on to illegal drugs and gambling.

The Italian-Canadian journalist Antonio Nicaso wrote: "Up to that time, a woman's role in the underworld was relegated to wife and mother, or mistress and prostitute. Until Bessie came along, none had been in a position of authority in a major crime gang-let alone entrusted to manage a massive flow of dirty money."

Of course, being a mob boss, even the first woman mob boss, meant that Bessie was involved in violent interactions with people. Her relationship with Rocco was also troubled and she left him and returned a number of times. Despite his progressive views of women in the mob, Rocco had an old fashioned wandering eye. He had an affair with Sarah Routledge, beginning in 1918, and had two daughters with her. He maintained a home and paid child support. Sarah, when falsely informed Rocco was married to Starkman, committed suicide in 1922.

Bessie's murder was never solved but much was written about it:

"Bessie died after being ambushed by two men with shotguns in the garage of their home, Aug. 13, 1930. She had alienated so many people, including possibly her own husband, police could not narrow the list of potential suspects to a workable number."

Though the 'alienated' husband was not married to her, he threw a heck of a funeral for her. Or was it her actual husband, who she never divorced, who killed her?

The first woman to do any job often garners respect and admiration. Not so with Bessie Starkman. The qualities that made her successful were the same as any mob boss: she was ruthless, greedy and had emotionally volatile relationships. The 20,000 people at her funeral were not devoted friends but were mostly strangers drawn to the spectacle of a very expensive funeral. The title of the article by Frederick Griffen says it all:

Grotesque Ceremony Becomes Free-For-All of Morbid Curiosity

Twenty Thousand Mill and Fight to See Bessie Perri’s Magnificent Funeral

How The Addams Family Got Their Names...Then Blackballed

The top brass was skeptical. Yes, Filmways Television had sent their head of development, Daniel Levy, on the hunt for new ideas, but they weren't sold on what he'd found. Look, Filmways was on a roll. Since jumping from commercials into the sitcom game, they'd scored with Mr. Ed (1961), The Beverly Hillbillies (1962), and Petticoat Junction (1963). Their formula was simple enough, bucolic family comedy with a problem of the week. And now Levy was pitching monsters. 

No, Levy said. A family of monsters. With the same problems as the rest of us. 

Levy was selling characters from Charles Addams' New Yorker single-panel cartoons run since 1933--and not getting far. Sure, monster movies were having a Sixties revival, and sure, Addams had become known for his humorous subversions of everyday life, a traditional world viewed through a mirror darkly. He'd published multiple collections and won a special Edgar from Mystery Writers of America. 

In 1938, one of his panels introduced a femme fatale housewife and her hulking butler hearing out a vacuum salesman in a dusty haunted house. An eerie figure peers through the upper-floor balustrades. Over the years, those characters would evolve and expand into a family of grotesque archetypes. A gnome-ish father, warped children, a hag grandmother, a criminally insane uncle in a frock.

There was a problem, one that underscored the Filmways brass' concern about a series made from sight gags. Addams had scarcely bothered to name the characters.

Nor did he have much need. The characters featured in a sliver of Addams' output. Addams maintained a diverse world of inverted reality for a simple reason: Getting paid. The New Yorker prized clean-cut sophistication and creative variety. They also received a ton of submissions. Addams leaned into his vision of everyday bizarre so that his submissions stood out. He saved his family for when they packed a selling punch. 

Levy hadn't reached head of development by being bad at it. He'd already recruited a bemused Addams onto the project. Job one: developing character profiles, to include proposed names. As a starting point, in 1961 Addams and FAO Schwarz had inked a deal for limited edition dolls of two family members. One was the mother, who had evolved into a vampish caricature, now dubbed Morticia for her complexion and personal interests. The second was the death-obsessed, void-eyed daughter, who'd first appeared in 1944, now dubbed Wednesday from the child of woe in the Monday's Child nursery rhyme.

For everyone else, Addams leaned into sharp puns, with Lurch for the lumbering butler and Fester for the deviant uncle. The simple appellative Grandmama clicked for the family matriarch. That lurking presence in panel backgrounds became Thing, changed for television to be a disembodied hand.  

Levy had talked Filmways into a pilot, in part because Levy hadn't picked a loser yet and a lot because ABC signaled interest. Addams' pick of Pubert for the mischievous, dynamite-packing boy was a non-starter. Pugsley was a more refined take. Addams floated Repelli for the father. It was clever in all the wrong ways, and the name would look terrible on the merch boxes. John Astin, already cast in the role, preferred the second choice, Gomez. That was that. 

Thomas E. Dewey,
Gomez's model

Addams didn't fret the creative control. Television paid better than freelance cartoonist. Besides, he never considered the sitcom as reflecting his art. He had a vision; Filmways had a derivative product. Where Levy made this gothic gag family into mere eccentrics, Addams' version was as dark as their archetypes. When Addams drew a ghoul, it was a ghoul.

When Filmways needed an expanded family to drive new plotlines, Addams stayed collaborative. With his permission, Levy developed Cousin Itt as a comical walking shag of hair. Itt was an instant favorite. Addams knew a winner when he saw one and retconned the cousin into his drawings.

Itt, though, had a publication problem. The New Yorker. Editor William Shawn refused to accept any further artwork from Addams featuring his namesake televised family. Other submissions were welcome. The New Yorker styled itself too up-market to amplify a mainstream sitcom. They certainly weren't in the free advertising business. Shawn continued to decline Addams Family panels long after the show's 2-season run ended. 

It was only in 1988, after Shawn retired, that the now-named Addams Family returned to The New Yorker. It'd been fifty years since their first appearance and a quarter century of editorial exile. Addams died a few months later.

Today, of course, the Addams Family is big business, their names pop culture givens. Back then, Levy sensed those cartoons' broad appeal, a family that was kooky, spooky, and altogether ooky--but still a family. That was one part of Addams' message. Monsters had problems, too. Monsters loved and bonded just like anyone else.  

Like anyone else. Like all of us. That's the rest of Addams' message. If good is tucked away in evil, then evil things hide in what is held out as good. Tradition, conformity, the need to pretend life is idyllic. Addams was calling out an uncomfortable fact. Life isn't pretty. Life isn't safe. It's just weird, wondrous, and short. 

We might as well embrace the ride.

* * *

Happy Halloween, everyone!

How About a Book with that Scone?

My accountant told me I was crazy. “This is not a way people make money,” he told me. Likewise, my financial advisor said that if I blithely ignored her advice that my wife and I would probably jeopardize our retirement plans. The lawyer—who represented the other side, not me—said that the investment on offer was probably not a smart move for most people.

Just what was this crazy thing I was about to do that everyone else seemed to think was moronic?

My wife and I were contemplating buying a bookstore. It made sense to us. We were writers, after all. We wrote books. We liked books. What more did we need to know?

We planned to partner with a friend of ours, a business dude, who dreamed of being a writer. (You know the type.) His wife was obsessed with books, and planned to play a hands-on role in the business. Which was good, because we didn’t. If we went ahead with the deal, we would attend a few bookstore schools—yes, there are such things—with our new partners, but we planned to keep writing. And to our partners’ credit, they wanted us to do so, thinking it would good for “our” mutual brand. He was thinking of the well-known authors who are or were part-owners in bookstores. But I don’t think anyone has ever thought of me in the same sentence as author-proprietors such as Anne Patchett or Judy Blume.

Ultimately, though, we never went through it. Mostly because the seller got cold feet, not us. (I dunno—maybe our questions about the store’s current financials sounded too business-y?)

When the deal didn’t go through, my accountant heaved a sigh of relief that I could hear all the way from Staten Island.

And you know what? Nowadays I’m glad that we didn’t take the plunge because there is a lot I know now—about employees, about business, about myself—that I didn’t know then. Interestingly, I became a better analyst of the bookstore business after the fact.

We have since moved to a small city that has eight brick-and-mortar stores, half selling used/rare books. And there are two online bookstores based in town that also sell used and rare books.

Whenever we are in a new city, I like to visit indie stores. Almost without thinking, I find myself ticking off a silent checklist that I have internalized. Is the store downtown in the middle of the action? Do they have good foot traffic? Are their patrons likely to be locals or tourists? Is parking great—or a challenge? Do they have a decent event space, or would they need to partner with a school, university, church, or some other obliging venue? If there’s ever another pandemic, are they well-positioned for contactless pickups?

The biggest question is unknowable unless I am willing to be impertinent: How much is your rent? Another biggie is typically more visible: what’s your overall business model beyond selling books to people who just happen to walk in off the street?

The most obvious gravy train are events with visiting authors on book tours. The more of these you can drum up in the course of a week or month, the more transactions you are likely to make. When people enter the store to hear an author speak, they are likely to buy something. Even if they skip the book on offer, they will buy a picture book or a finger puppet for a grandchild...or just a cup of coffee.

I used to think all bookstores did tons of events—until I met a woman who ran a teensy hospital bookstore. In her case, her “sideline” business model was selling fresh flowers and magazines to people visiting patients. See? To stay viable, stores often offer a little something extra besides the books.

Recently, when an author friend told me that he and his wife were partnering with their business dude in their cute city in the American South, I naturally started asking questions about their business model.

There are six or so models that I have seen over the years:

The For-Profit Bookstore That Sells New Books, Holds Regular Events, and Offers a Food & Drink Venue.
I worked in New York City in the 1990s when Barnes & Noble rolled out stores that featured overstuffed club chairs and Starbucks coffee. The press ate it up for years! Now even the indie bookstores are doing coffee, with little fanfare. Although, these days, if you aren’t selling coffee and scones that are better than Starbucks I don’t know why a customer would bother. Denise and I did a book event at an adorable bookstore in Alabama one year that offered a full bakery by day, and a bar with music venue by night. (In two separate rooms!)

The For-Profit Bookstore With the Unexpected Extra Wacky Thing. I’m thinking of the tiny bookstore in Charleston that nails its nut doing ghost and history walking tours. In fact, their first iteration of the bookstore was a small space in which walking tour patrons gathered to wait for their tours to start. Naturally, while waiting, they shopped.

The For-Profit Pop-Up. I have met young authors who double as booksellers, peddling a variety of brand-new books by themselves and their author friends from rolling carts that they set up at farmer’s markets and breweries. Overhead is minimal. I have known bookstores to set up satellite shops in different cities during summers, or right after the holidays when Main Street shops go vacant and landlords are willing to strike a decent three-month deal on rent. Just recently, I heard of a used bookstore setting up racks of highly curated books inside a cocktail bar. All the books are $8, and all are chosen to “pair” with cleverly named drinks on the bar’s menu. I guess a patron who chooses a beverage called the LeGuin & Tonic just might buy a hardcover copy of Ursula’s books.

The For-Profit Upscale Tippling Used Bookstore. There’s one of these in our town. They sell high-end bubbly, wine, cocktails, coffee, baked goods, and snacks in an extensive maze of shelves stocked with tons of used books, many of them in locked cases. It is as cute as all get-out, folks! Old books have tendency to look...picturesque, shall was say, especially when paired with attractive lamps and artwork. So picturesque, in fact, that the bane of the owners’ existence are Instagramming nabobs who clutter the aisles shooting footage for their social media feeds but who never buy a thing! The copious booze and sidewalk cafe tables offset the cost of rent, but once, I happened to walk in on a particularly happy day when alcohol took a back seat to print. “We just sold a signed, first edition of Watership Down!” the owner told me. The book’s $750 price-tag was a reminder that sometimes a single sale can bring in more revenue than a $50 bottle of champagne.

The Nonprofit With Side Hustles. I specified “for-profit” stores above because I occasionally encounter nonprofit bookstores. They ensure profitability by soliciting annual donations from their community. If patrons are willing to support local theaters, museums, symphonies, and news organizations, why not local bookstores? As one owner pointed out, bookstores may often be the only public venues in a community to host authors. If you are not lucky enough to live near a local university, or in a municipality with a robust library system or a “town hall” speaker’s program, your local bookstore fulfills that function. One of the nonprofits I encountered used the strength of their endowment to lock in a decent lease in a Main Street building and run a small indie publishing house in the back. They augmented their bottom line by subletting their extra space to a bakery. (This model is different from the Alabama store I mentioned above, which operates their own bakery and bar.)

The Nonprofit Sugar Daddy. I’m being facetious, but this model occurred to me when my author friend told me that a wealthy patron was bankrolling his bookstore. Said Daddy, who hails from a family with money to burn, bought an entire Main Street building with the intention of setting up a nonprofit bookstore, event space, and co-working space for the community. For every million their family foundation spends, they can deduct $100K off their income. This does not sound like a deal to me, but what the hell do I know? In another model I was privy to, a family foundation that owned a lot of real estate struck an unbeatable rental arrangement with the local bookstore. Instead of charging market rate for the store’s downtown space, they asked for a percentage of the store’s monthly revenue. It fluctuated monthly, but they didn’t care. They were writing the whole thing off as a deduction. In the Sugar Daddy model, you have to hope that Daddy never changes his mind, or drops dead and his greedy scions quash the good times.

I love bookstores, as I’m sure many of you do. But increasingly, we (Americans) live in a nation where citizens aspire to read more but just don’t. (Link and link.) It saddens me when the existence of bookstores must be associated with alcohol, coffee, baked goods, or else rely on the kindness of deep-pocketed strangers for survival. Then again, I laugh when I think of the longtime merchant who chided me when I called her place of business a bookstore. Like I made it seem cheap and tawdry.

“It’s not,” she said. “It’s a community center!” I was leaving town, and did not have time to ask her accountant if he agreed with her assessment.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Barnacles

File this one in your "Where and  how do you come up with your characters?" file.

Sooner or later, if you write and publish fiction, you're gonna have someone ask you this question.

I've answered this one many, many times, but for the purposes of this blog post, I'm going to focus on the most recent time I answered it. And I did so by talking about "barnacles."

Of course I'm not talking about the actual crustaceans found accreted to the hulls of ships. "Barnacles" in this instance is a metaphorical reference to a particular type of person everyone encounters over the course of their lives: unwanted (or at least unsought-after) connections with people they have no interest in connecting with.

Think Spike and Chester from Warner Brothers cartoons.

The prototypical symbiotic relationship.

Or Jim and Michael from The Office.

Or, for that matter, Michael and Dwight from The Office.

For most of us, barnacles come and go. Our personal barnacles attach themselves to our hulls as the result of a work relationship. It's often a case of changing jobs giving our metaphorical hulls a good, hard scraping.

Recently my wife and I were talking about a couple of my own latest work barnacles, and how each of them could make a great fictional character in one of my stories, whether protagonist, antagonist, or "plucky comic relief." My wife, in so many ways the most perceptive of women, pointed out something I had never given much thought to-something I think I always understood at a core level, just never really articulated it before.

In a phrase: the best fiction tells relatable stories about the human condition.

And since a "barnacle" is something everyone experiences at one time or another, what could be morevrelaqtable than writing about that experience?

After all, the world is full of barnacles. Everyone reading this can relate to this experience: the coworker who gets super graphic about his (nearly always his) dates. The neighbor who thinks you're as concerned as they are about a certain given "bad element" (Like, I don't know? Shriners?) moving into the neighborhood. The friend-of-a-friend you always seem to see at social events who thinks you two have bonded over some tenuously shared experience ("You were in the Navy? My brother was in the Navy!"), and defines you thusly ("My squid buddy! Glad you could make it, man! Let's talk patrol boats!").

What's more, everyone who reads this is also likely to have been (or is currently serving as) a barnacle in some else's life. Yep, in one way or another, we're all barnacles to some degree.

And it got me thinking: I have based characters on friends. I have based them on folks I may have met only once, with the interaction for some reason or another being incredibly memorable. I have based them on people I despised (or even still despise, present tense).

But–and I know that I might well be late to the party on this, because there are a lot of writers out there who are a hell of a lot more on the ball than I am!–I have never really based a character on someone who persistently annoyed me, day in, day out.

And I think it's high time I did.

On second thought, maybe instead of filing this one under "Where and how do you come up with your characters?", we ought to file it under "Writing Truths that are self-evident to most intelligent life in the Universe, but about which Brian is, as usual, Late to the Party"?

How about you? Any "barnacles" in your experience who may have provided fodder for your fiction? Please drop a line and share about them in the Comments section.

And as always-

See you in two weeks!

Reading Lists

I saw a Facebook post from the SF and fantasy writer C.J. Cherryh, soliciting ideas from readers for books to give a hypothetical 8-year-old, and she leads off with the books she herself got drawn into at that age.  Lucky Bucky in Oz – I had to look it up – a later book in the Baum series, but written by their longtime illustrator, John Rea Neill.  Disney’s duck comics.  Pyle’s Robin Hood, illustrated.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, not Tarzan, but the Mars books.  Then she throws the nominations open.

Reading the responses, there’s a lot of overlap, which is interesting because it suggests not a lack of material, but that certain writers hit our sweet spot.  C.S. Lewis and Narnia get high-fives - but it turns out I’m not the only one who thinks The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is terrific, and the rest kind of sag.  Same with Walter Farley.  The Black Stallion is aces; the sequels, not so much.  Everybody’s head-over-heels for E.B. White, Stuart and Charlotte.  Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Tolkien.  Nancy Drew.  Andre Norton.  Madeleine L’Engle.  Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider novels.  Robert Louis Stevenson.  Heinlein.  T.H. White.  Kipling.  Twain.  Lewis Carroll.  Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks.  The Wind in the Willows.  Anything with N.C. Wyeth illustrations.  Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea.  The Call of the Wild.  Sherlock Holmes.  Jules Verne.  The Secret Garden.  The Borrowers.  Harry Potter.  Doctor Dolittle.  The Little Prince.  Beverly Cleary.  Judy Blume.  The Last Unicorn.

Scrolling through, I recognized stuff I hadn’t thought of in ages, the Doctor Dolittle series, for one.  I was crazy about the books, at the time, but I’d be reluctant to go back.  Maybe it was my imagination that made them so good.  Burroughs is another one, the Tarzan books are ghastly, utter racist claptrap, but the Barsoom books are fabulous.  Kipling is one of my favorites, still.  I think the Carl Barks duck comics are genius.  Somebody mentioned My Father’s Dragon, a book of such complete charm I can’t even fathom it’s having slipped my mind, all these years later.

The coolest thing about this is seeing other people open themselves up to a larger world, and how it happened.  In some respects, it’s not the book itself, but the place and time we discovered it.  C.J. herself says that she read her first actual fantasy, Jirel of Joiry, when she was sick in bed, once, and she still remembers the room, the bed, the window, the curtains, everything, the experience being that vivid.  I know what she means.

There’s a great moment in How Green Was My Valley, the John Ford movie, when the boy Huw is recovering from pneumonia, and the minister, Gruffydd, loans him a copy of Treasure Island.  Gruffydd says, “I envy you, getting to read it for the first time.” 

I’m not sure, but I think this is what C.J. Cherryh is trying to conjure up, and I think that’s what she gets, in the responses.  What drew you in, and didn’t let you go?  Or more accurately, that you couldn’t let go of?  I clearly remember the room, the window, the curtains, the summer I fell under the spell of Renault’s The King Must Die.  I was under an enchantment I couldn’t break.

We think back and say, what was the magic, how did they cast the spell?  And we brought a lot of the energy ourselves, our hunger to be transported, but these are the writers who gave us the lamp to rub, the genie to call, the carpet to fly on.  I’m enormously grateful.

https://www.facebook.com/cj.cherryh

A Day for Writers and Lawyers

A week from today, my son has a birthday. Around our house, that‘s reason enough to celebrate. For those with a more global perspective, Tuesday, October 14^th, marks the 959^th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. On this date in 1066, the Norman army, led by William the Conqueror, defeated the forces of King Harold II of England. Harold was killed—shot in the eye with an arrow, according to legend. Shortly thereafter, his troops capitulated. The reign of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England came to an end.

Harold may have been among the last casualties of the Battle of Hastings. Today, however, I should like to consider the first.

The Normans invaded England at Pevensey in East Sussex. No troops lined the shore to oppose him, for Harold's army was in the north of England, repelling an invading Norwegian army. From the landing beach, William marched his men on toward Hastings. Harold raced his troops down from the north to confront this group of invaders. The Anglo-Saxons seized the high ground at Senlac Hill and prepared to fight a defensive battle.

The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio presents the oldest source on the Battle of Hastings, written in 1067 or 1068. On the eve of battle, the Normans were dispirited. Not surprisingly, since they, clad in chain mail, must charge the Saxons’ shield wall uphill. Harold’s infantry waited for them there, his lines braced for the attack by the invaders.

According to the epic, out from the mass of Norman soldiers rode a lone man, Ivo Taillefer, the jongleur, minstrel, or storyteller to William. He positioned himself between the two opposing forces. While astride his horse, he began to juggle his sword, catching and throwing it into the air again and again, while singing the

Song of Roland, a lyrical poem about a heroic French warrior who served under Charlemagne.

A man should suffer greatly for his lord,

Endure both biting cold and sweltering heat

And sacrifice for him both flesh and blood.

Stanza LXXXVIII, line 1117

Incensed by the bravado, a Saxon soldier rushed from the lines to kill the provocative Taillefer. Tailllefer, however, snatched his sword in mid-air and struck down the man. Singlehandedly, the warrior storyteller then charged the English lines. Inspired, the Normans loosed their arrows, and the battle began.

We might pause the story to consider the warrior storyteller, the person who finds battle and literature to be complementary. Their experiences with death, valor, inhumanity, and a community of individuals locked in a common lead some to contemplate the big questions of life.

In that moment, the warrior storyteller became a literary figure himself.

“Taillefer, who sang right well,

Upon a swift horse

Sang before the Duke

Of Charlemagne and of Roland

And of Oliver and their vassals

That died at Roncesvalles."

Wace, Roman de Rou, lines 8013–8019

Taillefer also enriched the lives of storytellers to come. The Norman victory at Hastings was “an event which had a greater effect on the English language than any other in the course of its history,” according to H. R. Lyon.

William the Conqueror’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, 1066, was voiced in English and Latin. He, however, knew Norman French. From that day, three languages were spoken throughout Britain, gradually melding into one. It is estimated that the Norman conquest added 10-12,000 words to the English language.

A story from the times illustrates the new world in which the conquered English found themselves. In a 12^th century miracle tale, a traveling friar named Brother William met a mute man. Falling to his knees, the infirm man sought a blessing. Brother William laid hands upon the man who suddenly could speak both English and French. The local priest, Brichtric, witnessing the miracle, complained about the unfairness. Brichtric had served the church faithfully for many years, yet he could not understand his French-speaking bishop. This total stranger, however, could now speak to the entire country, knowing both languages. Brichtric wailed at the injustice.

Before William's coronation, the Anglo-Saxons had a single word, kingly, a direct and straightforward expression for the actions of a king. Following the conquest, three synonyms entered the language:

royal, regal, and sovereign. Writers gained the capacity to express shades of meaning with the tools of expanded word choice. Walter Mead illustrates the point, citing a famous example from Time magazine, “Truman slunk from the room to huddle with his cronies,” while “Ike strode from the chamber to confer with his advisers.”

Legal doublets also came into existence. A legal doublet is a standardized phrase consisting of two or more words used frequently in Legal English. Such phrases couple terms that are synonyms. The origin of many doublings can be traced to a French (or Latin) and English word pair to ensure that the reader understood the phrase's significance. Aid and abet and

null and void represent examples of legal doublets.

Whether your goal is to clarify (or obfuscate) a legal document or to craft a story full of shading and nuance, the events of 959 years ago expanded your toolbox like no other event before or since. Raise a glass to Taillefer, the warrior storyteller who started it all. Raise another for Sam, whose birth, nativity, parturition, and delivery came along nine centuries later.

I’ll be traveling on the day that this blog posts. Apologies for failing to reply to comments.

Steady As She Goes.

Thank you for inviting me to address this year's graduating class at the Academy of Young Fiction Writers.

As much as I appreciate the invitation, I’m utterly unqualified to give you any advice, since you are growing up in an entirely different world from the one I inhabited (Planet Mid-20^th Century). However, I’ve already cashed the honorarium, so I’ll give it a go.

It was suggested I give my own take on Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Good Writing. However, I’ve found as soon as one starts in on rules, one is on shaky ground. And frankly, I’d toss out half of Leonard’s rules and rejigger the rest. But I can think of a few essential ingredients.

Every writer I know reads a lot. If there’s any way to avoid this particular penchant, I don’t know what it is. Anymore than a professional sax player can be unaware of Charlie Parker or Johnny Hodges. It’s also preferred to read all kinds of things – fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, blog posts, encyclopedias, cereal boxes, doctoral theses, etc. It almost doesn’t matter as you’re simply training your mind to be fluent and versatile with the language. To be aware of the various forms and styles, no matter what you end up specializing in.

This also means reading things you find distasteful, either in form or content. If you confine yourself only to works that comport with your aesthetic, religious or political sensibilities, you might live with a pure heart and soul, but you won’t be a very good writer. And who knows, if breached frequently enough those self-imposed boundaries might get a little more elastic over time.

It’s important to develop your own voice. Everyone says a strong voice is indispensable, though no one can tell you exactly what that means. If you’re lucky, you’ll know it when you hear it, or someone has the generosity to point it out. Your voice could – it should – change to suit the specific work you’re laboring over. But you need to know what voice is all about or you won’t get very far.

Being a good writer takes a tremendous amount of work. This often comes as a shock to people starting out. The main culprits are beloved authors whose prose flows as effortlessly as a sparkling Rocky Mountain stream, which can give a person false notions. Ask the writer to show you all the drafts and marked-up pages that led up to this and be ready for the avalanche.

Other than those three little guidelines, pretty much everything else is up for grabs. As much as I love going to writers conferences and listening to my fellow authors render sage advice from the panel tables (much of which can be extremely entertaining), by itself this probably won’t change your trajectory. You’ll hear a lot about process, but the only worthwhile process is the one that works for you. The magic isn’t in the mechanics, it’s in the imagination. Whether your work finds its way through a keyboard or a quill pen, in a Parisian loft or chicken coop, is irrelevant.

I think it’s good to read tutorials from Strunk & White, Stephen King, and especially Anne Lamott, but there’s little they can teach you that you don’t have to learn yourself.

As noted above, your world is going to be radically different from the one I’ve been living in, so you’ll have to adapt accordingly. Digital technology will impart unimaginable advantages, and detriments, and you’ll have to figure out which is which. Style will be as fluid as the cultural weather, though it won’t likely sound like late-Victorian or early-Beatnik. Some harbingers may be lurking on the bestsellers lists, but you won’t know which ones for a few years.

Language itself may morph into something entirely new. For all I know, you may have different rules for grammar and syntax. Dictionaries and remedial English teachers will have to scramble to keep up. But novelty doesn’t have to result in amnesia.

I mentioned Charlie Parker. Classical musicians often notice a Bach interval sneaking its way into one of his spiraling improvisations. This wasn’t just a sly homage, or hipster satire. Charlie was part of a continuum of genius, not a fatherless bolt of lightning.

Natural historians will tell you evolution never creates in whole cloth. Life transforms itself by adapting available material. What makes us human is nothing more than the clever repurposing of primordial spare parts.

Every generation needs to decide what constitutes quality writing. So ultimately, your peers will be much more valuable than your heroes. Though you’ll still be standing on the shoulders of giants, so it’s best to get a good sense of literary anatomy so you don’t lose your footing.

I think a healthy dose of optimistic skepticism is a healthy thing in a young writer. It’s fine to listen to advice, even what’s being spoken here, but don’t take anything to heart until you’ve proven it to yourself. And even that may slip out from under you when you least expect it.

Always remind yourself, you’re sailing a ship guided by ever-changing constellations.

He felt an itch to write and started from scratch

Before Tik Tok and the World Wide Web, before Chris Rock, before the Blue Collar Comedy Tour was UseNet and it was good. Terms like spam, FAQ, mod, and flame originated here. So did the Internet’s first advertisement — by a law firm — spam. Well, maybe not so good.

UseNet still exists, divided into News Groups, sort of a predecessor to Reddit. Examples might include:

• rec — recreation, entertainment
• sci — science, technology
• soc — society, early social platform
• alt — a catchall for extended discussions

Within this latter category is alt.humor and not long after it appeared, along came alt.humor.funny, a humorous recognition that some ‘jokes’ simply aren’t, well, funny.

alt.humor.writers.mystery ?

This crossed my mind when so-called writerly jibes, jests and jokes appeared in my mail. Ugh, they were awful, maybe 4^th grade level, but they sent me on a quest to find levity amongst fellow scribblers.

Don’t get me wrong… I enjoy my colleagues’ humor, often gentle and sometimes zinging, but it’s clear we as a group slept in during stand-up comedy classes. You might think writers would naturally excel creating authorishy humor, but perhaps wounds of rejection remain too raw.

Apparently a special Melodie brain lobe is required to coax one-liners, rib-ticklers, knee-slappers, thigh-thwackers, and wisecrackers from our inner dark to the light of smiling sunshine. As a public service to my writing friends, I threshed the chaff of many an internet witticism to isolate a few pearls and peals of laughter. Perhaps.

Beginning with…

• Writers learn to be tolerant folk. Pain tolerant, alcohol tolerant, rejection tolerant, antidepressant tolerant…
• What do you call a writer with health insurance? Married.
• How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one. You call Bob, the janitor, and he does it. He’s written six bestselling novels and won multiple Edgar, Macavity, Derringer, and Reader’s Choice awards.
• How many literary writers does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one. Screw you. I’m not changing one damn thing.
• How many mystery writers does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to swap the bulb, and the other to give it an unexpected twist.
• From novels to fiction to advertising, what writing pays the best? Ransom notes.
• What do writers often purchase with their first royalty check? Extra cheese on their White Castles.
• What do you get when you cross a romance writer with a deadline? A really clean house.
• It’s not unusual for novice writers to make several sales: their car, their cufflinks, their jewelry, their house…

You’ll notice I didn’t include the oft-repeated observation by Paul Gallico about sitting down at a typewriter and opening a vein. However, I came across an interesting variation:

• Writing is easy. You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.
• According to proofreaders, the blood’s Type O.

Bad Puns and Other Dishonorable Unmentionables

• Shakespeare wrote plays on words.
• What’s it like to be an aspiring writer? It’s difficult to put into words.
• What is a young erotica writer’s favorite position for love making? Exposition. (Yes, that’s a double double entendre.)
• Little wonder Neanderthals died out. They should have seen the writing on the wall.
• My new Parker Pen can write upside down and under water and other words too.
• I’m learning to write poetry: P…O…E…T… It’s coming along nicely.

Whew, those were bad. A good line edit is its own reword.

We can do better! What is your favorite writing quip?

Yep, They Shot Him – But He's Okay

I always try, like most writers I know, to make my stories as believable and accurate and authentic as possible. After all, mistakes can be jarring enough to snap a reader right out of the storyworld, and make him or her think more about the writing and about the writer than about the story itself. None of us want that.

But in the course of my movie-watching, which probably (and unfortunately) takes up as much time as my writing, I have often wondered if filmmakers worry much about those factual and logical mistakes. It would seem they don't. One of the worst inconsistencies is in the way the characters talk with each other. In current movies, the dialogue's pretty good unless you consider Southern accents (don't get me started, on that), but I recently watched an old, old Western that featured a hero who was in deep trouble shouting to his partner, "Come quickly!" I obviously didn't live in those times, but I suspect he would've instead said something like "Come quick!" There's no doubt "quickly" would've made my high school English teacher happy, but it isn't a word I could see John Wayne saying to Gabby Hayes as arrows are flying and the cattle's being stolen and the cabin's burning down around him.

And it's not only dialogue. Consider the following list of inaccuracies that I see in a lot of the movies and TV series I watch these days, mistakes that might make you say What the hell were they thinking? 

Here are my top 20:

1. Old West streets are usually neat, clean, and poopfree.

2. Explosions in outer space make noise.

3. Sheriff's badges can be removed in the blink of an eye (a handy trick, if the villain's in town looking for the sheriff).

4. Also helpful: People fleeing from bad guys always run down the exact center of the road.

5. Monsters often reappear, over and over, good as new, after being killed. 

6. Private eyes are knocked unconscious at least once per episode, with no lasting ill effects.

7. Good guys' gunshot wounds are inconvenient; bad guys' gunshot wounds are fatal.

8. Following an explosion, the hero always strolls toward the camera as the firestorm rages in the background. (Shrapnel? No worries.)

9. Silencers on movie weapons are more silent than in real life--and handguns remain accurate at long distances. 

10. Heroines can run just fine in high heels.

11. Towns have only one church.

12. Bombs have timers with easy-to-read displays.

13. Waitresses never ask customers what kind of salad dressing they want.

14. Bartenders never ask customers what kind of beer they want.

15. Hacking into computers is easy peasy (worst offender: Independence Day).

16. Air ducts are good hiding places/escape routes. And they're always shiny clean.

17. Schoolteachers are interrupted in mid-sentence by the bell, and shout the next day's assignment to the already-departing students.

18. If you're shot while attacking a house, town, fort, or wagon train, your horse will fall down too.

19. When a crowd (usually of teenagers) hears an ominous sound (usually in a cave or haunted house at night), one of them goes alone to check it out.

20. In very old movies, a hero in a fistfight with the villain will get no help at all from the lady he's just rescued. Also, women fleeing from monsters/dinosaurs always fall down and lie there screaming.

In closing, here is a 36-line observation I made years ago on this subject, back before I realized I wasn't a poet. It's called "A Fantasy World," and first appeared in the Spring/Summer 1995 issue of Mobius:

The only thing moviewise I find obscene
    Isn’t brutal or racial or sexual;
It’s that scene after scene that I’ve seen on the screen
    Could never be factually actual.

For example, in Westerns, the ladies of course
    Still look fresh after months on the range,
No one’s ever injured when thrown from a horse,
    And bartenders never make change.

All heroes bound tightly within villains’ lairs
    With one touch of a knife can be freed,
And the chuckwagon’s crew might as well say their prayers
    Anytime there’s a cattle stampede.

Every car, when it crashes, will burst into flames,
    All cougars are shot in mid-leap,
Most private detectives have rugged last names,
    And night watchmen are always asleep.

Our heroes are blue-eyed, their teeth are white-capped,
    All six-guns shoot ten times at least,
And wrapped gifts and presents need not be unwrapped--
    Their tops just lift off, in one piece.

And when stagecoaches fired on by unfriendly forces
    Are chased twenty miles without rest,
No one ever thinks to shoot one of the horses--
    That’d make things too simple, I guess.

More examples? Okay. Taking showers is deadly–
    It’s better to just stay unclean,
And movie blood glistens a trifle too redly,
    And windows don’t ever have screens.

Drivers don’t watch the road and they don’t lock their cars,
    People never use washcloths, just soap;
And the strength of a jail window’s solid iron bars
    Are no match for a nag and a rope.

So the next time you witness an in-progress plot
    To commit a spectacular crime,
Just step in and save everyone on the spot–
    In the movies it’s done all the time.

NOTE: I once heard that someone asked Stagecoach director John Ford why the pursuing Indians didn't just shoot one of the horses in the team, during the long chase. He said, "Because that would've been the end of the movie." 

Okay, enough of that. To you writers who are fellow movie addicts, what are some differences you have noticed, between film and reality? Were some of them wrong enough to be silly? What movies were the worst offenders? And remember--don't do that kind of thing in your stories!

Thanks for indulging me. See you in two weeks.

Crime Scene Comix Case 2025-10-036, Dog Walker

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.

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...