This Film Rolls

 

 I'd like to tell you about a movie I saw recently, one which I suspect you have never heard of.

A funny thing about movies: Some of the best ones don't become immediate hits in part because the studio can't figure out how to market them.  And I'm not really blaming the studio. (Not for that, anyway. I'm happy to blame for a lot of other things.)

Consider three of my favorite flicks: Galaxy Quest, The Princess Bride, and A Christmas Story.  If you have seen them, ask yourself how to sum them up in one sentence (the so-called "logline") in a way that makes them sound irresistable or even appealing.  Well, a grandfather reads a sick child an old novel about a girl who falls in love with a farmboy, and there's a giant, and a Spanish swordsman, and Rodents of Unusual Size...

Eventually each of those movies became a cult classic, because of word of mouth.

I doubt if the  movie I'm about to describe is destined for cult status, but it is one that is hard to summarize in a helpful way.  Please don't reject it immediately when I describe it. One thing is for certain: the title doesn't help.

Kills on Wheels (2016) is a Hungarian movie (with subtitles) written and directed by Attila Till. The protagonist is Zoli, a young man who suffers from a birth defect which will kill him unless he has an operation.  He is tired of thinking about that and only wants to create graphic novels.  “Why am I always the cripple?  It’s someone else’s turn now.”

His roommate, Barba, suffers from a serious palsy condition.

Into their life comes Janos, who was a fireman until an on-the-job accident made him a paraplegic.  To say he is not adjusting well is a gross understatement.

Assassin and Boss

But now Janos is making serious money as a hit man for a Yugoslavian crime boss.  You may be saying: A disabled assassin? That's hard to believe.

And that's exactly what Janos' victims die thinking.

By this point you may be thinking this is a dumb exploitation flick: Supercrip shoots 'em up!  It isn't. There is a heck of a lot more going on than it may appear.  

The acting is very good but I especially want to take note of two actors who come to the field in unusual ways.  Zoltan Fenyvesi plays Zoli.  This is his first acting gig, after the director discovered him through his Instagram account, wheelchairguy.  And Dusan Vitanovics plays the sinister crime lord.  The actor's day job?  He's a neurosurgeon.

I saw the film on Kanopy.  I recommend it. 

I'm Out

 I'm preoccupied these days with watching an ongoing series. It's got tension and drama. Stealing occurs. Twist endings. I've seen the occasional hit. Those involved make errors. Sometimes those mistakes cost them, while other times, they escape scot-free. 

The College World Series is playing in Omaha.

My alma mater is playing this year, so my long-times and I are fixated. 

Consequently, as I lay my fingers on the keyboard, I allow myself to get distracted by checking out the bracket breakdown at SI.com. Then, I'm pausing to look at the upcoming game schedule. Sometimes as a writer, it's essential to embrace reality. I'm thinking about baseball. A SleuthSayers blog is due. Here then, are a few of my favorite baseball-themed mysteries. 

1. Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker

I came into the mystery camp late. I wasn't one of those kids who devoured Hardy Boys books. Instead, a friend introduced me to Spenser in college, and I got hooked. Any personal list of baseball books must, therefore, include Mortal Stakes. 

Marty Rabb is the star pitcher of the Boston Red Sox. Rabb seems to be living a dream life. He has a beautiful wife and a wicked arsenal of pitches. Someone, however, may be blackmailing him to throw games rather than strikes. 

DanDectis: Creative Commons

Parker's story pits Spenser against a racketeer and a well-armed enforcer. Spenser throws a few punches, reads a few books, cooks a few meals, and drinks a few beers. He was the guy I remembered from my early readings. (Sadly, Spenser faces the challenges in Mortal Stakes without Hawk.)

The story opens with a lyrical description of summertime baseball. It is the nostalgic picture most fans carry around in their heads. 

2. The Final Detail by Harlen Coben

Myron Bolitar, a New York City sports agent, finds his business, friends, and life in peril. He returns from the Caribbean to discover that his partner has been accused of murdering one of their clients, a washed-up baseball pitcher attempting a comeback. Bolitar is determined to prove his partner's innocence, a task that would be easier if she would talk to him. 

Coben's pause to reminisce about the magic of baseball parks is about halfway through the story. He held off longer than Parker did. His description has a little less beer and a little more neurosis, reflecting the differences in the main characters. 

3. Murderer's Row by Crabbe Evers

The first two books are mysteries that touch upon baseball. Murderer's Row is a baseball book that uses a murder investigation as an excuse to spin baseball stories. It is the second of five novels written in the early '90s. Duffy House, a retired sportswriter, and occasional sleuth, is pressed by the baseball commissioner into investigating the assassination of the New York Yankee's owner. 

Murderer's Row was published in 1991. The book's style reflects a different time. The back story is shoveled into the first half-dozen pages. I'm not recommending it as a model for teaching novel writing. But this may be your book if you want a tour of names and places from baseball's past. 

* I don't have an international thriller with a baseball theme. I am also a fan of The Catcher Was a Spy. The book is the story of Moe Berg, a major league catcher in the '20s and '30s who later became a spy for the Office of Strategic Service during World War II. Berg was called the brainiest man in major league baseball. His friends said he could speak ten languages but couldn't hit in any of them. His baseball card is on display at CIA headquarters in Langley. (He is also one of the many players mentioned in Murderer's Row.)

**Murderers' Row was the name given to the core hitters of the 1927 Yankees. That batting lineup included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The name has been borrowed a number of times for novels and movies. Among these is an Otto Penzler-edited anthology of short stories. All the stories were original when the book was published in 2001. Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, and Michael Connelly contributed, as well as Robert B. Parker.  

And with Parker, we've gone around the horn. 

Until next time. 

The Short Happy Ad Career of Ernest Hemingway.

From Slate Magazine:  “Hemingway had no problem letting (his) familiar visage appear in ads, for which he also wrote the copy. In one he promotes Ballantine Ale: "You have to work hard to deserve to drink it. When something has been taken out of you by strenuous exercise, Ballantine puts it back in." There's one for Pan American Airlines: “We started flying commercially about the same time. They did the flying. I was the passenger." and another for Parker 51, "The World's Most Wanted Pen," to whose ad Hemingway lent his face and a paragraph (presumably in his handwriting) on the horrors of war.”

The man looks at the blank page.  It is the first page of a short story.  But there is nothing on it.  The man doesn’t know what to write.  He wishes he did not have to write anything at all.  But he is a writer.  He is paid to write stories.  And he needs the money.

He needs the money to buy food and Pernod.  That gives him an idea.  He can go to his favorite Parisian café and drink Pernod.  This idea makes him happy. 

At the café he drinks Pernod.  He only drinks two Pernods because he does not have money for a third.  His happiness begins to fade.  He thinks about the short story he cannot write and that makes him even less happy and want to drink more Pernod.  But he has no more money to buy Pernod.

The man looks across the street from the café and sees a poster on the wall.  It is a poster of a beautiful woman telling people to drink Pernod.  He reads the words on the poster.  The words say that Pernod is a drink for women.  Does that mean that the drink is for men who are soft and weak like women?  But the man drinks Pernod and he knows he is a strong man.  He is a brave man.  A genius of a man even after a dozen Pernods. 

Now he is no longer just unhappy.  His happiness has turned into sadness.  It has turned into wretched desolation.  The man knows that the only reason to live is to seek the one true thing.  The thing that tells him he is a man who can flatten Ezra Pound with a single punch, who can knock down Wallace Stevens, even though the Hartford insurance man is much bigger than Ezra Pound.  Wallace Stevens is a much bigger man, but he knows how to make enough money to have a big house in Hartford, Connecticut. 

The man stares into his empty Pernod and realizes he is a genius of a man who now knows how to make money like Wallace Stevens while the short story waits for the one true thing to reveal itself.  The man will write new words for the poster.  He will write better words than Scott Fitzgerald, who tried to write for advertising, but failed.  Fitzgerald is a weak man who falls down after five Pernods and swims in fountains with his wife, who can drink Pernods until the sun rips open the weary, perilous night.

He knows he will write the words that tell the world and the Nobel judges why Pernod is a drink for strong brave genius men.

Now when the man looks at the poster he is happy.     

 

 

 

Write of Way

As you may have noticed earlier this month, I’ve been paying attention to license plates and signs while idling in traffic. While negotiating neighborhood streets in south Orlando, I noticed a street sign labeled Chaucer and shortly thereafter Voltaire,^† two favorite classic authors.

This came as a surprise because Orlando is better known for family entertainment, not classical arts. Orchestras, opera, and ballet have died from indifference. WMFE, the local Public Broadcasting studio and station, collapsed. Hereabouts, Longfellow is thought to be the tall, floppy-eared pal of Mickey Mouse.

Upon returning home, I looked up this mysterious literary neighborhood and discovered references to nineteen authors, more precisely, sixteen names, two novels, and an epic poem. Two byways puzzled me, Jordan Avenue and Brice Street. I’m unable to think of significant writers matching the names, which indeed may be naught. You may know better.

So before our book-burning Governor DeSantis bans this defiant neighborhood, check out the names. (Click the map to expand it.) A list of authors follows.

^† Little known Mystery factoid: Voltaire (real name François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778)), arguably was one of the earliest writers of science fiction and detective fiction.

Quintilian

Plato

Orwell

Zola (Nana)

Marlowe

Linton

Keats

Ibsen

Hawkes

Galsworthy

Forester

Dickens

Chesterton

Longfellow (Evangeline)

Browning

Voltaire

Chaucer

Tennyson

Lewis (Arrowsmith)

A Western Fantasy

  

I'll start by stating the obvious. This is a mystery blog, I'm a mystery writer, and most of you are (I suspect) mystery readers. Some of you are mystery writers as well--thank God we can be both. And even though the vast majority of what I write is mystery/crime, I also like writing other genres now and then. I think most of us do.

You're probably familiar by now with a publication called Black Cat Weekly. It's a product of Wildside Press, its editor/publisher is John Betancourt, and its acquisition editors are my fellow SleuthSayers Barb Goffman and Michael Bracken. One of the ways BCW is different from most of the magazines we talk about at this blog (besides the fact that it's an e-magazine and there's a new issue every week) is that it's not exclusively a mystery/crime publication. It features a wide range of stories--science fiction, mystery, fantasy, etc.

I've been fortunate enough to have some of my stories appear in Black Cat Weekly, but these past two weeks brought something new for me: I had stories in back-to-back issues. The first one, Barb's "pick" for Issue #92 on June 4 (thank you, Barb), was a lighthearted crime story called "On the Road with Mary Jo." It was published in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, won a Derringer Award a year later, and remains one of my favorites because I still remember how much fun I had writing it. (Over the years I've found that to be a fairly good litmus test for how well a story might do later, out there in the world.) Anyhow, the "teaser" I gave to Barb when she asked for one was "Two dimwitted criminals, a carjacking, a bank robbery, and an experimental self-driving getaway car. What could possibly go wrong?" What happens, of course, is that almost everything goes wrong. If you should read this crazy tale, I hope you'll like it.

But the title of my post today refers to my story that appeared in BCW this past week. It's called "High Noon in the Big Country"--Michael's "pick" for Issue #93 on June 11 (thanks, Michael)--and is sort of a mixed-bag Western/crime/fantasy story that's heavier on the horse-opera and paranormal genres than on the mystery genre. In this story, a guy named Eddie Johnson is on his way through Wyoming on horseback and happens onto a little cabin standing alone on the flats at the foot of a mountain range. The funny thing is, it's a place he recognizes even though he's never been there before. He even recognizes the lady who owns the cabin. 

It is soon revealed that Eddie lives in the year 1989, and grew up going to movies every spare moment (can you spell "autobiographical"?). He especially loves Westerns. As a result of this lifelong cinematic obsession, he occasionally finds himself living, literally, in two alternating worlds. One is the present day--the late 20th Century--where he's on his way to South Dakota to play a small role (along with his horse) in a movie an old friend of his is filming there. The other world is set a hundred years ago, in the Old West. This double life of his scares him at times, but he's mostly grown accustomed to it. Anyhow, when he rides into the valley and sees the cabin, Eddie lapses into this other, long-ago world, and realizes this frontier lady is actually a character in a movie he has seen a dozen times, so he not only knows about her, he knows about her problem. She's worried about losing her homestead to a ruthless cattle baron who lives nearby. And while Eddie's not a brave gunfighter riding in to save the day, he does have a few things that might help the situation, like some items from the next century that he happens to be carrying with him on his trip. 

The fun of this story, at least for me as I was writing it, was trying to blend the events of those two time periods into something that--like any Western--makes the good guys get what they deserve while the bad guys also get what they deserve. In our modern world of blurred lines, I think the old-time, clear-cut, white-hat-vs.-black-hat code of life and justice is one of the things I like most about Westerns. Bottom line is, this is probably one of the weirdest stories I've ever come up with, and I hope readers will enjoy it.

As I've said before, on Facebook and elsewhere, I owe sincere thanks to both Barb and Michael for allowing me to be a small part of Black Cat Weekly--both now and over the past couple of years. That magazine's a winner.

If you've seen issues of BCW, what do you think? Do you like the fact that it offers such a wide variety of stories? Any favorites so far? Have you had any of your own stories appear there? If you haven't seen or read an issue, I hope you will.

Meanwhile, stay cool--it's already hot as a two-dollar pistol down here--and keep writing and reading. 

See you in two weeks.

The Great Satanic Scare of the 1980s

Those of us of a certain age discovered some great music in the 1980s. Before I drifted into jazz by way of progressive rock, my rock gods were Led Zeppelin and many of the bands that competed with them or followed in their footsteps. However, if you were raised in a household of a particular religious persuasion, you heard about it.

"That's devil music!"

In mom's defense, Jimmy Page was once a devotee of Aleister Crowley, whose hedonist creed used a lot of demonic imagery. Perhaps it didn't help when Zeppelin contemporary Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat in concert. Or certain bands slapped pentagrams on their album covers. Eventually, I learned this was marketing, almost identical to slapping a Parental Advisory sticker on an album.

But that was not the real source of conflict. The real source came from parents watching the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jim and Tammy Fayre Bakker. All of them pushed one of the most dubious conspiracy theories ever devised: backward masking.

For the uninitiated, backward masking was an idea that backwards messages could be baked into the lyrics of a song. Repeated playings would register these messages in the subconscious and brainwash unsuspecting teens into devil cults. The idea gained credibility when someone stumbled onto the Beatles' "Revolution #9" containing the phrase "Turn me on, dead man" when the voice repeated "Number Nine" over and over. "Oh, my God! What are they saying? Paul is dead?" (1.) No, and even Pete Best thinks those who believe that are stupid, and 2.) "Revolution #9" is so clearly the result of an LSD trip that anything being intentional in it is almost as likely as NASA proving the Earth is flat.) The most notorious culprit came from Zeppelin itself, specifically, "Stairway to Heaven."

A tape circulated purporting to prove Zeppelin's masterpiece contained several of these backwards messages designed to send your children to Satan. (Cue evil laughter.) Except the tape was so clearly faked (like it didn't sound a thing like Robert Plant), and...

Your truly bought a cheap turntable to play vinyl, which was not as revered in the advent of CDs as it is now. It had a DC connector in an attempt by the manufacturer to force one to buy their receiver to play it through. Clever boy that I was, I bought an AC adapter and spliced the wires. I accidentally discovered that, if you reversed the polarity, the turntable would play records backward. And I owned a copy of Led Zeppelin IV. Spoiler alert: There are no backward messages on "Stairway." Zip. None. Nada. "And it makes me wonder" can be sounded out to "There is no escaping it." You're likely to find more meaning in "Turn me on, dead man."

That's not to say there wasn't a kernel of truth in the Satanic scare. In 1991, before I journeyed to Cincinnati to put down roots, I lived for six months near Shreve Swamp in Ohio's Amish Country. The swamps, for some reason, attracted devil worshipers. Not the hippie hedonists of Anton Levay's Churc of Satan. These teens, out to prove who knows what, sacrificed small animals to Old Scratch. They also liked an abandoned Dutch Reform Church cemetery near a house my parents rented one summer. Cemeteries, of course, attract all sorts of off-brand fringe religions. In the case of the cemetery, they went to school with my brother and his uber-religious classmates. My brother, being a cynic at an early age, amused himself by driving his car straight through one of their black masses. One of them threatened him at school the following week, to which my brother responded by doing his best Crazy Riggs from Lethal Weapon. 

Warner Bros.

But threats of curses and human sacrifice? There are places where it happens, but it's rare. But what about all those heavy metal pentagrams? James Hetfield of Metallica put it best. Metallica is a decidedly non-Satanic band. Dark imagery, maybe, but the Prince of Darkness doesn't really appear in their music. He said the pentagram told them it was heavy metal, and they should probably give it a listen to learn the craft. I'd say they succeeded.

What did I believe? I honestly got annoyed. By the time I discovered Zeppelin, I had most of the catalog of their rivals, Deep Purple. Zeppelin sounded like a more polished version of Purple, more flexible in their sound, and a tighter unit. Talk of backward messages to me was silliness, something an uncle has never forgiving me for debunking. It led me to Yes, which led to King Crimson, but it also led me to grunge and the alt rock of the 90s for me. Last I checked, I wasn't praying to the devil for untold riches, no matter how charming he is on Lucifer.

Medical Genetics Redux: Yes, Virginia, There are More than Two Genders...

In July of 2012, I wrote my first and only article on working at Medical Genetics at Emory University (back in the early 80's), and considering the trans-hysteria of late, boy does it need an upgrade. 

My job at Emory wasn't especially technical.  It was the lab technicians would take the samples (from amniocentesis or, more often, a buccal smear of the cheek) and distill them down to one little drop that went under the electron microscope.  The next day I’d be handed a blurry 8 1/2 by 11 photograph, full of chromosomes no naked eye could ever, would ever see, transformed into inch-long fuzzy banded crosslets, tumbled and curled and overlaying one another like sleeping puppies. I was the grunt labor, and my job was to cut them out with a a pair of scissors, sort them, and line them up and tape them down to make a karyotype.  

I got to know those chromosomes really well.  Me and my trusty scissors untangled 9s from 4s, 18s from 21s, and set them in neat ordered pairs for the first time in their existence.  At first, like every Other, they all looked alike to me, but time and use and my own fancy gave them personalities.  The first five sets were large and strong and unmistakable -- any flaw in them and there would have been no being to be tested.  6 through 12 were like the dancing men of Sherlock Holmes:  jaunty, poised, often with one foot kicked up in dance or play.  16 through 20 were smaller but just as playful, children learning at their parents’ knees.  13 through 15 were Hopi women, with their looped hair risen above long blankets, or nuns in banded shawls; an elemental female image.  And then the mysterious, smaller shrouded shes, 21 and 22, solid, dark, impenetrable, unpitying, even when you winced with pain, even when you cried as you found a third come to join their pair, or one so damaged that nothing good could come...

The search for sex was a lot more fun.  I found the male in microcosm elusive, mainly because the Y chromosome looks nothing like a Y.  Half the time I thought it was a scrap of something else.  I started a lot of panics until I got it through my head that what looked to me like a tiny, flat-topped, spread-legged 21 was not a trisomic sister of doom, but a Y, a HE.  My only comfort, as I sat with my scissors and a worried look, was that over in the hospital, with the baby right there in front of them, they couldn’t tell either.  Parents panicking, doctors shrugging, nurses whispering, and all waiting for me (!) to find that other damn chromosome and tell them whether it was a girl or a boy.  

BTW, it's been determined that 1 out of every 1,000 babies are born with "indeterminate genitalia." 

1 out of every 5,000 female babies are born without a uterus.  

And sex chromosome aberrations are the most common of all chromosomal aberrations, because they are almost never lethal.  

Here are a few of the more common ones:

Klinefelter syndrome - males inherit one or more extra X chromosomes--their genotype is XXY or more rarely XXXY or XY/XXY mosaic. In severe cases, they have relatively high-pitched voices, asexual to feminine body contours as well as breast enlargement, and comparatively little facial and body hair. 1 in 500 and 1 in 1000 male births. (This makes it one of the most common chromosomal abnormalities.) 

XYY syndrome, a/k/a Jacobs Syndrome - males inherit an extra Y chromosome--their genotype is XYY. As adults, these "super-males" are usually tall (above 6 feet) and generally appear and act normal. However, they produce high levels of testosterone. During adolescence, they often are slender, have severe facial acne, and are poorly coordinated. Legend has it that this can cause strong criminal propensities. 

Triple-X syndrome - Also common:  occurs in women who inherit three X chromosomes--their genotype is XXX or more rarely XXXX or XXXXX. As adults, these "super-females" or "metafemales" as they are sometimes known, generally are an inch or so taller than average with unusually long legs and slender torsos but otherwise appear normal. There is a tendency towards ovarian abnormalities that can lead to premature ovarian failure (early menopause, infertility). 1 in 1,000 female infants are born with this, and it occurs more commonly when the mother is older.

Turner syndrome - occurs when females inherit only one X chromosome--their genotype is X0 (i.e., monosomy X). If they survive to birth, these girls have abnormal growth patterns. And they are born post-menopausal. 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 female infants are born with this.

45,X/46,XY mosaicism, also known as X0/XY mosaicism and mixed gonadal dysgenesis - can appear male OR female, and a significant number of individuals show genital abnormalities or intersex characteristics.  (This is probably what most of the old literature was referencing when they used the term "hermaphrodite.")  Rare: 1 in 15,000 live births.

46,XX/46,XY - is a chimeric genetic condition in which one human being has two distinct cell and sex lines. This is caused by two fraternal zygotes being absorbed in utero in one fetus. What will emerge in puberty is anyone's guess.  "The rate of incidence is difficult to determine as the majority of diagnoses go unreported in the literature."

XX gonadal dysgenesis - the baby is born without ovaries. Because of this, it's not diagnosed until puberty fails to develop, and it's unknown how many are born with it.  

XX male syndrome, also known as de la Chapelle syndrome - a rare syndrome where the baby is male, but has two X chromosomes, generally with one of them containing genetic material from the Y chromosome; this gene causes them to develop a male phenotype despite having chromosomes more typical of females.  Rare: occurs in approximately 1 in 20,000 newborn males.

(LINKS ARE HERE & HERE) 

Which brings up the Guevedoces (which literally means "penis at 12"):  

"In a small community in the Dominican Republic, some males are born looking like girls and only grow penises at puberty." Raised as girls - and generally hating it, they become male around 12. How did that happen? A 1970 study showed the following:

"When you are conceived you normally have a pair of X chromosomes if you are to become a girl and a set of XY chromosomes if you are destined to be male. For the first weeks of life in womb you are neither, though in both sexes nipples start to grow.  Then, around eight weeks after conception, the sex hormones kick in. If you're genetically male the Y chromosome instructs your gonads to become testicles and sends testosterone to a structure called the tubercle, where it is converted into a more potent hormone called dihydro-testosterone This in turn transforms the tubercle into a penis. If you're female and you don't make dihydro-testosterone then your tubercle becomes a clitoris.  

When Imperato-McGinley investigated the Guevedoces she discovered the reason they don't have male genitalia when they are born is because they are deficient in an enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase, which normally converts testosterone into dihydro-testosterone... So the boys, despite having an XY chromosome, appear female when they are born. At puberty, like other boys, they get a second surge of testosterone. This time the body does respond and they sprout muscles, testes and a penis."   (LINK)

The condition of 5-alpha-reductase type 2 deficiency (5-ARD) is an inherited disorder and is limited to male genetic. The affected males are usually identified as female in childhood but undergo striking virilization at puberty. While overall incidence for various countries are not established, increased incidence is reported in the Dominican Republic, some highland tribes in New Guinea (where they're 
called kwolu-aatmwol, literally 'a female thing changing into a male thing') Lebanon and Turkey. (LINK)

Now you may wonder what all this has to do with crime. Well, think about it - you're obviously born a girl, raised as a girl, and then you hit puberty and voila! you're male! If that wouldn't call for a charge of witchcraft in medieval times (are we done with those yet?), I don't know what does.

Or someone with 46.XX/46.YY commits a crime - but the DNA tests show a male did it and the DNA sample of the person shows a female? Or vice versa?

Or someone finds out - after marriage - that they're infertile due to genetics and that leads to... fill in the blank yourself. 

I'm sure we can all think of some more.

Meanwhile, Nature is not always "right" (and if you think it is, you've never seen a two-headed calf or a child with cancer or photograph of Joseph Merrick). 

Nature is not always limited to two genders (fish, gastropods, worms...). 

Nature mixes it up a lot (male seahorses carry and give birth to the young; rabbit does can absorb their litters before birth if there's a shortage of food).  

And, whether 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 5,000 or even 1 in 20,000 - with a population of  332 million, that means that an awful lot of Americans are / were born with some sort of sex chromosome disorder.  Personally, I am all for genetic testing of every baby, but that's not going to happen, because of freedom...  Meanwhile, often the only way to treat many of these conditions is genetic testing followed by gender affirming hormone treatments and sometimes surgery.  All of which are currently banned in 20 states and counting...  

And - since it is all too easy to screw up the visual determination of sex at birth (Guevedoces!), and in some cases even a genetic test can't determine it, can we just leave the whole #$%*%&@ bathroom issue alone and let people pee when and where they need to?  

Thanks.

The Girl from Ipanema

 

Astrud Gilberto died earlier this month.  She was famous, of course, for her breathy vocals on “The Girl from Ipanema,” which made Bossa Nova a brand name in the U.S. market.  The single sold five million copies.  She was paid scale, and never saw any royalties.

Bossa Nova, in Brazil, developed from samba.  An early iteration is said to be the soundtrack from Black Orpheus, in 1959.  In other words, not so much nova as it is a novel style.  The two big homegrown names were Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim, who popularized it worldwide.  In the States, though, Boss Nova was a fad, like calypso or the Twist, and it fell out of fashion after the Sixties.  But in the meantime, it put Sergio Mendes and Stan Getz on the AM charts, and “Girl from Ipanema” and “Desafinado” have become standards.  (“Ipanema” is supposedly the second most covered song in the world, after “Yesterday.”)

Getz/Gilberto was released in 1964.  It was recorded the year before, but Creed Taylor, who produced for Verve, was afraid it would be a dud.  The LP went platinum, and won the Grammy for album of the year.  The previous Getz, Jazz Samba, with Charlie Byrd, had been a hit - “Desafinado” charted for sixteen weeks - Getz/Gilberto was a phenomenon.  It set the bar. 

Stan Getz is one of the great tenor horn players, no question.  And they’re very distinctive.  Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, Coltrane.  It’s a muscular instrument, and these are guys with muscle.  You can hear ‘em honk.  Getz, though, is incredibly warm.  He doesn’t attack, like some, he caresses.  Getz on tenor curls up with you.  This isn’t to say he was necessarily a nice guy.  Let’s be honest, we don’t always want to meet our heroes.  Sometimes they turn out to be jerks, be they writers, jazz musicians, or whoever.  But when he played the horn, Getz was sweet.  “If we could all play like that,” Coltrane once said of him, “we would.”

That said, the guys didn’t want to give Astrud the credit. Getz and Creed Taylor made it seem like they’d done her this huge favor, putting her on the record.  (The vocals on the album version of “Girl from Ipanema” were Astrud and Joao, in English and Portuguese; the single was engineered to be Astrud alone, with only the English lyrics.)  The whole thing just sounds churlish.  Sixty years gone by, you can’t help thinking they’re a couple of total dicks. 

Anyway, the song put her on the map.  Her first solo album, with Jobim, came out the following year, and included “Insensatez” (“How Insensitive,” but more accurately translated as “Foolishness”), another much-covered standard – Sinatra, Peggy Lee, William Shatner, Sting.  She’s never gone away, either.  You can argue that such-and-such didn’t happen, but it doesn’t seem to have cramped her style. 

 

Tall and tan, and young, and lovely

The girl from Ipanema goes walking

And when she passes, he smiles

But she doesn’t see

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

My mother’s earliest known work:
a self-portrait painted when she was
a teenager. Was she dreaming about
her future as an artist?

Eighteen years ago, I was a full-time freelance writer/editor, and one of my clients was a professional symphony orchestra. When the orchestra offered a part-time position as Marketing Director, I accepted. I would continue doing for the organization what I was already doing as a freelancer (writing, editing, and designing advertising and promotional material), and the position guaranteed a minimum monthly income, which helped smooth out the wild income roller coaster of freelancing.

So, for nearly eighteen years I was a full-time freelancer with a part-time position, and I often worked sixty-plus hours each week.

Two months ago, I left the symphony and returned to full-time freelancing. Through good planning, good luck, and a good marriage, I no longer need to scramble for work, and I no longer need to accept any project that comes my way. Except for my responsibilities as editor of a gardening magazine—a twenty-year relationship with a great deal of flexibility—I’m concentrating on writing and editing fiction as well as occasionally lecturing about and leading workshops related to writing and editing.

And I no longer need to work sixty-plus hours each week.

When I was a beginning writer, I dreamed of being in this position, though I never actually believed it would happen.

This isn’t the world in which I was raised. I come from hard-working blue-collar stock. Though my mother was an artist, there was never any expectation that her painting would ever be anything more than a hobby, and she worked a never-ending series of low-paying jobs.

College was not an option. Students were tracked when I was in school, and I was never in the college prep track. High school counselors never mentioned advanced education as an option, my family didn’t have the money, and my parents and I knew nothing about grants, scholarships, and loans that could have helped breach the financial barrier.

But I knew I wanted to be a writer, and so I spent my teen years writing horribly unpublishable stories while other boys my age were tossing footballs and shooting baskets. My mother provided me with my first typewriter and my second typewriter, and I taught myself to type using only a few of my ten fingers. Later, she helped me purchase a used mimeograph when I wanted to publish a science fiction fanzine.

And she died when I was 17.

I lived with my grandparents for a little more than a year, and though my grandmother was supportive of my writing, I couldn’t remain with them. Shortly before my nineteenth birthday, I moved out on my own.

Over the years I’ve had multiple residences (some better than others), multiple jobs (some better than others), and multiple relationships (some better than others), and I attended classes at two community colleges and two universities, finally graduating with a BA in Professional Writing when I was 48.

Through it all, I pounded the keys. I wrote fillers and jokes and cartoon captions and poetry and essays and articles and novels and short stories. Lots of short stories. Lots and lots of short stories.

The writing was the only constant. Though it tore apart some of the relationships, it kept me focused no matter what curve balls life threw.

My work was published in my junior high and high school literary magazines, in my high school newspaper and an underground newspaper during my high school years, in science fiction fanzines and other amateur publications, in company and organization newsletters, in magazines and anthologies, and in all manner of electronic publications.

I wrote my first professionally published short story when I was 17, it was published when I was 21, and so, unlike many writers, I had early affirmation that writing was a viable life option.

Unlike my mother’s painting, writing didn’t remain a hobby. It generated a side income (some years much better than others) until it, combined with editing and design work, became my primary source of income.

And having reached this point, I wonder how my mother’s artistic career might have progressed if she had not died when she was 37. Her work had just begun to be recognized locally. She had her work hung at a local physician’s office, and it looked like she was on the verge of getting her work into a local gallery.

When my mother was young and dreaming of a career as an artist, what were her dreams? Were they anything like mine? Did she dream of one day leaving her day job and doing nothing but painting?

I’ll never know what her dreams were, but I know she encouraged mine.

“Beat the Clock” appears in the March/April issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; “Denim Mining” in the May/June issue of AHMM; “Words on Wheels” in the June issue of Mystery Magazine; “Family Tree” in Starlite Pulp Review #2; and “When Sin Stops” in Weren’t Another Other Way to Be: Outlaw Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Waylon Jennings (Gutter Books), edited by Alec Cizak, released in May.

Off With Their Heads

Sounds really gruesome, huh? And I'm not a horror writer, but dang I have killed any number of  character. I'd hate like the devil to reread my books and short stories and do a body count.

We often dispatch a bad guy or two towards the end of a story. Give them their just desserts, so to speak.

But what about the opening? You can kill a character in the beginning, sometimes because it's a rather hateful person that needs to die. Then as a writer you can come up with several suspects in order to unravel the case.

Sometimes, to make it harder for your professional or your amateur sleuth to solve the murder, you knock off a character in an unusual way. Like perhaps nicotine poisoning. Gives a nice plot twist to your howdunnit.

How about the feeling of power you can get? Killing a character you've created.

Here's something my award winning mystery writer pal, Rick Helms wrote recently about killing.

I just spent fourteen pages building a fleshed-out, sympathetic, likable character.

Then I fridged that SOB and sacrificed him on the Altar of Plot, because I can.

Writers are like minor deities. We manifest whole worlds --nay, entire universes-- inside our heads and rule over them both lovingly and capriciously as it suits us. Then when suitably irritated, we smite thousands with guiltless abandon, but we also have the power to say, today, nobody in our world dies and everyone gets laid. We thrust perfect strangers together to become tortured lovers, and then, just for shits and giggles, we separate them for years. Sometimes, our own creations bring us to tears, even on the twentieth reading, despite our omniscient knowledge that they would do so, because that is exactly what we crafted them to do.

Writers are the creators and destroyers of worlds.

It's a pretty fucking awesome way to kill an afternoon.

Perhaps we destroy a character or scene or even a chapter. Many years ago, another award winning mystery writer pal, Max Allen Collins spoke at a con and if memory serves, he even wrote a book, titled: Kill Your Darlings.

The premise was sometimes you write a character or a scene, then upon rereading it, you know it doesn't work. It doesn't ring true.  Doesn't move the story along. And although you love, love, love the character. You just highlight that paragraph or scene and click "delete." Or if you just can't stand to kill the whole scene, copy, print it and put it in a "kill your darling" folder.

So tell me have you  chopped any heads off this week? Did you kill a darling? Or was it some despicable character who just needed killing?

 Or do you kill because you just love that feeling of power? Of playing God in a world you've created?

 Just confess and most likely I'll pardon you.

The Last 300 words: A Query Letter

I wrote a 80,000 word book that got shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for unpublished novels and then, decided it needed work so, I did what any sane person would do and wrote a whole new 80,000 word book. 

I’ve done my final edits and my editor will do her grim reaper work on it and then it’ll be done. 


Writing the book is the best part - it’s full of long mornings getting up before the sun and quietly writing. Even when I’m not writing and, perhaps sitting for lunch with my family, a part of the book comes up that I need to add to or edit, I replay it in a few different ways and often slip away to write it. Sometimes things are maligned by saying they’re child’s play but writing is child’s play in all the best ways - it is the total immersion into a world of your creation that’s so real that the real world can sometime pale in comparison.

Now I’ve hit the next step: the query letter.

The purpose of query letter is to seduce an agent into reading your book. An agent can’t read every book sent to them so a short letter is how they choose what to invest time into and what to reject. However, the whole process of writing a query letter has my heart racing, my mouth dry and in this state I couldn’t seduce my own husband let alone a complete stranger. But sure, let’s be seductive.

Did I explain that there are sections? Yes, sections. In 300 words.

I can barely say hello to an old friend in less that 300 words and that’s with no sections. 

First, there is a warm greeting to the agent and an explanation of why you want to work with them. For the agents I want to work with, I would need the whole 300 words to explain why they’re amazing, it would be an honour to work with them and why a future of having tea and chatting about books is both of us living our best lives.

Ok, maybe just me living my best life. 

Then I need a hook to get them interested in my book. A hook is a sentence or two to make them want - nay need - to dive into my book even if it means neglecting their children, pets or dinner in the process. This is the ultimate seduction and I’m not sure I’m up for that.

Can I beg off with a headache? 

Then I need to summarize my book. Summarizing a 80,000 word novel would take me (checks notes) 80,000 words.

That’s why I wrote the darn thing in the first place. 

Then there’s a little bit about me. I am down with that part and can do it in a few words. It’s the rest of it that’s driving me around the bend.

I have always loved reading. I can’t remember even a day in my life where I wasn’t immersed in a book and, whenever I finish all the books by an author I love its almost as bad as a death in the family. These constant companions of mine, writers, have always been my heroes who create worlds from nothing but ink. I have a new found respect for authors because they also they managed to wrangle this dreadful beast called a query letter. It is no small feat and may well be a bigger feat than writing their books in the first place.

This leads me to my next problem: should I write the query letter or just write another book instead? As an escape from the anxiety of the query letter, I’ve already mapped out another book and it’ll take less time and be less stressful than writing a query.

A summary of my writing experience is this: the first 80,000 words are a delight to write but the last 300 words are hell.