The Tyrant Who Sold the Philosopher Plato Into Slavery

A few years back I wrote a series of brief biographical sketches collected in a volume entitled The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds from Ancinet Sumer to the Enlightenment. Now out of print (it is, in fact, the only one of my books not still in print), It remains one of my favorites from among my own work. This week I've decided to share the story from this book, of how an early poet–admittedly an incredibly powerful one–dealt with harsh criticism of his work.

Plato: you expect this guy to be fun at parties?

So here he is, Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse!

When Philosophers and Tyrants Don’t Mix (ca. 432–367 B.C.) 

[Dionysius], taking offence at something [Plato] said to him . . . ordered him to be brought into the common market-place, and there sold as a slave for five minas: but the philosophers (who consulted together on the matter) afterwards redeemed him, and sent him back to Greece, with this friendly advice. . . . That a philosopher should very rarely converse with tyrants.

—Diodorus Siculus, ancient Sicilian Greek geographer and historian 

If ever there was a piece of work who could prove single-handedly that one man holding all the levers of power is usually a lousy idea, it was that real piece of work, Dionysius I, tyrant of the Greek city-state of Syracuse in Sicily. Originally a government clerk, Dionysius rose through the ranks to ultimate power based on his ability as a political, diplomatic, and military strategist. To balance this out, he was also arbitrary, capricious, cruel, and (perhaps worst of all) harbored literary pretensions. 

Bear in mind that Dionysius was a tyrant in the ancient sense of the word (Note: in the ancient Greek world the word 'tyrant' didn't necessarily carry the negative connotation it does today. It simply referred to someone who control of a city by military force and used his troops to enforce his rule.). As such he was a military man, and particularly fearsome in battle. He’d lost an eye early in life, and as a result presented a ferocious image that struck terror in the hearts of his enemies. That terror was justified, as even in victory he could be a particularly ruthless bastard: In 386 B.C., Dionysius led his mercenary army in an attack on the Greek city of Rhegium (now Reggio, in southern Italy). After a protracted and bloody siege, the tyrant, who fancied himself a cultured and enlightened man, sold the entire population of the city into slavery. 

So this was the fearsome antagonist, ruthless conqueror and all-around rough guy, who also fancied himself both a poet and a philosopher, boasting “far more of his poems than of his successes in war,” according to Diodorus. Poetry being a big deal in the ancient world, and Dionysius being the big man on campus in Syracuse, he surrounded himself with other literary and intellectual types, including Plato, who, as described in the quote opening this chapter, got sold as a slave in the public market for speaking his mind in the presence of the philosopher-tyrant. 

In another example of why it’s a bad idea for a creative type to be bluntly open and honest with a benefactor possessing no discernable sense of humor, Dionysius asked the poet Philoxenus what he thought of Dionysius’s poetry. When Philoxenus answered candidly, Dionysius had him dragged off to work in the quarries. 

Dionysius regretted the action once he’d sobered up, freed Philoxenus the next day, then invited him to dinner again. The wine flowed (again) and Dionysius asked (again) what Philoxenus thought of his poetry. In response, Philoxenus told Dionysius’s servants to drag him off to the quarries. This time the tyrant laughed. 

From then on, and for the remainder of his time at Dionysius’s court, Philoxenus promised that he would give truthful criticism of the tyrant’s work while also never again offending him. He accomplished this by basically inventing the double entendre. Dionysius’s poetry, according to Diodorus, was “wretched,” and he had a taste for tragedy, so when Dionysius would declaim a poem with a sad subject, then ask Philoxenus what he thought about it, the poet would reply, “Pitiful!” 

Dionysius is reputed to have either been murdered by his doctors to make way for his son to succeed him or to have died of alcohol poisoning from having drunk too much celebrating a win by some of his poetry at a festival in Greece. Either way, neither Dionysius, nor his poetry, proved "deathless."

And Philoxenus? He eventually left Syracuse and went on to write his most famous and successful poem, a comic piece called Cyclops, about the ridiculous passion of the mythical one-eyed monster for a beautiful goddess. Most people assumed that he was making fun of his one-eyed former benefactor. 

If Dionysius wrote a poem about his feelings on the matter, it hasn’t survived.

Thoughts on Writing & Memory

Dear Fellow Sleuthsayers- It’s the beginning of another school at the day gig, and due to some things going on with my family, I’ve been thinking a lot about both memory and how one writes about it. Reposting this piece from 2023, and will follow up next time in the rotation I’ll expand on these thoughts.

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Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.    

   – Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Orator

My brother-in-law has a saying. "With family, it is best to have a short memory."

I was thinking about this quote during a recent conversation I had with my wife. She showed a photo of something and I asked her what it was. She said to me, "I showed you this thing just the other day.

I responded with an intelligent, "You did?"

And she said, "Yes, and you said at the time, 'Looks exactly like I pictured it.'”

I have no memory of this conversation. Or had no memory of it, until my wife reminded me of what I said.  And I think this is an interesting illustration of how tricky human memory can be.

And what’s even trickier is trying to write human memory in all of its forms: straight remembering; having some thing tickle at the back of your skull, but you can’t quite put your finger on it; not remembering at all, etc.

Luckily we're not talking about THIS kind of "Memory."

One of the things that I have always prided myself on throughout my life, is my memory. Now deep in the midst of my late 50s, I find certain names dates, etc., elude me and I have to reach for them. 

I have also noticed, as illustrated in the instance related above, that my mind is pretty efficient about discarding memory that is trivial or completely unimportant to my long-term goals, to my long-term interests, or to anything other than being in the moment. 

And yet other such memories, the feeling of hiking the Virgin River in Zion National Park, for example, that could be a cursory memory that some people wouldn’t remember. And yet I do, and I don’t just remember the hiking. I also remember the sun filtering off the canyon walls, the smell of the river, as I waded through it, the sound of people murmuring to each other as they hiked up the river, and so on and so forth.

Like I said, memory is a tricky thing. 

And it's even more dicey to effectively to write about it. 

Some examples that spring to mind (Warning: there are a few SPOILERS looming ahead)

In his novel Inferno Dan Brown has his protagonist Robert Langdon awaken in an Italian hospital with no memory of the past several days, and he spends the lion's share of of the rest of the book trying to put together some fragmented images and some sentence fragments, especially the repeated phrase “very sorry,” repeated over and over again. Turns out he was thinking of the Italian artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari.

For my money, Brown draws this out quite a bit longer than necessary, and this eventual "revelation" is expected to carry far too much of the load as a plot transition point. This is no criticism of Dan Brown. Far from it. I'll be the first to say that his experiment with the vagaries of a fragmented memory and their collective effect on the narrative, especially when the point-of-view character is the one struggling with their memory, is one worth taking. And it's definitely a larger risk than I have taken in my own fiction writing.

This trope has been around for a while. Memory loss has frequently been used as a crutch tossed into any number of formulaic novels/films/TV shows over the years, with mixed results. Thinking especially of some good examples (The Prisoner, starring the inimitable Patrick McGoohan, comes to mind) and some hokey ones (Pretty much anything produced by 60s/70s Hollywood TV heavyweight Quinn Martin, with the exception of The Fugitive and The Streets of San Francisco).

And there are , of course, many other relatively recent novels/films that have played around with sketchy memory: not least the Guy Pearce vehicle Memento, which turns on the point of view character having brain damage that has affected his ability to process short-term memory into long-term memory, and Dennis Lehane's terrific novel (and the Martin Scorsese-helmed film of the same name adapted from it) Shutter Island–a master class in the use of an unreliable narrator.

Other successful novels (and films adapted from them) in the unreliable narrator vein include such bestsellers as The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window, neither of which I have read, and both of which I am given to understand make use of questionable memory on the part of the main character (at least in part alcohol-induced). 

There have been so many films of this variety, that the whole subgenre even has its own excellent parody: the 2022 Netflix miniseries The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. It's worth your time. Kristen Bell alone as the main character is worth the price of admission.

For me, though, no one has ever done the "shattered memory holding back the main character, who must race against time to put the pieces together" thing quite so well as thriller master Robert Ludlum.

I'm talking, of course, about Ludlum's masterwork, The Bourne Identity. And yes, I am well aware that Ludlum's novel has long since been adapted into a rightly well-regarded series of thriller films starring Matt Damon and Brian Cox. If you haven't seen these films, I urge you to do so. They are incredibly well-done.

And yet, if you haven't read the source material, Ludlum's original novel...even if you have seen the movies based on it, I strongly urge you to give the book a chance. There are so many differences between book and movies, and I don't want to spoil them, so I'll just close with a phrase that Ludlum used (to vastly greater effect) as his own earlier version of Brown's "very sorry":

"Cain is for Carlos, and Delta is for Cain."

How about you? Favorite works of fiction that play around with memory? Challenges you have faced trying to play around with memory in your own work? Let us hear from you in the comments section!

See you in two weeks!

The Dog Days of Summer

(Locked in the middle of another July heatwave, so this repost from LAST July seems really timely. See you in two weeks!)

Happy Mid-July! Hot enough for ya?

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

The cloven-hooved, Inca-pack-animal-kind.

Not the robe-sporting, enlightenment-spewing kind.

This kind.

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

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

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

Ever.

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

Because it was the ‘70s?

Nah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pet Peeves: 2025 Writing Edition

Interesting, title, right? Perhaps a little provocative?

Let’s be clear. I’m talking about writing pet peeves.

I mean, come on. This is a blog ostensibly about writing. And while many of my fellow SleuthSayers and yours truly frequently indulge our impulses to discuss other interests, There’s plenty going on in the writing world right now that merits commentary.

In light of this, I offer below a few of my own beefs about current trends in writing, As well as some pithy observations from other writers among my circle of friends. Where the comment is my own, I have left it unattributed. Other contributors are noted alongside their entries.

With that said, let us begin.

GROUND/FLOOR

I’ve noticed lately that a lot of writers (Many of them, Indie) have a tendency to conflate the words “ground” and “floor”.

For example:

“The glass candelabra dropped from her hand, crashing into a hundred pieces when it hit the ground.” 

This when the character is in a second story bedroom. Not outside, and not even in a basement with a dirt floor!

I have seen this literally dozens of times in books I’ve read over the past year. What’s more, said conflation seems to go only one way. And that is using the word “ground” when the word “floor” is appropriate.

I have yet to see something along the lines of: “Milton stood in the middle of the road, watching the wagon retreat into the distance. And when it had gone from sight, he fell to his knees on the dusty floor.”

Weird, huh?

An actual example of something actually being thrown on the actual ground.

NOT JUST THE TITLE OF A TERRIFIC PETER GABRIEL ALBUM

I’m referring, of course, to the word “so.”

Specifically, at the head of a sentence, and solely used in dialogue.

For example: “So I heard you got cancer.”

I suppose seeing something like this once or twice over the course of 80-90k words is one thing. But here’s the thing about “dialogue leading so”: once it crops up one place, pretty soon you’re seeing it as dialogue tag signaling a transition in every conversation in said book. I have seen this time and again. And that is just lazy writing. Why not just go with: “I heard you got cancer.”?

AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON (OVER)USING A.I.

No question A.I. can come in handy when a writer needs a quick answer to a research question in the middle of a scene. We’ve all been there. It’s like a Google search on steroids.

But (and again, I’m seeing this mostly with Indie writers) I have begun to see bloated passages where paragraphs tend to run together, often repeating the exposition of a certain set of facts over and over, as if to show the importance of said facts, and the intensity of the revelation of their existence by sheer repetition.

Mess around with any form of A.I. long enough and this pattern can seem awfully familiar. And then there’s stuff like this:

Readers Annoyed When Fantasy Novel Accidentally Leaves AI Prompt in Published Version, Showing Request to Copy Another Writer’s Style.

And apparently there are plenty of other examples of this sort of thing.

And when caught out, the authors in question seem to be leaning hard on the notion that what tripped them up and revealed their use of generative AI constituted an “editing mistake.”

Uh-huh.

Laurie Rockenbeck says:

If I see “long moment” I want to scream. (Mainly because a best selling author uses it ten times in every novel….)

David Schlosser (who writes as “dbschlosser”) says:

Hyphenation proliferation. The stupidest example I see everywhere now is 70-percent.

Or seven-out-of-ten.

It's like engineers using Random Capital Letters to tell you How Important This Is.

I (also) have an opinion about "as" from editing non-native English speakers' technical reports.

Because, since, as all *can* mean the same thing ... and so we should choose carefully which word to use in each instance.

Because is explicitly causal. In research on influence and persuasion, it is literally a magic word - people will do things they would not otherwise do when they hear a reason justified by "because."

"Since" and "as" both have temporal implications "because" does not have.

Use "since" to describe time elapsed SINCE something happened - not to describe why what happened since then happened.

Use "as" to describe events occurring simultaneously.

Use "because" to describe cause-and-effect relationships.

Jim Thomsen says:

I would say the growing reliance on histrionic reaction beats in thrillers. From a recently released novel: “Guilt had twisted in my entrails like a knife.”

Other examples:

“Anxiety churns along her skin.”

“Anger, pulsing anger, dripped down her body.”

“Grief hurtled toward me, crashing into me and beating inside my chest like a giant, furious animal.”

“Horror stole over me like a mist, uncurling deep within. And then a fiery knot began to burn in my stomach.”

“Agony was stamped indelibly on his body, weighted across the miserable hunch of his shoulders. He looked smaller somehow, shrunken, the way a grape shrivels into a raisin.”

I collect these.

My evergreen sarcastic retort: “That makes my heart pound like a hooker’s headboard in a highway hotel.”

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And that is about as great a last word as we’re gonna find. So I’ll leave it there. How about you? Pet peeves? Got ‘em? Share ‘em in the Comments section below!

See you in two weeks!

Morpheus is Overrated

March 9^th is my grandmother‘s birthday. It is also my sister-in-law‘s birthday.

And now, and forever more, for me, it will also be the day I got sick.

As I mentioned the last time I posted (and it’s been a few weeks), I wound up in the hospital for nearly a month. Long story short, I had an infection (as I mentioned before, it was cellulitis in my right leg below the knee), and it got into my bloodstream and then my kidneys shut down.

The pain in my leg was unlike anything I had ever felt before, and something I hope never to feel again. And as I mentioned previously, my saviors at the hospital treated my pain by doping me to the gills. Mostly with oxycodone.

Oxy. The stuff of dreams. And not just during my sleep-which is saying something, because those first couple of weeks I slept about eighteen to twenty hours a day-thanks to all of the oxy I was getting pumped into my veins, I experienced all manner of waking dreams, as well.

During this time I couldn’t help but recall the descriptions of drug-induced “trips” in all manner of literature, from classic to crime, and the analytical, always there author in me began to compare notes between what I was experiencing and what I had read.

I gotta say, if my oxy-fueled hallucinations are any indication, I must possess the id of an accountant. My hallucinations were, well, you be the judge:

1. I saw flaming writing scrolling across the ceiling tiles in my hospital room. If you’ve ever seen that scene in Cecil B. deMille’s The Ten Commandments where God carves out his commandments for Moses using heavenly fire, it sort of looked like that.

But the writing was too small for me to read. So, kinda lame.

2. Across from my bed was a wash basin with a mirror above it. Looking into it from my bed gave me an excellent view the drawn blinds on the window over my head. Oxy made this reflected set of blinds seem like the kind of big rolling door you see on loading docks. And my could even make out the blonde guy standing right to the side of the “door” and working the controls that caused it to rise and fall.

3. There were a number of nights where it seemed to me that my hospital room had morphed into the back room at a tattoo parlor, and the nurses and support staff were all tattooists who came in to check on me every half-hour or so.

Oh, and of course the mirror showed me the guy across the street, running that loading dock door up and down then, too.

So my oxy dreams were just kind of…weird and pointless.

And as soon as I could stop taking the oxy, I did.

And I don’t regret it. I don’t miss it, or the banal, beige dreams it brought me, waking or sleeping.

And I’m positive this experience will influence my fiction, going forward.

But I’ll be damned if I know how!

And that’s it for me this time! See you in two weeks!

"Worst Case Scenario: We Amputate Your Leg"

    "Worst case scenario: we amputate your leg to save your life

 — Hospital ER Surgeon, in conversation with me, March 10th, 2025

Soooooo it's been a while. Miss me? How did your March go?

To say mine was "eventful" would be a colossal understatement. I spent three weeks in the hospital battling a septic infection that had half of my legion of doctors convinced I would be dead before the end of the week.

Not that they told me.

They told my wife. Gave her the whole "Might want to get your affairs in order" speech.

Yep. March was the cruelest of months at Casa Thornton.

I didn’t know any of this (not then anyway).

Here’s what I did know:

I had cellulitis. That infection in turn got into my blood stream, giving me a case of blood poisoning, and my leg got “septic.”

That’s when my kidneys shut down.

I can also now speak with authority on what two solid weeks of having your medical team treat your intense pain with oxycodone.

I quit taking that stuff the first minute I felt able to. I don’t understand why anyone would want to risk addiction to this particular pain killer: yes it deadened my pain, but the hallucinations were so unpleasant, and it was not the sort of “high” I would think I could ever enjoy.

Lots more to share, but I still tire easily, so that’s got be it for now.

Stay tuned!

In Defense of Kindness (Or: This Time I Only WISH I Were in Hawai'i!)

 Way back in the Before Times (we're talking the tail end of 2019 here!) My wife, our son, and I took a long overdue vacation in Maui. While there I penned the blog post below, accompanied by vacation pics that had nothing whatever to do with my subject: the notion that it is absolutely fair that customer service get to rate their interactions with customers in much the same manner that customers have been empowered by the internet to do. Bear in mind this is pre-Covid and I'm pretty sure right around the time of the Dawn of the "Karen."

This post seems timely in light of so many goings-on in this country-and by extension, the world-right now. Where phrases such as "the cruelty is the point" get bandied about non-stop. Me, I'm for kindness. And this year I'm MISSING Maui, instead of visiting it-a pre-fire Maui, no less, with an intact Lahaina, and an unscorched Banyan tree. I say if you're gonna go nostalgic, why not go all in?

So please enjoy the repost below. I've got a longer, craft-related piece in the works for my next turn in the rotation! - Brian

Aloha from Maui!

Every time I've driven past the signs for Kihei in the past week, I've thought of old pal and fellow Sleuthsayer R.T. Lawton, and his better half, Kiti. (And they know why!).

As I sail toward the end of the first real vacation my family has taken in years, my thoughts have been on an amazing and amusing thing that happened to me during the final week of the school year a couple of weeks back.

One of my students (hard-working, charismatic, a real leader, just a fine young lady) informed me that her mother works for the credit union where I and my family do most of our banking. "Oh," I think to myself, "Small world."

Turns out there was more.

"My mom finally remembered where she recognized your name from," this amazing kid went on.

"From the credit union?" I said, still not quite getting it.

"Yep. She sees your name quite a bit there."

These are vacation pics and have zero to do with this post: that's the island of Kaho'olawe across the bay.

Casting back in my memory to try to recall whether I had any recent NSF fees (Hey–no judgement. Most of us have been there at one time or another, after all.), I asked, "What does your mom do at XXXX Credit Union (Not its real name)?"

"She's Quality Control for Customer Service."

This information sends my thoughts in a new direction. Have I complained about the service I've received lately? Nope. Does that mean someone's complained about me? Is that even a thing customer service folks even do?

I asked myself this last question because a few decades back, I was one of those people working in a variety of entry-level customer service jobs. It was some of the hardest and least rewarding work I've ever done. I worked in food, in hospitality, in transportation, all while working my way through college so that I could embark on a different–yet–not–all–that–different type of customer service: teaching.

Back in those days (and we're talking the early '90s here) one customer complaint could mean the end of your employment (I didn't have a union job until I started teaching, everywhere I worked was a one-counseling session and you're fired kind of place.). I know this because at least once I got fired because of a customer complaint.

Well, that and the fact that the guy who fired me (someone who really put the "ass" in "assistant manager.") was a real piece of work.

But that's another story.

These and other memories were washing over me during my conversation with that awesome student of mine. So I said: "Quality Control, huh? She fields complaints, things like that?"

"Yep," Awesome Kid (not her real name, but it might as well be) said.

"Does she like her job?"

"She does. And she likes you."

I cudgel my brain trying to recall whether I've ever met Awesome Kid's mom. Nope. I'm pretty sure I'd remember. She didn't come to conferences, and I didn't see her at Open House. So that surprises me.

"She likes me?" I ask, all intelligence and awareness, now.

"Yes. You're one of the highest-rated customers they have."

I blink at her, not comprehending. "They rate customers?"

She nods. "And the customer service reps all really love you. You get high marks all the time and you're near the top of their list."

And just like that, with this small kindness, Awesome Kid made my year.

The island of Lana'i (left) and the West Maui Mountains (right) framing a spectacular sunset

My early experiences with the downside of customer service (being the one to catch the irate call, or get someone's order wrong, or commit one of thousand small errors) have informed my interactions with the people who work in those positions ever since my own days in customer service, lo those many moons ago.

In the years since I've striven to be patient, to be polite. To be courteous and respectful, even when I'm pretty pissed off about something.

Because, nine times out of ten, it's not the fault of the person I'm talking to. They're there because they picked up the phone, took the chat request, what-have- you.

I've never forgotten what it's like to be on the other end of that call, and I hope I never do.

So it did my heart good to know that customer service reps are getting a chance to rate their interactions with clients: getting a voice in how that back-and-forth went. Because, hey, it's a hard job. And it usually doesn't pay all that well.

Plus, I gotta admit, I like that someone on the other end of that phone call notices how I try to treat them well.

After all, Couldn't we, each and every one of us, use a little more humanity in our daily interactions?

This is why I've been tipping people left, right and center (something I do religiously anyway) over the last week, and will until we head for home.

Like I said before, it's a tough job, and people don't get paid a whole lot to do it.

And that's all I've got for this go-round. I hope you're all having a wonderful and productive July.

Mahalo, and see you in two weeks!

Write Fast! Write Slow! Write Daily! Write When You Can!

 I currently exist in two distinct hells: Rewrite Hell, and End-of-Term-Grading Hell. So I thought I would repost something I wrote back in 2013 under the title: Writing Efficiency in its Myriad Forms. As a rumination on efficient writing it has aged surprisingly well. As a snapshot of life at Casa Thornton it is definitely a fly flash-frozen in amber. (occasional parenthetical updates in italics are additions/emendations intended for this repost, btw.) I hope you get something out of it either way. See you in two weeks! - B.T.

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In his excellent piece This Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Moseley gives the following advice: “The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day–every morning or every night, whatever time it is that you have. Ideally, the time you decide on is also the time when you do your best work.”

In his defense, Walter apparently has the luxury to plan out his schedule to quite a specific degree.

Along with “Write every day,” “Write fast” seems to be the mantra of this generation. “Writing fast and producing copious amounts of word product is the key to success,” so many “how to” books seem to say.

Bosh.

I’ll tell ya, I have had my share of 2,000 word-count days. Not a one of them came independent of either a hell of a lot of time spent thinking about what I wanted to write that day, or by dint of a whole lot of later tweaking, editing, or outright re-writing.

Put simply, I can write fast, or I can write well. I cannot do both.

This is not to say that such a thing isn’t possible. It is! Just not for me.

I once wrote a pair of 40,000 word books (80,000 words total) in eight weeks. Tight deadline. Unreasonable (and unprofessional, and unhelpful) development editor didn’t make it any easier.

I was an unmarried, kidless apartment dweller at the time. I had (and still have) a day gig that required a fair amount of headspace. So it was work, home to write, bed, rinse and repeat.

Talk about a miserable couple of months!

Astonishingly these two books are still in print.

We spent longer on reworking what I’d written into something passable than it took to write the initial drafts, or, for that matter, for me to have written them well in the first place. But that was a different time in my career, and in my life.

If I were to find myself in that sort of situation today, I’d have to give back the advance. Seriously. I’ve got a marriage and a house and a wonderful one (now twelve!) year-old son, all of whom require my time and attention.

More to the point, they command my time and attention. I enjoy the hell out of being married, being a father, and owning a home. I suspect the fact that I was in my mid-forties by the time I experienced any of these pleasures does nothing to lessen them.

Couple these aspects of my daily life with the fact that my day gig still requires a lot of my energy and attention, and I find myself left with the question, “How do I get anything written at all, let alone sold?”

The answer is that for I published my most recent book in 2011. That was also the year in which I collected and edited an anthology of crime fiction called West Coast Crime Wave. I got married and bought my house in 2010. My son was born in 2012.

(I've published a lot of stuff since then, glad to say!)

So there was some adjustment involved in taking on these new responsibilities, adjustment time during which my publishing slowed to a stand-still.

This is not to say that I stopped writing during this time. Far from it. I figure that during the second half of 2011 and all of 2012, I easily wrote 50,000 words on my work-in-progress historical mystery.

I just won’t be publishing any of those words. They were intended to keep my hand in it, if you will, not to be part of the final equation.

And it worked.

You heard it here first: I’m just wrapping the sale of my first short story in years. I’m also nearly 2/3 of the way through the final draft of my current WIP, a historical thriller set in antebellum Washington, D.C. By this time next year, I’ll have this and another novel wrapped, in addition to writing three more new short stories, and publishing them along with some of my previously published canon in a collection.

And I won’t do it by “writing every day” or “writing fast.” With my schedule that’s just not feasible. So I do the next best thing.

I write when I can where I can as much as I can and as often as I can. Sometimes it’s 2,000 words a day. Sometimes it’s 2,000 words a week.

(And some days it's a few hundred words on my phone!)

It takes a while longer to get my head back into the story once I’ve been away from it for a while, but I think that’s a small price to pay for making time to play with my son every day, spend quality time with my wife, and keep the house from falling down around our ears.

For example, I wrote the ending to “Paper Son,” my short story featured in Akashic Books’ Seattle Noir anthology, while sitting in Seattle Mystery Bookshop, waiting for my friend Simon Wood to finish up a signing there. What’s more, I wrote it on my Blackberry smartphone and emailed it to myself.

I’ve also been known to record story ideas while driving. My commute contributes to some terrific “alone and pondering” time.

Plus, I don’t tend to let story ideas fall by the wayside. This is especially true of short stories. I will get an idea, do some research (remember, I write historical mystery/crime fiction, after all), then begin working on it.

This has so far stood me in good stead. So far I’ve published five short stories (soon to be six), all with paying venues, out of a total of seven shorts actually completed.

In fact, the second story I sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, “Suicide Blonde,” was initially rejected. I reworked it, submitted it to the annual MWA anthology contest. They also rejected it.

But I believed in the story enough to resubmit it to Linda Landrigan AHMM, and this time she bought it. What a great feeling!

By the way, I almost never finish a short by working on it straight through. Usually the ones I’ve published have come from months or years of on and off development. Take the story I am about to sell. I first began work on it in 2007.

I guess in the end I don’t really disagree with Mr. Mosley’s excellent advice, at least in spirit. After all, while I can’t really generate new fiction every single day, I definitely do write every day (in various forms), and I believe I’m in complete agreement with the spirit of his advice, which seems to emphasize the importance of establishing a routine in order to help make you more efficient as a writer.

In that regard, I’m doing the best I can. And life is good!

(And it's even better now!)

Vegas: Well-Spring of Story Ideas

 

A room with a view-photo by the author.

So as it turns out the Most Wonderful Woman in the World is both lucky at love and at cards. And the Luckiest Man in the World– that’s me by the way– got to do a ride-along when the aforementioned Most Wonderful Woman in the World went to Vegas for a couple of days last week.

We had one heck of a time. My lady love has mad skills in the casino, and I wrote a bunch. Plus the Bellagio’s atrium is currently decorated for Christmas. If you happen to find yourself in Vegas, it would be a shame to miss it.

Longtime readers of this blog (Both of you!) will no doubt remember that l lived and worked in Vegas for a couple of years back when the world was young. It was the beginning of my public school teaching career, and I could not have asked for a better baptism of fire than teaching in one of the Clark County School District’s schools.

Because I worked with some of the best teachers in the world. Because they were generous with their time and their advice, and they were overwhelmingly effective in their example. I learned tricks of the trade that I use every day to this day.

Stuff like learning a kid‘s name. Using it. Making sure to pronounce it correctly. Letting them see you do that. It’s a great way to show you care enough to say their name right, and that means that you care about them. You build a relationship with these kids– and this is true anywhere in the world– and your work gets monumentally easier. My heroes, the Vegas teachers, taught me that.

So anyway, it’s always nice to visit Vegas, and when I go, I try to get out to places that tend to be far away from the strip (like Red Rock Canyon. Not to be missed!), and the best thing about it, is I always return home with ideas for stories. Because Vegas is full of characters. Let me give you just one example.

The Calico Hills, Red Rock Canyon-author’s photo

More shots of Red Rock- all author’s photos.

Robyn and I were headed to the airport to catch our flight home. We had eaten at an Italian place I knew of away from the Strip, so rather than cab it, we called for a Lyft. And that was how we met Mark.

Mark’s SUV make & model

Nice guy. Early 60s, so a few years older than me. Drove a sweet Mercedes SUV. Spotlessly clean. Told us all about how he was working on getting his CDL, because the money was so much better than driving for either Lyft or Uber.

Not Mark-but definitely his fleece.

Now, this was a guy whose entire appearance practically screamed “MONEY.” Manicure. $200 haircut. Expensive base layer fleece that retails starting at firm $150. So I was somewhat surprised to hear him complaining (however mildly) about money.

Then came the segue. While talking about money, Mark made an oblique reference to the recent election (full disclosure: I think Mark would have been surprised to learn that in this election I backed the accomplished brown-skinned lady with the foreign-sounding first name.). He said, “Yeah, I was tired of seeing all of the money leave the country, instead of coming into it, and felt like we needed a change.”

Bear in mind that my origin story includes being born in, raised in, and taking frequent sojourns in what the chattering class have lazily begun to refer to as “Trump Country.” I call this “lazy,” because I am well aware that aside from campaign stops and photo ops, Donnie Dollhands wouldn’t be caught dead in places that bear such a moniker.

But I’m from there. I still have friends and family there, and I have learned how to either talk with the people I care about whose opinions differ from mine, or even more importantly, how NOT to talk to them about things like politics. It is definitely a skill.

I used that skill to evade being drawn into just such a discussion with Mark. But as it turns out, he wasn’t done trying.

When I mentioned I used to work in Vegas, he asked what line of work I was in. I told him I was a history teacher and a writer. 

He immediately seized on the “teacher” part. Asked about whether I had any exposure to students categorized as “ESL” (“English as a Second Language”- an outdated term outside of Vegas. Several years back the state changed the acronym to “ELL” - “English Language Learners”, and more recently to “MLE” - “Multilingual Education,” but I wasn’t about to tell him this.).

I replied that I did. In fact I worked very closely with kids in that program. 

And then he said it.

“I bet they’re a real drag on your resources, huh.?”

Well.

No.

Far from it.

And I made a decision that I wasn’t going to avoid this conversation after all. I mean why not? I kinda liked the guy. And all he was really doing was the all-too human move of seeking confirmation/support for his biases. We’ve all been there.

So I told him no. I told him my hardest working group of students tended to contain high numbers of “ESL” kids. I further explained that I teach in one of the most diverse districts in the nation (we are situated cheek by jowl with a huge refugee resettlement center.) and something like 240 different languages are spoken in my district.

And that’s the thing: I explained. I didn’t lecture. I didn’t proselytize. I kept my tone light, breezy, conversational. My very first response to his question about “those kids“ being a “drag“ was to say: “On no, far from it. Some of the hardest-working kids I have are ‘newcomers.’ I teach in a very diverse district with a ton of different languages being spoken there. And I invite anybody to come on into my school. Come on into my classroom. Mark, if you ever find yourself anywhere near my patch, get in touch with me. Come visit. It will blow your mind.” 

To his credit, Mark listened. Or he at least seemed to. Our conversation stayed pleasant. And then we moved on to him telling Robyn and I a cool story about him watching a semi truck practically blow up during a training exercise gone horribly wrong (no one was hurt) on a part of the freeway one of his CDL classes was using for training. 

I told him I was going to use his description in this other story I’ve been thinking about. This is one I’ve told before about a former student of mine who teamed up with a friend to steal cinderblocks from a construction site and spend a lot of time trying to drop them on cars from the loca I-15 overpass back when I  still taught down there. 

I think I’m gonna put those two together and I think I just might have something. I’ll keep you guys posted.

And I already promised Mark I would use his name.

So yeah, Vegas well-spring of stories! And as it turns out, civilized political discourse.

Who knew?

(Same view as above, only at night, and a panorama shot. Video by the author’s better half.)

And on that note, my time here draws to a close with this, my final blog entry of the year. I wish you all the finest of holidays, and a blessed new year. See you in January 2025!