When I published my first mystery
novel, I knew nothing about the mystery world and the writers, readers,
reviewers and journalists who inhabit it.Nothing.Nada.Zip.I’d
written the thing in complete isolation, informed only by the hardboiled
classics and my
twisted imagination.So
I brought my book to a mystery bookstore, The Black Orchid in New York run by Bonnie
Claeson and Joe Guglielmelli.Bonnie
spent about two hours giving me advice, the first of which was to “Go to
Bouchercon and hang out at the bar.”I
thought, this is something I know how to do.
What I discovered has been as meaningful
to me as publishing the books and short stories.A big community filled with intelligent,
witty, gracious and generous people.I
never would have expected this in a million years.I assumed that writers were all introverted
shut-ins, protective of their work and privacy above all else.Not even close.All I heard at that first Bouchercon was
wall-to-wall counsel, useful information and welcoming words.And encouragement.Not just from the writers, but the
booksellers, reviewers and magazine publishers, people like George Easter,
Chris Aldrich and Jon Jordan.
I was hardly ever a shut-in, but I’m
by nature an introvert who fancies solitary pursuits.So I’m not naturally a joiner.But in the mystery world, I fell in with a
good crowd.Aside from Bouchercon, I
became devoted to Crime Bake in New England, which had some overlap with
Bouchercon, but introduced me to a different sort of writer-oriented, and
extremely involving conference.Likewise
Killer Nashville, ThrillerFest and SleuthFest.
Twenty years later, I have a whole
crop of lifelong friends.I’m not a
sentimental person, but I’m deeply grateful for these associations and all the
experiences that have come from entangling myself in this hidden, delightful
subculture.
I joined the New York Chapter of the
Mystery Writers of America, which is geographically enormous.Richie Narvaez, then chapter president, was
eager to bring more programming out to his far-flung domain, and asked if I
could do something in Connecticut.The
result was CrimeCONN, a one-day conference co-sponsored by MWA/NY and the
Ferguson Library in Stamford.I teamed
up with my longtime editor, Jill Fletcher, to create the programs and we’ve
been doing it now for eleven years.It’s
been a rollicking success, and you should come next year, especially if you
live in the Greater New York area.
I imagine most readers of
SleuthSayers have been in the game a long time and are familiar with everything
I’m writing here.The people who really
need to read it are the aspiring, at any age, who feel isolated as I did, in a
state of doubt and confusion.The social
element is great, and I treasure it, but equally valuable is the ongoing
education.I walk away from every
conference, including ours – especially ours – having learned something I
didn’t know before, and wouldn’t if I hadn’t been there listening.I may or may not find it useful for my writing,
but I love to learn in general, and nothing makes me happier than gaining an
insight that topples a pre-conceived notion, or a bit of knowledge that is
entirely novel.
I’m not exactly sure why people
pre-occupied with murder and dastardly criminal behavior would be such
convivial companions, but there you go.Through all this I’ve also become friends with people in law
enforcement, and feel the same way about them.They
don’t fit the stereotype at all, especially the detectives,
attorneys and forensic experts.They are
universally bright, self-effacing and quick witted.Even cheerful in a disarming, irreverent sort
of way.They tend to admire us fiction
writers as much as we admire them, even though we often test their patience
with our accuracy and fact-checking.But
they’ll tell you, “That’s okay.You’re
just trying to tell a good story.”
Lilly Tomlin once said, “No matter
how cynical you get, you just can’t keep up.”That’s how it feels these days, and it’s easy to just succumb to the
prevailing oppressive mood.But just
coming off our most recent CrimeCONN, I feel like declaring for the optimists –
that there are good people in the world doing good work, and supporting one
another, with thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit.
Anyone who's taught writing (or, I suspect, most other topics) in the last few years would have found little surprising in the recent news about an MIT study revealing that people who make regular use of AI tools like ChatGPT quickly show a serious reduction in cognitive activity. After only a few months, such users "consistently underperformed neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."
Lydia the Tattooed Lady Magnolia Puzzles Artist: Mark Fredrickson
I've certainly seen evidence of this in my own students. (For those unaware, I teach composition and literature courses for a number of online schools on an adjunct basis.) More and more of them are not just choosing to make use of AI, but fundamentally feel they have no other option, because they lack the reading and writing skills necessary to complete assignments on their own.
The situation isn't helped by the increasing number of schools that have essentially thrown in the towel, designing courses that actively encourage or even require the use of AI while giving lip service to the idea of training students to use it "ethically and responsibly."
This makes about as much sense as training someone to run a marathon by having them drive 26 miles a day and eat a meal from every fast food restaurant they pass on the trip. And yes, in case you were wondering, it does make teaching depressing as hell.
An aside: I want to be clear here that I'm not blaming the students, certainly not on an individual level. They can't help growing up in a world where literacy is consistently degraded and marginalized; they can't help having screens shoved in front of their faces all day long, starting before they can talk. What I can say is that, if I was under 25 years old, I would be in a constant state of white-hot rage over the world previous generations propose to leave me: a world that is less safe, less clean, less kind, less thoughtful, and far lonelier than it should be. I would be furious to live in the richest, most technologically advanced society in human history, while millions have no access to healthcare or secure occupations. It's no wonder so many of them are on antidepressants.
Aspic Hunt Art & Fable Artist: John Rego
But to get back to today's specific crisis…
AI has, in a very few years, become a source of existential terror for writers and other artists--not to mention those in a score of other occupations it threatens to wipe from existence (including, ironically, computer programmers, since it turns out AI is great at writing code). It's a little quaint to look back at the many giants of science fiction who confidently predicted that robots would free humanity from dangerous or tiresome tasks like mining or washing dishes. We've still got plenty of people dying of black lung or scraping by on scandalously low minimum wage gigs, but folks who want to write or create art have to compete with machines pretending they can do the same thing.
Believe it or not, I've painted this picture of doom and gloom because I want to share a tiny glimmer of hope I've found in an unexpected place: jigsaw puzzles.
Puzzling as a hobby exploded during the pandemic, when so many of us were looking for ways to pass the time, and my household is one of many that got caught up in the craze (see the pictures here of a few puzzles we've completed in recent weeks). Even now that the pandemic is (sort of) over, it continues to be a thriving activity and means of connecting a huge number of people. There are puzzling competitions around the globe, popular puzzling websites and content creators online, forums for discussion and news, and a lot of companies (many small, many new) turning out high-quality, beautiful puzzles in every corner of the globe.
Princess on the Pea Enjoy Puzzles Artist: Larissa Kulik
Not surprisingly, some of these companies use AI to create the artwork for the puzzles. I can't report that these companies are immediately run out of business, and no doubt they're doing fine, for the most part. But I can report this: there are a lot of puzzlers who actively refuse to buy those puzzles, and they tend to be fairly vocal about it. They want to know that the puzzles they do were created by real artists, they want those artists to be clearly identified, and they (or at least some of them) are willing to pay a little more for puzzles that meet those demands.
As AI writing and art becomes more widespread, maybe it's people like these we can invest a little optimism in. Maybe there will come to be people who demand this of their fiction and poetry and essays, and who aren't willing to just hop on Amazon and download one of the 5000 AI "books" that pop up every day. Maybe they'll be willing to pay, just a little more, for the knowledge that a real person created the thing they're looking at, and will benefit from their patronage.
Maybe there will be just enough of these people that reading and writing– real reading and writing, not a simulation– will continue to be a worthwhile, and occasionally even rewarding, way for a lot of people to spend their time.
It wouldn't take much. After all, the number of people willing to pay money to read, say, short mystery stories has been a small part of the population for a long time. It doesn't seem unreasonable to hope that it won't die out completely.
The Happy Sheep Yarn Shop Ravensburger Puzzles Artist: Nathanael Mortensen
That's my hope, anyway. In the meantime, I'll be continuing to follow my personal policy of never using AI– not for brainstorming, not for drafting, not for editing. What possible satisfaction could I get from asking a machine to write something and then putting my name on it?
Oh a high today, as The Toronto Star (Canada's biggest newspaper) has compared me to Agatha Christie! If I could have dreamed of anyone to be compared to, that's who. Now back to our regularly scheduled post…)
I don't know why I should have to be over 60 before I learn what I truly want from a protagonist.
Taking
into account that I've read at least 30 books a year for 50 years, that
is a hulking number of books to read before figuring it all out. But
figure it, I finally have, and I'm keen to share, to see if others feel
the same.
This goes for the books I write myself, but more
particularly, it goes for books I pick up to read for pleasure. Back to
that at the end of this post.
1. A protagonist I can trust.
I
was the first to admit this among my set, and I'll continue to say it:
I HATE unreliable narrators.
I want to root for the protagonist. I
want to be their friend. When I find out the protagonist has been lying to
me, it feels like a friend has betrayed me. Yes, I'm talking
about Gone Girl, and others of the like. While I admit The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd is clever, it is my least favorite book by Christie, and I
don't want to read another like it. It's been done.
I don't like being tricked by a protagonist. I don't want to become part of an author's experiment.
2. A protagonist I can enjoy becoming, while I read.
This
perhaps is the most important thing. I read to escape. I particularly
like first person books because I can slip myself into the skin of the
protagonist and become that person for the length of the story.
For
this reason, I need to respect the protagonist. Yes, they can be
flawed, but I don't want to be forced into the skin of someone who is
lacking in the morality I think is so important in life. For the same
reason, I want that person to be the sort where I can find what they think about
intriguing, with knowledge that interests me.
I discovered this recently while reading the first
book of a current series that is doing very well, which features a young, naive maid (current day) who solves crimes by noticing details. Lovely
premise, and I did respect the protagonist, but I found being in the mind of such a gal for three/four
hours to be somewhat limiting. In a short story, I could manage it. But in a long work, I need the protagonist to be someone I want to *be* for a time.
3. An ending for the Protagonist that isn't going to make me cry.
This
is why I write the sort of books I do. I find the world a scary
place. If you have watched the person you love the most, die painfully
far too young, it does something to you. I want to know - that at
least in my fiction - my beloved protagonist is going to survive and
overcome the things that threaten them.
How does all this manifest
itself in my own writing? If I am writing a novel (I've written 20)
then there is going to be humour as well as crime in the story, and the outcome will
not be a bad one for my protagonist.
There is enough dark in our world today. I want to add light.
So readers can pick up my books knowing that
they won't read for 4 hours, only to find the character they have come
to care about has kicked the bucket. Instead, they will live to tell
another tale. And the reader will hopefully leave the book smiling.
Finally: my husband just
asked me what I was writing about for this blog, and I told him the topic, being what I want from a protagonist. He immediately said: "Sales."
How
about you? Do you relate as strongly with a protagonist? Or do you
like to get into the skin of someone entirely different, no matter their morals?
Compared to Agatha Christie by The Toronto Star, Melodie Campbell writes capers and golden age mysteries. Now available everywhere! Book 18, The Silent Star Murders
"The pacing is brisk, the setting is vivid, and the dialog is
sharp. The Silent Film Star Murders is an enjoyable read with a
conclusion that—even though I should have—I simply did not see coming."
A mystery writer friend was delighted when a regional writing conference asked her to speak and offered an honorarium of $1,000. She arrived at the venue and discovered to her dismay that no one had bothered to tell her that she could sell her own books. (The organizers did not want to go to the trouble of asking a local bookstore to sell, and were too disorganized to spell out the DIY details.) She spent hours after her talk silently fuming while other authors sold books in a meeting space, swiping credit cards with Square readers.
Another friend, who writes in the horror genre, has grown accustomed to driving to any small conference that will have him. But when a library group in upstate New York contacted him, he calculated that he would need to drive 700 miles round trip. He declined rather than ask if they would consider chipping in for travel expenses. “I hate to bring it up,” he said. “It would be too awkward. Some of those peeps are my friends. But shouldn’t they give me something?”
Yeah, dude! I know it sounds nutty, but many civilians love hearing writers speak—and they are often willing to pay. You just need to know how to ask.
In the book world, it’s expected that an author will make bookstore or library appearances for free when on the road promoting a book. It’s now somewhat expected that you will make yourself available to Zoom with book clubs.
Beyond these, there are book festivals, library conferences, university speaker series, women’s clubs, corporate retreats, historic sites, and town hall venues that pay writers attractive fees to speak.
Strangely, many of these events don’t do book sales. The world of publishing is so opaque that outsiders reflexively avoid onsite sales because they seem like extra work. Reasons range from a) not knowing how to acquire and sell books themselves, b) not knowing that they can invite a bookseller, and c) feeling confused about how much time on the schedule they should allow for a book signing.
Worse, sometimes they will allow book sales, but think nothing of insisting on a 10 percent cut of sales. And they never understand why bookstores tell them to pound sand. “Do these people know how much we make on a book?” a bookstore owner once told me.
Most of the best-paying orgs hold a place of honor in the contact lists of major speaker’s agents. And yes, some speaker’s bureaus exclusively represent writers. Increasingly, such bureaus are embedded in the offices of the Big Five publishers. Why? Money.
Publishers have figured out that a cash payment plus book sales is lovely thing to behold. Authors should also grasp that when the average paperback royalty is seven percent, a $500 honorarium is the equivalent of selling 420 copies of a $17 paperback.
Speaker’s bureaus take a 20-25 percent commission on your speaking fee, but they are arguably worth it because they arrange the booking, book the travel, have someone standing by to deal with travel snafus as they arise on the road, and mail you a check with expenses when the whole thing is done.
They also have the chutzpah to do what most writers cannot do: ask people to pay them. We writers are coded to be payment-shy, which is why the worst publishers find us such easy prey.
The folks who work at the bureaus do what literary agents do. They advocate for us when we think it would appear gauche to advocate for ourselves. (Have you watched Uncle Harlan lately?)
That said, these bureaus are as tough to sign with as literary agents, but you don’t need one to handle the occasional speaking engagement that comes your way. You just have to be savvy and borrow a few tricks from their toolkit. I’ll mention two.
Speaker’s agents have a standard patter that goes something like this:
“Mr. Slapscribe is very much in demand, and we typically quote $15,000 for one of his appearances. However, I have seen him get much, much more, and I’ve seen him voluntarily take less because he was impressed with an organization’s past record of inviting mystery writers who wear unflattering fedoras. So don’t be put off by the fee. Fill out our questionnaire and bring us your best offer. We need to know what your organization can offer in terms of a speaker’s fee plus travel expenses. And we’ll go from there.”
It’s a spiel that asserts the price but still manages to sound welcoming. The “best offer” line is critical, because it invites event organizers with small budgets to throw their hat in the ring. They return to their team, hammer out their best package, and fill out the questionnaire. If the dollar amount falls below the bureau’s minimum, the agent typically routes the deal back to the author/speaker, saying: “Here—you can deal with this one yourself. There’s not enough money to interest us. But please, for the love of monkeys, don’t do too many of these cheap deals because word gets around.”
In our household, who do you think ends up dealing with the events my wife’s speaker’s bureaus reject? I hate talking about money with anyone, but when forced to do so, I do what any self-respecting writer would do: I hide behind my words.
Over the years, I have compiled my own questionnaire, adding all the questions I’ve seen on the documents of the name agencies and a few of my own. Now, when a fresh inquiry hits my inbox, I triage it immediately. Is it worth sending to her speaker’s agent, or can I handle it myself? (I can usually tell.)
Then I unfurl my own patter, according to a time-tested strategy. Is this an organization she has worked with before and adores? If they’re not “a friendly,” are they relatively nearby? Will a significant amount of travel be involved? Then I go from there. Here’s how you might do the same:
“Thanks for writing. I have always loved talking to your group. Do you mind filling this out for me? It probably touches on stuff that don’t apply to your event, but at least we will all be on the same page.”
“Thanks for writing. I am happy to travel within 60 miles of home to do these types of events. I’m wondering if your group can cover any travel expenses because I estimate this will take 6 hours round trip by car. Since you’re planning an evening event, I will will probably need to book a room for the night. Do you mind completing…”
“Thanks for writing. The festival sounds fun, and next May is doable, but since it’s in a different state, I’d need to see the overall package you’re offering guest authors before agreeing. Do you have something you can send, or do you mind filling out…”
The toughest one is saved for a certain type of inquirer who gives the impression that they are doing you a favor by asking you to work for free:
“Thanks for the invite. These days most of my author talks are paid, or they go on my waiting list. But I look at all the offers people send. All I ask if that you be up front and give me your best offer so I can consider it quickly in good faith. Attached is my questionnaire…”
Responding in this fashion usually weeds out the groups who are simply not organized. Some of them never write back. That’s fine. I am guided by two principles.
The first comes from the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, the computer scientist and attention management guru who famously does not respond to most emails, and forces his academic colleagues at Georgetown to boil their requests down to solid details before he will respond. The message is: Let’s not waste each other’s time. Summarize your expectations—all of them—in writing. If you can’t do this or find it onerous, we cannot work together.
The second is, humans are fallible. If an event organizer is not seasoned, it will not occur to them to mention that you can do book sales, or whether they can offer you a travel allowance, and so on. Inexperienced organizers are like deer in the headlights. They’re terrified. They are praying that you will make their problem go away by filling the empty slot on their schedule. If you say yes, they log you on the calendar and forget to tell you what is expected of you until it’s too late.
And that’s bad.
If you knew that your hosts intended to post a recording of the event to YouTube, would you say yes?
If you knew that they intended to sell tickets to your talk, would that change whether you did the talk for free?
Recently, for example, I have heard of two other annoying requests:
If you knew that they insisted on seeing a copy of your talk or PowerPoint ahead of time, to make sure it was not “offensive,” would you agree?
If they asked for a list of all your social media accounts to vet your level of “controversiality,” would you agree?
I swear I am not making this up.
Everyone’s circumstances are different, but a decent list of questions will unearth many of the issues that they will not think to share. The current version of my questionnaire lives on my website. Feel free to download the PDF, scrape and copy the text into a Word document, and tweak it with questions of your own. Send the document to correspondents, and see what happens. Three of the email openings I shared above raise the issue of some form of payment. The questionnaire asks it more explicitly. In the best-case scenario, prompted by the form, they will tell you if they can pay and how much.
Let me stress that it’s perfectly fine to do an event for zero payment. We do them all the time. We once participated in a well-run book festival where the only obligations were an hour-long talk on how one gets published (shoot me) and signing books for buyers in the sales room. They paid us $200 each for our time, and it was a lovely, 90-minute round trip through the mountains. We would do it again in a heartbeat. I’d just insist on a different topic.
I once did a Zoom event for an elementary school group for no payment, only to be surprised when a $50 check arrived in the mail with a school T-shirt, a mug, and a card signed by the students.
I will say that in the children’s book field, in-person school visits are no joke. They are often full-day events that involve leading one or more classrooms of squirming fifth graders in a writing lesson. Yeah—I would much prefer chatting on a four-person panel about how I do fiction research.
Many children’s book authors print flyers describing the type of events they offer for payment, and hand them out at conferences if anyone asks. Others post a one-sheet “explainer” PDF on their websites that school districts can download. Those docs spell out the types of talks they do, their ground rules, fees, and required deposit. (Example: the school district pays the writer a nonrefundable half-fee three months in advance to get booked on the schedule. That way, the writer does not book the flight unless money is in hand.)
One of our friends, a bestseller in this field, states openly on his website that he charges for school visits because he’s a full-time professional author, and this is how he provides for his family. Can’t get any clearer than that.
It’s nice to work with people who appreciate what you have offered them. But far too many groups have gotten it into their heads that writers will do things for free because of the “good publicity.” And that’s just plain wacky.
My last tip comes from a young writer friend who has dealt with this attitude far too often. (You’ll see why I italicized that word in a second.) A while back he was asked to attend an event three states away for no pay or travel expenses. His room and board would be covered because he would crash with a fellow writer in the destination city. Rather than fly, he insisted on driving 521 miles in a single drive. (Times two, counting the return trip.)
“You’re kidding me, right?” I said.
“Naw. I’ll make money on the mileage alone,” quoth he.
He’d become such a pro at non-paying writer events that he counted on them to reduce his annual income taxes. For 2025, the US business mileage rate is 70 cents a mile. That means a 1,000-mile car trip to a nonpaying author event can, in theory, “earn” you a $700 income business tax deduction.
It’s the same sort of logic I have used to justify pricey conference expenses: “But we can deduct it!”
Said friend uses the QuickBooks mileage app to track out-of-town trips, not to mention his in-town “writer business” errands to bookstores, the library, the post office, the UPS Store, FedEx, Kinko’s, office supply stores, and driving to meet fellow writers for lunch.
I asked my accountant about this, and he chided me for not doing it sooner. I prefer an app called MileIQ. (Both are subscription based, but even the subscription is tax-deductible.)
In closing, let me say that I wish you well, wherever such events take you. A world that wants to hear what writers have to say is a beautiful one indeed. It also better not make us angry. Long may we flap.
On May 2, 2025, The New Yorker posted an article by Malcolm Gladwell, "What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime". (LINK) Now I'll read about anything by MG - don't always agree with him, but he's generally interesting - and this was worth it.
Here's the official story that sparks it:
"Late on a Sunday night in June of 2023, a woman named Carlishia Hood and her fourteen-year-old son, an honor student, pulled into Maxwell Street Express, a fast-food joint in West Pullman, on the far South Side of Chicago. Her son stayed in the car. Hood went inside. Maxwell is a no-frills place—takeout-style, no indoor seating. It’s open twenty-four hours a day. Hood asked for a special order—without realizing that at Maxwell, a busy place, special orders are frowned upon. The man behind her in line got upset; she was slowing things down. His name was Jeremy Brown. On the street, they called him the Knock-Out King. Brown began to gesticulate, his arms rising and falling in exasperation. He argued with Hood, growing more agitated. Then he cocked his fist, leaned back to bring the full weight of his body into the motion, and punched her in the head.
When the argument had started, Hood texted her son, asking him to come inside. Now he was at the door, slight and tentative in a white hoodie. He saw Brown punch his mother a second time. The boy pulled out a revolver and shot Brown in the back. Brown ran from the restaurant. The boy pursued him, still firing. Brown died on the street—one of a dozen men killed by gunfire in Chicago that weekend.
In the remarkable new book “Unforgiving Places” (Chicago), Jens Ludwig breaks down the Brown killing, moment by moment. Ludwig is the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and he uses as a heuristic the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s version of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking."
System 1 - "Expressive Violence" - fast, automatic, intuitive, emotional: hurting someone in a sudden burst of frustration, anger, confusion, or drug addled state.
System 2 - "Instrumental violence", acts such as a carefully planned robbery, whether of an individual or a bank. Or a serial killer.
Now, according to Ludwig, our criminal justice system is largely based on the idea that most violence is System 2, instrumental, i.e., planned, BUT the real problem is System 1, expressive violence, i.e., spontaneous. "The ongoing bloodshed in America’s streets is just Maxwell Street Express, over and over again." I totally agree.
South Dakota's incarceration rate is 370 per 100,000 residents, which is higher than the national average, and higher than any other democratic country in the world. We are, as all our gubernatorial and legislative candidates are proud to say, "tough on crime." Most inmates (around 80%) are in for non-violent crimes, mostly drugs and/or DUIs.* Of the violent crimes, most are (in percentage order) in for assault, sexual assault, manslaughter, sexual assault of a child, robbery, first degree murder, burglary, kidnapping, child abuse, 2nd degree murder, weapons charges, arson, and stalking. If you added up all the sex crimes, they'd outnumber assault, but that's another blogpost. Let's just say that there's a lot of sex crimes in South Dakota, and every week someone is arrested for one, but no one really talks about it.
*Sentences are harsh up here, and very little in the way of drug and alcohol treatment or rehabilitation is provided. So a significant number are revolving door inmates - they get out, they come back, they get out, they come back...
In my years volunteering in prison, I've met inmates convicted of any and all of the above. And heard a lot of stories.
The inmate who'd served 30+ years for a drunken teenaged bar brawl that got taken outside. Both tried to kill the other, and one succeeded.
The middle-aged inmate who'd tweaked out so often on meth that his brain was still addled after 20 years hard time, but he could clearly remember the time he was tweaked out, and his meth buddy was grabbing a beer that he thought was his, and he went ballistic and stabbed him.
The inmate who killed his wife because he couldn't take one more minute of living with her. "What's wrong with divorce?" I asked. "Too damn expensive," he said.
The inmate who killed someone in a drug deal gone bad and left him in a car in the middle of winter outside of town... Took a long time for that body to be found.
The inmate who assaulted and damn near killed a guy who owed him 6 soups (Ramen, the prison favorite and a form of currency). "What was I supposed to do, let him get away with disrespecting me like that?"
BTW, much of the violent crime in the prison is based on someone's perceived disrespect - which must be instantly dealt with, before other inmates start perceiving you as weak, i.e., prey.
And many more.
Basically, almost all of the violent criminals I've met are System 1 criminals. As Ludwig writes,
"System 1 thinking is egocentric: it involves, everything through the lens of ‘What does this have to do with me?’ It depends on stark binaries—reducing a range of possibilities to a simple yes or no—and, as he notes, it “focuses more on negative over positive information.” In short, it’s wired for threats. System 1 catastrophizes. It imagines the worst."
I ran into this all the time in our AVP (Alternative to Violence Project) workshops. We'd be doing exercises on the root causes of violence, on anger (which is always a masking emotion - no one runs out and gets angry because it's fun), on act/react, etc. A lot of responses were, "Well, what the hell am I supposed to do when someone disrespects me?" "You let someone take your stuff, you'd better get them right away, or everyone'll think you're just a punk." "You HAVE to react, around here."
Thankfully, we always had inmate facilitators who would explain that you didn't HAVE to do anything you didn't want to. But first you had to learn to slow that reaction, that anger down... Deep breaths. What's going on? Is this worth time in the SHU?* What would really happen if I just walked away?
*Segregated Housing Unit, i.e., The Hole.
It didn't always work, and it often took a long time to become part of someone's way of thinking and acting, but when it did... it was remarkable. Our facilitators, and our inmate graduates, stayed out of the SHU, and stayed out of gang wars. Which were always based on respect/disrespect issues, i.e., System 1.
"Brown’s encounter with Carlishia Hood pushed him into System 1 mode. He made an immediate egocentric assumption: if he knew that special orders were a norm violation, then Hood must know, too. “Given that System 1 assumption,” Ludwig explains, “from there it is natural that Brown believed the person in front of him was deliberately holding things up.”
"Hood, meanwhile, didn’t know about the special-order taboo, so she was operating under her own egocentric assumptions. She “knew she wasn’t being disrespectful and deliberately trying to hold up everyone else in line, so the curse of knowledge led her System 1 to assume that Brown surely also knew that,” Ludwig writes. “So why was he getting so bent out of shape? She didn’t mean to be inconsiderate to the people behind her in line; she just wanted the Maxwell Street Express people to change whatever it was that she wanted changed on the burger.” Neither had the cognitive space to consider that they were caught in a misunderstanding. They were in binary mode: I’m right, so you must be wrong. From there, things escalated:
Hood says to her son, who’s standing behind Brown, “Get in the car.”
Brown seems to think that comment is directed at him—another misreading of the situation.“WHO?!?” he says. “Get in the CAR?!?”
Hood says something that’s hard to make out from the video.
Brown says, “Hey lady, lady, lady, lady. GET YOUR FOOD. GET YOUR FOOD. If you say one more thing, I’m going to KNOCK YOU OUT.” You can see his right fist, clenching and unclenching, over and over.
She says something that is again hard to make out on the video.
He says, “Oh my God I SAID if you say one more thing, I’m going to knock you out.”
At which point he punches her—hard.
Hood’s son is standing in the doorway, watching the assault of his mother. Had he been in System 2 mode, he might have paused. He might have asked for help. He might have called 911. He could have weighed the trade-offs and thought, Yes, it’s unbearable to watch my mother being beaten. But, if I kill this man, I could spend years in prison. But he’s filled with adrenaline. He shifts into catastrophizing mode: There is nothing worse than seeing my mother get pummelled by a stranger. Brown punches her again—and again. The boy shoots him in the back. Brown runs. Hood tells her son to follow him. There is nothing worse than letting him get away. Still in System 1, the boy fires again. Brown collapses in the street."
And that, my friends, is what most homicides look like. Out of nowhere. No good reason. Shit happens.
BTW, this is one of my favorite parts:
"Much of what gets labelled gang violence, Ludwig says, is really just conflict between individuals who happen to be in gangs. We misread these events because we insist on naming the affiliations of the combatants. Imagine, he suggests, if we did this for everyone: “ ‘This morning by Buckingham Fountain, a financial analyst at Morningstar killed a mechanic for United Airlines.’ Naturally you’d think the place of employment must be relevant to understanding the shooting, otherwise why mention it at all?”
"The Chicago Police Department estimates that arguments lie behind seventy to eighty per cent of homicides. The numbers for Philadelphia and Milwaukee are similar. And that proportion has held remarkably steady over time. Drawing on data from Houston in 1969, the sociologist Donald Black concluded that barely more than a tenth of homicides occurred during predatory crimes like burglary or robbery. The rest, he found, arose from emotionally charged disputes—over infidelity, household finances, drinking, child custody. Not calculated acts of gain, in other words, but eruptions rooted in contested ideas of right and wrong."
Meanwhile, our criminal justice system is designed with the idea that people weigh the costs of their actions and act accordingly. In the heat of the moment, especially if alcohol, drugs, and/or mental disturbances are involved, no one thinks about "Well, I'll go to prison for life if I do this", especially if they're young. Teenagers run on surging tsunamis of emotions that wipe out all sense of sense. Too many adults - in and out of prison - are still emotionally teenagers, because they've never been taught how to deal with their emotions. And these days our entire advertising system is aimed at getting you to buy (products, ideas, politics, wars) without thinking. We have got to spend time and energy training children, teenagers, and adults how to navigate life the way it is: constantly changing, often volatile, and sometimes downright violent and dangerous. We live in a world full of drugs, alcohol, guns, and violent social media content, and we're still commonly assuming our towns are Mayberry, and everyone's the Waltons. Gotta cut that OUT.
Three other things we've got to cut out, according to Ludwig is to
(1) "stop talking about criminals as if they occupy some distinct moral category." As I tell people when I've done presentations about AVP and prisons, everyone is one bad decision, one bad night, one bad choice, away from going to prison. Everyone.
(2) "stop locking up so many people for long prison terms." Mass incarceration drains adults from troubled neighborhoods and their families, and the longer you keep someone in prison, without rehabilitation or education, the less able they're going to be to deal with the world outside.
(3) "spend more time thinking about what makes one neighborhood safe and another unsafe." Ludwig cites a randomized trial in New York City’s public-housing projects, which found that upgrading outdoor lighting experienced a 35% decrease in serious crimes. Help bad neighborhoods clean up.
"[Ludwig] describes one of the program’s exercises, in which students are paired off. One is given a ball; the other is told he has thirty seconds to take it.
"Almost all of them rely on force to try to complete the assignment; they try to pry the other person’s hand open, or wrestle or even pummel the other person. During the debrief that follows, a counselor asks why no one asked for the ball. Most youths respond by saying their partner would have thought they were a punk (or something worse—you can imagine). The counselor then asks the partner what he would have done if asked. The usual answer: “I would have given it, it’s just a stupid ball.” Exactly. It’s almost always a stupid ball."
Now to just convince them - and us - that almost everything is almost always a stupid ball.
Somebody famous, Sir Walter Raleigh, or one of those guys, on his way to the block, said
there was nothing like a date with the headsman’s axe to sharpen your wit.
Which got me thinking about deadlines.
Both literally, and otherwise.
For instance. We here, at SleuthSayers, all
collaborated on a mystery anthology last year – titled Murder, Neat – with each of us contributing a story. I, of course, dragged my feet until the last
minute. I had a title, and the set-up,
which is nought but bare bones; I didn’t have a clue
what kind of pickle I planned to put my guy in, let alone how to get him out of
it. And then, the deadline loomed, and
it was like that old joke, “With one tremendous leap… Off to the races.
In another case, though, I missed the
deadline for the Black Orchid submission, at the end of May, this year. I think I can explain the difference. With the Murder, Neat story, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,”
I had a tight internal timeline – the arc of the story itself is only a couple
of hours – and a single setting. It was
a physical trap, with the clock running out.
In other words, writing the story was like winding a watch. But the Black Orchid novella was a bigger,
shaggier animal. I wanted the story to open
up, across a wider canvas, I wanted you to breathe in, and fill your lungs, to feel
the whole of a landscape. I wanted that
room to breathe, myself, to give the story interior
space, as well as outside. From my
immediate perspective, I don’t know whether I’ve pulled it off, I’m still too
close, but my point is that one kind of story benefits from pressure, and another
doesn’t.
Harper Barnes
It’s partly about narrative compression.
What is it you want to say? Say it, and get it done. This is what newspaper people always tell
you. Lead with a jab, soften ‘em up with
some combinations, finish with a roundhouse punch. Decades ago, I wrote a movie column for an
alternative Boston weekly, the Phoenix. Often as not, I was turning in my material
right as the paper was going to bed, locked in for the press run. I remember, one night, I was there in the
empty offices, in the Back Bay, me and my editor – Harper Barnes, a real newspaper guy, who’d made his bones
with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – with
me at a borrowed desk, pounding out copy on a big Royal manual, the floor
shaking, I was punching the keys so hard.
Typing MORE at the bottom of each page, full caps, yanking them out,
never a backward glance, and on the last page, typing em-dash, 30, em-dash. Old newspaper thing, from the days of movable
type, to let the typesetters know they’d hit the end of the copy. (Even if the Phoenix
was photo-typeset.)
Were those columns back then any good?
I’d like to think they were literate, at least.
I’ll tell you this. Banging on
that typewriter, handing my pages across the desk to Harper, no hesitating, no
second thoughts, no sucking on my knuckles for inspiration, nothing but my ass in
that hard chair, I felt like I was Jimmy-God-damn-Breslin at the New York Post taking on Carmine DeSapio and Tammany Hall. That good. Never be that
good again.
I've been doing some research on
the American Civil War for my next project. The notes I'm taking are stacking
higher and higher. I could write a first-class term paper at this point, but
I'm not ready yet to write a story.
In particular, I’m still looking for a hinge fact.
The hinge fact, in my definition, is the
tidbit that hooks the reader and opens up the story. I assume that it will capture
the reader’s interest if it grabs my attention.
I recently read Dust and Light. The author, Andrea Barrett, writes
historical fiction and has garnered numerous national prizes for her work. Dust and Light is a short nonfiction book in which she discusses finding and
using facts in her writing. The book received some nice attention and seemed perfect for helping me clarify my thoughts on research and writing.
The Devil's Kitchen, my debut
novel, unfolds across dual timelines. The remaining books in the series will as
well. To write the historical chapters, I need a basketful of facts. However,
to progress as a writer, I wanted to consider new and better ways to utilize
them.
Dust and Light has me thinking about historical facts and their judicious use. I want to deploy the facts to tell the story rather than using the story to display the facts. That's
always the goal, but it's easier to articulate than to execute.
I also hoped the book might show me how to pinpoint the hinge fact.
That final search didn’t pay off. As Barrett
outlined her method, I kept hearing the word "chaotic" in my head. In interviews, she has described her research and writing process as odd, inefficient, even
crazy. One of the book's themes is that a discussion of process isn't intended
to teach a particular method of writing. Instead, the conversation teaches us
that we all have our own individualized method for writing and that “we should cherish those ways.”
Andrea Barrett may be the dictionary definition of ‘pantser.’
Her book reminded me of a few other
things. The author related a story about scientific research from the nineteenth
century. Fridtjof Nansen theorized that in the frozen wilderness of the Polar
Sea, ice drifted northwest. He searched for evidence to support his belief.
Nansen learned of the Jeanette, a ship exploring the region that had
been lost at sea. Several years after its disappearance, a pair of oilskin pants from the Jeanette
washed up on the shore of Greenland. Nansen recognized their clockwise drift
pattern and set off on his own largely successful expedition.
An empty pair of pants floating onto the Greenland coast is my idea of a hinge fact.
To make his leap of understanding,
Nansen needed this fact. But to appreciate its significance, he
required a solid knowledge foundation in his field. The explorer also benefited from a community to support and challenge him. He needed resources— a crew, a ship, and time. Finally,
Nansen required the courage to try.
The scientific or explorer’s method
may not be identical to that of the fiction writer, but the resource demands
are similar. The entry point, an adequate base, space and time to explore, and
a supportive community are all elements of successful writing.
Barrett seriously downplays the use
of facts. She acknowledges that fiction must be about something. Setting out a
story about a character doing something within a specific time and place
necessarily involves articulating facts. While reluctantly agreeing, she wants
her facts to be dissolved into her fiction. The basket of facts she accumulates
is used to inform what characters love and what motivates them rather than providing specific details about who and when. She doesn't like to overburden her stories with facts.
Much of Dust and Light is devoted to
clarifying this idea. What Barrett wants to convey about her characters needs
to be true, even if not entirely factual. Everyone who writes fiction probably
thinks the same way. We write stories and not encyclopedias.
To write crime fiction rooted in
history, I need a plot. And within a plot, I need facts. In interviews, more so
than in Dust and Light, Barrett makes clear that she writes literary
historical fiction rather than genre fiction. I felt the metaphorical pat on the head and the implied, 'I’m not really talking about you.' While her polite dismissal sounded a bit pretentious, the take-home lesson--to separate the cause from the
result--retained value. Barrett encourages writers “not to confuse the material with the
aesthetic creation arising from the material.” In fiction, the facts are in
service to the story.
We think the same way about
character building. Somewhere on my computer are saved a host of surveys I’ve been given. These are questionnaires to flesh out fictional characters. When I’ve thought through
what sort of dessert she likes and what pet she had as a child, I have a better
picture of who my character is and how she might respond in each situation,
even if nowhere in my story does she ever pause to eat strawberry ice cream
with her cat. The pile of facts Barrett accumulates help her to know her historical characters in the same way.
Dust and Light is a quick read. I didn’t find my
guide to locating the hinge fact. I did, however, come away with a lesson on
delicacy in selecting and incorporating facts into my stories. I got a
cautionary tale about the temptation to flood my stories with excessive information.
The book gave me a glimpse into different research and writing styles. It reminded me about the value of the community.
And speaking of community. I’ll be
traveling from ThrillerFest on the day this blog posts. I won’t have internet
access. Please excuse the failure to reply to a comment.
Elaine Viets, our guest blogger today, is a highly popular mystery author whose fourth series launched this month. She’s won the Agatha, Anthony, and Lefty Awards and was honored with Malice Domestic’s Lifetime Achievement Award. With Sex and Death on the Beach, Elaine returns to her adopted home, South Florida.
My grandmother liked to sing. She’d sing while she cooked in her kitchen, pulled weeds in her garden, or rocked in her porch glider. On summer nights, she and her friends would drink highballs, play cards, and sing. Comforting songs from when Grandma was young, like “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” “Pennies from Heaven,” and “Blue Skies.”
But one of Grandma’s favorites sounded downright creepy to me. It began:
“Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?”
“There are a few, kind sir, but simple girls and proper too.”
Ick. Where did that come from?
I didn’t track that song down until the advent of the Internet, when I learned the tune Grandma used to sing was “Tell Me Pretty Maiden,” a showstopper in a hit musical comedy called Florodora. The musical debuted in London, where it was wildly popular, and was transplanted to Broadway in 1900.
Florodora was set on a mythical island, which produced a perfume by the same name. The characters included an evil millionaire, snooty Lady Holyrood, a ridiculous phrenologist, a stolen fortune, and of course, beautiful showgirls, the Florodora Girls.
Florodora Girls were such stunners that supposedly they all married rich men. There was also scandal. Real live juicy scandal. The notorious Evelyn Nesbit was in Florodora.
Once I knew this, I had to have a Florodora Girl in my new Florida Beach series. Except the series was set in the present, featuring Florida Men and Women. And Florodora hadn’t been on Broadway in more than a hundred years. So I gave my character, Norah McCarthy, a racy Florodora grandmother, who seemed capable of almost anything. Maybe even murder. Norah’s grandma built an apartment house in mythical Peerless Point, Florida, and Norah inherited it.
Sex and Death on the Beach opens when the body of a porn star is found buried by the pool at the Florodora apartments. Norah is the prime suspect. Worse, another body is unearthed, buried when Norah was a little girl. Did Grandma kill that person?
The residents of Norah’s building belong to an exclusive group. They must be Florida Men and Women, but the benign variety. The exploits of Florida Man often include alligators and alcohol. You’ve seen the headlines: “Florida Man Busted with Meth, Guns, and Baby Gator in Truck.” Norah’s feelings about Florida Man and Woman are “somewhere between appalled and perversely proud.” She’s descended from an early Florida Woman, her grandmother, Eleanor Harriman.
Norah’s grandma had a soft spot for scapegraces, since she was one herself. She was a Florodora Girl, a superstar chorus girl a century ago. Norah’s grandmother was in the 1920 Broadway production of Florodora before she eloped with handsome Johnny Harriman, a millionaire, back when a million was real money. She was married at sixteen and madly in love. When Norah was old enough, “Grandma told me about poor Johnny’s accidental death, which involved a champagne bottle and a chandelier.”
Like Norah’s grandmother, my own grandma married at sixteen. But my grandfather was no champagne-swilling millionaire. Grandma worked at a pickle factory. She married on her lunch break and went back to work. The bride and groom each went home to their parents. They were too poor to have their own home. They were married more than fifty years.
At seventeen, my character Norah’s grandmother was a rich widow who moved to Florida and built an apartment building, the Florodora, right on the ocean in 1923. The Florodora was quirky as Norah’s grandmother, with grand rooms, odd hideaways, and at least one secret staircase. To her bedroom. Norah was orphaned at age four and raised by her grandmother. The eccentric residents became her honorary uncles and aunts. When Norah’s grandma died at ninety-eight some twenty years ago, Norah inherited the Florodora.
The painting of Norah’s grandmother, commissioned by her doting husband when Eleanor was seventeen, displays her in all her Florodora glory. She wore a black picture hat, pink ruffled dress, long black gloves, and a frilly parasol.
Despite the modest costume, some critics were scandalized. A reviewer from the show’s first run in the US called it “one of the most uncompromisingly filthy plays ever seen in New York.”
What was so outrageous? Most of the girls didn’t wear pink tights when they danced.
That sounds quaint, but Florodora Girls were mixed up in modern crimes like murder, date rape drugs, and underage sex. Architect Stanford White was shot and killed by Harry Thaw, the husband of Evelyn Nesbit, for drugging and raping the Florodora beauty. You may recognize Evelyn from the movie Ragtime or an even older movie, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. Don’t waste your sympathy on Stanford. He was a married man in his fifties when he seduced Evelyn.
If you drive past the Florodora Apartments on Ocean Drive, you’ll see the old white building looks much the same as it did during the roaring Twenties. The Florodora Apartments are Spanish Colonial, a white stucco structure with a red barrel-tile roof. The front windows have elaborate plaster Churrigueresque, which make the windows look like they’re framed in cake frosting. The Florodora’s almost the only old Florida building left on Ocean Drive. The rest are high-rise condos. Most look like shoeboxes standing on end. The Florodora is a reminder of Florida’s glamour days in the Twenties.
What you can’t see from the road is the beachfront. The Florodora sits on a wide boardwalk teeming with tourists and vendors selling everything from rum-filled pineapples to T-shirts and beach umbrellas. The sea air smells of salt and suntan lotion and the breeze is soft on the hottest days.
When I was nine, I realized my own grandmother lived during the roaring Twenties. Just like in the movies. I was sure my law-abiding Grandma wore beaded dresses, slammed back champagne with gangsters, and dodged police raids at speakeasies.
“What were the Twenties like, Grandma?” I asked her. “Were they fun?”
So there I was, minding my own business when that dastardly evildoer’s name popped up on my security screen. Professor James Moriarty was up to his old habits, literally escaping the hangman’s noose in the first five minutes of a restored Lumière moving pictures Cinematograph. The case may have been part of the Moriarty Canon, but one and a quarter centuries later remains unmentioned In the official Holmes Canon.
Unfortunately, Holmes does not revert to his brilliant disguise as Jeremy Brett. Despite this, as a public service, we share with you this previously untold history titled Hands of a Murderer. If you prefer to watch this later during your own criminal pursuits, here is a link for your tablet or phone:
My friend Judy Penz Sheluk has twice been a guest columnist here at SleuthSayers--once in 2021 and once in 2023. Today, at our regular two-year interval, I'm pleased to have her here for another guest post, this one to celebrate the latest book in her Superior Shores Anthology series. Please join me in welcoming her once again.
--John Floyd
Creating a Cohesive Collection
by Judy Penz Sheluk
I've acquired a few skills during my corporate life as a credit manager (among other finance-related jobs) and as a magazine editor for multiple publications, but one of the most important was a good working knowledge of Excel, spreadsheets being a good way to number crunch and manage budgets. Even so, I never thought I'd use it as a tool to help me determine the order of the stories in my Superior Shores Anthologies. But that's exactly what I've done, each and every time.
Let's take my most recent multi-author anthology, Midnight Schemers & Daydream Believers: 22 Stories of Mystery & Suspense, released on June 18th. Admittedly, much of the heavy lifting lies in culling down the 80 submissions to a manageable number, but turning the selected stories into a cohesive collection isn't quite as simple as it might seem on the surface. That's where my handy-dandy spreadsheet comes in. Here's a step-by-step look at how it works:
1. Set up five columns: Order (1-22), author name, title, word count, and comments.
2. Select which story will be first and mark that as number 1 under the column titled 'Order.' I spend a lot of time deciding what story will be first, because that sets the stage for the rest of the collection. In the case of Midnight Schemers, I chose Charlie Kondek's 'Secretly Keith,' the tale of a cover band guitarist who decides the time is right to rob barroom bookie Big John Warmer. At just under 3,500 words, it's middle of the pack in length, and as you've probably guessed, things don't go according to plan for our scheming, daydreaming, and very misguided musician.
3. Mark 'A Foolproof Plan,' my story of a woman desperate for a new life, as number 22, the last entry--it just doesn't feel right to put my own story ahead of any of the other authors. At just over 1,800 words, it's the shortest in the collection, which brings me to...
4. Select #21: the lead-in to the final story. Preferably long, and completely different in every way. In this case, I selected C. W. Blackwell's 'Making Up for Lost Time,' which clocks in at about 5,000 words, a poignant tale of a down-on-his-luck divorced dad and his daughter.
5. Sort the remainder of the stories by word count. In this way, I can begin to vary the order by story length, i.e., long, medium, short, long, medium, short, and so on.
6. Of course, just sorting by length isn't enough. That's where my Comments column, a one-sentence reminder about the content, comes in. It wouldn't do, for example, to have Pam Barnsley's homeless man in 'The Underground,' compete with C.W. Blackwell's down-on-his-luck dad. That said, at roughly 2,500 words, it's not long enough to follow Charlie Kondek's mid-length opener. The balance? Inserting Susan Daly's 5,000 word 'A Talent for Fame' between the two.
7. The heavy lifting done, I tinker with the order until it's right. Sort, re-sort. Re-read the intro of each story until I'm finally satisfied it's as good as it's going to get. After all, even the most devoted tinkerers have to let go sometime.
READERS: Do you pay attention to the order of stories? Or do you read them based on author name recognition, story title, and/or length?
About Midnight Schemers & Daydream Believers: 22 Stories of Mystery & Suspense:
Desire or desperation, revenge or retribution--how far would you go to realize a dream? The twenty-two authors in this collection explore the possibilities, with predictably unpredictable results.
Featuring stories by Pam Barnsley, Linda Bennett, Clark Boyd, C. W. Blackwell, Amanda Capper, Susan Daly, James Patrick Focarile, Rand Gaynor, Gina X. Grant, Julie Hastrup, Beth Irish, Charlie Kondek, Edward Lodi, Bethany Maines, Jim McDonald, donalee Moulton, Michael Penncavage, Judy Penz Sheluk, KM Rockwood, Peggy Rothschild, Debra Bliss Saenger, and Joseph S. Walker.
About Judy: The Past Chair of Crime Writers of Canada (CWC) and a former journalist and magazine editor, Judy Penz Sheluk (author/editor) is the multiple award-winning author of seven bestselling mystery novels, two books on publishing, and several short stories. She is also the editor/publisher of five Superior Shores Anthologies. In addition to CWC, Judy is a member of International Thriller Writers and the Short Mystery Fiction Society.
It started with one hula hoop, eight writers drinking S.J. Rozan-inspired martinis all basking in ShortCon’s afterglow…
Dan White & S.J. Rozan with her Signature Martini
There is something magical that happens when writers gather after a conference.
Maybe, it’s because of how we are wired. Maybe, it’s because of the creative energy that still lingers in the air—and we had plenty of it this year, thanks to the incredible presentations by S.J. Rozan, Jeffrey Marks, and Michael Bracken. Being together ignites our imaginations and fosters inspiration.
At Elaine’s Literary Salon that night was no different.
Conversations about the conference turned to hula hoops. I am still not sure what sponsored the now-infamous hula hoop-moment between Dan White and S.J. Rozan and the deep dive into iconic playground games and equipment that quickly followed.
Like so many similar moments when crime fiction writers are together, snippets of story ideas began bouncing around like a gaggle of kids on pogo sticks: hopscotch and chalk-lined bodies, Double-Dutch turned deadly, butt-burning metal slides, death-defying jumps from swings, and tether ball clashes. Some, reimagined the Tony Sopranos of the sandbox-world uttering,“What happens in the sandbox stays in the sandbox.” I can still hear the New Jersey-accent playing in my head.
We also discovered just like “regional words” exist for carbonated drinks (soda, pop, Coke), names for playground equipment vary, too: Seesaws or Teeter-Totters, Monkey bars or Horizontal Ladders, Spinners or Merry-Go-Rounds or Roundabouts, Spring Riders or Spring Rockers.
And the list goes on.
Others recounted playground politics and social hierarchies, what it felt like to be fearless, what it felt like to desperately want to be accepted—all of us reliving nostalgic and not so nostalgic moments from our childhood.
Less than an hour later, short story legend (aka Michael Bracken) roughed out a proposal for a crime fiction anthology where a piece of playground equipment or a playground game plays an important role. These had to exist on old-school playgrounds, where the playground was was made of asphalt and the equipment was made of metal, which likely meant these stories would be set in the past or in the present with flashbacks or in neighborhoods that had not upgraded to modern, safe playground equipment.
Michael Bracken exhausted by the "Idea Fairy"
And just like that, Playground Noir: For the Kids Who Never Grew Up, was born.
Michael was surrounded by his list of contributors. He also had a publisher in mind.
As I write this post today, Michael has already pitched his proposal and awaits a response.
My key takeaways from that night at Elaine's:
Crime fiction writers are all a little twisted. Thank God, we have each other.
The best story ideas happen when writers gather to enjoy one another’s company.
It’s important to stick around after conferences and connect with fellow writers. You never know what is going to happen. You may become a contributor in an upcoming anthology.
***
Stacy Woodson with Dan White
Want to make space for your own hula-hoop moment?
ShortCon 2026 is just around the corner.
Hosted by Michael Bracken, the conference will be held at Elaine's Literary Salon in Alexandria, Virginia on June 6, 2026.
Gary Phillips will lead a three-hour writing workshop on “Blueprinting Criminal Behavior.”
Michele Slung will present “Every Moment is a Story,” a behind-the-scenes look at putting together annual best-of collections.
Art Taylor will discuss “Linked, Intertwined, or Seamless: The Curious Case of the Novel in Stories.”
I will also lead an end-of-day panel discussion with the presenters. Registration opens in July.
