Notes on Author Readings from Noir at the Bar Seattle

by Brian Thornton

So, as I mentioned in my last blog post, I read at Noir at the Bar Seattle, at the wonderful Sorrento Hotel, with a line-up of incredible writers a couple of weeks back. 

As promised, I put the question to several of these ace wordsmiths, asking them to share what, if any, rules/rituals they had for author readings. Strap in, because I’ve shared the resulting pearls of wisdom from four of these worthy scribes below:

Jim Thomsen:

1. Six to eight minutes seems to be the sweet spot. Any longer and you're likely asking too much of your audience.

2. Be comedically dense. You're asking a lot of an audience, to sit and listen to you and follow your narrative. Big broad unsubtle laugh lines are a sure way to keep them hooked.

3. Short stories written specifically to be performed seem to play better than novel excerpts. Settings like Noir At The Bar are not the best place to workshop your "serious" material that almost always reads better on the page. A piece shouldn't need more than a few lines of setup, in any case. 

4. Go "big." If your story itself isn't sufficiently outrageous and over-the-top on its own merits, help it along by acting it out.

5. No droning-monotone deliveries. Use an actor's arsenal: dramatic/comedic pauses, original voices/accents for each character, speeding up and going up in register as things intensify, slowing down or using a low voice as a counterpoint to high intensity, etc.

6. Always remember, the reading is about the audience, not about you. Never forget that your job is entertain the shit out of the people who showed up.

Jim Ziskin:

I couldn't say it any better than Jim has. I agree with every point. If I were to add anything, it would be to speak loud and clear. And don't have too many drinks before you read.

Kat Richardson:

I used to read for the Braille Reading Radio Service and I learned a lot about reading aloud from them and from some professional voice actors I know. So here's some of the things I bear in mind:

Read about 50% slower than you think is reasonable--it improves your accuracy and raises the listener's comprehension--it also gives the impression that you're confident and in control of the reading, even if you're scared to death. A good read-aloud pace is approximately 300 words per minute, or about 3/4 of a hardcover page.

Select and prep your piece ahead of time. Record yourself reading it two or three times so you have an idea of the actual reading time you'll need and can find and smooth out any difficult areas--or change your selection entirely if needed. Some pieces don't come across as well read aloud as they do when read to yourself in silence, even if they are great pieces of writing. 

If you're good at it, use character voices, but if you're unsure or hesitant, don't--bad voice characterizations can ruin your reading. Also, select a piece with no more than three speakers, if possible, it's much harder to differentiate each character when you have more. You can also use your head or body position to indicate who is talking by turning slightly one way or the other as the speaker changes. This doesn't have to be a big change, but it should be consistent.

If you can, print out your selection in a large font, double spaced, or adjust the font size on your tablet/Kindle rather than reading from a book. Even if you have great vision, this trick makes it easier for you to read. And an added bonus: if you've printed out the selection, you can always offer to sign the reading copy and give it away at the end of the session.

If your throat is a little phlegmy, try drinking warm or hot (not cold) pineapple juice about 30 minutes before your reading; the acid cuts phlegm without encouraging more--unlike citrus juice--the warmth loosens your throat and vocal cords, and most bars have it on hand.

Will Viharo:

Personally I’m not into theatrics when it comes to reading in public, and I say this not only as a former cult movie impresario, but also as someone who is much better at improv than “acting” from a script, even my own. In fact, speaking strictly subjectively, I’d much rather read a piece quietly to myself than hear an author read it to me, so that I can imagine the voice of the characters for myself. But then I also hate sports and the sun, so I’m a trend bucker and no one should ever listen to me. Basically, in case anyone cares, I see live readings as advertisements not only for one’s particular book, but one's brand name. Your performance should be sincere and lucid, but the product should be able to sell itself. Select a passage that represents your body of work as a whole, not just the piece in question. 

*               *               *

And that’s it for this installment, boys and girls. Tune in two weeks from now for my own “Things to Do For An Author Reading” list, in addition to some final thoughts on the importance of authors doing readings in the first place.

See you in two weeks!

John Ford's PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND

I had another subject in mind, but then I spotted this coming up on Turner Classic Movies. I couldn't let it slip past unnoticed.

The Prisoner of Shark Island is a lesser-known John Ford, from 1936. It came out after The Lost Patrol and The Informer, and the three pictures he made with Will Rogers. Ford was already established, in other words. He'd won his first directing Oscar for The Informer.  At this point, he probably didn't have to take work he didn't want to, and he didn't suffer much interference. He made Shark Island by choice. Ford said more than once, "It's a job of work," meaning he did what he did for a living, but it's plain his heart was in it.

Shark Island is about Dr. Samuel Mudd, who gets caught up in the conspiracy panic that followed Lincoln's assassination. There was, in fact, a plot, targeting Secretary of State Seward and Vice President Johnson as well as Lincoln, but only John Wilkes Booth got his part right. The others made a hash of it. This didn't keep

four of them from being hanged. Booth himself was shot and killed eleven days after Lincoln's death, but his first night on the run he stopped at a local Maryland doctor's - Dr. Mudd - and the doctor set his broken leg. This was enough to buy Mudd a treason conviction and a life sentence. Was he involved? It's never been established, but Shark Island plays on your sympathies, the innocent man being framed, justice denied.

Let's get the two most serious weak points out of the way. First off, Warner Baxter plays the lead. Big in the silents, made the transition to talkies, but a little overwrought. Admittedly, the acting style goes with the period, and you can get past it. It's a lot harder to get past the second thing, which dates even more badly, and that's the racism. I never thought of Ford as being particularly racist - although a fair number of American Indians might disagree with me - and while he's of course a product of his times, and Hollywood has historically been disrespectful of black people (along with the Chinese, and Mexicans, and plenty of others), Ford is often subversive with his black characters. Stepin Fetchit, in Steamboat Round the Bend, plays it very sly and saucy. His relationship with Will Rogers could be described as two bickering old ladies, Lucy and Ethel. Unhappily, the same can't be said of Ernest Whitman as Buck in Shark Island. Still, it strikes me as an extremely difficult part for a black actor to play without falling into

caricature, and Buck comes perilously close. The real problem is that these attitudes aren't peripheral, they're built into the narrative structure. Buck isn't just comic relief. He's integral to the story, he's a major piece of the action, and he has to walk a very fine line between pretending to Tom it up and demeaning himself. I'm a white guy. I can't step into Ernest Whitman's shoes, or get inside his skin. Maybe he simply figured it was a job of work. I'd like to think he did the best he could by a part that didn't give him much wiggle room - and I wish I could say the script or the director helped him make up for it. Not.

How about what's right with the picture? For openers, Bert Glennon's cinematography. It's the first of eight movies he made with Ford (including Drums Along the Mohawk, Ford's first color feature), and it has one of the most breathtaking pulled-focus shots I've ever seen. Ford's known for not calling attention to himself, or using obtrusive effects. He seems to prefer a static frame, but he moves the camera when he wants to. You see plenty of mobility in his tracking shots. I don't remember a single example of zoom, though. Ford's camera is always the human POV. When he breaks stride, it's doubly startling.

Here's the set-up for the defining moment. Booth slips through the door into the back of Lincoln's box at the theater. You hear the laugh line from the play on-stage, "You sockdologizing old man-trap." Booth shoots the president, and jumps from the box to the stage, but his foot gets tangled in the flag draped from the box. He calls out, "Sic semper tyrannis," and limps off. Lincoln, mortally wounded, is slumped back in his chair. The camera holds. It's a medium shot, Lincoln's upper body and shoulders, his face in three-quarter profile. A curtain falls across, in front of his face. It's lace or embroidery, so you still see Lincoln behind it, slightly blurred. Then he comes into focus, but the embroidered curtain creates a pointillist effect, fragmenting his image, breaking it down into dots, like an engraving. Your eye needs to catch up, and reconstruct him. In that one brief image, Lincoln passes from life into history, leaving a retinal memory. It happens while you're watching.

I first saw Prisoner of Shark Island late one night on a UHF channel, just a programmer they used to fill a time slot. It was some years later that I got to see it in a theater, a Ford revival series at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge - a labor of love, they actually screened something like forty of his pictures over a couple of weeks, and I didn't miss too many. Shark Island drew a capacity crowd, a lot of them film students who hadn't seen it before, and more than a few who were unacquainted with Ford except for the big-ticket movies. Shark Island starts out on a note of low comedy, a joke about the number of kids Buck has, with its obvious racial slant, and Buck asking his mule what the mule thinks, which isn't any too subtle, either. Remember, we're talking about wiseass college kids here, everybody goofing and groaning and poking fun at the picture's dated political attitudes, and when Booth slinks on-screen, practically twirling his mustaches, you've still got people laughing at the exaggerated histrionics of it all. But then. Booth steps forward. He shoots Lincoln. Lincoln sinks back. The curtain falls. Everybody in that movie theater went dead silent. Literally. There wasn't a murmur. Not an embarrassed giggle, not even a gasp. Nothing but absolute, stunned shock.

Okay, the gravity of the event. And maybe these kids were of an age to remember the Kennedy assassination. But there's more to it. Because after Lincoln's murder, the movie goes on to show the courts-martial. You heard that right. The conspirators were tried by military tribunal and without constitutional protections. We see them hooded and shackled during the trial. We see them hanged. The hysteria isn't soft-pedaled, and if the Grassy Knoll is any part of your vocabulary, you feel a familiar dread.

I don't think Shark Island is supposed to be taken as some kind of allegory about the Red Scare or the rise of Fascism or anything like. It's meant to be a rousing yarn, and no more. There is a shark-infested moat, too, but since we're in the Dry Tortugas, that's gilding the lily. And the Yellow Fever epidemic, and the mutiny, no reason to doubt. Dr. Mudd was later pardoned. Whether he was in on the plot has never been decided one way or the other.

TCM is showing The Prisoner of Shark Island on Tuesday, January 31st, at 10:45 PM. Program your DVR's. It's also available on the Ford at Fox boxed DVD set, a collection of Ford's pictures that gives good weight for the money.

Why does an author need an e-mail list?

People keep telling me to get e-mails from my readers. And they make good points. Like this:

“You can’t build your content on rented land. So many brands and companies build their audiences on Facebook and Google+, which is fine, but we don’t own those names – Facebook and Google do.” Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute

"You’re not just a status update that’s there and gone, you’re right in someone’s inbox, where they receive other important communication from their work, family, and friends." Nathalie Lussier, Digital Strategist at Ambition Ally

"Email marketing consistently generates 80-90% of our landing page traffic." Corey Dilley, Marketing Manager at Unbounce

But what really caught my attention was that my friend, Maggie Jaimeson, credits her mailing list with kick-starting her writing career. She took a Facebook ads course with Mark Dawson, learned how to make effective Facebook ads and how to band with fellow authors, and has recently celebrated a milestone: 10,000 subscribers.

Okay! Time for me to get some subscribers. I had a few hundred, mostly students who'd signed up after I'd spoken at health care conferences. Not the same audience as eager book-buyers.

I set up a landing page. I tried Facebook ads, but found them relatively expensive. What really worked for me? Instafreebie.

 You give away a free book--I used the short stories that Kobo had commissioned for the Gone Fishing mystery contest--in exchange for an e-mail address. My first one is here: https://www.instafreebie.com/free/qpGYY

Don't just use their free feature, because then you can't harvest the e-mail addresses. Instafreebie gives you one month free trial of "Plus" ($20/month) or "Pro" ($50/month). You can link it to your Mailchimp account and set up your mailing list there.

Then look on the Instafreebie forum and bundle with other authors in your genre. I bundled with a thriller group and got 350 downloads before I figured out that I had to upgrade to get the addresses (select "opt-in required"). So that was sad--except Instafreebie decided to feature me on their blog, resulting in 600+ e-mails. Altogether, 1000 people downloaded my book without me spending a dime, because I'm still on the free trial.

I'm currently doing a Horror and Suspense giveaway, a Chinese New Year celebration is starting up, and I can’t wait for the chick lit group on February 1st.

Of course, nothing's perfect. One author pointed out that you can end up with a lot of unsubscribers and complainers, because these readers are looking for free books and may get enraged if you a) have the temerity to send them a message, and worse yet, b) charge money for a book. However, I'm looking at my friend Maggie and her 10,000 subscribers. I want to be like her. And so I'm willing to try.

If you want to try, too, this is my Instafreebie referral link. No pressure. https://www.instafreebie.com?invite_code=cpSHuy8qdh

Another thing Maggie does is join with other authors to have contests. We're just finishing up the Transformations Contest on Jan 23rd at 11:45 Pacific Time with $250 in gift cards and $50 in book prizes. Depending on your time zone, you may be able to grab a free copy of EXPENDABLE and other terrific books: http://www.maggielynch.com/giveaways/transformations-contest/

I'm writing this past my bedtime, so please excuse any lack of lucidity. Please feel free to ask questions or provide tips of your own. I'm always looking to learn.

And in case you ever want to sign up for my list, it's very chill. The picture of my kids in squid balaclavas was very popular. https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/x6d4e4

Break It, Fix It, Break It, Fix It Again

Last time, I listed several books that helped me write better. They all tell what to do in order to write more effectively, but no book can tell you how to do it. That's a personal thing.

Grad school rekindled my long buried urge to write, and over the next nine years, I wrote five atrocious novels. All I can say is that I learned to produce junk more quickly. When it came time to produce a thesis/project for my sixth-year degree at Wesleyan, I decided to rewrite one of those train wrecks based on what I'd already learned from hundreds of mistakes.

I chose Dr. Joseph Reed as my adviser, partly because I knew he didn't give a rat's ass about hurting my feelings. When I phoned to ask him if he would be my adviser, he said, "Probably not, but come in tomorrow and we'll discuss it."

Because of his response, I did two things I'd never done before. I wrote a 2-page summary (Now I know enough to call it a synopsis) and a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the events in my story.
Joe looked them over as though he saw checkmate in three moves. When he learned that I wrote everything out longhand and re-typed it for him--this was 1980, pre-computers--he shook his head.

"You're wasting time," he said. "Compose at the typewriter and don't worry about typos. You're going to revise everything to death anyway."

An outline and typing the first draft changed my process radically. Between 2003 when I retired from teaching and started writing full-time, few other changes merit discussion. But here they are.

Jodi Picault once said that a writer must learn to write on demand, and that's another skill nobody can teach you. Stephen King and other writers set word count goals--King's is 2000 words a day--and I forced myself to do that, too. It didn't matter if 1999 of them were crap, I wrote until I reached that number. Some days, I finished by noon and other days I wrote until midnight, but after a few years, I knew I could sit down at the keyboard and produce two or three pages of semi-coherent English is an hour.

Now, I generally write a few paragraphs in the morning and go to the health club if I get stuck. While I sweat on an arc trainer, my mind runs free to figure where I'm going next. But I don't have to write in the morning. Remember that write on demand thing? I wrote the first draft of this essay at 4 pm.

Do you outline just because your teacher told you to do it in school? If so, have you found a more flexible way to do it? If you do some form of pre-writing, is it words, diagrams, phrases, or something else? What really works best for you? I used to doodle on separate sheets of paper and move them around to figure out my basic plot and character relationships, but now I use a dry marker board. At the end of the day, I photograph it and stick it in my picture files so I can start with a fresh board the next day and still refer to the previous work.

The only other major change is my outline/synopsis. Somewhere in those years of wood-shedding, I started doing what the screenwriters would probably call a verbal story board. I list fifty scenes in order. The character name in bold type is the POV character, and I tell the essential action/change of the scene in a sentence or two. The number at the end is its order in the MS.

The storyboard tells me where I need to do research and shows if I have too many expository or action scenes together so pace is an issue. It takes me several weeks to develop fifty scenes (although I'm getting faster) and that's my first draft. Writing those scenes out as real prose is my second draft, and always shows where I've left something out, repeated something, or put events or information in the wrong order. I correct the scene list ("Chronology" in my terminology) as I go, each change a "save as." By the time I have my first full MS, I'm usually on at least the twelfth draft of the scene list. That continues through the next several drafts, and my record is 31 scene lists.

That first full MS has to come fast because that's how I find the rhythm of the story. It helps me feel when a scene is in the wrong place. I wrote the first "full" version of Dark Gonna Catch Me Here in 33 days (I didn't plan it, it just gushed out that way) and it had over 92,000 words and 57 scenes. The final version a year later lost four of those scenes, added an new one, added another POV character, and cut about 8000 words.

Through my first four or five drafts, each scene revision is a separate word file: Scene 1-A, Scene 1-B, Scene 1-C, Scene 2-A, Scene 2-B, etc. I keep them separate because it's easier to change the order by renumbering a five or six page scene than it is to cut and paste in a 300-page document. If Scene 12-C needs to move, "Save As" gives me Scene 22-D.

None of this means you should do it, too. But if you're in a rut or things aren't working, maybe put a few new parts in the machine and see what happens.

Do you write at a particular time of day because you need to get to work or the kids have to be in school? If not, try earlier or later. Try in a different room. Walk around outside before you write, or go to the gym, or listen to some music. Do you write with music? Try a different kind (baroque instead of jazz, for example) or silence. Do you hear the words better?

If you normally outline, write a scene or two without planning and see what happens. If you don't outline, try it. This is a huge change, and it's hard, but you might discover something.

Try writing character bios for your main characters before writing your story. Figure out what's at stake or what that character's weakness is. I do bios for my major characters and have a file so I have ages and major events consistent (like when Zach Barnes stopped drinking or Chris Guthrie almost lost his leg in the shoot-out), but the minor characters change as I need them, especially names.

Try writing in pencil or roller ball or ballpoint or fountain pen (my fave for early planning) or even crayon or dry marker instead of the keyboard. If you write longhand, go to the keyboard first.

Do you write a few pages, then go back and revise before moving on? Try writing the whole work before you go back. If you usually do a complete draft, try revising scene by scene.

Do you have a word or page goal for the day? What happens if you raise or lower it? What if you write a scene instead of a word count? If one scene is four pages long and the next one is ten, can you still do it? That's my only solid rule now, I have to write the complete scene in a day because the rhythm won't sustain overnight. My scenes average about 1600 words, so if I write one a day, that's about 50,000 words a month (Hello, NANO). And I no longer have to write every day. The point of the fast and messy first draft is that it gives me something to fix. A first draft is like a block of marble: once you have it, you have to chip away the excess to make a statue of an elephant. Or Michaelangelo's David.

When I finished that MS in 1980, Dr. Reed encouraged me to send it out, and it collected a stack of rejections. I knew I'd revise it yet again someday--when I'd learned more craft. When I looked at it again a few years ago, I understood that the opening dragged because the important subplot took a long time to develop. Re-sequencing with several overlapping flashbacks helped, but that created another problem. For the first time, I listed all the events in the story in chronological order before I wrote the new outline so I could keep the back-story coherent. I've only done that with two other books (one of them is currently a WIP) because they had more history to them than usual.

I added a couple of scenes and expanded one character, but beyond the re-sequencing that demanded some new transitions, at least eighty percent of that book is what I wrote in 1980. That astonished me. I finally self-published Postcards of the Hanging (Another Bob Dylan allusion and not the title from back then) in 2014, 34 years after it was a thesis and 42 years after the first version began in the back of a spiral notebook.

Gotta keep it fresh, right? My next project is to learn to write with my left hand...while standing on my head.

What have you changed since you started writing? What do you wish worked better?

Yet Another Computer Scam

 WARNING A scam involving Google and clever programming sleight-of-hand has hit the scene. It’s not entirely new– a prototype showed up in 2014– but it fools many professionals. Apologies in advance for the technical parts below.

A new month, a new scam, this one brought to our attention by a reader. Although widely reported, this scam hasn’t shown up in the ACM Risks Digest yet. Surprise– the scheme starts with your GMail where a note from a friend or colleague contains a link to another page or document. You click and receive a message you must log in again. Happens every so often, annoying but sign in again for security.

A Google log-in page shows up– the URL field (web page address) contains google.com. Enter your name, enter your password. Click. The document your compatriot sent now appears.

You may not know it, but you just lost exclusive control of your Google account. Your pal didn’t send that email and the link was plucked out of your emails.

Let’s look at the sign-on dialogue boxes again. Which one is counterfeit? Hover your mouse over them for the answer, but the fact is, they’re indistinguishable.


The insidious part is that email web sites– Yahoo and AOL included– train us by periodically forcing us to relog in. Hold on… didn’t the URL box contain google.com?

Yes. Over the years we’ve seen clever fraudsters incorporate target domain names similar to this:

http://w5.to/google.com

The trick here is that the real domain, web address of the bad guys, is w5.to. The google.com is only a web page set up to fool you. Other examples might look like the following:

http://citibank.net.w5.to/index.html

This is a variation of the bad guy’s domain, w5.to, above.

http://citybank.net

Here the bad guys registered a variation of the real name made a little easier by CitiBank using a non-standard spelling. These three examples are reasonably clever and some scammers don’t take that much trouble. However, this new one can catch even professionals by surprise:

data:text/html,https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin

The clue something is very wrong lies in the first three words, data:text/html – you shouldn't see that at all. The opening letters of an URL don’t have to be http – they can be file, data, help, about, chrome, gopher or possibly another protocol, but ‘data’ is the only hint the page is abnormal.

Browsers have become more sophisticated over the years, so web pages might include additional capabilities such as setting preferences. The ‘data’ keyword allows HTML to be embedded in the URL field, but more insidiously, it allows JavaScript, and that’s how this particular exploit fools us. Following the ServiceLogin part of the URL are dozens upon dozens of spaces so you can’t see what comes next. Far beyond the right side of that URL field is where the real sorcery begins with <script…>. This malware program throws up a fake Google sign-in page to capture your ID and password.

Expect Google to quickly mount an update, but beware, look ever more critically at URLs when you’re asked to type in your credentials. It might save your on-line life.

Take the Money and Ron

I like titles. I especially like trying to dream up good titles for my short stories.

What is a good title? That's hard to say. Sometimes you just know one when you see it. I think the best titles are those that are catchy and/or mysterious and/or appropriate to the story. And I like it when there's a hint of a "double meaning."

I confess that I'm always a little disappointed if an editor changes my title before publication. Not angry--just disappointed that she didn't agree with my choice. I've found a way to ease the pain, though: since I recycle a lot of my stories as reprints, I usually reinstate my original title when/if I'm fortunate enough to sell the story again elsewhere. Not that it matters, but Woman's World has changed more of my titles--46 out of the 84 stories I've sold to them--than any other magazine I submit to. Two more observations: (1) Anthologies seem less likely to ask for a title change than magazines, and (2) so far I've not had a title changed by AHMM, EQMM, Strand, or any of the other mystery publications. That's probably a mystery in itself.

Here are some examples of my titles, from both magazines and anthos, that were overruled. (My choice is listed first, the editor's second.)


"Smoke Test" -- "Switched Off"
"Name Games" -- "Who's He?"
"Dry Spell" -- "Listen Up!"
"Good Samaritan" -- "After the Storm"
"Diamond Jim" -- "A Bright Idea"
"Backward Thinking" -- "Baffled and Confused" (a choice that left me baffled and confused)
"Batteries Not Included" -- "Too Many Choices"
"Silent Partner" -- "When Samantha Smiles"
"Henry's Ford" -- "Everyone's Angel"
"Find Me" -- "Where's Emily?"
"Alumni Relations" -- "Old School"
"Neighborhood Watch" -- "Stormy Weather"
"Old Soldiers" -- "No Horsin' Around"
"A Day at the Office" -- "Take a Bow"
"Hold the Phone" -- "Can You Hear Me Now?"
"Guardian Angel" -- "Keeping an Eye on Crime"
"A Gathering of Angels" -- "The Ring of Truth"
"Buzz Off" -- "The Truth Stings"
"Right on Time" -- "What Happened to Ernie?"
"Low Technology" -- "Dial D for Desperate"
"Quick Stop" -- "Caught in the Crossfire"
"Mattie's Caddie" -- "The Missing Caddy"
"Byrd and Ernie" -- "Hidden in Plain Sight"
"Jack of All Trades" -- "The Listener"
"Bronco Bills" -- "The Hold-up"
"Ex Benedict" -- "Ball and Chain"
"Trapped" -- "Fiery Foes"
"Going for the Gold" -- "Diamonds Are Forever"
"Positive Thinking" -- "Labor Day Heist"
"A Clean Getaway" -- "A Dirty Trick"


 . . and so on and so on. And yes, I grudgingly admit that some of the changed titles wound up sounding better than the ones I created.

My most recent story in Woman's World (their January 16 issue) was changed from "Out of Left Field" to "Relative Strangers." The new title wasn't bad--in fact it was pretty good--and it remained appropriate to the plot, but I liked my original choice because one of the main characters was a left-handed former ballplayer and the solution was (hopefully) unexpected enough to come "out of left field." Oh, well. Another of my recent WW stories (the November 28 issue) involved a character I named Ron McNair, who was robbed and then kidnapped. The title I chose for the story was "Take the Money and Ron," which I thought was incredibly clever. (My wife would tell you, with a roll of her eyes, that I often think I'm incredibly clever, even if no one else does.) Anyhow, "Take the Money and Ron" got changed to "Candid Camera." Again, I prefer the title I dreamed up--but the new one worked also. I took the money and ran.

My point is, you as a writer might just as well accept this kind of thing, because it happens now and then and unless you're more important than I am there's nothing you can do about it. And there are sometimes good reasons for a title change. Maybe a similar title, one the writer didn't know about, recently appeared in the publication. Maybe the meaning of the title wasn't as clear to the editor as it was to the writer. Maybe the editor just didn't like it. The editor is, after all, the captain of the ship, and--as my hero Mel Brooks once said--"It's good to be da king."

Going back to examples, I've heard of a few well-known short stories whose titles got changed,
but mostly we hear about changes to the titles of novels. The following is a list of original titles (sometimes they were the authors' "working titles"), followed by the result:


Something That Happened -- Of Mice and Men
Catch-18 -- Catch-22
Trimalchio at West Egg -- The Great Gatsby
Fiesta -- The Sun Also Rises
Dark House -- Light in August
First Impressions -- Pride and Prejudice
The Wolfsschanze Covenant -- The Holcroft Covenant
Sister Maggie -- The Mill on the Floss
Strangers From Within -- Lord of the Flies
The Village Virus -- Main Street
The Sea-Cook -- Treasure Island
The Strike -- Atlas Shrugged
Second-Hand Lives -- The Fountainhead
Tomorrow Is Another Day -- Gone With the Wind
The Chronic Argonauts -- The Time Machine
Tenderness -- Lady Chatterly's Lover
Twilight -- The Sound and the Fury
Come and Go -- The Happy Hooker
The Jewboy -- Portnoy's Complaint
The Tree and the Blossom -- Peyton Place
Before This Anger -- Roots
The Saddest Story -- The Good Soldier
Salinas Valley -- East of Eden
Elinor and Marianne -- Sense and Sensibility
Private Fleming, His Various Battles -- The Red Badge of Courage
Mag's Diversions -- David Copperfield
Poker Night -- A Streetcar Named Desire
The House of the Faith -- Brideshead Revisited
The Last Man in Europe -- 1984
Paul Morel -- Sons and Lovers
They Don't Build Statues to Businessmen -- The Valley of the Dolls
The Mute -- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
O Lost -- Look Homeward, Angel
Kingdom by the Sea -- Lolita
Mind and Iron -- I, Robot
Cancer -- Dreamcatcher
Return to the Wars -- To Have and Have Not
Robotic Banana -- A Clockwork Orange
All's Well That Ends Well -- War and Peace
Summer of the Shark -- Jaws


I don't know about you, but I'm glad most of those early choices underwent a do-over.

What are your thoughts, about this subject of editors and publishers changing the titles of stories/novels? How often has it happened to your creations? When it happens, does it bother you? Do you ever feel the changed title is better than the one you came up with? Have you ever protested, or would you ever protest, a title change?

A final note. I mentioned that one of my recent Woman's World stories was reassigned the title "Relative Strangers." Oddly enough, I submitted a story back in 2010 to WW with the title "Relative Strangers." When they published it, my title was changed to "All in the Family."

Go figure.

Ending Before the Ending

by Art Taylor

Earlier this week, Robert Lopresti posted his list of the best short stories of 2016—a fine slate of stories, and it was great to see a couple of my own favorites in there as well, along with some stories I didn't know and now need to track down.

One of those stories—"The Last Blue Glass" by fellow SleuthSayer B.K. Stevens in Alfred Hitchock's Mystery Magazine—has been on my mind recently, as has another story by one of our group—"Stepmonster" by Barb Goffman in the anthology Chesapeake Crimes: Storm Warning—not solely because of how much I enjoyed and admired them (I did, and I do!) but because of a structural approach that each story shares. (Each story is linked so you can enjoy and admire for yourself!)

In several ways, the stories might seem to have little in common. "The Last Blue Glass" is a much longer story, covering nine years; it's presented in the third person, from the perspective of a woman who goes from newlywed wife to troubled widow; and it is fairly traditionally told, summary and scene gliding one into the other to navigate those long years and the moments key to the story. In contrast, "The Stepmonster" is narrated in first-person and takes place over a fairly short amount of time, two short scenes, and with a twist, one scene commenting on the other in ways that I won't divulge so that readers can enjoy the twist themselves.

But while the overall structures and time-frames and points of view are different, each story centers on a moment of revenge—though even as I write that, I recognize that center might well be a misleading word, since the "central" action of each story isn't at the center of its tale; in fact (small spoiler alert?), those moments of revenge never actually occur within the confines of the stories themselves. It's this latter similarity that struck me as I reflected on the stories—how each story draws to its end by looking ahead, past the final word of the story and into the (figurative) blankness beyond, where the next bit of the drama, arguably the most dramatic bit, will actually happen.

The structure of Barb's story is unique because that forecasting of the drama circles back on itself, as you'll see when you read it. What happens in the beginning of the story foreshadows what will likely occur next. And in Bonnie's case, the final scenes sketch out the narrator's intentions and how the plans should play out. But likely and should are key words here, and the authors' decisions in each case not to dramatize these scenes allow the reader's imagination a greater degree of involvement—allowing the story to linger on in that imagination, the events to spool ahead in the reader's mind beyond the so-called "end" of the story proper.

A few years back, I wrote a short essay to help debut the then-new blog "Something Is Going to Happen" from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine—and I took the blog's title as a starting point for my thoughts on open or unfinished endings, where the something that is going to happen next is hinted at but not fully dramatized. In my post, subtitled "Perched on the Edge of What Happens Next" (and linked here), I talk about a couple of Stanley Ellin stories I admire and particularly "The Moment of Decision," certainly one of my all-time favorite stories, which (another small spoiler!) ends dramatically just before the moment in the title, leaving the reader both to wonder what decision is reached and to ponder what decision he or she would make in similar circumstances (a question which has provoked great discussion in my classes when I've taught this story, I should stress).

I won't revisit every point of that post, but reading and studying Bonnie's and Barb's stories reveal to me again of the importance of structuring your storytelling (as much as your plot, not the same thing) and of the power in handing over some of that process to the readers themselves, drawing them in, involving them if not even making them complicit (and I'll stress again that each of these stories is about revenge).

And yet, looking back over that post for EQMM and some of the stories I sampled there, and looking at Barb's and Bonnie's stories, I also realize that there are a couple of different ways that "ending before the ending" might play out—with different ways of involving the reader and different effects on their experience.

One approach, like Ellin's, is to leave something fundamental unanswered and some aspect of the ending more fully unresolved. While I would argue—vigorously—that Ellin's story isn't "unfinished" (a much longer and more detailed post), there are clearly two dramatically different choices that could be made by the narrator, and each choice could then branch out into several different outcomes, depending on other factors in the story. In short, that blank page beyond the final sentence is filled with unanswered questions and possibilities; an enterprising writer could, by my count, pursue at least four distinctly different combinations of events, each with their own stakes, to describe what happens next. (Note to any enterprising writers: Please don't try to write the ending. The story is really fine like it is.)

In a similar vein, Ed Gorman's "Out There in the Darkness" (which I also mentioned in the original EQMM post) ends with a looming sense of dread but little certainty about what's ahead—a character "waiting" but will the thing he's waiting for actually transpire? There's little certainty how the rest of his story will play out, but the sense of doom and dread are palpable—more so because we the reader share it, perched on the edge of the unknown.

The second approach is to wrap up the story more fully, pointing to what's ahead without dramatizing it actually happening. In this case, the reader's imagination still fills in some of the blanks but in a more focused way. At the end of David Dean's fabulous "Ibrahim's Eyes" (available as part of EQMM's podcast series), there's little doubt about what will happen mere seconds after the final words of the story, so the reader doesn't need to wonder or ponder over unanswered questions; instead, what the reader does is conjure up those next moments for him/herself—engaged more fully in that process, I would argue, than if David had simply written the next lines. Pulling back, letting the reader fill in to complete the story, is here too a powerful move—without the uncertainty of the first approach I mentioned above (inviting the reader's intellectual engagement, particularly in the Ellin story) but with perhaps a greater emotional involvement.

Barb's and Bonnie's stories lie closer to this latter approach, I think—sketching out, as I said, the events that will follow, the characters' plans/expectations for what's next. Obviously those plans might not play out exactly as these characters expect but the level of uncertainty there is lesser than in a more open ending and the effect is different, ultimately bringing the reader emotionally closer to the characters, even complicit in their plan.

Speaking of sketching, I feel like I'm still only sketching out some of my thoughts on this topic—even here taking a second try at refining my thoughts on this idea. But in the spirit of leaving endings open, I hope there's room for readers here to do their own thinking on the topic—and again, I hope I've spurred you to read these fine stories themselves. 

An Addict's Life

by Eve Fisher

Divine
(Source)

I grew up in Southern California in the 60's, which explains a lot. (Thank-fully, there was no Facebook, and no cell phones that took pictures, so I can deny everything.)  As I've said before, it was an interesting time and place to be a teenager.  There's nothing like starting off in a place where there are people of every ethnicity and religion.  (I still love the good juicy mix of people that you can only find in a multi-cultural city.)  Where people still might not be officially out of the closet - although wearing great designer drag - but the euphemisms were very thin and nobody was fooling anyone. (I learned about Jim Nabors when I was ten, and it didn't bother me a bit.) Where cult-shops were on offer everywhere you looked (which is why I know a cult when I see one, even if it's called a church, a party, a membership, or a club).  Where you were never sure if what was going on was reality or someone shooting a movie/tv show (now that could get a little weird...).

And then there were drugs.  Everywhere, oceans of them, both on and off-label, as it were.  I remember when I went to junior high, and the girls' bathroom reeked of what I quickly found out was not just cigarettes (my parents smoked), but also marijuana.  Reds and whites (downers and uppers) were widely available. And other things.  And wide recreational use was helped by the fact that both my junior high and high school were outdoor campuses.  Literally.

Only the actual classrooms and the auditorium were indoors.  The lockers were under the equivalent of concrete carports; the cafeteria was a row of vending machines (they even had burritos, which we all somehow ate and survived...) under their own concrete carport, and there were metal tables (never enough) under their own sheds.  The idea was that we students would dine and relax and run playfully on the wide and spreading lawns.  And we did.  Just not the way they [officially] planned.

Now, my personal experience in life is that almost all children and teenagers, given half a chance to run amok, will.  And in Southern California, where the weather was good and the teachers were worn out...   So freedom, space, opportunity...  most of us took it.

There is a period, from say 12 to 25, where people will do as much drinking, drugging, etc. as they can.  Whether or not they really feel like it.  Those of you who have ever worked at a candy store or a pizza place and been told, "eat all you want" will know how after a while, you don't really feel like it anymore, but you keep doing it because it's free, man, and you're supposed to want this stuff... Most people, after a few weeks/months of gorging will stop.  They may never want the candy, etc. ever again.  But during that time of gorging, you'd be really hard pressed to figure out who's an addict/alcoholic and who isn't.  I know anyone who watched me from 14 to early 20s would have been sure I was headed to rehab.  I drank, I smoked, I did some prescription drugs (my parents had bottles of both booze and Darvon everywhere), and later, when I left home, I did everything I could get my hands on. Just about everyone I knew did the same.

And then, it got old.  I quit doing pretty much anything but pot, alcohol, and cigarettes when I turned 18.  I quit smoking dope a couple of years later, when I figured out that it did nothing for my writing but make me think it was better than it was.  And then there was the early morning (2:30 PM) after the last big New Years' party of my life, where I turned to my new husband and said, "There has got to be a better way to start a new year than this."  And from then on, I was a social drinker.  One glass of wine, two at the most, and I'm done, thanks.

So, if you want to figure out if your teenager is an addict or alcoholic, chances are you really should wait until they're in their 20's to make a final call.  (I know, I know, what if you can't wait that long? Go to Al-Anon.  I am dead serious.  It can save your sanity, and perhaps your life.  Check HERE for a meeting near you.)

So, everything worked out great for me, right?  Yes, it did.  Except that I had one addiction I could not shake:  cigarettes.

Marlboro - my brand for years

Now this didn't bother me for years.  I loved smoking.  I loved the taste of it, the feel of it, the style of it, watching the smoke curl up to the ceiling, the activity, the movement of my hands, and the knowledge that I always had something to do.  It warmed me when I was cold, cooled me off when I was hot, tamped down the hunger pangs, tasted sooo good after a meal, fit in perfectly with my reading addiction (see my blog of 1/5/17), and was somewhere between the best thing that ever happened to me and my pacifier.  Smoking was entwined in almost everything I did, in almost every moment of my day.  I didn't know and I didn't care whether or not I was addicted: smoking was GREAT.

Fast forward twenty, thirty years.  I'm in my 40s, and I'm starting to feel it.  Colds sink into my chest and stay there.  I kind of want to quit, although I don't actually say it.  I'm struggling to cut down, to keep it under a pack, which I manage, and then under half a pack.  If I only smoke half a pack, that's fine, right?  It's better than nothing, and I still can't imagine being without cigarettes.  How do people live without smoking? How did I?  I can't remember it?  I can't envision it - not without a panic attack.  I am hooked, although I'm still in denial...

In my 50s, and I want to quit, God do I want to quit.  I can't deny it anymore:  my lungs are foggy, I'm coughing too much, my wind is gone, this is not good.  My journals are all about my struggle with addiction:  I tried Chantix (didn't work); I tried tapering down even more; I tried to quit outright, and failed, because I kept being ravaged by desire for a cigarette...  and I couldn't not give in.  I kept doing that years.  Tapering off, cutting down, going back, quitting, going back, on and on and bloody on...  I couldn't live with out that damned cigarette.  And the next one after that.  And the one after that...

Not me, but close enough...
(Source)

When I did quit, it was a miracle, plain and simple. My husband had a heart attack, and was hospitalized for 3 days.  I spent those days in the heart hospital with him, and I knew that that meant the nicotine was physically out of my system.  So - now or never, baby! And, by the grace of God, along with a sack of horehound drops big enough to choke a small hippo and a stack of straws, I quit.

TIP OF THE DAY:  If you cut a straw in half, it is the exact size and shape of a cigarette, and not only can you can puff away on them, but it fills that space in your hands, and that hand-to-mouth action of smoking, that cigarettes held for years.

There were times I thought I would die.  I'd walk by someone smoking and smell that warm, wonderful smell and practically reach down their shirt pocket for a smoke.  Something stressful would happen, and I would walk around the house puffing madly on that damned straw and thinking "this is lame."  And there would be that time, late afternoon, work mostly done, sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea and my heart breaking because that had been the best cigarette of the day.  (That and the one after lunch, the one after dinner, the one after that, and...)  But, through the grace of God, I bulled through.  For one thing, I kept telling myself, "Fine, go ahead and have one.  But if you do, you'll just have to quit again."  And I knew I could never go through this again and make it...

Skull with a Burning
Cigarette -
Vincent Van Gogh

And now, I have over 6 years smoke free (after 40 years of smoking). God is great.  Huzzah!

Why am I telling you all this?  Because addiction is real.  Addiction is a disease.  I learned that the hard way.  There are still times when I want a cigarette.  There is a part of my mind that - against my will, I swear to God - likes to look back with nostalgia and regret for the good old days of smoking.  I've got my addiction, like a gorilla, bound up in a corner in my mind, but if I give it an inch, it will come roaring out and eat me alive again.  I know that.  And I'm terrified of that.

And at the same time, I'm so glad.  Because otherwise, how would I understand what it's like for alcoholics? drug addicts? addictive gamblers? other addicts? How could I relate to the guys at the pen, most of whom have been wrestling (and mostly losing) the battle with the gorilla for years?

It's not a matter of will power.  It's not a matter of moral fiber.  It's a mental/physical disease that takes a long, hard time to uproot.  That sometimes is never uprooted.  That is waiting, always, to lure you back again, into one more dance with the devil.  And the worst part of it is the mental, not the physical.  It's the mind - that devious, malicious, faux-nostalgic, faux-friendly, faux-helpful f***ing mind that still screws with me, and that I'll have to watch out for until my dying day.  And so will every other addict.

Maybe someday our laws will reflect that.  As I've said before, mental illness has been pretty much made illegal in this country.  Rather than getting treatment, it's expected that the family will get their loved one the help they need -

(a brief intermission while all of us in Al-Anon or other family support groups have a long, hard, bitter laugh - again, HERE's the link to Al-Anon, and to NAMI) 

that the family will somehow get their loved one to the treatment they need, make sure they take their meds (if any exist), and keep them out of trouble.  It doesn't work.  (In fact, usually, it's the people closest to you that you can help the least.) Allow me to repeat that:  IT DOESN'T WORK.

Addiction, like any other mental illness, like any other illness, needs professional help from the get-go, not shame and secrets and expectations that do nothing but drive it further underground.  And then, when the addict finally does something that lands them in the hospital and/or prison and/or the morgue everyone acts so shocked!  How could that happen?

Because there isn't enough treatment.  Because there aren't enough facilities.  Because there aren't enough programs.  Because none of them, without really GOOD insurance, are affordable.  Because we don't believe, as a nation, that addiction is an illness, that mental illness is really an illness, and that treatment / medication / therapy really works.  Instead, we keep talking this BS about willpower, and then, when people's lives have crumbled, we say stupid things like, "I hope they get the help they need."

Maybe.  Someday.  In the meantime, I am so fortunate, and I know it.  

The very best stories of 2016

I hope you have all donned your tuxes and/or gowns, because I am about to announce the best short mystery stories of the year.  Prepare to watch the winners sashaying down the red carpet and smirking at the paparazzi.
This is the eighth year I have conducted this ceremony.  I regret to say 2016 was not as good as 2015 (insert political joke here), since the number of stories dropped from 14 to 13.

Seven authors were men, six female.  The big winner was Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine with four stories.  Ellery Queen scored three and Crime Plus Music, an anthology from Three Rooms Press nabbed two. Five stories are historic fiction.  Three are (loosely speaking) comic.

The biggest surprise may be that there were  no repeat offenders: none of these authors had made my best-of lists before.  One SleuthSayer is included, as is one first story.

Addendum: I should have mentioned that slightly longer reviews of these stories can be found at my weekly review site, Little Big Crimes.

Okay.  Start the show!


Barnes, Linda. "The Way They Do It In Boston,"  in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2016.

Veteran Drew wants to be a cop in Boston but it's hard to make the resident-for-a-year requirement when you are living in your car with your only friend, a beat-up ex-army dog.

So she's working night security on a tow service parking lot, down by the river.  One night a crate of assault weapons washes up on the shore.  Something bad is going on.  Does it involve the lot?  Can she survive long enough to find out?

Bastable, Mark.  "Motive, Opportunity, Means,"  in The Thrill List, edited by Catherine Lea, Brakelight Press, 2016.

Congressman John Fuller left his wife for his secretary.  Said wife did not take it well.  Now she has plotted an elaborate revenge, and Fuller's future depends on the shrewdness and determination of an overworked cop named Pinski who just wants to spend some time with own wife. 

If this description sounds a little sparse, you are right.  I don't want to give away any of the secrets of this marvelous, convoluted plot.

Bracken, Michael.  "Chase Your Dreams,"  in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, June 2016.

Picture a small town in Texas, one so set in its ways that the whites and blacks still use seperate cemeteries.  Cody is a gay man, deep in the closet.  His secret lover, Chase, on the other hand, was "leading one-man Gay Pride parades." When Chase disappears, Cody has to decide what is more important: finding out the truth, or staying safe?

Buck, Craig Faustus.  "Blank Shot," in Black Coffee, edited by Andrew MacRae, Dark House Books, 2016.

1960, East Berlin.  Our protagonist has been shot in the head, a grazing blow that erased most of his memory.  The cops want to know what happened and the deadly secret police, the Stasi, are lurking on the sidelines, up to God knows what. Will our hero figure out who he is before the shooter realizes he is still alive and tries again? 

Cajoleas, Jimmy.  "The Lord of Madison County," in Mississippi Noir, edited by Tom Franklin, Akashic Press, 2016.


Teenage Douglas  has come up with the perfect place to sell drugs: his church's youth group.  Pastor Jerry loves his enthusiasm and has no clue about what's going on... or what Douglas is doing with his young daughter. What I love about this story is that is is full of classic noir characters, but they don't all follow the noir rules, and their choices may surprise you.  Very nice piece of work.


McCormick, William Buron.  "Voices in the Cistern,"  in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, August 2016.

This is McCormick's  second story about Quintus the Clever, a thief in the early days of the Roman empire.  And Quintus is having a bad day.

It isn't enough that he is in a city under siege by the Roman's deadly Scythian enemies.  No, he also has to deal with Vibius, a large, nasty, unscrupulous rogue.  The brute has decided Quintus is the perfect co-conspirator to help him with a dangerous scheme.  The last person involved was actually killed by, uh, Vibius.  What could go wrong?

McDermid, Val.  "The Long Black Veil,"  in Crime Plus Music, edited by Jim Fusilli, Three Rooms Press, 2016.

Jess lives with relatives because, a decade ago when she was four years old, her mother murdered her father.  That's the official story, but it turns out the truth is a lot more complicated.  "There are worse things to be in small-town America than the daughter of a murderess," says her caretaker.  "So I hold my tongue and settle for silence."

Moran, Terrie Farley.  "Inquiry and Assistance,"  in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January-February 2016.

A nice story in the P.I. vein by my friend Terrie Farley Moran. New York City, the Great Depression.  Tommy Flood, unemployed bookkeeper is looking desperately for work, and surviving through family ties.

And speaking of family, he gets an invitation from Van Helden, the wealthy man who employs his cousin Kathleen.  He has a dangerously wild daughter, and Van Helden has decided the solution is to find an attractive but tame gentleman to escort her safely to the risky sorts of establishments she enjoys. Tommy meets the daughter by pretending to be a private eye.  And guess what?  Turns out he's good at it... 

Rogers, Cheryl.  "The Ballad of Maggie Carson,"  in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,  May 2016.  

A real sui generis tale.   Maggie Carson, newly unmarried senior citizen, is racing through the Australian Never-Never with a lifeless body in her car.  A retired police officer is on her trail.  And why, in such circumstances, is she so cheerful?

Rogow, Roberta. "The Perfesser and the Kid," in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, issue 19, 2016.

At Nikola Tesla's funeral an aging politician decides to entertain the gathered reporters with the true story of the great inventor's first day in America. We know that Tesla was robbed on the ship and stepped onto dry land with four cents in his pocket.   The official version says that he then met a man on the street with a broken machine and fixed it on the spot, thereby earning his first dollar on these shores. But our politician's version involves  a pool hall, a gang of street toughs, and Tammany Hall.

 Smith, Mark Haskell. “1968 Pelham Blue SG Jr.”  in Crime Plus Music, edited by Jim Fusilli, Three Rooms Press, 2016.

When was the last time you read a story written in first person plural?  The narrator is we, the collective voice of an over-the-hill rock band. After a gig the band's equipment (including the titular guitar) is stolen but "we couldn't call the police because one of us was supposed to be home with an ankle monitor strapped to our leg."  Hilarious.

Stevens, B.K. "The Last Blue Glass," in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, April 2016.

My fellow SleuthSayer B.K. Stevens has come up with a nice one. Cathy and Frank buy the titular set of six blue glasses as they are preparing for their first dinner party.  They are a bit fragile and expensive but Frank loves them and Cathy tends to go along with what he wants, which turns out to be a piece of the problem in their marriage, a marriage we see falling to pieces like, well, a set of blue glasses.

Thielman, Mark. "A Meter of Murder," in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2016.

In his first published story (!) Mark Thielman makes 1661 London come to life.  King Charles II had just taken the throne and anyone who had been on the Roundhead side in the Civil War, or sided with Cromwell after, had to keep one eye over his shoulder, expecting arrest or worse.

One of those was the blind poet John Milton, not yet the creator of Paradise Lost.  The narrator of the novella is Milton's younger friend, Andrew Marvell, who was both a member of Parliament and a poet. When a royalist member of Parliament is killed in circumstances that suggest a possible political motive big trouble is afoot, unless Milton can get to the bottom of it.