Measuring Success as a Writer

Reprinted from March 27, 2019, FaceBook:

This is how I feel today, not how I look. First, much appreciation to the staff at Lexington Hospital, especially the Critical Care Unit. They took excellent care of me, always with smiles and patience. Special shout-out to Megan and Jeanna who devoted hours to removing the clotted blood from my hair instead of shaving my head.

As always, I am grateful for my sons and grandson for their never- ending attention and love, both at the hospital and now that I'm home. Thanks to all of you for your FB messages, phone calls, and visits. Now, what happened?

I stepped out onto the elevated rear porch/deck to enjoy a bit of sunshine. The next thing I knew I was lying face-down at the foot of the steps, unable to rise and gushing blood from both front and back of my head. My son found me. I don't remember the fall, but the evidence includes massive black bruises and contusions covering my body from broken toe to the sixteen stitches in my head as well as several cracked ribs.

My family and I have tried to figure out what caused the fall. There was nothing on the deck to cause me to trip. One suggestion was that I was trying to twirk and tweeked instead. Ridiculous! I'm too old for twirking. (But I bet I could if I tried though.)

Second idea was that I thought I could fly, but I gave up adult beverages years ago.

We finally figured out that I was abducted from the deck by little gray men with big eyes who whisked me up to their space craft. They treated me well, but when they tried to return me to the deck, they missed, causing me to fall down the steps.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Recovery from that fall resulted in depression. When my neurosurgeon told me the way to live long was, "Don't fall," I laughed. After being told that I almost bled out and that I coded twice in the hospital, I spent too much time realizing that no one lives forever and I'm growing older every day. (Imagine that!) He's the same doctor who once greeted me, "Hello, Fran, I've got good news for you: We've both lived too long to die young." I pondered the significance of my life.

While I still wallowed, a FB message arrived in May inviting me to be interviewed on SCETV (South Carolina Educational Television) by Dr. Stephanie Frazier, VP of Education, SCETV, for Teacher Appreciation Week. I hadn't seen Stephanie since I taught her fifth grade at Bradley Elementary School, Columbia, SC, thirty years ago. I was honored that she named me "favorite educator."

Dr. Stephanie Frazier and Fran Rizer in SCETV studio, May,
2019. This was my first outing except to doctors' offices after
my fall and hospitalization. Stephanie is holding one of my
books,which I took her as a "hostess gift." Since then, I've
followed Stephanie on FB. I love seeing the accomplished
lady and the celebration of her recent big-four-oh birthday.

Fifth-grader Stephanie Frazier and Fran Rizer
on the playground in the late eighties.

The interview was fun and lifted my spirits. Stephanie said that among other things, she learned to "write well and present with confidence" from me. She reminded me of the monologue I wrote for her to audition for the middle school drama program in our district. Although my magazine features had been published before, "Modern Shakespeare," written specifically for Stephanie led to my first published book: Familiar Faces & Curious Characters, a collection of monologues for intermediate students.

What does all of the above have to do with my success as a writer? Please keep reading. We'll get there.

As some of you know, I've been reading Len Levinson's books recently. Stephanie made me think of Levinson's words in his My So-Called Literary Career:

It all began in 1946 when I was 11, Fifth Grade, John Hannigan Grammar School, New Bedford, Massachusetts. A teacher named Miss Ribeiro asked students to write essays of our choosing. Some kids wrote about baking cookies with mommy, fishing excursions to Cuttyhunk with dad, or bus to Boston to watch the Red Sox play the Yankees at Fenway Park, etc.

But my mommy died when I was four, and dear old Dad never took me anywhere. So Little Lenny Levinson penned a science fiction epic about an imaginary trip to the planet Pluto, probably influenced by Buck Rogers, perhaps expressing subliminal desires to escape my somewhat Dickensian childhood.

As I wrote, the classroom seemed to vanish. I sat at the control panel of a sleek, silver space ship hurtling past suns, moons and blazing constellations. While writing, I experienced something I can only describe today as an out-of-body, ecstatic hallucination, evidently the pure joy of self-expression.

Levinson's written works inspire me to write whatever I want
and not worry about staying in one genre. His life inspires
me to stop worrying about my age and enjoy living. He's 85
years old, and here he is hitting on an even older lady (The
Lost Pleiade by Randolph Rogers at the Art Institute of
Chicago). The lady was created in 1874; this photo was
made August 8, 2019. I can't help wondering if Len is
whispering sweet nothings or perhaps asking,
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

I returned to earth, handed in the essay, and expected the usual decent grade. A few days
later Miss Ribeiro praised me in front of the class and read the essay aloud, first time I'd been singled out for excellence. Maybe I'll be
a writer when I grow up, I thought.

As time passed, it seemed an impractical choice. Everyone said I’d starve to death. I decided to prepare for a realistic career, but couldn’t determine exactly what it was.


Levinson took that realistic career path until he was thirty-five years old and decided to become a full-time author. He went on to have major publishers release eighty-six novels, mostly in the high adventure category, about cops, cowboys, soldiers, spies, cab drivers, race car drivers, or ordinary individuals seeking justice in an unjust world. The photo caption explains how his books provide me with what I need as I continue the physical therapy, medications, and life-style changes for the heart attack that put me at the foot of the stairs.

I could talk about Levinson's work indefinitely, but the point today is not really about Len, nor about me and Stephanie. It's about Miss Ribeiro. Would any of those almost a hundred books exist today if Miss Ribeiro had not planted that writer's seedling with her praise for Little Lenny? We never know what influence our spoken words may have on someone. What are writings except spoken words on paper (or, in today's world, an electronic device)?

If you're ever a little depressed by a rejection letter or the size of a royalty check, measure your writing success the way I measure mine. As writers, we appreciate fan letters. "I love Callie" is always good for me to hear, but one of the best came from a lady in Tokyo who wrote me that after that horrific tsunami in 2011, during which she lost relatives, one of my Callie Parrish books was the first thing to make her smile and laugh again.

Success as a writer? It doesn't get any better than that! My measure of success is determined by this question: Have I written anything that has made a difference in a person's life, even if it's only that my words entertained the reader when that person needed the friends that books can be?

Until we meet again, please take care of … YOU!

Canada responds to the U.S. on mass exportation of our drugs: Sorry.

Rarely does American primary politics impact Canada, but Senator Bernie Sanders’ ‘Insulin Caravan’ has certainly led to a situation that has ruffled Canadian feathers.

First, let’s be clear on why Sen. Sanders came: “By traveling to Canada, which has a single-payer, government-backed health care system, he was also making an implicit case for his "Medicare for All" plan, which would create a similar system in this country."

The people who came in the caravan didn’t come for political reasons but, rather, for heartbreakingly personal reasons: “Kathy Sego, who made a 7-hour trip from Indiana with her son, Hunter, who requires insulin and has rationed his intake, became emotional as she described choosing between paying a power bill or for the teen's medicine.”

What is the response in Canada? The average Canadian believes that healthcare is a human right and this compassion is best expressed by the Canadian mother of an eight-year-old Type 1 diabetic : "When I see headlines of people passing away because they're having to ration their insulin and they can't afford it [and] when you live with someone with Type 1, I can't imagine," she said. "What if it was your mother? Your brother? Any family member? I would give anything I could to afford the insulin to buy it — but we shouldn't need to do that.”

Then this happened: “[The Trump] administration said it was weighing plans to allow for the legal importation of prescription drugs from Canada to help Americans coping with skyrocketing drug prices in the United States.
The response from Canadians? Sorry, but back off.”

Why such a different response to the individuals coming for drugs and the American government promoting a mass importation of Canadian drugs? It is because Canada has a small population of 37M compared to the massive population of 325M. We already have drug shortages and cannot sustain a mass exodus of our life-saving drugs.

In fact, “the Canadian Medical Association and 14 other groups representing patients, health-care professionals, pharmacists and hospitals wrote last week to Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor. The supply simply does not, and will not, exist within Canada to meet such demands…John Adams, the chair of the Best Medicines Coalition, an advocacy group for access to drugs that signed the letter last week to the health minister, said he’s not encouraged by the Canadian government’s “nonspecific” response to Trump’s proposal.
He called it “a clear and present danger” to the health of Canadians.
This is not the sort of thing that good neighbors do to each other.”

This is Canadian-speak for no, we won’t do that.

So, the consensus seems to be this: if you are in dire need, come here and we’ll share.

 If you want - as a nation - to pull drugs away from Canadians, then no. And no again. 

Perhaps it’s time that Americans use the Canadian method of price regulation. “The reason for the discrepancy is because Canada regulates drug prices through the quasi-judicial Patented Medicine Prices Review Board designed to prevent gouging...In the U.S., market forces are the lay of the land.” 


In speaking to the character of Canada, I would like to thank the Canadian who invented insulin: “Banting famously sold his patent for $1 because he believed his discovery belonged to the world and not for profit.”

I hope America takes Banting’s message and actions to heart and creates a system where citizens can access drugs at a fair price. However, when it comes to pilfering Canadian drugs on a large scale, Canadians have clearly said, sorry but no.

In case our response is misunderstood, translated into American speak, the answer is, “Hell no.”

Technology Creeps

A decade ago, I wrote a short story about an author who upgraded his computer for a model that could talk and think. QWERTY, the new computer, had a mind of its own. It changed its name to Oscar, offered unwanted advice on split infinitives, and began to write a screenplay (after networking with Peter Jackson's computer). And then it tried to steal the author's girlfriend.

"I arrived home. I parked the car. I went inside and made my way to my office. As I climbed the stairs, I could hear voices. I could hear Oscar, and I could hear Ruby. Oscar was telling Ruby his Ernest Rutherford joke. When he got to the punch line, she cackled with laughter." The Trouble with QWERTY (COSMOS Magazine, Aug/Sep 2010)

The story was science fiction. It was a flight of (humorous) fantasy.

Consider this: The technology we have today wasn't around yesterday. My cheap cell phone (bought in January) has significantly more processing power and memory than my first Windows computer (bought in 1995); and that computer, a quarter of century ago, had more computing power and memory on board than the spaceship Neil Armstrong landed on the moon (a quarter of a century before that).

Technology creeps. Yeah, like rust, it doesn't sleep.

My computer, today, doesn't talk to me. But I can talk to it. Using voice recognition (Nuance's Dragon software, if you're curious), everything I say can be transcribed (almost perfectly) into text, and directly into an MS Word document. It's so easy, and workable, that I sometimes "write" first drafts of my stories this way.

Amazingly, scientists (in a study funded by Facebook) have already started taking steps to remove the "voice" part of speech recognition, transcribing directly from your brain waves.

Article at The Guardian: Neuroscientists decode brain speech signals into written text 

They're working on this for the benefit of people who are paralyzed; remember the elaborate process by which Prof. Stephen Hawking communicated. It's an excellent field of study and development... and you just know (and this is not a negative) that once the software/equipment is up and running, market forces will see to it that it's available for everyone. One day, probably sooner than we'd imagine, we'll be able to "think" our stories into our computers.

But what really does worry me is, will there come a day when my computer doesn't need me to think for it, and it can write a story all by itself?

Technology creeps.

Yes, Virginia, there will come a day.

What do we writers do? We make stuff up. Well, there's an app for that. Actually, it's some pretty hardcore AI programming, but it can... actually... "make stuff up." I believe you can even download the code and try it out for yourself.

OpenAI.com: Better Language Models and Their Implications

(Also) Article at The Guardian: New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators

OpenAI.com is a nonprofit research organ (funded by Elon Musk and others), and it has an AI text generator called GPT2. When fed text, anything from a few words to a whole page, it can write the next few sentences based on its predictions of what should follow. And this output text is coherent, fluid and natural. To most readers, it could have plausibly been written by a fellow human.

The OpenAI's software uses an input sample of content, e.g., 40 GB of internet text, and uses that dataset as a model to generate output. To quote The Guardian article:

"Feed it the opening line of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” – and the system recognises the vaguely futuristic tone and the novelistic style, and continues with: “I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science.”

The internet is an awfully large, easily accessible (by man or machine) dataset. So imagine what might be possible if the program had more than 40 GB to play with? And frankly, 40 GB is nothing. My car radio has more memory. And it won't take long before the "opening sample" dataset isn't needed. I'm a Technical Writer by profession, but even I can write the code to randomly generate data, be it numbers or words. And how do we humans start a brand new story? With random ideas.


One of the key tasks the writer has when making up a story is bringing order to randomness. Writing fiction is a long, long series of decisions, mostly YES/NO decisions. They might start out a little more complex, but they will always eventually come down to the binary: Do I end the chapter here? Does she have dark hair? Does he know she cheated on him? Does she drink red wine? Does he drink white wine? It's 1s and 0s. 

Could a machine/computer/robot/software/app one day write a short story, or a book, that passes muster with an editor (i.e., it's good) and it gets published? Yeah, I know, there's a wide    gulf between spitting out a paragraph or two of passable content, to the undertaking of the complexity of a 6,000 word short story, or an 80,000 word novel. But then, consider how much crap out there actually does get accepted and published.


Remember, it was a breathing, walking, talking human being who wrote "It was a dark and stormy night..."

There is, right now, an argument taking place about whether AI can, or should be recognized as the "creator" of something. From a BBC article:

"Unlike some machine-learning systems, Dabus has not been trained to solve particular problems.Instead, it seeks to devise and develop new ideas - "what is traditionally considered the mental part of the inventive act", according to creator Stephen Thaler."

Article at the BBC: AI system 'should be recognised as inventor'

So, why not? AI is simply a bunch of programming. In many respects, so are we. We write what we know. We write from our 'personal' datasets.

Welcome to our brave new world. And for the record, I really did write this article, I didn't outsource it to my toaster.

Bonus Trivia Item for Mystery Writers: "It was a dark and stormy night" is the start of the opening sentence of Lord Lytton's book Paul Clifford (published 1830). This is the only book that Raymond Chandler is known to have checked out of the library at Dulwich College, when he was a student there.

www.StephenRoss.net

Uses of Mystery, Part 2

by Janice Law

I have recently become interested in how certain writers use the conventions of mysteries and thrillers to explore topics. Jim Gauer’s Novel Explosives was a madly ambitious literary example. Derek B. Miller’s Norwegian by Night and American by Day are both firmly within the mystery genre but both use a crime, pursuit, detection, and chase to explore a variety of difficult topics, including racism and violence in American by Day, and anti-Semitism, post traumatic stress, immigration and parental guilt in Norwegian by Night.

Derek B. Miller

Both are distinguished by perceptive reflections on cultural assumptions and religious beliefs, some of which is funny. They have complex characters and in Sheldon “Donny” Horowitz, the main character in Norwegian by Night, one of the most completely drawn mystery protagonists in a long time.

A widowed, retired watch repairer, an ex-Marine Ranger and sharpshooter, Donny is intensely patriotic, pugnacious, cranky, and opinionated. His late wife thought he was showing signs of dementia; his beloved grand daughter has similar suspicions, and to be fair, he does conduct conversations with his dead friend Bill Harmon as well as experience intense serial trips with his dead son, Saul, along his fatal journey on the Mekong River.

Nonetheless, Donny is  as close to a believable eighty-one year old action hero as you are likely to get. When one of his grand daughter’s neighbors is murdered in their Oslo apartment, he finds himself on the run from ex-Kosovar militia with a traumatized little boy. Donny doesn’t speak Norwegian; he doesn’t have access to a car or a weapon; he can’t risk public transport, and he feels every day of his age. He’s impossible not to root for.

Donny Horowitz’s ingenuity is matched by Sigrid Ødegård in American by Day. Sigrid, the Police Chief Inspector in Norwegian by Night, has like Donny, her own regrets and bad memories. Although a more subdued character – Miller’s women, though well-drawn are not as impressive as his men – Sigrid proves equally ingenious off her own patch. Searching for her missing brother Marcus in upstate New York State, she navigates an unfamiliar geographic and cultural landscape with considerable aplomb.

Through her eyes, Miller gives a foreigner’s view of our tangled mess of race, sex and violence, much as he used Donny Horowitz to critique aspects of Norway. Well aware of our record of gun violence, Sigrid struggles to find her shy, almost reclusive brother before the authorities and also to understand how he became a suspect in the death of his African American lover, a woman herself traumatized in the wake of a police shooting.

The psychological climate of the book is necessarily somber but occasionally relieved by feisty bit characters like the savvy prostitute who has inherited tenancy in Marcus’s apartment and especially by Irving Wylie, the decent and philosophical local sheriff who may prove susceptible to Sigrid’s off beat charms.

Together, the paired novels are thoughtful, ambitious, and entertaining. If the body count in Norwegian by Night is maybe more than is needful and if American by Day is occasionally talky, they are both superior specimens of the genre, with all the action, smart dialogue and ingenuity that characterize good mysteries.

Historical Bastards Revisited – Sargon of Akkad: Just Like Moses, Only Bloodier, and Not Egyptian (reigned 2334-2279 B.C.)

by Brian Thornton

A decade ago I wrote a book of thumbnail sketches of "Great Men" (Well, mostly men.

Akkadian ruler thought to be Sargon

There were a few "wicked queens thrown in there, too.) of ancient history – The Book of Ancient Bastards. It's the only one of my twelve books to go out of print, but it still manages to occupy a place near and dear to my heart. 

So I've decided to resurrect the content of these character sketches in coordination with the launch of my new author's website. I'll be resurrecting my original blog, The Weekly Bastard, over there once it's up and running later this Summer.

So for this week's Sleuthsayers contribution, I've decided to give my readers (BOTH of you!*rimshot*) a foretaste of what's to come with the soon-to-be-resurrected Weekly Bastard. And with that, let's talk about Sargon of Akkad!

*     *     *

But because of the evil which [Sargon] had committed, the great lord Marduk [personal god of the city of Babylon] was angry, and he destroyed his people by famine. From the rising of the sun unto the setting of the sun they opposed him and gave him no rest.

                                                                                             – The Chronicle of Early Kings

Imagine what it takes to forge a collection of petty, warring city-states into a unified, multiethnic empire. In a word: “bastardry”! Not necessarily out-and-out evil, but definitely bastardry.

Empire-builders down through the ages have been veritable poster children for the notion of “bastardry”: Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler, the list is long. But who set the first example that so many conquerors have followed?

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sargon of Akkad, the first bastard (but hardly the last) to build an empire through conquest.

Haven't We Heard This Story Somewhere Else Before?

Whether you’re a devoted daily reader of the Bible or merely have seen the Cecil B. DeMille movie, you’ve likely heard this story: woman has baby, for debatable reasons woman decides to get rid of said baby, and rather than killing it outright, sets it adrift in a basket on a great river, hoping it will be found and taken in by some kindly soul. Moses, right? Well, yes, but the story of the foundling-who-goes-on-to-be-great is first told in the legendary birth story of Sargon of Akkad. In his case, he is the son not of an Israelite slave, but of a temple priestess, and raised, not by the royal family of Egypt, but by a humble gardener. Still, the whole “baby in a basket in the river” thing is virtually the same (Sargon was set adrift on the Euphrates, though, not on the Nile).

Moses? Sargon? Both? Neither?

The Original "Tough Guy."

Everything we know about Sargon screams “tough guy”: his rise from humble origins to serve as cupbearer to the king of the city of Kish (a job not as effete as it might sound; it was an influential post in the ancient Near East. The king's cupbearer was responsible for ensuring that no one poisoned his wine.); how that king grew to fear him and his popularity, so sent him to the court of a neighboring king in Uruk, asking that king to kill him, only to have Sargon overthrow the king of Uruk, turn around and go home to conquer Kish, and by extension, the rest of Sumer,  Mesopotamia, and the Fertile Crescent all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. You don’t get these sorts of things done without having a bit of the bastard in you.

What's In A Name? Everything!

In what today we would call a brilliant piece of "branding," the man who became known as “Sargon” to us changed his birth name from whatever it was originally (we have no idea) to Sharru-kin (Akkadian for “rightful king”), a brilliant PR move, especially in light of the fact that Sargon was a usurper twice over (in other words, not the rightful king).

You Can't Be An "Empire Builder" Without...

Once he’d built up his empire, the “rightful king” ordered the construction of a capital city from which to rule it: Agade. (“Akkad” was a geographic region in central Mesopotamia so-named for the people who invaded and settled there. “Agade” was the capital city that Sargon built.)  So not just a conqueror, but also a builder. 

And More Than That, A Survivor. 

The king’s own words show that he was most proud of that aspect of his personality. Sargon wrote in his autobiography: “In my old age of 55, all the lands revolted against me, and they besieged me in Agade ‘but the old lion still had teeth and claws’, I went forth to battle and defeated them: I knocked them over and destroyed their vast army. ‘Now, any king who wants to call himself my equal, wherever I went, let him go’!” 

Staying Power.

Sargon didn't just conquer an empire, build a capitol and all manner of infrastructure, all while ruling to a ripe old age. He also founded a dynasty. His kingdom lasted from its establishment in 2334, through Sargon's long reign and those of two of his sons, Rimush and Manishtusu, and only ended after the reign of Sargon's grandson, a pretty tough customer in his own right, named Naram-Sin, who ruled until his own death in 2224 B.C. The empire itself collapsed around thirty years after Naram-Sin's death, but hey, who among us has established something which will last for over a hundred and thirty years?

Naram-Sin is the giant in the horned helmet. Likely not to scale.

*     *     *

And that's it for this installment. See you in two weeks!

Smoke Gets In Your Line-Up

by Robert Lopresti

Earlier this week I needed to do some business at a government office and I knew there would be a wait, so I got there fifteen minutes before they opened.  Naturally other people had the same idea, so there was already a line.

Directly ahead of me was a man of about thirty, with several neck tattoos.  In front of him was a gray-haired man in his sixties, wearing a rather dapper soft hat.  Both of them were smoking.

Now, I have asked people not to smoke on more than one occasion, but it never even occurred to me that day.  I could smell whiffs of the burning tobacco but it was a pleasant and breezy morning and the smoke was no problem for me at all.

What really had my attention was the conversation between the two men.  They were discussing their alma maters, by which I mean the prisons they had attended. Tattoo had recently been a guest of the taxpayers of our fair state, while the older gent had involuntarily spent some time in Texas.

While they conversed the line extended behind me and--

"Excuse me!"

He was a preppy-looking guy, in his thirties, perhaps five people behind me in the queue.

He was glaring at the two ex-cons.  "Would you mind stepping out of line if you're going to smoke?  Some of us are non-smokers."

Tattoo immediately stepped away from the crowd.  Because the line bent at the edge of the parking lot this actually put him closer to the man who had complained, but at least he had tried.

The dapper gent stood his ground, literally and figuratively.  "I'm not in the building," he said, mildly.  "Smokers have rights too."

"No one's saying you shouldn't smoke," said Preppy.  "But the law says you're supposed to be twenty-five feet away from the building.  We'll hold your place."

"I'm twenty-five feet from you."  Which wasn't true.

Then the doors opened and everyone's attention turned to the slow shuffle to the security desk where our bags were inspected before we were allowed to await our turn at a service window.

I couldn't help wondering: If Preppy had heard the subject of their conversation, would he still have confronted the men about their cigarettes?

The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods

A few minutes ago, as I write this, I finished checking proofs for The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods and, as soon as I have the answer to a question posed to one of the seventeen contributors, I’ll be sending everything back to the publisher. Scheduled for October 21, 2019, release from Down & Out Books, The Eyes of Texas will be my sixth published anthology.

I edited the first five—Fedora, Fedora II, Fedora III, Hardbroiled, and Small Crimes—(all of which were released in hardback and which will soon be released in trade paperback and as ebooks)—in the early 2000s, so there’s been a bit of a gap in my anthology output. This wasn’t by choice. In the interim I pitched anthology ideas to several publishers, received some positive feedback and encouragement, but finalized no deals.

THE BACKSTORY

One of those ideas—a collection of private eye stories set in Texas—had a positive reception at a regional publisher, but, like many other pitches before and since, ultimately led nowhere. (On the positive side, it did lead to cowriting “Snowbird” with Tom Sweeney, the first sale either of us made to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.)

The idea languished in my file of anthology pitches until February 2017 when I learned that Bouchercon was coming to Texas. I dusted off The Eyes of Texas, revised the proposal, and, in my pitch to Eric Campbell at Down & Out Books, suggested releasing it to coincide with the Dallas Bouchercon. Three days later I had a commitment from Eric and work began.

I soon issued an open call for submissions and set the submission deadline for November 30, 2017. Submissions drifted in during the coming months, from new writers and well-established writers, from writers I had worked with previously, writers I had shared space with in various anthologies and periodicals, and writers with whom I had no previous experience.

(For those who like to see stats: I received forty-three stories from thirty-nine writers. I accepted seventeen. I received submissions from twenty-nine writers who appear to be male; I accepted fifteen. I received submissions from ten writers who appear to be female; I accepted two. I did not include my own work.)

Though I rejected stories throughout the process, I did not send acceptances until the tail-end of December 2017, and I spent the next several months editing and working with the contributors, finally delivering the full manuscript to D&O in early July 2018, more than a year before the scheduled publication date.

One of the stories I accepted was the author’s first sale, submitted after he saw me on a panel of anthology editors at Armadillocon. One of the stories was submitted following a conversation I had with the author at the Toronto Bouchercon in which we discussed an aspect of Texas history that no submission had addressed, and which the author incorporated into his submission. One story’s protagonist first appeared in a story published years earlier in Fedora III, and one story’s protagonist will be featured in a forthcoming novel.

Unfortunately, one contributor has passed away.

And those stories I didn’t select? At least two have found other homes: One recently appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and another will appear in an anthology edited by Maxim Jakubowski.

THE NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Editing The Eyes of Texas led, directly or indirectly, to several new opportunities. I recently turned in the manuscript for Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, the first in an annual anthology series, and I will begin reading submissions for Mickey Finn 2 in September. (For guidelines, visit http://www.crimefictionwriter.com/submissions.html.) I co-created and am co-editing, with one of the anthology contributors, the Guns + Tacos serial novella anthology series. With one of the anthology’s contributors, I co-authored and sold two stories. With another contributor, I co-authored a story that is currently making the rounds, and I’ve placed stories in two anthologies edited by yet another contributor.

All of these unexpected opportunities remind me how interconnected we are as writers and editors, and they remind me how important it is not to give up. If I had stopped pitching anthologies during my decade-plus drought, it is likely that none of these new opportunities would have fallen into my lap.

THE EYES OF TEXAS

Texas has it all, from bustling big cities to sleepy small towns, and law enforcement alone can’t solve every crime. That’s where private eyes come in. They take the cases law enforcement can’t—or won’t. Private eyes may walk the mean streets of Dallas and Houston, but they also stroll through small West Texas towns where the secrets are sometimes more dangerous. Whether driving a Mustang or riding a Mustang, a private eye in Texas is unlike any other in the world.

The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods features seventeen original tales of Lone Star State private eyes from Trey R. Barker, Chuck Brownman, Michael Chandos, John M. Floyd, Debra H. Goldstein, James A. Hearn, Richard Helms, Robert S. Levinson, Scott Montgomery, Sandra Murphy, Josh Pachter, Michael Pool, Graham Powell, William Dylan Powell, Stephen D. Rogers, Mark Troy, and Bev Vincent.

Preorder now at https://downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/bracken-eyes-texas/.

Three Brisket Tacos and a Sig Sauer, my contribution to and the second episode of the Guns + Tacos serial novella anthology series Trey R. Barker and I created and edit, released August 1.

Joseph “Joey D” Garrett owes everything to his Aunt Sylvia, including a stint in the Stateville Correctional Center. When he’s released, Joey returns to the only life he knows, and he soon becomes an instrumental part of his aunt’s plan to rob four banks in a single day.

Before that can happen, though, Joey meets Gloria Sanchez, and she turns his life upside down. Gloria’s everything his aunt isn’t, and their developing relationship makes him think about how life could be if he weren’t so dependent on Sylvia. When he’s forced to choose between the two most important women in his life, Joey finds the answer in a take-out bag from a taco truck.

Order here: https://downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/bracken-three-brisket-tacos/.

Or order the entire first season here: https://downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/guns-tacos-s1-subscription/.

Also, I’m reading my story “Oystermen” from the July/August issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in episode 118 of EQMM’s podcast. Recorded at this year's Malice Domestic, my voice had grown a bit horse before Jackie Sherbow began recording. Listen here.

Bending The Bar

I attended high school so long ago that my class used Roman Numerals. My ninth-grade English teacher was the sister of Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke, and she was one of the best--and toughest--teachers I ever had. Because of her, I finished what was then called Junior High School with a better understanding of grammar than any healthy person should have to admit. I earned a "B" from her and was put into the honors English classes in high school because nobody else had earned a "B" from her since the Korean Conflict.

The honors classes all took a diagnostic grammar and usage test the first day, we all scored 177 of a possible 177, and the teacher called that our grammar for the year. We read lots of books, of course, and we did lots of writing, which was graded on our grammar, spelling, punctuation and general usage.

My senior class demanded a research paper of 1000 words, and we had to put footnotes at the bottom of the page and include a bibliography. The teacher promised us she would check our form carefully. I don't remember now whether we had six weeks to complete the assignment, or maybe even eight.

Six weeks, maybe eight, to complete a 1000-word essay. It works out to about 170 words a week, roughly 25 words a day. And we were graded on "correctness," with not a word about style or creativity. I don't remember anything changing in English classes until the 1980s.

In the mid 80s, I found several books that changed my teaching landscape. Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers brought the free-writing idea to daylight. Rico's Writing the Natural Way gave students stylistic models to emulate. Klauser's Writing on Both Sides of the Brain amplified both Elbow and Rico. Adams's The Care and Feeding of Ideas and Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience set up the ground rules for how this stuff all worked.

Nobody else in my school seemed to notice these books, but they actually taught writing the way writers write: Say something, THEN worry about saying it more effectively or even "correctly."
Clarity and voice came first. For decades, we'd been trying to teach kids to say it right the first time, when we know that doesn't really happen.

Most of the English teachers I know are poor writers because they know grammar and punctuation so well that it gets in their way. When I retired from teaching, it took me about three years to accept that sometimes a sentence fragment works better than being correct.

One of the popular in-jokes was a facsimile lesson plan about teaching children how to walk. It buried the topic in medical jargon and psycho-babble and evaluation buzzwords until it became incoherent and impenetrable. The point was that if we taught kids basic life skills the way we taught them lessons in school, the human race would have died out long ago. (I'm carefully avoiding any mention of sex education here, maybe the only class that should be a performance-based subject...)

Back when I was in high school, golfers Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer both said that when they were learning the game, they were encouraged to hit the ball hard and concentrate on distance. They learned control and finesse later, and their records prove that it was the best way to learn.

That's how it should be with writing. Until you produce enough words to say something, don't worry about spelling or grammar.

Today, I expect to write 1000 words in an hour or so. My personal record for one day, back on an electric typewriter in 1981, is 42 pages, or about 10,000 words. I only had three weeks between the end of a summer grad school class and the beginning of my teaching year, so I just got stuff down on paper to fix later. The book was terrible and I later scrapped it, but that was ten times as many words as I'd done years before in eight weeks.

My second high, done to finish the first draft of a novel before I entered the hospital for surgery, was 7000 words.

If you're a writer, this probably doesn't shock you. I know many writers who set a 2000-word-a-day goal. If we'd asked that of kids in my generation, they would have all joined the Foreign Legion. That's because we were attacking the project from the wrong side. It's like pumping in the water before you dig the swimming pool.

Maybe this is why so many people say they don't write because they can't find a good idea. They may have perfectly good ideas, but they're afraid to begin because they fear doing it "wrong." It's the age old false equivalency over priorities: is it a candy mint or a breath mint?

If you think of your story, even in general terms with very little worked out yet, and start typing, the ideas will come. You may have to do lots of revision, but that's easy when you have material to work with. You can't fix what isn't there. The only document I get right the first time is a check because all I have to do is fill in the blanks. I take three drafts for the average grocery list.

Writing CAN be taught, but we have to teach the right stuff in the right order. It's no good obsessing abut correctness until you have something to "correct." We teach all the skills and have all the standards, but they're in the wrong sequence.

Don't raise the bar, bend it.

Teach kids the fun parts faster. I still remember teachers reading us stories in elementary school or the excitement of sharing our adventures in show-and-tell. Maybe if we kept the story first and worried about the finesse later, kids would grow into adults with more and better stories to share in the first place.

THEN you worry about style. There are dozens of books on grammar and usage--I've mentioned several of them before--but there are only two books I can mention about style, and Strunk and White is only really good for expository essays and academic subjects.

The other would be a required text in any class I taught. If you haven't read this, find a copy. I'm not going to discuss it because that could be another blog all by itself.

When I see kids reading on their screens or tablets instead of books, and watch them text with their thumbs, I have a few seconds of concern. But then I see how quickly they can type and the worry goes away. If they can produce communication that quickly, they can produce many short works quickly to make a longer one, and they can connect with each other. The phone abbreviations and emojis solve many of the concerns we obsessed over, too, like spelling, punctuation, and grammar.