Breaking into Showbiz

by Robert Lopresti


Usually I put a picture of myself at the top of this piece, figuring you should suffer in order to read my wisdom.  However, that is not me over there.  It is Charlie, who likes to sit on the desk between me and the screen.  He decided to co-author this piece, sort of.

Years ago  I saw an artwork by Robert Rauschenberg entitled ERASED de KOONING DRAWING, which was just what it sounded like.

And such is the case here, with me playing de Kooning and Charlie as Rauschenberg.  (You get to decide which is the bigger stretch.)

See, after I had poured hours of research into this piece and done most of the writing Charlie stuck his paw on my keyboard and erased it.  (Blogger is unforgiving about some things, as all of us SleuthSayers know.)    I put it back together as best I can.  When you go to Heaven perhaps St. Peter will let you read the Platonic ideal of this blog entry. Unless, of course, St. Charlie gets there first.

Today I am offering a quiz of a type I haven't seen before. I am going to give you a list of familiar characters from popular culture.  (You may not know all of them, but trust me, most will ring a bell.)  The question is: How did each of them start out?   The answer is, in one or more of the categories you see on the left.

Here is an example, not on the list below: Zorro originated in a short story by Johnston McCulley. See how easy?

One warning: Some of those categories on the left might get used more than once, or not at all.  Okay.  Go!

Rosie the Riveter.

Smokey Bear.

Harley Quinn.

Arthur Dent.

Topper.

Boba Fett.

Ma and Pa Kettle.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

The Cisco Kid.

John Henry.

Dr. John H. Watson

Made up your mind?  Here are the answers.

Grounded Parents page

Rosie the Riveter.  Song.  The iconic symbol of women in the World War II war effort originated in a song created by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb in 1942.   The image most associated with her during the war was an illustration by Norman Rockwell, cheekily based on Michaelangelo's portrait of Isaiah.  The illustration we associate with Rosie now ("We Can Do It!") was created by J. Howard Miller for Westinghouse factories, and didn't get its Rosie connection for decades.

Smokey Bear. Advertisement.  A lot of people think Smokey started with the black bear cub rescued after a fire in the Lincoln National Forest in 1950.  But the cub was named in honor of the Forest Service symbol who first appeared in ads in 1944.  By the way, the real-life bear lived to old age in the National Zoo and was so popular he had his own zip code (20252).

Harley Quinn. Television.  In the Batman universe Harley Quinn was a psychologist who tried to shrink the Joker.  She went nuts and wound up as his sometimes lover/sometimes enemy. She was the only character who made the jump from the animated TV series to the comic book.  Her portrayal by Margot Robbie was generally considered a highlight of the unloved movie Suicide Squad and is supposedly scheduled for another flick this year.

Arthur Dent.  Radio.  Poor confused Arthur Dent has wandered  throughout the universe (usually in a bathrobe) in a multitude of media but Douglas Adams' brilliant Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy started on the radio. It then became a series of wonderful novels, a clever TV show, and a dreadful movie.

Topper.  Novel. Cosmo Topper was the mild-mannered bank clerk who bought a car possessed by the ghosts of the Kirby's, a fun-loving, hard-drinking couple who dedicate their afterlives to making Topper's life more exciting, whether he wants excitement or not.  Before it became a movie and a TV series (with the wonderful Leo G. Carroll in the title role) Topper was a novel by Thorne Smith.  If Hollywood paid Smith fairly for all the ideas they cribbed from him, his descendants would be heating their mansions by burning thousand dollar bills, just to keep them from cluttering up the place up.

Boba Fett. Parade or Television.  Boba Fett, the iconic bounty hunter from the Star Wars movies, right?  A lot of people know that.  Some fans know he appeared earlier in the legendarily-despised Star Wars Holiday Special.  But two months earlier he marched, with Darth Vader, at the San Anselmo County Fair Parade.  Why?  Well, Lucasflm was headquartered at San Anselmo back then.  

Ma and Pa Kettle.  Real Life or Memoir or Novel.  You tell me.  In 1945 Betty MacDonald published The Egg and I, a comic memoir of life on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula.  Among the characters were the disreputable Kettle family, a lazy and not-too-bright couple with many children.  The movie version was a hit and the Kettles were so popular that they were spun off into a series of popular comedies.

Later the Bishop family, ex-neighbors of MacDonald, sued her, claiming that the Kettles were based on them and they had been libeled.  They settled out of court but when they sued the publisher MacDonald testified and swore she had made the whole thing up. Okay, she said the characters in the book were all composites, not based on real individuals. The jury believed her, or  maybe they didn't care for the plaintiffs, and found in her favor.  So: Memoir or Novel?

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  Advertisement.  Robert L. May created the ninth reindeer for an ad for Montgomery Ward in 1939.  A decade later May's brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, wrote the famous song, growing a number one hit for Gene Autry, and a permanent part of our holiday culture.

The Cisco Kid.  Short Story. The idea for this blog entry came when I read this piece in Dear Rich, a wonderful advice column about intellectual property issues.  Turns out the Cisco Kid originated in a story by O. Henry of all people.  In "The Caballero's Way," he was an American outlaw, and a nasty one at that.    By the second movie (1928) he was a Mexican good guy.

By the way, Dear Rich concludes that Cisco is in the public domain but his sidekick, Pancho, is still under copyright.

John Henry.  Real Life.  Most scholars seem to agree that the song (songs, really) about John Henry were based on an African-American prisoner working on a railroad tunnel after the Civil War.  (They have reasonable doubts about the steam drill contest, however.)  The problem is they disagree as to which tunnel was involved, with major candidates in Alabama, Virginia, and West Virginia.  I lean toward the Lewis Tunnel in Virginia, because I have read Steel Drivin' Man, by Scott Reynolds Nelson.  His choice was a resident in the state prison with the right name, although he was a slim young man from my home state of New Jersey. Nelson provides one convincing bit of evidence:  Some of the old versions of the ballad say that the hero was buried at the White House, which sounds like the craziest of fantasies.  However, see the postcard of the Virginia Penitentiary?  That white building in the middle was the work house and when they tore it down they found 300 skeletons in unmarked graves, just outside.  They realy did bury prisoners at the white house.

The ballad of John Henry became very popular during the left-leaning folk revival of the 1950s as a metaphor for the noble worker battling soulless automation, but the early songs about him written by and for African-Americans mostly had a different message: Don't let the bastards work you to death.  Tom Smothers spoke truer than he knew when he summed up the song as follows: "Dumb smart alec.  Thought he could beat a steel drill."

Dr. John H. Watson. Novel.  Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. Didn't you know that?

Best New TV Show of the 2016-17 TV Season

There are a lot of new TV shows this year, and while I haven't seen them all, I am staking my claim here and now: NBC's Timeless is the best new TV show of this season. And I am not alone in this belief.
What is Timeless? It's hard to believe I need to pose this question, but I know I do. Not everyone has heard of, much less seen, this great show.

Timeless is an hour-long drama involving time travel. (Don't stop reading if you don't like sci fi. This is worth it!) The show begins with a so-called bad guy, Garcia Flynn (played by Goran Visnijic), stealing a newly invented time machine and going into the past to change history so he can keep his late wife and children from being murdered. For reasons that are explained as the season goes on, Flynn's quest requires killing a number of famous people in the past in an attempt to stop a powerful secret organization called Rittenhouse, which aims to change the past to control the future. The government has a second time machine, and it sends a team of three to follow Flynn each time he jumps, trying to stop him from hurting people and changing the past.

Each episode showcases different famous historical times and figures. The main "good guy" is Lucy Preston (played by Abigail Spencer), a whip-smart historian. Her backup, Wyatt Logan (played by Matt Lanter), is a military guy with his own reasons to want to change the past. Rounding out their trio is Rufus Carlin (played by Malcolm Barrett), also super smart, who is a scientist and the only one who knows how to drive the time machine.

I heard someone ask if Timeless is a reinvented Quantum Leap. That's a big no. Nothing against Quantum Leap, but that show from the 1980s was highly episodic; it didn't have the overarching storyline that ties every episode of Timeless together.

So what makes Timeless so great? Let's count the ways. I interviewed a few friends who love the show, and I'll share their and my thoughts below.

Time Travel

First of all, time travel is interesting and cool and fun. You just have to say time travel, and I'm intrigued. But so many time travel shows follow what fans of Star Trek might know as the Temporal Prime Directive: don't change the past; don't tell anyone in the past about the future or else it may be changed. In Timeless, the good guys believe in the concept of the Temporal Prime Directive (though they don't use that name), but they don't succeed in following it, and that has interesting ramifications. Imagine if the Hindenburg didn't catch fire, as happened in the pilot. Or if Eliot Ness didn't get to take down Al Capone. And imagine if changing these events in the past changed the personal lives of our main characters in the present. Lucy returns from the past in the pilot episode to find that the sister she's had all her life has now never existed. She's determined to change the past again to bring her sister back.

"I was kind of meh on the first episode," author Janet Halpin said. "But when they actually changed history with no do-over (the Hindenburg lands, no fire!), I was all in."

Fan Michaela Shannon-Sank agreed. "I love Timeless! It's a classic time travel plot with a twist--when things are changed in the past, they stay changed in the present. I was at first confused about it. Like, really? They're seriously rewriting history? The Hindenburg? But it works, and it works well."

One reason it works well is the show's writers really know how to draw the viewer in. This isn't a show just for people who like time travel. It's a show for people who like history and complex characters and romance and angst. Yep, it has it all.

History

As the good guys follow Flynn into the past, they go from one historical episode to another, giving viewers a glimpse into the past--the people, the dress, the limitations, and the real history (until it gets changed). Thinking about the Al Capone episode, author Sherry Harris said, "I've learned something new in every episode. Al Capone had an estranged brother who was a cop? Wow!"

Friend Meghan Gray agreed. "The dramatization of historical events is what we are enjoying. Particular favorites are the Lone Ranger and the NASA plots." In the latter, the characters travel to Houston, Texas, in 1969 and interact with African-American mathematician Katherine Johnson. "I love that they are putting people who have been erased from these stories back into the narrative," Gray said.

Even the characters get excited by history--learning it and participating in it. Lucy goes all fangirl when she meets Abraham Lincoln and his son. In another episode Rufus is excited to learn that the Lone Ranger was black (as he is). When the trio team up with the Lone Ranger (identified as Bass Reeves), Rufus excitedly says to Wyatt, "We are in a posse with the Lone Ranger!" And when they all team up with Eliot Ness, Rufus says quietly, "We are so the Untouchables right now." The show has pop culture references weaving throughout the episodes that add an extra element of fun.

Complex Characters

But the show is more than fun. It has complex characters, which in turn results in angst and big questions. Wyatt is a soldier. He is trained to follow orders and do the right thing, but he is compelled to try to change the past when the opportunity presents itself. His wife was murdered a few years back, and he'd do anything to fix it, no matter the cost. It's a good way to encourage the audience to consider if the ends really can justify the means.

Rufus's race figures into several of the episodes. In the pilot, he's not too keen to start on these adventures, saying, "I am black. There is literally no place in American history that'll be awesome for me." Harris remembered watching that scene with her daughter, Elizabeth, and said that Rufus's take on time travel was Elizabeth's favorite part. "It really puts things into perspective for both of us," Harris said.

But it's not just the good guys who are conflicted. In another episode, Flynn goes back to the beginning of the Rittenhouse conspiracy, during the Revolutionary War. He could save the future, he believes, by killing a certain child. He'd hate to do it, but he would. In the meanwhile, Lucy has come to believe Flynn is right--but she won't let him take that drastic step. We see Flynn struggle throughout the episodes. In one, he sits in church for hours, seeking absolution. In other episodes, he tries to show Lucy how the people she works for aren't really all that good after all and he's not a bad guy. Rather, he's trying to right history, not ruin it.

"I love that the lines start getting blurred between saving history/doing what's right/self-interest," said fan Abby Fabian. "I also love the character Flynn, because even though he is the 'bad guy,' he's also a 'good guy,' which can make things confusing for Lucy, Rufus, and Wyatt."

"I don't know about anybody else," Shannon-Sank said, "but I completely sympathize with Garcia [[Flynn]] and would be actively helping him. Except for his killing so many people."

Of course.

"As a writer," Harris added, "I admire how much I care about the characters. I root for them, feel sad with them, and get scared for them. I hate the villains and every week I can't wait for the next episode. It's what every writer hopes they can do in their own writing."

Love and Romance

For those who love a little love in their stories, don't worry. Timeless has this too. We see characters risk their lives for others who they love or grow to love--friends and family. We see sparks growing between Lucy and Wyatt. We see romance bloom between Rufus and Jiya, a computer programmer with whom he works. And as a bonus for the viewer, all these actors are "easy on the eyes," as Harris said.

But perhaps the thing that stands out the most to those of us who loved history in school is that the star of this story is Lucy, a woman who is the brains of every episode, who figures out what Flynn is up to each time he jumps, who knows the history in an instant, and who can figure out how to try to save the future by saving the past. Perhaps Halpin said it best: "a freaking HISTORIAN is the one who saves the day."

What's Next?

I'm thinking about Timeless as I write this on Monday night because it should be on at 10 p.m. Eastern time. That's it's normal time. But the show had its season finale last week. Yep, that's pretty early in the TV season. Timeless is on the bubble, I understand. And NBC needs a push to keep it on. That's where we come in. If you love this show, join the Facebook Timeless page. Every follower pumps up the show's credentials. And tweet about it too. Tell NBC to #savetimeless. And if you haven't seen it yet, you can stream the entire season. It's well worth your time. Every viewer helps.

Shannon-Sank summed things up well, saying the show "is so well written and acted and I hope so hard that it gets renewed and lasts for many, many seasons. I mean, they have a lot of things to set straight."

If you love Timeless, please share your favorite parts in the comments. Maybe someone at NBC will read this. #SaveTimeless!

Lockhart Texas Book Club

This past Friday, the 24th I was invited by my Sister-in Crimes friend, of over 20 years Janet Christian, to be the guest of honor at the Irving Book Club in Lockhart, Texas. The Irving Book Club, named after Washington Irving is the second oldest according to the Federation of Women's clubs, formed in 1896.  Lockhart is known as the BBQ capitol of TX but, that is disputed by several other Texas towns. Lockhart is also one of Austin's bedroom communities, thirty miles south and slightly east. Since I live 45 miles west and slightly north, it was a 78 mile drive one-way. (I know that's 3 miles short but I'm going by map mileage here and not actual driven miles.)

The book club meets in the Dr. Eugene Clark Library which has the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating library in the state, founded in 1899. The members of the club brought finger foods including desserts, everything homemade. Many of the members wear hats and you are immediately reminded of the hats on display at the Kentucky derby. I have a Cowgirl hat and a black and a red hat that are sort of fedoras, Private-Eye style but, the weather was too hot for any of those.  I searched my closet shelves and found a lovely hat box with three hats inside that I had forgotten about. The hatbox and the hats I had inherited from my bonus mom and the one I picked was a black mini-pill box hat with a veil. It more or less sits right on the top of your head. You can pull the veil down but that didn't work for me. I pulled the veil to the back and only a small part shows on front and side.

I had fun talking about how I first starting writing and sold my first short story for $100 and how I'm so glad I didn't quit my day job because I didn't sell anything else for 5 years. Also how I was writing a female private-eye novel that never sold but, I sold probably 12-15 short stories with the characters, Jenny Gordon and C.J. Gunn and likely made more with those that I ever would have with the novel.

Also told about how I took Citizen's Police Academy Training that was offered by the Austin Police Department which was set up to help folks who were interested in being part of the Neighborhood Watch Program. I applied for the program and was accepted. It was set up once a week for three hours, meeting for ten weeks and you learned a lot about each department of APD. Homicide, Robbery, Fraud, Firearms, and we got to ride along for a full shift in a patrol car with an officer. That's when I realized that every single call the police answered could turn-out to be dangerous. This was in the early 90s when police officers weren't being slain very often...at least not in Austin.

One fun thing after the ten weeks training we could join the Alumni Association and we could go out to the academy where the cadets were training and got to role-play and be a bad guy. Once I played a lady who had a warrant out for her arrest. The training officer who was watching the role-play had told me when the female cadet arrested me he wanted me to be rude to her, call her names and try do things to make her angry. The idea being that each cadet needed to learn to deal with a belligerent public and he wanted to see how she'd react. So when the cadet put the handcuffs on me, I cursed her up one side and down the other. I called her every name in the book. The only time in my life I got to cuss out a cop and get away with it. Then I told her the handcuffs were too tight. She finally loosened them one notch. Then put me in the squad car. I have small hand and wrists so I was able to slip the cuffs off. When they came to let me out of the police car I handed the cuffs to them. The cadets were not supposed to talk to each other but they did. All the remainder of the day, cadets put the handcuffs on so tight that everyone would have been mad at me if they had known it was my fault.

My next story was how while I was taking the Citizen's Police Academy training this woman named Zoe Barrow started talking to me in my head. Voices in my head happens to me all the time and the astonishing thing is no one calls the men in the little white coats to come after me. Zoe (rhymes with Joe) turned out to be an Austin Police woman and is the main character in my first book, Austin City Blue. In my second novel, Dark Blue Death the first chapter is almost word for word of a role-play scene out at the Academy. I was in a vehicle with a Training Officer and two cadets were out side. One on the driver's side and one on the passenger side...my side. They both stood back a bit from the vehicle. I could see the driver side cadet in the rear view mirror. When the training officer was asked for her name and phone number, she gave her name and then her phone number as 1-800-GOODSEX.  I could see the cadet trying to contain his laughter and almost choking.

The training officer had suggested I get out of the car and see what the cadet on my side would do. I opened the door and started to get out, the cadet says, "Ma'am, please stop. Police get back in the car. Please ma'am." I said, "I have to go to the bathroom." She said, "Ma'am, you must get back into the car." I said, "I'm pregnant. If you don't let me go now, I'll pee all over this car seat." Like I said, the ladies of the Book Club were so attentive and laughed in all the right places. They asked interesting questions and everyone told me afterward how much they enjoyed my talk.

These events are a lot of fun for me and you get inspired because people who love to read are there listening to you. I LOVE READERS  

Paint It Black

Last November, I received an e-mail invitation to write a story for one of those noir anthologies named after a city or an area. You know the ones, Brooklyn Noir, Seattle Noir, etc. Anyway, this one will be titled Rocky Mountain Noir and will be edited by Laureen P. Cantwell who also edited Memphis Noir. Naturally, I was pleased and even flattered to be invited to submit a story to this anthology, knowing that an invite is almost a guarantee of having one's story accepted as opposed to submitting a manuscript in reply to a general call for submissions and ending up in a vast slush pile.

One small problem on my side.

In the past, I had written biker stories, children's stories, historical stories, comedy capers, traditional mysteries, horror, sci-fi..,,and some other stuff. But, I had never written anything in the noir genre. Where to start?

Fortunately for me, at one of our monthly MWA meetings several months ago, an author gave a presentation on noir. And, I had taken notes during that meeting, even though I had no intentions at that time of doing anything in the noir genre.

In short, here's what the notes contained:
 ~ it is an amoral world
 ~ it's about sex and greed and violence
 ~ the protagonist is always flawed, a loser with great humanity
 ~ the plot may be where nothing is as it seems
 ~ the ending may be a twist that no one saw
                                                                                        coming
And, my favorite, the part that stayed in my mind: In epics, the hero falls from the heavens, but in noir, he falls from the curb.

There was also a suggestion that we should read "The Simple Art of Murder" essay by Raymond Chandler. Okay, so I did that.

Further research on Wikipedia showed that noir "is a literary genre closely related to hardboiled genre with a distinction that the protagonist is not a detective, but instead a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator." The website goes on to say that the protagonist has self-destructive qualities and is opposed by a corrupt system which puts him in a no win position.

Surprisingly, there are now sub categories of noir. For instance,Mediterranean Noir where the cities of the Mediterranean are looked upon as broken and distorted by crime. In this sub category, authors explore the duality of local foods, fine wines, close friendship, warm skies, blue seas and joyous living against a backdrop of greed, violence and the abuse of power.

There is also Urban Noir, where the story is set in the underbelly of various large cities or certain areas vulnerable to crime. Akashic Books has published several of these, and is the proposed publisher for the noir anthology from which I received the invitation. At this point, my story submission is finished. Now, it's up to Akashic Books to accept the proposal and for the editor to accept my submission.

If the proposal or the story acceptance goes bad--hey, noir is French for black--then I can always submit the story to AHMM or EQMM.

Either way, wish me luck.

Never say die.

Oh, wait a minute, in noir everything goes wrong and the protagonist usually does die.

Damn.


POST SCRIPT ~ How little did I know that the last five paragraphs would turn out to be prophetic. Seems I wrote an e-mail to the editor in late January inquiring if she would like to receive my story in advance of the proposed schedule. Her reply e-mail said the project died aborning. Akashic Books did not accept the proposal at this time. Maybe sometime in the future. In which case, I'm off to remove some of the sex and violence from the original manuscript to see if EQMM or AHMM will find the story a home.

PPS ~ As of 02/16/17, the time of this article's final editing, the story will have been at EQMM for twenty days. Their usual rejection turnaround is about two weeks, but then Janet Hutchings, the editor, may be busy elsewhere.

Catch ya later, as I'll be gone when this is posted.

Know the Rules You’re Breaking (THE most controversial post you’ll see from me)

by Melodie Campbell (Bad Girl)

The rules, the rules…

Always, in my Crafting a Novel college class, beginning students are alarmed to find out there are rules to writing.

I’m not keen on rules in general. After all, I became a writer so I could thumb my nose at reality, right? Control the world of my fiction in a way I can’t control my real life.

All that said (and I could make a blog post out of just that line above) there ARE rules to writing. A bunch of middle-aged guys behind a baize door didn’t make them up for no reason (double negative – Ha! Rule-breaker, you.)

The rules are there for a reason. They’re all about logic. Here are two that are perhaps least understood. Let me make this clear:  You don’t have to follow them (more on that later.) But you do need to know them first, so that you know when you are breaking them. Here goes:

Present Tense:

This isn’t a rule. It’s more about savvy marketing. Most novels are written in past tense. Did you ever wonder why?

The trouble with present tense is it defies logic. If what I am reading is happening NOW, then how did it get written down on this page?

Approximately 60% of people (stats from a publisher) have trouble with this. Big trouble. I’m one of them. Our brains can’t accept it. Every time I hit a present tense verb, I’m thrown out of the manuscript. My reading is disrupted every paragraph. Ergo, I will not read present tense books.

Some students tell me they like to write in present tense because to them it ‘feels more immediate.’ (The classic way to do that is by increasing tension, I subtly remind.)

Here’s what I tell students: if you are writing your first genre novel, it might be wiser not to write it in present tense. Publishers know that present tense reduces the potential market because of morons like me who can’t read it. Why put another obstacle in the way of getting published?

(Publisher story: one popular YA dystopian fantasy novel was written and published in present tense. The publisher instructed her to write the second book of the trilogy in past tense.)

First Person Viewpoint Switches:

Many, many people don’t know the rules to first person viewpoint. So here goes:

The rules of writing in first person are simple: The protagonist becomes the narrator. As a writer, you make a promise to the reader. The person telling you the story is telling their story to you directly. No third party writing it. You are in her head.

I love first person. I *become* the protagonist, when reading or writing first person. But first person has huge limitations for the writer: the person telling the story must be in every scene. Otherwise, they won’t know what is going on in that scene (unless you employ a second person to run back and forth, telling the protagonist. Note the use of the word ‘tell.’ Telling is ho-hum. You won’t want to do that often.)

If your story is in first person, you can’t be switching to another character’s viewpoint. Ever. Nope, not even another viewpoint in first person. Why? Because your reader thinks this: “What the poop is happening here? The book started in first person. The protagonist is supposed to be telling the story. Now someone else is telling it. What happened to my beloved protagonist? Are the original protagonist and writer number two sitting next to each other at twin desks writing the story at the same time and passing it back and forth?”

In a phrase, you’ve broken your promise to the reader.

The rule is simple. If you need to write the story in more than one viewpoint in order to show every scene, then write the whole novel in third person. That's the advantage of third person, and why we use it. You can use multiple viewpoints.

One additional first person restriction: if your protagonist is telling the story directly, then he can’t die at the end of the story. This should be obvious: if he died, who wrote the darn thing?

Should you break the rules?

If you want to break the rules, have at it. You can write what you want. That’s the delight of being an author.

But in my class, you will hear this: The rules are there for a reason. Of course you can break the rules, but if you do, you will lose something (usually reader continuity and engagement.) It’s up to you to decide if you gain more by breaking the rules than you lose by doing so. BUT: If you break them in your first novel, publishers (and savvy readers) will think you don’t KNOW the rules.

So at least go in knowing the rules. And then do what you damn well please.

Final words: Don’t publish too soon. Take the time to learn your craft. And then…be fearless.

Cat's lunch

by
O'Neil De Noux

The explosion outside sent my inside cats scrambling out of the room. I knew what it was because the generator kicked on automatically and the lights flickered back on. Transformer. No damage to my computer. Laptop wasn't plugged in. It was midday and the summer air thick with humidity, clinging to my face as I stepped outside and over to the light pole.

inside cats

A whiff of white smoke rose from the gray metal transformer atop the pole and I punched 911 into my cell phone, told the emergency dispatcher the transformer may be on fire and gave the intersection of the light pole and the twelve digit number on the pole and waited.

A fire engine crawled up, red lights flashing but no siren and two firefighters in orange uniforms climbed out, shielding their eyes to the sun as they looked up at the transformer. They declared no immediate danger but would stay around until the electric company repair truck showed up. Twelve minutes later a white truck pulled up and a woman in blue work clothes stepped out, greeted me and the firefighters. She looked up at the transformer, nodded and reached into the back of her truck for a long yellow pole. She lengthened the pole, pulling out extensions until the ten-foot pole was long enough to reach the top of the transformer.

She maneuvered the hook at the end of the pole to the transformer and that's when I saw the woodpecker. One of the pretty ones with a bright red head and throat, while belly and black feathers along its back and tail. The woodpecker was frozen in electric death above the transformer. It had pecked the conductor atop the transformer until the conductor struck back. The hook of the pole lifted the woodpecker off and it tumbled to the grass.



I moved to it, saw the feathers were ruffled, feathers normally neatly alighed as the pretty bird fluttered through my neighborhood. The feathers stuck out like porcupine quills and the bird's skull lay cracked open.

As the electrical worker positioned her truck so she could climb into the bucket of its cherry-picker to rise and replace the conductor, I asked the firefighters if they had a glove and one gave me a rubber surgical glove. I worked the glove onto my left hand and picked up the woodpecker, took it to the side door of my house and laid it on the concrete driveway next to my wife's bright red car. As I walked back to the telephone pole, I spied one of the feral cats we feed to keep the urban rodent population down as it came out from under my raised house to sniff the dead bird. This was a gray cat, one of the big onces. A male. He didn't seem interested in the bird and turned away. A black and white cat, thin, a young female, darted from under the red car, snatched up the dead woodpecker and took it under the house.

 outside cat on fence

Fifty-one minutes after the explosion the electricty was restored to the area, my generator kicking off. The fire engine crept away and I thanked the electric worker who took her truck to the next call. I moved to go back inside and spotted the black and white cat just under the house, her yellow eyes watching me as she gnawed the woodpecker's breast.

I looked up, shielding my eyes from the sun and thought - if one death was due today, I was glad it was the woodpecker, although it was a lovely bird. Somewhere in that sky my wife was in a silver jet, flying to visit her mother. If God, or the devil, or fate or whoever was due a death, let it be the woodpecker because everything dies. I thought of the heart surgery I survived a few years ago as I stepped back into my house and wondered if something else died the day the doctors saved me. Most likely.

Back at my computer, I picked up where I left off in the novel I was writing before the woodpecker interrupted me. Only I could not envision the characters or the scene. I saw the red-headed woodpecker fluttering low to the ground, passing from one tree to another and felt sad. Damn transformer. Damn humans with our endless contraptions.

But the sadness was short lived because I remembered the hungry yellow eyes of the cat as she had her lunch.

This was a true story

www.oneildenoux.net

In The House of Sick

by Brian Thornton

Now ain't that a catchy title?

It narrowly beat out such colorful runners-up as "The Vomit Wheel," and "It's Thursday, So This Must Be Bronchitis."

This is not what I'm talking about when I say it's time to "Sell the Buick."

In other words, Casa Thornton has seemed more like Casa Enferma lately.

And by "lately," I mean, "Since September."

And what happened in September to get this party started?

You guessed it.

My four year-old started preschool!

And for those of you in the audience who are kid-free (whether by choice or nature, no judgements either way!), that sound you just heard was every parent reading this (all three of them!*rimshot*) saying collectively, "Oh yeeeeeaaaaahhhhh..."

And it's not this type of "Technicolor Yawn"!

Our pediatrician referred to preschool as an opportunity for our child to "build immunity," since he's an only child, and although he has cousins and other kids he plays with, it's not the same as having a sibling at home to help double his exposure to germs that bring maladies such as cold, flu, pneumonia, and bronchitis.

And since we share this home with our child, we get exposed, too. I don't have to draw you a picture for you to visualize what that has been like, do I?

Since September we've had all of the above. Some of them several times (our son has had pneumonia and my wife and I have had bronchitis. We've all had multiple colds and several rounds of several different types of the flu.).

And this? NOT what I mean by "Instant Bootcamp."

What's worse than getting sick yourself?

Witnessing your little boy or girl getting sick.

What's worse than that?

Trying to nurse your sick kid back to health while you've been flat-on-your-back-sick too.

Anyway, we finally all got the flu shot, and that seems to have helped with the colds, and the illnesses that follow in their collective wake. Over the last month, we've stopped playing such fun Cold and Flu Season games as Musical Snot, and Cold, Cold, Who's Got The Cold?

Which left us all down with the stomach flu this past weekend.

But!

(And I knock wood as I type this)

We are all feeling much better now!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don't have a more substantive blog post for you this rotation!

Tune in in two weeks' time for an interview with a very funny man of many hats, comedian, DJ, and crime fiction Bill Fitzhugh!