A Bold Preposition(al Phrase)

If sentence construction is a story's tactics, then grammar is the rules of engagement. I'm no grammarian, mind you. I just want my words to count. That brings me to this particular sound-off and sometimes my almighty struggle: the prepositional phrase.

For the grammatical record, a prepositional phrase is:

• The preposition (about, before, down, except, for, in, near, on, off, under, with, etc.);
• Its object -- a noun, pronoun, or something functioning as such; 
• Any modifiers to the object.

No prepositional phrase exists in a vacuum. They modify something higher up the grammatical food chain, either a noun or a verb. Preferably, an important one. This is nerdy but essential. Too often, no small amount of my editing dwells on fixing my prepositional phrases--including whether I needed them at all.

But I'm also talking about more than grammar. When I'm moving those prepositions around, I'm calculating punch, timing, mood, and sentence variety. I'm fine-tuning the action and thus the characters. Not surprisingly, I've developed a few guidelines to help minimize editing blood pressure spikes.

Guideline: Stay Active

"The sound of laughter" is a complete grammatical phrase. "Sound" is the subject, "laughter" the modifying prepositional object. A complete thought, but indirect enough to invite the passive voice. "Was heard by all" feels almost inevitable to follow. 

What's more important here? The "sound" or the "laughter?" It could be either. "Laughter" is more specific and more powerful than "sound." If laughter is the key action and heaviest hitter, then it should be the sentence subject with an equally powerful verb. "Sound of" seems unnecessary. 

Guideline: Drunk and Disorderly

If you read a fair few legal documents, it's not uncommon to encounter mass pile-ups of prepositional phrases. A lawyer on a roll can chain four, five, eight prepositional phrases together in a single, sprawling clause. Boring, but it's doing its job. Those prepositions stack needed qualifiers to the core provision. 

Well, we're not writing legal documents here. A traffic jam of prepositions makes things blocky and turns reading comprehension into a slog. An example:

Conversation ground to a halt when McGillicuddy shot me the stink-eye that he usually did before breaking tough news in his office on the penthouse floor with the full view of the city behind him.

To avoid things getting out of hand, I self-imposed a cap of two in a row max. Two keeps me focused on key actors and actions. Any further details can be worked into a later sentence.

Conversation ground to a halt. McGillicuddy shot me the stink-eye that he usually did before breaking tough news. We were drinking Old Sasquatch in his penthouse office, the city below spreading to the horizon.

Not great, but at least these sentences behave. Once I cap the pile-up, the next problem is ordering the survivors. 

Guideline: First Things First

The English language has developed many ordering rules for modifiers--except for prepositional phrases. We writers are largely left to our wits. But there are two north stars to guide us.

• A phrase functioning as an adjective follows the noun (sentence subject). Think: Her photo on the wall stood watch over the parlor.

• A phrase functioning as an adverb follows the verb. Same sentence: Her photo on the wall stood watch over the parlor.

Easy enough. My headache comes with ordering my chains of two or (shudder) three. Flipping them--and maybe flipping them back--bites me more often than I care to admit.

• WRONG: Dave shoved the evidence in the drawer ahead of the cops under his socks.

• RIGHT: Dave shoved the evidence in his sock drawer ahead of the cops.

The first example fails its adverbial duty. The cops are not under the socks. Also, shoving is the important action, so the modifier belongs where the socks were shoved. The second example lands the sentence on that small matter of the cops.

Let's get more complicated.

• WRONG: The pirates debated their heading in the galley for raiding Port Arghh with the captain.

• RIGHT: The pirates debated the Port Arghh raid over rum with the captain. 

The first example is all over the place. Is the captain connected to Port Arghh or the pirate crew? The second example won't win any awards, but it keeps the thought line straight. The construction immediately cuts to the central rum-soaked debate and Port Arghh, giving both more primacy. Ending on "with the captain" sets the blackguard up to decide the next move. 

Guideline: Proper Introductions

In fiction, some sentences just work better with an opening preposition. Take that last sentence. The opening "In fiction" grounds the reader, and there isn't a better fit later on. This is a flow thing, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence. I know it when it works--and I pick up on it when reading a manuscript aloud. 

I default to opening sentences with the subject. English is designed that way, and I'm not going to fight that. But guidelines are just that.. Inverting prepositional phrases to open things can change the feel in critical ways:

• Traditional: "The truth looked a lot different under the streetlamps." That's effective in showing the narrator shifting as they have time to think, with "streetlamps" as a stark and atmospheric closer.

• Inverted: "Under the streetlamps, the truth looked a lot different." This time, we get the mood before we get the truth. Ending on "different" sets up an emotional or revealing next sentence. 

Done judiciously and well, the humble prepositional phrase is powerful, flexible--or ruinous fluff leading to blood pressure checks.

A Library of One's Own

 

Books I have not read.

In the beginning they were all library books, and they were manageable. At the library across the street from the public school, a kid could borrow up to five books, max, which was good, because those early selections were short picture books that I breezed through quickly, often in the car on the way home. Typically, I chose books our teacher had read to us in class. Now I wanted to turn the pages myself and take as much time as possible to digest them.

After I absorbed the story, I’d start over again, this time studying every single image and imagining how the illustrators had done their work. Think about the crosshatching in books by Maurice Sendak. You could get lost in those lines.

One of the books from those days—Stupid Marco by Jay Williams, about a moronic prince who cannot tell his right hand from his left—was beautifully illustrated by a Dutch illustrator named Friso Henstra. Scritchy-scratchy lines galore. Can you imagine anyone permitting a kid to read a book today whose protagonist is labeled stupid on the front cover?

Eventually, I’d bring the books back and get a whole new stack. I could do this as many times as I wanted, and no one ever gave me guff about it. It cost nothing, and in the end the books went back where they belonged.

Neat. Tidy.

When I started buying paperbacks at the local bookstore, I bought to fill in the gaps in the library’s collection. But I still followed the same logical process: buy, read, buy another.

Neat. Tidy.

In other words, books were borrowed or purchased in order to be read now. They never came home and stayed untouched. This was the greatest of all rules. I read what I bought, and I read what I borrowed.

There was no such thing as unread books.

I continued this practice well into college and slightly beyond. Then, for some reason, the Neat-Tidy system broke down. Books entered my apartment and stayed unread for a good long time. They stacked up on the bookshelf. Or in piles near the couch. On my bedside table. On my desk. I rationalized their acquisition because I knew I would get to them in time, because I always had.

Soon books entered the dwelling unread and stayed that way for years. For some reason, I was okay with this. I did what anyone in my position would do: I blamed Otto Penzler.

When I was fresh out of college, somehow I learned of the Crime Collector’s Club (CCC) that Penzler operated out of his Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, the location with the charming spiral staircase. You signed up, you sent him money, and every month he mailed you a new hardcover book.

These were special. They were autographed by the author. I had never heard of such a thing. It was the most marvelous thing ever. When I finally got around to reading the book, it didn’t matter that there were no pictures; I could ogle the writer’s handwriting on the title page as I read. Wow.

Sometimes you could opt for a second book on Otto’s monthly offer! Holy smokes. More books to paw over and stack up for future reading.

Thank you, authors. Thank you, publishers. Thank you, Otto.

A friend once asked about Otto’s CCC and marveled that I was willing to spend a princely $17.95 a month on hardcover books. “That’s expensive!” she spluttered. She was right. We were journalists living on crappy incomes. In my defense, I wasn’t yet married, nor did I have the mouths of babes to feed. What was I going to do with my meager earnings anyway? Eat? Pay rent?

The Japanese have a word for this bookish behavior: tsundoku. It means piling up reading materials that go unread. Apparently no judgment is implied when a case of tsundoku is diagnosed. The situation just is.

I have developed coping mechanisms over the years. I had to. I am not an animal. Pound for pound, unless you have taken up a side hobby like blacksmithing, welding, or the letterpress arts, books are apt to be the heaviest things you will ever own. A single move will impart a critical lesson: you are, in effect, paying twice for all the books you have and haven’t read. From time to time, I painfully pick my way through the stacks and decide: Am I ever really going to read this? If the answer is no, out the door it goes.

I have given away books, lent them, donated them. The piles still grow. Nowadays, when I pick them up, they come with stories their makers never intended. This copy of Irish short stories is the one I bought for my Irish lit class in college. I remember how charming the professor was when he read Yeats aloud in a pleasing Irish brogue. By chance is he still alive, I wonder? Here, also, are countless copies of signed books by friends. Looking back, I should not have been so impressed by the signed books Mr. Penzler sold. If you write, in time you amass friends who also write. You amass their books as well. Now, fully a third of my living room bookshelves are devoted to signed copies. And yes, I have to admit, many of those are unread too.

Once, while walking the dog, I happened upon one of those Little Free Libraries, and discovered a first edition of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and nearly wept. Ages ago, while living in Hoboken, I once had my own first of that book. I’d bought it when it first came out. (Tom and I go way back. In journalism school, we were taught that he was a god, and for a while I subscribed to this notion.) I had enjoyed the book the first time around, but I had donated it after some years and always regretted it. Here it was, in North Carolina, in a perfectly fine dust jacket. What was I supposed to do, not take it home and stick it on a pile?

For a while there, my wife and I eagerly consumed Marie Kondo’s classic, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and dutifully followed its prescribed steps. We decluttered our kitchen! We decluttered our clothing closets, our garage, the outdoor shed. Kondo’s system was brilliant. Pick up an item and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?” If the answer is no, you know what to do.

She instructed you to carefully purge your way from objects of little sentimental value to the most. (Family heirlooms and photographs are the last thing you purge.) We never applied her principle to books. My wife refused to. She insisted that Kondo, a Japanese author who had once worked at a shinto shrine before becoming a professional organizer, didn’t actually understand books. It seemed as if tsundoku, in her personal cosmology, came loaded with judgment. At that stage in our process, we donated Kondo’s book and never looked back.

I have learned over time to not gratuitously add to the pile. I feel a helpful wave of shame when I attend bookstore events. Such lovely authors! (But I simply cannot buy another book, can I? No! You have too many! More than you will ever read in the time remaining!) Then comes the other voice: You can’t support another writer? What kind of writer are you?

I used to be appalled when I saw how many people departed bookstores, empty-handed, after a reading. Now I understand.

In 2022, when my father died in California, my brother asked if I wanted Dad’s multi-volume set of Popular Mechanics guides for the practical handyman. If I Venmoed him some money, my brother would pack all sixteen volumes in a box—

“Absolutely not!” I shouted into the phone.

I was outvoted by my wife, who thought it might be hilarious to have such books.

Great. I squeezed them in among the cookbooks in the den, and flip through them when I need to repair a faucet or refurbish a crappy cabinet, as I did last weekend. Why would I use the internet to research how to remove decrepit hardware, and to sand, buff and carefully pound in finishing nails when I had a perfectly good book on my shelf—which predated the internet and possibly the invention of television—that demonstrated the precise steps necessary to turn another inherited piece of crap into an exquisite, eye-catching piece upon which to store more piles of unread books?

There is a moment in many of those country house mysteries where the inspector interviews an insomniac suspect who says he came downstairs in his bathrobe at 3 a.m. to get a book out of his host’s library, and encountered another suspect who was descending the servant’s staircase to fetch a sandwich.

Bull, I used to think, when I encountered such characters. Who wakes up at 3 a.m.? And who goes into someone else’s private library to borrow a book? And while we’re at it, Inspector, do you not find it at all odd that Lord Squidgecombe packed a bathrobe to visit someone’s country house for the weekend? How convenient! Almost as if he were expecting to need an alibi!

But you know what? Decades later, I get it. Not the bathrobe part, but the reading of new, enticing, strange books in the middle of the night. It certainly beats tossing and turning. If you have a sandwich handy, so much the better.

Five decades after I entered my first library, the one across the street from the public school, I have built my own. Amid the occasional duds and tripe, it’s filled with wonders, most of them forgotten or unappreciated by me. When I happen upon one of these, I’m a kid again and feel as if I’ve just picked out another gem. Please say you understand.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Unintended Benefits of Reading Nonfiction

As readers of this blog may recall, my recent posts here at Sleuthsayers have carried a heaviness to them: my recent discussion of my father’s experience of Alzheimer’s, and how it is impacting his loved ones, and the one about plagiarism down through the centuries, fine, fine times, for sure.

So I felt the need to change things up this go-round, and here’s what I did. I queried several writer friends and posed them the following question:

"I’m writing a blog post about 'How It’s the Non-Fiction You Wouldn’t Expect to Help Make You a Better Fiction Writer That Does In Fact Make You a Better Fiction Writer,' and so would LOVE your input. So maybe your pen name, title of the book and why it so helped your fiction writing?"

First, here are a few of my own favorites:

1. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The gold standard. Shirer served as CBS Radio’s “Man in Berlin” during the 1930s, getting out of town one step ahead of an SS arrest warrant in December of 1940. And after the war he pointed out who did what, where the bodies were buried, and brought receipts. And he did it all in a way that spoke directly to an American audience predisposed to disregard “just more European politics.”

2. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

Bloom, a well-respected literary critic, was a master prose stylist in his own right. Reading this slim volume helped remind me that language can be so much fun to play with.

3. Barbara W. Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China

Much better known for her two Pulitzer Prize winning works (The Guns of August, about World War I, and A Distant Mirror, about “the Calamitous Fourteenth Century,” Tuchman cut her teeth working for the Associated Press in Japan before World War II. As such she was deeply steeped in the goings on in China, and the perspective she brought to the conflict there was decades ahead of its time.

4. Diana Cooper, Darling Monster: the Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to Her Son John Julius Norwich (1939-1952)

Lady Diana Cooper knew everyone from the Mitford sisters to the most respected clerics in the nation, to Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. Her candid, incisive, funny character sketches addressed to her son, historian J.J. Norwich (see below) are not to be missed.

5. John Julius Norwich, Byzantium (3 vols.)

Three volumes, eleven hundred years. Norwich is a master of the narrative voice. Each volume is a graduate course in writing compelling narrative while not losing sight of the larger stories

6. Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

Once called a cross between James Bond, Indiana Jones and Graham Greene, Fermor lived a restless, adventurous life, and documented it entertainingly. At 18 he trekked from Dover to Constantinople. It was 1933, and A Time of Gifts documents the first one-third of that trip through a world that was already beginning to vanish under the pressures of Nazism, modernism, socialism, etc.

7. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

I picked this one about the role romance played in the cultural syncretism ongoing during the early years of the British Raj, but honestly, anything by Dalrymple, the greatest travel writer of this or any age, is worth your time.

8. Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

Tey was a terrific novelist. And she was also a passionate defender of the reputation of King Richard III. As such, her panegyric raising the question of whether or Richard Crouchback bore any culpability in the disappearance of his nephew the so-called “Princes in the Tower.” She says no. The historical record is far more damning. Tey is so good she almost convinced me!

9. Ross King, Brunelleschi's Dome

Turns out the greatest Renaissance genius might not have been a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, but rather an irascible builder who studied the interior dome of Rome’s Pantheon to unlock the secret of constructing an apparently unsupported dome. Short, quick and riveting.

10. Steven Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

The ancient Roman poet Lucretius theorized the existence of the atom in a poem written two thousand years ago. But that’s only half the story. How Lucretius’ poem was lost for centuries and then found again, and preserved for modern audiences, now THAT is quite a story!

And on that note, on to the thoughts of my writer friends!

Writer and Editor Extraordinaire Jim Thomsen:

Top of mind is Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser, the recent true-crime Edgar winner, about the possible links between serial killers and being raised in the shadow of lead smelters (like the one in Tacoma). While I’m not sure I buy all her arguments, and I might have wished for less Ted Bundy and BTK rehash, I find myself rereading this book over and over because of the audacity of its originality — a wild mashup of science, true crime and memoir. Fraser, who was raised on Mercer Island, plays with the rules and breaks them all in dizzying but energizing fashion, veering page to page from wonky exposition to irreverent editorializing, and not being afraid to sound silly or sophomoric. Consider this quote: “During his five years on McNeil Island, virtually everything Charles Manson eats and drinks comes out of the earth, where particulates from the Ruston plume have been drifting down to the ground since 1890. He’ll live on McNeil Island longer than he’s lived in any place in his life. Later studies on McNeil find lead in soil ranging from a low of 19 parts per million (ppm) to a high of 190. Helter smelter.”

Murderland is such a wild original that I found myself pleasantly helter-skelter with the possibilities of widening the aperture of narrative in ways I’d never imagined. And with the idea that it’s OK to look a little silly in doing so in the service of a strong writing voice.

Fellow Sleuthsayer Eve Fisher:

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, the Calamitous 14th Century - impeccable research, amazing stories (truth really is stranger than fiction), and a prose style to die for.  

Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange - The book that made me see ecosystems in a whole new way. And how they affect(ed) our daily lives today. Very important. And very applicable to us on the micro as well as macrosystem.

Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC.  - Humans are humans, no matter how far you go back. The emotional / mental / spiritual ideas are always there.  But it sure is interesting what we do with them!  

I guess what I'm saying is that all of these showed me the important fact that no matter where you are, or what time you're in, the styles will change, but the stories remain the same.

As far as the language - oooh, I grew up reading Shakespeare, all kinds of poetry, and I discovered Bruce Chatwin (supposedly non-fiction but he did make some stuff up) and Peter Matthiessen and Henry Thoreau, who could describe a place and a feel and a spiritual experience with such beauty...  

So yeah, reading non-fiction has great rewards!

Kat Richardson:

I started out as a journalist, so non-fiction has had a big impact on my fiction writing. There were a lot of books and lectures within that study and my early career that made an impact, not to mention the journalists dictum "write tight."  Prof. Lawrence Meyer, my Course Advisor at CSULB, compiled a collection of historically significant journalism, from 17th century British authors Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, to the "new journalists" of the 1970s, including Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Dunn, and Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem. For copyright reasons it was never published, but we used it as our primary study text in his "Journalism as Literature" course. I learned a lot about writing with style and impact while keeping fact intact and prose tight

I also read a lot of narrative non-fiction, and the work of writers like Erik Larson (whom I do not care for, but owe respect for his ground-breaking approach), Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook, and Mary Roach's book Stiff. While these authors' narrative style is occasionally flawed in terms of absolute fact and completeness, they taught me a lot about drawing the reader into a longer, realistic story while maintaining an accessible and engaging tone. They also reminded me to check my sources and not rely on the veracity of any one source or author, if I'm writing about anything outside of my personal experience, be it fiction or non-fiction.

*    *    *

What about you, dear readers? Let us know what you think, or add your own favorites in the comments. And on that note, that’s it for this go-round.

See you in two weeks!

Emptying Pockets

My MMPB mysteries

The news may have slipped past you but last year the media was announcing the death of a familiar part of publishing.  It isn't exactly that the mass-market paperback is dead but that ReaderLink, the major distributor of paperbacks, has decided to stop dealing with them.  Which is not so much a killing blow as  a recognition that the format is fading away.

The mass-market paperback (MMPB) has been a staple since the 1930s.  I am putting up pictures of the  oldest ones I own.  One of the major publishers of them was Pocket Books, which tells you exactly what they were designed for: to fit into a man's pocket.  (Women were very lucky if their clothes had any suitable spaces.)  These were the books GIs took to the front. (My copy of Pocket Mystery Reader belonged to Sergeant Lawrence E. Hough in 1943.)

By the way, you may notice that three of the books I include here say Complete and/or Unabridged on the cover because in those early days  an MMPB often was a shortened version.  When I worked at a public library in the 1970s I had a hard time convincing an older patron that the paperback I had found her was complete.

MMPBs were so-called because they were sold in mass markets: grocery stores, drug stores, and so on.  Their competition was the trade paperback, typically the same size as a hardback, and only found in the trade, that is to say, bookstores.  Trade books are still around although ebooks continue to eat into their sales.

I have a special fondness for MMPBs, and here's why.

When I want to buy a new book, hardcover or trade, I go to my favorite independent bookstore.  But when I am going on a trip I go to my favorite used bookstore which has an amazing selection of thousands of MMPB mysteries.

So when I went to Egypt and Greece in January I headed to used-book-land with a special list of authors in my hand.  Take a look at the picture below and I am  sure you can see the factor that connected them.  And the beauty was, when I finished one I could leave it in a hotel or train and not worry about the cost.

I suspect the used book store will have old MMPBs long enough to last me out, but  you young whippersnappers may not be as lucky.

Change of Direction

     My turn to blog has circled around again. Originally, I had planned to use this space to talk about Malice Domestic. I'd rhapsodize about the forums I attended, impart the things I'd learned, congratulate the award winners, and, naturally, laud the high-level conversation conducted at the panel in which I participated. 

    The rough draft turned out to be a pretty boring read. Consequently, I've switched directions. 

    The longer I work at writing, the harder it is to find value in the planned events at a conference. Occasionally, I glean a nugget. And I still believe there is merit to an occasional refresher course on the lessons I should already know. But the thunderclaps of insight are becoming increasingly rare. 

    That's not to say that I didn't benefit from attending Malice Domestic. Rather, at this stage, the value I gained was subtle and harder to articulate. I renewed many old friendships, established several new ones, and plotted some future opportunities. None of the details fit well to a column like this.     

    Some months back, Michael Bracken modestly proposed in a SleuthSayers blog post that writing conferences should schedule less time for panels and more time for standing in the hall. The hallway, outside the meeting rooms, he noted, was where the real business got done. 

    More than ever, I found that I concur. But it is hard to talk about afterward. 

    And perhaps, it should be so. 

    The word "hall," according to Etymology Online, comes from the Old English heall, meaning a large space covered by a roof--think Beowulf's great hall or a market hall. The word later morphed into a term for a passageway as a castle's private rooms became separated from the common areas by doors. 

National Archives College Park Public Domain

    The heart of the word heall seems to be the roof. It protected the space from the elements. In some explanations, the roof concealed or shielded the room's occupants. The hall, in its oldest form, was a place of cover, protection, and concealment; it's only fitting that what happens in the hall, therefore, stays in the hall. 

    Fully geeking on the etymology of conference words, I spent a little time researching "panel." 

    Seamstresses and fans of craft cozies shouldn't be surprised to learn that the word panel comes from a French term meaning a piece of cloth, generally a rectangular one. The same root word is used for a glass pane. 

    Sometime around the 15th Century, panel made the jump to refer to those summoned by French authorities to serve as jurors. Once called, jurors' names were inscribed upon a rectangular piece of parchment (cloth). By the late 16th Century, this notion of panel had been diluted to include any group of people who gathered together to advise and consider. 

    And now, a distinguished foursome sitting on a dais behind a cloth-covered table holding forth and sharing their insights has become a panel. But the word remains particularly apt for Malice Domestic, Bouchercon, or any of the other mystery conferences. 

    Remember the original meaning of panel as a rectangular square of cloth? Heavy fabric made a great wall covering. The word panels also developed in that direction. Panels became the term for specific wall or door sections. And it's here that things started to take a dark and nefarious turn. 

    Bordellos and other disreputable places would be outfitted with panels. In these seedy establishments, at least one could be slid back and allow for customers to be robbed, beaten, or possibly killed. By the 19th Century, a panel-house had become slang for a bordello. 

    Panel, therefore, has the twin traditions of an erudite gathering combined with a dash of thievery and bodily harm. 

    Halls and Panels--two words with suggestions of secrecy. Perfect words for a mystery conference. 

    Until next time. 

  
 BSP: Panels do provide a great time to tout new works. Thanks to all who helped me release The Firefall by attending one of the launch events. I appreciate your support. 

Straight-laced hobgoblins.

             I’ve been tying my own shoes for about 70 years, give or take.  In that time, I’ve always preferred to include a double knot following the basic bow for added security.  When my son was a little boy, he called this extra precaution a “daddy knot”.  I’d do the honors, since it took a while for him to master it. 

In all that time untying my laces, I’ve pulled a loose end, which released the whole knot, quickly and simply.  Though it often didn’t, instead, tightening the knot further.  This led me to use fingernails and grit to complete the task, in a much more laborious operation.  I frequently wondered why sometimes the free lace untied the knot, and sometimes it didn’t.  I began to believe that I must have been tying the laces in different ways at different times, and in the back of my mind, promised myself to delve more deeply into this mystery when I had a ridiculous amount of spare time.

Then the other day, on my 75^th birthday, I pulled at one of the loose ends, which tightened the knot, then chose to pull the other one, which released it.  I thought, huh.  Is that the answer?  I realized I’ve tied my laces exactly the same way since early childhood.  The difference is that one end works great at freeing the knot when you pull it, and the other works at cross purposes.  It only took most of my years on earth to figure this out.  Discounting a few occasions when I went barefoot or wore flip flops, or loafers, I’ve probably had the opportunity to discover this simple truth about 24 thousand times (rough estimate by a non-mathematician.)

This was sobering.  I wondered what other solutions to common problems have been lurking there, staring me in the face for my entire life.  What else did I miss? 

I’ve written a lot of stuff since I learned how to do it.  I feel in some ways, I’ve gotten better at it, and in other ways, continue to fall short.  I’ve read masterful writers and think, how do they do it?  What do they know that I don’t?  Do I need to learn how to pull the right shoelace instead of the wrong one I’ve been pulling for my entire life?

I like to study brain science, because who doesn’t?  One of the things I’ve learned is that the brain prefers to follow pathways that it’s already established when assembling a thought or initiating a behavior.  This is because the brain consumes a disproportionate percentage of the resources we require to exist, so it’s always looking for more efficient ways to accomplish day-to-day responsibilities. Carving out new routes is harder than trekking along familiar highways, thus more energy conserving.  They call it habituation, and there’s no shame in it.  It’s just how we’re wired.

When you’re 75 years old, simple activities take on greater significance, since there are fewer important enterprises to focus on.  As a good German/Anglo-Saxon, I strive to make each of these more efficient, or less onerous, or more engaging, depending on the task.  Nobody but me cares about this, and neither should they. 

One of my favorite books from my early reading years was John Barth’s The Floating Opera.  He published it when he was in his early twenties, remarkable enough.  One of the protagonist’s practices was to intentionally make or break a habit as a matter of regular pratice.  This is the sort of wisdom that should be reserved for people far older than 20-something Barth.  He proposed that we should stop every once in a while and ask ourselves if we’re thinking something or doing something because it’s a good idea, or because our neural pathways are forcing us into lazy mental processing.

             Keeping an open mind is a whole lot harder than it sounds.  It’s almost impossible, no matter how much we revere the disposition.  Aside from the tyranny of our brain’s energy conservation there are social pressures to conform to certain established norms.  We like keeping the goodwill of our friends and family, so adventurous deviations, just for the hell of it, have their costs.

Family members in particular are threatened by sudden changes in course.  Their first thought is, “Uh-oh, Dad is getting wifty.”  But unless these loved ones are also your editors, changing up your approach to writing shouldn’t fire up any alarms.  Your family hasn’t paid enough attention along the way to notice anyway.  You’re just the granddad, or grandmother, huddled over the keyboard in your little corner of the house like you always do.

Following John Barth’s advice, I’ve been dabbling in habit making and breaking.  One of the most salubrious outcomes is realizing that some habits are very valuable and hard won.  You get a chance to recommit to certain things, because you’ve given them a fair appraisal.  You feel more secure in certain beliefs after they’ve been stress-tested and found to be worthy. 

You begin to realize that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, but so is a promiscuous sampling of all the less beneficial options available. 

 

Spam and Scam • part 2

Last time, we shared real life scam stories. In the interem, an acquaintance was conned out of $38,000 as part of a marriage scam. Fortunately, once he discovered his mistake, he acted quickly and was able to recover all but $2000. He was lucky.

This month, I’ll offer basic suggestions to protect yourself.

Red Flags

• Unsolicited contact (call, text, email, or social media) demanding action right now.
• Unwarranted sense of urgency: Your bank won’t collapse. Super amazing investment deals can wait. The Nigerian prince is dead or he isn't. The IRS doesn’t keep local police on speed-dial. They also don’t phone you at home.
• Pressure to pay with untraceable methods: wire transfers, gift cards, payment apps, or that dark mystery of cryptocurrency.
• Requests for personal or financial information.
• Requests for you to help catch a bank swindler.
• Offers that sound too good to be true.
• Stories that tug hard at your emotions.
• Poor grammar in ‘official’ messages.
• Discouragement toward verifying their story with a trusted source.
• URL links that may or may not look slightly off. For example,
• YoürBank.com instead of YourBank.com or
• YourBankHelp.com instead of YourBank.com.
• Be aware that emails and web pages may display a web site name with a clickable link that hides a sinister URL within the HTML. In other words, text on the web page may display YourBank.com, while the hidden web address might be www.NastyScams.com.

Practical Protection

• Pause and verify. If someone claims to be calling from your bank or the government, hang up and call back using the number on your bank statement or official web site, never one scammers provide.
• Think before you click. Hover over links to check the real address. Better yet, type in your bank’s address. Don’t trust conveniently provided URLs.
• Block and filter. Use your phone’s built-in tools to enable spam-text filtering and silence unknown callers.
• Register with the national Do Not Call list. It’s imperfect, but it helps.
• Secure your accounts. Use strong, unique passwords and monitor statements weekly.
• Better yet, use lengthy passphrases. For example: ‘Judges12:5-6SayNowShibboleth’ is much, much stronger than Shibboleth42k (or Sibboleth).
• Do not provide real answers to so-called security questions. I may be the only consultant who argues against security questions, but I’m convinced it’s critical. Never ever select your favorite color question. Lie to protect yourself. Make up a nonsense alternative:
• Favorite pet name? “Forget it, buddy.”
• Your first car? “Forget it, buddy.”
• Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb? “Forget it, buddy.”
• Most experts recommend using multi-factor authentication everywhere possible. I confess reluctance, having witnessed users losing access because of a forgotten passphrase. Nevertheless, pros urge using 2FA until something better comes along. You decide.
• Never urgently send money to ‘help’ a ‘family member’ without independent confirmation. Call them on a known number first. For example:
• You receive a call from a Mexican jail claiming your grandchild is locked up but needs bail money. That can seem funny when your young relative is safely sitting on the sofa beside you, but it’s not funny in the middle of night when the caller sounds and acts exactly like your young relative and you have no idea where they are.
• Consider creating a family ‘safe word’ for emergencies.
• Do not download attachments from unknown sources.
• Be very cautious before downloading programs outside your app store.
• Help protect your family, especially trusting older relatives who are frequent targets.
• Don’t be concerned you'll hurt suspect callers’ feelings. They’ll survive. Scammers have screamed and cursed me. I survived.
• Know that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issues monthly advisories and alerts.

What to Do If You Suspect a Scam

• Act fast, but don’t be stampeded into recklessness before you can verify a caller’s story.
• Contact your bank or credit-card issuer immediately to freeze or reverse transactions.
• Report incidents at ReportFraud.ftc.gov . The FTC uses reports to track patterns and pursue criminals.
• If you shared personal data, place a fraud alert with credit bureaus and monitor your credit report.
• For tech-support or investment scams, additional help is available through the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (www.IC3.gov).

Scammers count on fear, greed, kindness, and time crunches to cloud judgment. They operate by script, intent of fooling a profitable percentage of ‘suckers’. Don’t be a sucker. Slowing down, asking questions, and trusting instincts breaks their playbook. Every report you file helps shut down operations and protects others. Stay vigilant, talk openly about scams with friends and family, and remember: legitimate organizations will never rush you into sending money or sharing sensitive information.

For more resources, visit consumer.ftc.gov or consumer.gov. Awareness is the best defense. Spread the word and stay safe.

April Stories

First, sincere congratulations to all the 2026 Derringer Award winners, especially to Adam Meyer, Alan Orloff, and Michael Bracken--and special congrats to Golden Derringer recipient David Dean. I'm also thrilled that Dave Zeltserman has won the Edgar for Best Short Story. Well done and well deserved, my friends!

Now, to less important matters . . .

I'm a couple of days past April, here, but this is a quick look at the stories I published last month. And I should begin by saying, yes, these are mystery/crime stories even though I mentioned a few weeks ago that I've started producing stories in other genres lately. I'm hoping that in several months some of the science fiction/fantasy stories I've been writing since then will pop up someplace. We'll see. 

Anyhow, here are my three stories that popped up in April.

"Creativity," published on April 3 at Curated by Costuic, a market I discovered via one of my friends on the Short Mystery Fiction Society list. This 1100-word story consists almost entirely of dialogue between two characters, both of them businesswomen who meet on a flight from Lost Angeles to Dallas. As I've said before at this blog, stories that are heavy on dialogue are always among the easiest and the most fun for me to write, and I remember this one coming together pretty fast. It was published many years ago and was lucky enough to be a Pushcart Prize nominee. If anyone feels the urge to read a quick little crime story, it's posted here. Many thanks once again to editor Nikita Costuic.

Speaking of SMFS, the second one of my April stories was "On the Road with Mary Jo," published April 7 in the anthology Hot Shots: Celebrating Thirty Years of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. For those of you who don't already know, this anthology features 28 stories that won the Derringer Award--one story for each year between 1998 and 2025--and editor Josh Pachter did a great job of putting it together. My story in the book was a winner for Best Short Story in 2020, and had previously appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine's Jan/Feb 2019 issue. Like "Creativity," this story is mostly dialogue but is quite a bit longer, at 2700 words. As I said this past Thursday night in the Zoom meeting about the anthology, I was surprised when "On the Road with Mary Jo" was accepted at EQMM because it's mainly humor, and therefore different from any of my other EQ stories. Quick summary: It's a weird story about two nitwits who carjack a self-driving vehicle and use it as a getaway car in a bank heist. Yes, I said it was weird . . .

The last of these three stories was "Lewis and Clark," first published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine's May 2012 issue and reprinted on April 16 in The Ranger's Almanac, Vol 1. As the publication's title suggests, this market wants forest/park-based stories; mine was a 2200-word tale of two young Boy Scouts who get lost on a hike in the woods and stumble upon a couple of bank robbers on the run. It's more a YA adventure story than anything else, and marks one of those times when a previously published story that's sitting around doing nothing happened to exactly fit the submission guidelines of a new (to me, at least) publication. Before I forget, I owe a big thank-you to Ranger's Almanac editors Andrew Akers and Adam Geer. Check this market out here.

I think the only unusual thing about these April stories is that none of them were in publications that I'd been in before (one, of course, was a one-time anniversary anthology) and that two out of the three were sold to paying markets I didn't even know about until fairly recently. The editors of both of those were great, and were prompt in their responses to my submissions. "Creativity" wa submitted to Curated by Costuic on 11/4/25 and accepted later that same day, and "Lewis and Clark" was submitted to The Ranger's Almanac on 1/14/26 and accepted on 1/18/26. (These were breaths of fresh air in a world where we writers often wait for many months to hear back from a submission.) 

So, here are my questions for the week, to any fellow short-fiction writers out there. Are you, in answer to our recent downturn in the number of available mystery markets, finding new places to send your work? Where are you looking, in order to do that? The Internet? The SMFS market list? (You can find it under "files" at the SMFS forum site.) Are you sending any stories to existing markets that you haven't tried in a while? Are you continuing to submit to those who have regularly published you in the past? Do any of you have, as I do, submissions queued up at those markets? Are any of them already accepted and waiting to be published? Are you, like me, writing and submitting some non-mystery or cross-genre stories, and getting any relief from that corner? Please update me in the comments. 

And then get back to writing.

See you in two weeks.

Boo Hoo, Tee Hee, She Chortled

 

As a writing teacher, I spend an inordinate amount of time urging other writers to eschew clichés. This is more easily said than done (see what I did there?) as sometimes a cliché expresses one's thoughts perfectly. Nonetheless, I'm ruthless with my students, who are mostly published writers - all talented - and can take it. No nights as black as pitch, no thinking outside the box, no being sly as a fox or brave as a lion. And for the love of God, no smiles that light up a room.

So it was with some chagrin that I found myself recently "laughing through my tears."

Yep. This is an action I've read in a thousand sophomoric short stories and novels, and even in a few poems, yet one I didn't even know could actually be done. If you keep track of happenings in the mystery world, you're no doubt aware that Down&Out Books closed recently, and my newly-released collection of stories, It's Not Even Past, died along with them, just when the reviews (and orders) were starting to roll in. Now, I've published before, but this is truly the book of my heart. Most of the stories were originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and the main character, Lori Yarborough, is a librarian-on-the-run in Federal WITSEC. Lori is a mostly-better version of myself - like me, sort of, but smarter, braver, stronger, better-educated, and more resilient. She's shorter and skinnier than I am, though, and a good deal younger. In fact, the version of her that lives in my head looks an awful lot like my daughter.

There's a picture of said daughter, taken by the talented Robert Tate, in which she's striding down Mulholland Boulevard in an evening gown, strong, powerful, and stern. I call that picture "Don't Tell Me to Smile," and I keep it pinned over my desk to remind me of the tenacity and potency at my character's core.

Lori Yarborough would never laugh through her tears. In fact, she brags in a couple of stories that she never cries at all. But I do, and what drove me to enact that oxymoronic stock phrase was receiving yet another order for my DOA book. When the publisher closed, I'd hastily ordered a couple of boxes of resale copies, but more fans than expected had tracked me down to order. I was saving one copy for the coffee table and one for my grandson - and that was it. So there I was, laughing ruefully but snuffling back tears, too, as I checked the author's copy carton in my closet (still empty), thinking what a fool I'd been to order so few, to choose the wrong publisher, hell, to write a book at all.

(As it turns out, a white knight publisher rushed in - yes, inspired by one of those author's copies I sent out - and It's Not Even Past will be released anew later this year, along with a volume of short stories not from the librarian-on-the-run series. My cup runneth over! But more on that when I can share all the details.)

Meanwhile, Lori's life post-collection continues. In Traveller from an Antique Land, published in EQ in May/June 2025, she hit rock bottom, living in a tent on the streets of Los Angeles. In When Bright Angels Beckon, coming in the September/October issue, she's on her feet and back to amateur sleuthing. (Cliché count: two in this paragraph, two in the graph above. I think I owe my students a mea culpa.)

Writing a returning, evolving character is tough - as plenty of folks here on SleuthSayers can attest. There are lots of details to keep track of, of course, but there's also the simple recurring question where do we go next? I gain inspiration from the world around me, particularly from photographs.

Here's a photo I found helpful in writing about Lori's days on the street. The image of makeshift shelters over the 405 in California - a freeway that runs by Disneyland and Hollywood along the sparkling Pacific Ocean, through BelAir and into the opulent valley - while small, tragic lives play out unseen above, is particularly evocative. But there are real meat-and-potato details in the photo, too. That blue tarp - who hasn't seen them on roofs and hillsides after a heavy rain? The piles of trash heaped around something that may be the form of a sleeping person, and there, heartbreakingly, a bag of food clipped out of reach of rats, as if the unhoused were camping in the Angeles National Forest guarding their food from bears.  

I'm not alone in looking to visual images for inspiration. Photographer Horace Bristol's collaboration with Steinbeck inspired the immortal Grapes of Wrath. (Though many associate that book with Dorothea Lange's iconic photo Migrant Mother, there's not actually a linear connection between Steinbeck and Lange.)

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje was inspired by a rare photo of jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden and his band.

The epigraph to Clarence Major's gorgeous poem, Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving, reads "based on an old photograph bought in a shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999." Who would not be transported by the poet's lines, "You remember your own meadow/…your grandmother’s church-folk/ gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness."

In my series, Lori's friends Tony and Marta Morales have three kids, the youngest of whom is Camilla, named after one of Lori's alter egos. In some of the stories, the Morales family barely surfaces, while in others they play an integral role. But it's been years since I was part of a big, loud, active family, and I need my work to be up to date. I don't want to show the oldest boy bragging about his razor scooter, only to find dirt bikes are the current thing. Do people still cook out on tripod Weber grills? Are bougie toddlers wearing spaceships this year, or jungle animals, or clowns, or dinosaurs? Google can tell you a lot, sure, but to see how people really live, go onto facebook or instagram and start scrolling. Like many parents and grandparents, I don't post pictures of children or teens online. There are too many freaks out there, manipulating photos with AI. But plenty of people do post pics of little Shiloh learning to ride a bike, of Jaden's birthday party and Olivia's sixth-grade graduation, and those photos will give you a wealth of detail to work with.

You'll find that razors are still popular (along with dirt bikes, offroad bikes, and skateboards). Yes, people still burn burgers on Weber grills, and while spaceships and jungle animals are perennially popular, dinosaurs are really back - and for girls, as well as boys. But you're not going to find much by way of clowns in your local Carter's shop. Cool Millennial and Gen Z couples are tearing out carpeting, throwing down hardwood, and painting the interiors of their homes muddy browns and greys and mauvish-pinks. For the outsides, "Millennial charcoal" is still a thing, but white, grey, and pale blue are coming back strong.

You can also get story ideas from those pictures of anonymous strangers - remember the photo of little Olivia's sixth-grade graduation noted above? Perfumes of Arabia, the first story in It's Not Even Past, was inspired by just such a photo. In a shot posted on Insta by a proud mom, Olivia is beaming, her dad's arm around her on one side, Mom beside her on the other. But who's that off to the side? Could it be Olivia's younger sister, looking up at her with narrowed eyes that seem more envious than admiring?

And to see where that went, you'll have to grab a copy of the book and read the story. I'll keep you posted about our upcoming pub date.

And yes, "I'll keep you posted" is absolutely a cliché.

You Can Take the Kid Out of Middle School...

Eve Fisher

I was driving over to one of South Dakota's state parks last week, and I spotted a blue car with the following South Dakota licence plate:

FCK YOU

I instantly thought: Well, they seem nice.

No I didn't. Instead, I thought about going to the local Walmart to buy a paintball gun and, when I saw that car again, drive up and spray it heavily. Deeply satisfying.

But I didn't.

It's all so middle school, and I've already been there. The days of 12-13 year olds going on 18 (we thought). Pimply, snarly, sarcastic, selfish little know-nothings trying desperately to learn only the bad stuff in order to grow up fast, hard, tough... Ready to throw a riot or a fit, doing anything (especially insulting the teacher - if you could get a rise out of the teacher, that just made everyone's day) - to just get attention. And betraying each other for a laugh, a sneer or just more attention. Periodically someone would burst out in tears and storm out of the room, screaming at everyone. Generally after insulting the total crap out of someone who turned around and handed it right back to them (which of course was NOT the idea).

I remember we were reading "Lord of the Flies", and almost none of us were horrified at the behavior in it. The teacher asked what would have been different if it had been all girls instead of all boys? A lot said, oh, it would have been really different, girls don't do that kind of stuff. I disagreed and said so: that it would have been pretty much the same, and in some ways worse. Mean girls start young and stay late. 

Basically, the middle school motto is FCK OFF and/or this Famous Coat Message:

But they did care, they do care, and what they really wanted / want was to piss everyone off around them and / or get them in trouble. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate all of you - WHY IS EVERYBODY MAD AT ME???"  

Or, as Thornton Wilder put it in "The Skin of Our Teeth":

HENRY: What did they ever care about me? 

SABINA: There's that old whine again. Always thinking you're not loved enough, that nobody loves you. Well, start being lovable and we'll love you. 

HENRY: [Outraged.] I don't want anybody to love me. I want everybody to hate me! 

Sabina: Yes, you've decided it's second best...

The depressing part is so many people are still there.  

For example, How dare you do something I don't want you to do?

Sergeant Dusten Mullen showed up at the ICE protest run by Hamilton High School students masked and fully armed with an exposed handgun in a holster and two extra handgun magazines. (my emphasis added) Mullen said, "My plan is legitimately to just let them all assault me and you guys arrest them all, and I’ll keep it on film. I also have other people filming from a distance." According to police, Mullen also said that more protesters in support of him were on the way, some armed with rifles (my note - this apparently wasn't true), going on to say his goal was to "get all these kids in jail if they want to break the law." (LINK)

Ahem:  (1) It's not against the law to protest peacefully - it's one of our First Amendment rights.  and  (2) In these times of endless school shootings there's nothing legitimate about an unknown (remember, Mullen didn't announce who he was) armed masked man at a school doing his best to incite violence.

Some other interesting ways to twist real events to one's own reality:

"How dare you do what we tell you to do, you warlike heathens?"

Wounded Knee Massacre:

Back in the 1890s, the US Army / Government was convinced that the Ghost Dance spreading among the Lakota would destroy the U.S. government’s decades-long effort to “civilize” the Lakota, i.e., get them settled on the reservations (the size of which kept getting smaller every day), and take up farming like good civilized people. Things reached a head on December 29, 1890, after a group of 350 Lakota had been called to the Pine Ridge Agency and went, as ordered, with a detachment of the 7th Cavalry to a camp on Wounded Knee creek. At daybreak, the troops demanded all the guns (which BTW, were the Lakota's only way to hunt food, since their rations had been cut to the bone). There are differing reports of what happened next - other than the fact that it was a massacre, and the soldiers lost all control: nearly 300 of the original 350 - men, women, children and babies - were killed or wounded, with a blizzard preventing immediate search following the massacre.

One of The Mass Graves of Wounded Knee

"If you had just obeyed the orders you never got, you wouldn't have been killed"

The Amritsar Massacre:

This one happened when Asian Indians were mobilizing the Indian Independence Movement. Naturally, the British Raj was totally opposed to it, and passed the "Rowlatt Acts", which gave power to the police to arrest any Indian person on the basis of mere suspicion. And keep them arrested. 

On April 13, 1919, a large Asian Indian crowd gathered in the beautiful garden of Jallianwala Bagh, which unfortunately had only one exit. The local commander of Indian Army forces, Brigadier General Dyer had ordered that no Indian assemblies were allowed, but had only told his troops. Without warning, Dyer ordered his troops to block the exit and shoot toward the densest sections of the crowd. They shot for approximately ten minutes. Unarmed civilians, including men, women, elderly people and children were killed. A cease-fire was ordered after the troops fired about one third of their ammunition. He stated later that the purpose of this action "was not to disperse the meeting but to punish the Indians for disobedience." There's nothing like killing them all to get them to obey, is there?

"How dare you not accept the deal I'm offering you, no matter what it says?"

The Destruction of the Summer Palace:

At the end of the Second Opium War, on October 18, 1860, Lord Elgin ordered the destruction as a "solemn act of retribution" to target the Qing Emperor personally and force the signing of the Treaty of Beijing. British and French forces burned the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) and destroyed the gardens, the treasures, everything. Total destruction.  It worked, but at the cost of something that was, according to Stuart McGee, then chaplain to the British forces, "arguably the greatest concentration of historic treasures in the world, dating and representing a full 5,000 years of an ancient civilization". Charles "Chinese" Gordon, who was no stranger to slaughter in China (he fought for the Emperor / Empress in the Taiping Rebellion), wrote "You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one's heart sore to burn them; in fact, these places were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army."

BTW, the treaty literally gave foreign ambassadors have immunity for any and all actions and legalized the British sale of formerly illegal opium in China.  Most opium sellers instantly became foreign ambassadors.  And a few other things...

And a couple of more modern examples:

The Godfather

Recently:

"Some of the previous [Iranian] leaders are now no longer on planet Earth because they lied to the United States and they strung us along in negotiations, and that was unacceptable to the president, which is why many of the previous leaders were killed."  Karoline Leavitt, March 30, 2026.

BTW, classic middle school, all the way:   

The spat between the President and the Pope because Pope Leo spoke out in favor of peace.  Actually, that's the pope's job - back during the Gulf War, Pope John Paul II spoke against it, repeatedly, to President Bush, et al.  "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God."  (Matthew 5:9)  

Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth praying at the Pentagon:

"They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17.  'The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.'"  (Actually, it's from Pulp Fiction.)  (Link)

The original version:  

NOTE: There's nothing more middle school than trying to out-tough Samuel L. Jackson.

Oh, and just last week, Chicago police had to investigate because there was a bomb threat made against the Pope's brother.  We really are in middle school, and all the nosepickers are out.  (Link)

Social media right now is just a stew of on insults, invective, lies, damn lies, statistics, and bullshit – specifically in order to get another party to react and punch back. Preferably harder. Threats are rampant.  And the trouble with threats is that sooner or later the threatener must either fulfill it or back down, and either way someone (at least metaphorically) is going to end up stuck to the flagpole with a frozen tongue thanks to a triple-dog-dare.  That's middle school.

Sigh...

Look, what I want is a return to a country, a world of adults, who actually know things, like history, science, mathematics, literature, the arts, and who have probity:  integrity, honesty, moral uprightness, goodness, virtue.  

Who really do want and work for peace, human rights, liberty and justice for all. Not profit for some.

Who really do know how fragile this planet is, and even more, how fragile we are on this, our only home.

Image taken by Atemis II Commander Reid Wiseman 

from the Orion spacecraft's window