25 June 2022

What Makes an Author a Hero? Paying it Forward


 I love that term, Pay it Forward.  It speaks of giving selflessly, but also of planning for a future.  

Really, we're talking about Hope.  When you pay it forward, you are believing in Hope.  Hope that the world will continue to be a good place in future - or at least, a good enough place for you to invest some time NOW helping others who will be around later.  In our case, helping them to continue the literary tradition.

Recently, I got an almost tearful email from a former student who has been picked up by a traditional publisher.  Her book comes out this month.  I couldn't be more thrilled.

She has been generous in her thanks to me for serving as a mentor and cheering squad, and that got me thinking about the people who influenced me in my publishing travels.

I've had maybe a dozen students do really well as writers, in my 30 years of teaching the craft.  Each email telling me of one's success does something to my heart. This is why we teach!  What joy I am given by a student's success.  

But it also does a very curious thing for me.  It reminds me of my own first successes, and the people who helped me on my way.

It's lonely out there, on that author journey.  You basically have to travel it yourself (writing for hundreds of hours, alone at a keyboard.)  Writing, as we all know, is a solitary exercise.  Unless you co-write a book, no one else will have the same investment in it.

It's a journey, no question.  But along the way, you may come across some seasoned travelers who give you the benefit of their experience.  Generous people who take the time to encourage you, when there is no tangible benefit to themselves.  

I started writing for money in my 20s. As I look back on a thirty-five year writing career it suddenly struck me that few of my mentors or people who encouraged me are still alive.  And thus the circle has completed.  They mentored me.  I mentor others younger than me, who will go on to support the next generation of writers, when I am long past.  

God Bless all those who mentor and encourage writers.  You are important and appreciated long after the fact.

A few of mine:

Marilyn Laycock:  Marilyn was a columnist for her local paper.  She died last year, after serving as an older sister to me for almost forty years.  It was she who encouraged me to 'go pro' and take college writing courses in 1986 and 7.  Marilyn told me where to send my first essay (it got published) and provided all the 'Attagirls' I needed in those early years. She sponsored me for membership in the Mississauga Writer's Guild, and introduced me to well-published fiction authors there who would be instrumental in encouraging my fiction career.

Michael Crawley:  The head of the Mississauga Writer's Guild was Michael Crawley, a professional veteran fiction author of horror, erotica, and other genres, under several pen names.  Michael saw potential in me, took me under his wing, and made it his job to see that I tried writing and publishing in several genres, some of which I don't admit to these days :)  Michael died several years ago, but is still fresh in my mind - he lives on in a way I don't think he ever would have anticipated.  

And finally, one who is still alive:

Linwood Barclay:  Sometimes a simple act of kindness can make all the difference.  After some early humour column publications, I brazenly wrote to Linwood Barclay, who was then editor of the Life section of the Toronto Star (Canada's biggest newspaper,) asking if he would consider publishing one of my pieces.  This was completely unsolicited.  I marvel that I had the guts.  But here's the thing:  Linwood wrote back.  This was before email.  So he actually *wrote* back.  He told me the piece was definitely funny, I had talent, but the Star didn't take freelance.  Why didn't I try my local paper?  So I did.  They took it.  They took more.  I got syndicated.  And that launched a humour career of columns, standup and comedic fiction that has spanned thirty years.

One simple act of kindness that has lasted a career.  He didn't have to do it. Most wouldn't have.  It took a bit of effort on his part.  And I have never forgotten it.

 How about you?  Are there people who made all the difference to you as a newby writer?

Linwood Barclay in Conversation with Melodie Campbell, Burlington Public Library, May 19, 2022

24 June 2022

The Sound Of Music


Music can be a powerful motivator for a writer. Years ago, I heard Annie Lennox's cover of Neil Young's "Don't Let It Bring You Down." The image of a dead man lying at the side of a highway as semis (or "lorries," as Young puts it in his lyrics) at sunrise crystalized a series of unconnected scenes. Years later, after putting it on the shelf and dusting it off again, that project became Holland Bay.

Of course, you hope a song exploding in your brain like that pays off sooner. Holland Bay took so long to write that I spun up an entire trilogy and adjacent arcs of novellas by the time I sent it to Down & Out Books. In fact, I had no idea I would be getting back into science fiction when I started.

In the early days, when I wrote about PI Nick Kepler, I wanted a series of prompts to keep short stories flowing. In my misspent youth, I had an obsession with, along with Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, heavy metal gods Deep Purple. I decided I wanted a short story named for a song title from each of their (ever-growing) list of studio albums. That was a start. But "Hush," which spawned a short story about hush money, became "Just Like Suicide," as the hush money involved a murder made to look like suicide. The obscure "Chasing Shadows" involved a witch and a graveyard (the former making a return appearance in the novel Bad Religion) became "Full Moon Boogie," another obscure song by a later iteration of the Jeff Beck Group. So music led to music. But some were obvious.

Deep Purple's second hit, an instrumental called "Wring That Neck," has a title that calls to mind chickens meeting an untimely demise before ending up in a bucket with eleven herbs and spices. Nick Kepler was a creature of Cleveland and its suburbs. However, I had lived briefly in what I now dub Amish Mafia territory, specifically Holmes County, Ohio, where my parents spent their final years. I remember I was culture shocked being fifty miles from anywhere. So Nick went looking for a Romeo and Juliet couple who run off to more rural than rural Ohio. It ends a bit better than Willy Shakes' tragic tale, but Nick is a fish out of water, even slipping in chicken poop at one point. He is less than charitable to his client after that.

Then there's "Flight of the Rat," written about two years after 9/11. Many of us struggled to deal with that event without hitting the reader over the head with it. The song, from Purple's In Rock album, gave me an obvious title. Nick chases a bail jumper into Cleveland's Hopkins Airport on 9/11 and gets away with things he would not be able to do twenty-four hours later. That one, I played the source song over and over while writing it.

Lately, one song came up on Tidal, my streaming service of choice. "Last Plane Out" by one-off band Toy Matinee has shown up several times on Daily Discovery. While inspired by Yes, UK, and, to some extent, Asia, the band featured Guy Pratt, aka Roger Waters' replacement in Pink Floyd. The song, however, has more in common with Radiohead and Coldplay but doesn't take itself nearly as seriously. "Last Plane Out" begins with the line "Welcome to Sodom. How we wish you were here." It goes on to tell the tale of someone living in a land of decadence and vice but hoping for a seat on the titular last plane out. Edge of the apocalypse stuff.

The song is quite catchy, but the lyrics suggest the second season of Jack Ryan, as Ryan and Greer seek to navigate a fictionalized Venezuela. Currently, I'm pondering either going with a thriller and accessing my inner Lee Child or making this a second outing for my science fiction space spy Eric Yuwono, who may return to the land of sin and vice already in a pending novel. "Welcome to Sodom," the Biblical land of violent hedonism, seems an irresistible jumping off point for either a present-day character or a futuristic spy finding himself on a planet about to implode under the weight of its own over-indulgence.

These aren't the only examples. Our own Brian Thornton edited two anthologies inspired by the music of Steely Dan while the same publisher just released one based on Warren Zevon's. (How can you not do crime fiction with a title like Lawyers, Guns, and Money?) And music is all through Stephen King's books, quoted, as themes, and even in the meta fiction. (The Dark Half's main character wrote a literary novel called Purple Haze that may or may not have had an intrusion by his violent dead twin pseudonym, but clearly channeled Hendrix in its tone.)

And why wouldn't music weave its way through our writing? Some writers listen to specific music to set the mood for a scene. Others want a wall of sound to keep the world out so they can concentrate. And sometimes, it just helps you think.

23 June 2022

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes


 Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. 

         -John Hughes, Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

As regular readers of my turn in this blog rotation (both of them!*rimshot*) will no doubt recall, my day gig for the past twenty-five or so years has been teaching history at the secondary level. For the past twenty years I have taught solely at the middle school level (and in the same school, no less). 

What's more, I have loved nearly every minute of it.

As of this time last week, I had every intention of coming back to this same position in this same school and teaching 8th grade history for the eighteenth consecutive year. The only changes would be a shift in the era taught (from Ancient and Medieval World History to American History, 1790-1920), and a one-year move to teaching part-time as a single-year concession to some on-going health problems (both my own and those of a close family member). 

In short I'd be teaching American History (my MA is in 19th century American History) three periods per day, rather than Ancient and Medieval World History five periods per day. At least, that was the plan. And it has been a long-standing precedent in both my building and my district that this sort of part-time schedule is a morning gig, wrapping up around Noon or shortly thereafter, leaving my afternoons free to take care of myself and my family.

And then last Thursday happened.

At 8:58 AM I received an email from my vice-principal informing me that not only would I not be teaching in the morning, but I wouldn't be teaching 8th grade. My building administration had scheduled me to teach three 7th grade classes from 11:19 to 3:20 every day.

What's more, my administrators had made this radical change to my on-going schedule without once doing me the courtesy of consulting me about it. That is just not done. 

In fact I had filled out the required end-of-school-year wish-list for the coming year and made it clear that I was only interested in continuing to teach 8th grade Social Studies. Early in my career I had taught multiple subject areas and grade levels in different classrooms over the course of school day. This went on for the first several years of my teaching career-just paying my dues, nothing more, nothing less. As I gained seniority within my subject area and within my building, that changed. 

I don't need to tell anyone who has a family member either attending or working in the public school system during the COVID-19 pandemic that the past three years have been some of the most stressful for all concerned in the history of public education. And that stress has taken a toll on my health. Hence my taking a partial leave in the first place.

To say that working a mid-day schedule would do nothing to support my attempts to address my on-going health concerns is an understatement. In point of fact, it would cripple them. As for teaching 7th grade, that too was a minefield.

My district recently changed the 7th grade curriculum to one provided by an education nonprofit. To call it "history" is to misname it. It's barely social studies. Without getting too deep into the weeds on this, I'm a trained historian, published in my field, and cannot, in good conscience, agree to teach this curriculum. Period.

So there are two nonstarters.

Which meant I was suddenly faced with a choice: "What do I do about it?"

I briefly considered reaching out my to building admin to ask why they had done this, and whether there was wiggle room to change it up to something more palatable, something that would work better for me and my needs. I did not consider this option for long.

After all, when I first began to consider taking a partial leave of absence for the coming year, I immediately consulted with my building administration, as a matter of professional courtesy. This was three months ago. When I decided on this course of action two months ago, I also immediately notified my bosses. I was able to confirm this shift in my work assignment had been in place for at least a month by the time I received my career-changing email last Thursday.

That begs the question: why did my bosses not afford me a similar courtesy? I would think at the very least my twenty years' working in this building merited an in-person conversation as soon as the decision had been made, and not simply announced in an email several weeks later.

Draw your own conclusions as to what these actions on the part of my building admin say about my value as an educator within a building I've called my professional home for two decades. I know I certainly did.

So I did the smart thing. I went home and talked it over with the wisest, brightest, kindest person I know. My wife. (Yes, she's all of the above and more, and NO you CAN'T have her. She's all MINE!).

My wife expressed concern for my health (as she had before many times) and for what toll the stress of this new schedule and struggling with this new curriculum might take on me. Her proposed solution was an astonishing combination of love, compassion, empathy, and concern for my well-being.

She suggested I simply expand my leave for next year to a full-time leave. She made the case that we could afford it, and all she asked in return was that I honor my obligations to address my chronic health issues, help my family, and one other thing.

I have to finish my current novel, outline and write another one, and write and publish a yet-to-be-determined number of short stories and novellas.

What writer in his right mind (no cracks, now!) would not take that deal?

So that's what I did. 

The next day I informed my principal (a wonderful lady, new to our building this year, but someone whom I very much enjoy and toward who I have not one shred of ill will). Her dismay at my decision frankly surprised me.

I mean, no one talked to me about this. Literally for weeks.

So when she started bartering, trying to keep me on-staff at least part-time, I had to stop her. After all, I didn't do what I did as the first move in a series of negotiating ploys trying to "get what I wanted."

I made a decision. An informed one. And truth be told, as I explained to my principal just last Friday, they did my a favor. Their scheduling me to teach afternoon 7th grade classes forced me to take a good hard look at my plan to work part-time in my building and try to address my health concerns piecemeal.

The realization that I have the option (thanks, again, I hasten to add, to the loving support of the World's Best Wife) to step back and focus on my own needs full-time for at least the next twelve months has been incredibly freeing for me.

And I am beyond grateful. Thanks all over again, honey. I love you more than words can wield the matter.

So that's it. For at least the next year it's get healthier and write, write, write!

See you in two weeks!




22 June 2022

An Antic Disposition


  

Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet are probably the best-known of Shakespeare’s plays, and at least the most quoted – if not misquoted, for that matter.  Romeo & Juliet is performed often, by both professional and amateur companies, because it’s pretty straightforward.  Hamlet is trickier, or has the more troublesome reputation.  The prince, too, is one of those parts any name brand Shakespearean actor is pretty much obligated to take on early, like Lear, later in life. 

Olivier’s is the one most people know; his 1948 picture is usually cited as a classic.  I wonder if I’m the only one who thinks he kind of missed the point.  Kenneth Branagh took a stab at it, but you have the unworthy suspicion Branagh is trying to knock Olivier off his perch.  I saw Richard Burton do it on stage, but unfortunately everybody in the cast was acting in a different play from everybody else – and surprisingly, the most effective performance was Alfred Drake, playing Claudius as mildly puzzled.  I don’t have a problem with Zeffirelli’s version, Mel Gibson, but they cut the play even more severely than Olivier does.  For my money, the most engaging production is the 1980 BBC Shakespeare: Derek Jacobi as Hamlet, Patrick Stewart as Claudius.  It’s the full original text, with a runtime of three and a half hours, and it’s unapologetically played as a political thriller.


Hamlet, notoriously, is open to interpretation.  The melancholy Dane, the guy who doubts himself, and hesitates.  Olivier takes for his epigraph a line from early in the play, “Oft it chances in particular men,… carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,…” and then leaves out the rogue and peasant slave soliloquy entirely.  To my mind, this has it completely backwards.  A recent production I just saw, by the Upstart Crows here in Santa Fe, edits out that same speech Olivier chooses as emblematic, but includes all of the rogue and peasant slave speech, which I think is key to the play.  “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?  What would he do, had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?”  Hamlet, we can agree, is clearly a revenge plot.  Claudius has usurped both his brother’s throne and his marriage bed.  The prince is prompted, his word, by heaven and hell.    

It’s a misreading to suggest Hamlet can’t make up his mind.  He thinks Claudius is a rat from the get-go, and he’s furious with his mother, “to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets,” but he’s choking on his own resentment.  Even after the Ghost shows up, he second-guesses himself: “the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.”  The real sticking point, though, is that Claudius “popp’d in between the election and my hopes.”  Hamlet wants to be king himself, and Claudius cheated him.  In order to swing this - regicide, and a coup – Hamlet needs Claudius seen to be guilty, to be “justly served.”

If you read the whole play, front to back, or if you see a production that’s the whole thing, more or less, you notice the political machinations.  It’s not something read into the text, or grafted onto it.  It’s organic.  Watching the BBC Jacobi, or the Branagh movie (Jacobi as Claudius, all the more sinister for seeming reluctant), or the Upstart Crows, which left very little out, and moved like a rocket, with no wasted motion whatsoever, the political dimension is front and center.  Once the kid realizes he’s got a solid alibi to go after his uncle, he’s only waiting on opportunity.  But he himself understands he can’t be regarded as some cranky-pants teenager with a grudge; he has to be seen as responsible, not as settling a score, but righting a wrong.  He charges Horatio, as he’s dying, to report his cause accurately.  “Absent thee from felicity a while.”  This isn’t chump change.  The obligation is everything left to history.  How the story is told, after Hamlet leaves the stage.  He didn’t kill the guy because he screwed his mom; he killed an illegitimate king. 

There’s a terrific poem by Constantine Cavafy.  The premise is that Horatio has a dog in the fight.  After the events in question, Horatio becomes a court favorite, and if he maintains the narrative, it discredits Claudius, creates a legend around Hamlet, and legitimizes Fortinbras as heir to Denmark.  Cavafy’s an astute critic, if a bit cynical.  


What is the story, exactly?  The son of a dear father, murdered.  “A little more than kin, and less than kind,” the prince says, when Claudius calls him his cousin and his son, in the opening scene at court.  We know something’s amiss.  The question is whether Hamlet’s nuts.  The play is how he justifies crazy. 

Suppose, then, that Hamlet might be a classic example of the unreliable narrator.  He’s completely transparent, his thoughts spilling over, unpacking his heart with words, but is he trustworthy?  The rest is silence.

21 June 2022

Miles of Files


I started my writing career long before personal computers were anything more than a plot device in science fiction stories. Despite making the transition from a manual typewriter to an IBM Selectric and from there to a series of ever more powerful PCs and then to a series of ever more powerful Macintoshes, my record-keeping system has remained almost entirely manual.

The file folder and tracking
system I used for “Disposable
Women,” currently
shortlisted for a Shamus.
I’m uncertain if this is ironic or pathetic, given that for most everything else in my life I’m a heavy user of computers and computer programs, but I think it may be the result of long-established habit and the knowledge that if I did convert to a more sophisticated system I wouldn’t be satisfied with a spread sheet or two for new work. I would want to build a sophisticated database that includes everything I’ve ever written and includes every possible bit of information about each story.

I would want to know at the click of a few keys which is my shortest story and which my longest, which had the most submissions before acceptance, which has been reprinted most often, my sales/rejections ratio with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, how many times I submitted to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine before I received an acceptance, and so much more.

The time it would take to input all of that information, and the time I would later spend using the data to create charts and graphs and all manner of interesting reports, would consume a significant amount of time and eliminate what little writing time I have these days.

These six filing
cabinets may soon be
joined by a seventh.
For now, I remain with the tried-and-true: Every finished story gets a file folder, and into it goes a hardcopy of the story and a cover sheet where I track submissions, rejections, and other important information such as the dates I returned the signed contract, copy edits, and page proofs, and the story’s publication date. Also in the folder goes a copy of the signed contract, copies of important research, and a copy of the published version.

This file folder travels through a series of file drawers: awaiting submission; under submission; accepted, not paid for; paid for, not published; published, not paid for; and so on until the folder moves into its final home after the story has been published.

There are six of these filing cabinets in my second office, containing everything I’ve had published since my first sale back in the mid-1970s. In my first office—the one where I do much of my writing—are three file drawers containing the work under submission or awaiting submission, as well as several bookshelves filled with my novels and short story collections, anthologies I’ve edited, and many books and magazines containing something I’ve written (short stories mostly, but essays and non-fiction as well).

A 5.25" floppy disk
containing an early
version of the novel published
as All White Girls.
Hard copies of finished manuscripts take up a great deal of space—hence the six filing cabinets—but I can still read every one of them. Many of the earliest stories were written on typewriters, so hard copies are the only versions that exist, and the on-going evolution of computer science has left me with 5.25” floppy disks, 3.5” diskettes, and Zip drives for which I no longer have appropriate drives. Even if I had appropriate drives, many of the files were created with WordStar and I no longer have a program that will allow me to open the WordStar files and save them as Word documents. Luckily, I so rarely need to access the oldest files that it is easier to retype anything I might need.

Temple and I have reached the age where retirement is in her foreseeable future (writers don’t retire, so it isn’t in my future), and we’ve discussed downsizing to a smaller home with less upkeep. The biggest obstacle, though, is my antiquated record-keeping system—a system I started using long before personal computers stopped being a science fiction plot device and became a reality.

My story “Disposable Women,” published in
Tough (July 19, 2021), has been shortlisted for a Shamus Award.

“Sit. Stay. Die.” A story I co-authored with Sandra Murphy was published in the July/August Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. This is our fifth collaboration and my second consecutive appearance in EQMM.


20 June 2022

Xena, The Heroine/Villain


 by Steve Liskow

When Ernie, our 13-year-old Maine Coon, died a year ago after a long battle with kidney disease, Barb and I agreed he would be our last cat. We've been together for almost 38 years and shared space with at least one cat for 36 of them, so we may have been kidding ourselves.

Two months ago, one of our neighbors had far too many cats because her tom has fathered half the cats in our condo complex. She offered us a small tuxedo girl. We agreed to meet her, but that was all. Then we said we'd pet her, but nothing else. Then I held her for a minute. You see where this is going, don't you? She snuggled under my chin and purred.

Well, we decided she could visit our place on Monday for an hour or two and see if she was comfortable. She was. We arranged another visit on Thursday for a longer period of time to check things out more thoroughly. So thoroughly that she hasn't left yet. That was six weeks ago.


I've said before that animals, especially cats, inspire great human characters, and Xena exemplifies that even more than Ernie and Jewel did.

Like most cats, she's probably somewhere on the spectrum. She isn't really a lap cat, but she likes to cuddle. That and her sense of humor make her a great sidekick. But she still refuses to differentiate between our recliner and her scratching post, and she plays rough. She's made friends with the plant mister and fears nothing except the hair dryer. This makes her a great villain, too. She's smarter and faster than we are and can move from room to room--or floor to counter--so quickly we don't have time to say, "Xena, NO! Oh, never mind."


She's very social. She met Barb and me with no hesitation and explored our place with the enthusiasm of a six-year-old in Toys R Us. Unfortunately, her social skills extend to other cats, too. At 18 months, she's already birthed two litters. When she's in heat (which seems to be more frequently than your average porn star), she announces her needs loudly enough so most of the complex can hear her. Two of her former boyfriends have taken to hanging out on our front steps. Every well-developed character needs a weakness, and that's hers. 


Living with several other cats, she had to fight her way to the food. For the first two weeks in our place, she emptied her dish so quckly she spent the next hour crying with a stomach ache. Now, she's figured out that there's no competition and she can slow down. Sometimes. She still sticks her head in the can while I'm trying to spoon food into her dish. 

Today, she will meet her veterinarian for the first time. She's had none of her shots yet and we want to make sure she's as healthy as she seems. She's the smallest cat we've ever had, especially apparent because our last two cats were a Himalayan and a Maine Coon, and we don't expect her to get much bigger at 18 months. 

But she already likes to curl up on my left foot while I type, so she'll probably become another writing partner and character inspiration. The female leads in both my Connecticut and Detroit series have cats already, and maybe there's room for another tuxedo.


19 June 2022

The 7 Lives of Léa


7½

7½ months or more ago, Rob and I wrote about an unusual English manor mystery, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Much of the surrealism comes from what we’re not told. We’re given damned little in framing and a backstory.

Compared to the British title, The 7 Deaths… both Rob and I prefer the American variation, The 7½ Deaths. The novel left an impression– Four years after publication, I’m still yakking about it. But this isn’t about that.

The 7 Lives

When NetFlix presented a French miniseries, The 7 Lives of Léa, based on the novel, Les 7 vies de Léo Belami by Nataël Trapp, I couldn’t help comparing. Like 7½ Deaths, each day the protagonist in 7 Lives finds herself jumping from one body to another, trying to learn what is happening, trying to figure out who killed Ismael, a nearly forgotten boy thirty years earlier.

Think of it as a French episode of The Twilight Zone.

Raïka Hazanavicius
Raïka Hazanavicius as Léa

Conceptual Issues

Hard sci-fi proudly embraces the physics of its world, whether real-life or a well-defined fictional model, the science in science fiction. Time travel novels and films may or may not succeed in the redefined reality of their new world. Laws of physics disallow a traveller meeting a past or future version of himself. A traveller must be careful not to alter his ancestral line that might preclude his own birth… while sometimes trying to disrupt the lineage of an adversary.

The average time travel story earns perhaps a C. I’ll award Léa a B-/C+, reasonable for the tale in question. It doesn’t pretend to be more than it is.

The 7 Lives of Léa follows a recent pattern of recasting male leads as female. Some reimagining works better than others. Without having read the book, I felt comfortable with a heroine instead of a hero. And indeed, the story zeroes in on unsung heroism.

The multi-generation actors of 7 Lives seemed to have been cast while wearing blindfolds. Virtually no teenage character resembles its much older adult version, which made it trickier to track the plot.

Léa manages to squeak past a couple of incestuous make-out close calls. Perhaps the funnest part, so to speak, occurres when she lands in the body of Pye (Pierre-Yves), the town’s rich kid, who’s not only popular but a snobbish bully. Léa alters the timeline to make a clumsy fool of him (with the result of making him somewhat endearing), but hooks him up with Jennifer, the school’s picked-on homely girl. Time travel should be built for anti-bullying alone.

Although a suspected murder is involved, The 7 Lives of Léa isn’t truly crime fiction, but it is an enjoyable journey into an imagination Rod Serling would have been proud of.

18 June 2022

Plots and Characters


  

Two often-asked questions, at writers' meetings and writers' conferences, and sometimes even at readings and signings:

(1) When authors think up a story, should they start with a plot or with a character? 

(2) Which of these (plot or character) is more important to the story?

There are, as you probably know, no correct answers to these. Writers' processes are different and their opinions are different, and whatever works, works. But since this is my topic today and I don't want to end it here, please consider a couple of examples.

Plot first

Anytime the subject of plot vs. character comes up, I think of "The Choking Doberman." I don't know who dreamed up the story, or when, but it's been around a long time. Here it is, as close as I can remember it, in a nutshell:

A lady comes home from the supermarket with a sackful of food, opens her front door, and finds her pet Doberman choking in the entranceway. She drops her bag, picks up the gasping dog, and rushes him to the veterinarian's office. The vet tells her, "We'll take care of him--go home and I'll call you later." She drives back home and is picking up her dropped groceries when the phone rings. It's the vet. He says, "Get out of the house! You're in great danger--get out right now!" So she does. Terrified, she runs to the next-door neighbor's house, and watches through the neighbor's window as several patrol cars screech to a stop in front of her house. Half a dozen policemen hop out with guns drawn and run inside. Several minutes later the veterinarian arrives also, and when he gets out of his car the lady hurries up to him and says, "What on earth is happening?" He tells her that when he examined her dog he found a severed human finger lodged in the dog's throat--that's why he was choking. Assuming the dog might've surprised an intruder, the vet called the police and, sure enough, the cops found a man hiding in one of her closets and clutching his bloody hand. 

Question: Is this fine, illuminating, life-changing literature? Of course not. But it damn sure is memorable. I think I first heard the story told in high school, and I remember it to this day.

In the Doberman story, the plot--the story--is everything. It's all that matters. The characters--the woman, the vet, the neighbor, the policemen--aren't all that important. They're there only to make the story happen. I've heard this mentioned as a good example of genre fiction as opposed to "literary."


Character first

On the other side of the aisle is "Big Two-Hearted River," by Ernest Hemingway. I can't remember it in detail, but here's a quick summary:

After the war, a man goes back home and visits his old fishing spot. He hikes to the river, sits around, smokes, makes camp for the night, and goes to bed. The next morning he cooks breakfast, finds grasshoppers to use for bait, and goes fishing. He catches a few trout and loses a few and finally stops. 

And that's it. I don't mean to in any way demean the story; it's well written and certainly well known. But nothing really happens in the story. I suppose there's symbolism here--the river could probably represent life, flowing steadily past him, and the battle between him and the fish he tries to catch is an insignificant struggle when compared to the fighting he did in the war. But there's no plot at all. The character is everything. This story would fall more on the literary-fiction end of the scale, as opposed to genre fiction. 


A clarification (I hope)

Please be aware, I don't think the plot/character issue is the deciding factor in whether a story's categorized as literary or genre. I think it's more a case of whether the viewpoint character undergoes a change in the course of the story. If that happens--if he or she becomes a different person by the time the end rolls around--it's literary fiction. If the character remains pretty much the same at the end (think James Bond or Nancy Drew or Indiana Jones), it's genre fiction. There are other things to consider as well, like entertainment vs. enlightenment, and the sophistication and beauty of the language, etc., but I believe the man thing is the extent to which the POV character experiences a change in the way he or she looks at life. And it's not always the main character--it's the viewpoint character. Atticus Finch and Shane and Jay Gatsby aren't the ones who undergo this kind of emotional change; Scout and Bobby Starrett and Nick Carraway are. They're the people who are in a position to observe what happens and learn the most from it. It is for this reason that I believe some genre stories like Westerns and mysteries and science fiction can also qualify as literary fiction. (My opinion only.)

NOTE: I recall seeing much of this plot vs. character debate years ago in a book called 20 Master Plots by Ronald Tobias. Or at I think that was it. If I'm wrong it wouldn't be the first time. (Maybe the second.)


So, which should come first? Plot or character?

That depends on the author. Almost all my writer friends tell me they come up with the character(s) first and only then do they worry about giving those characters something to do, which is the plot. I do it the other way around. I always come up with the plot first, and only then create the people (and try hard to make them interesting) who will act out the story.

One thing to bear in mind is that your characters don't have to be any less interesting if you come up with the plot first. I even think the characters can turn out better when they're tailored to meet the requirements of the storyline.


Which is more important to the story?

That varies as well, depending on who you ask. Personally, I probably prefer plot-driven stories to character-driven stories because I think entertainment is the one most important thing I can try to deliver to readers. If they somehow happen to be enlightened or educated as a result of the story, that's icing on the cake, but if they're entertained--if it's a good story--I feel I've done what I set out to do. On the other hand, I know many writers, and readers too, who always prefer strong characters over a strong plot.

Stephen King once said, in his essay collection Secret Windows, "All my life as a writer I have been committed to the idea that in fiction the story value holds dominance over every other facet of the writer's craft; characterization, theme, mood, none of those things is anything if the story is dull. And if the story does hold you, all else can be forgiven."

As for literary fiction vs. genre fiction, which always seems to go hand-in-hand with discussions of character vs. plot, the best definition I've heard of those terms comes also from Stephen King, in a taped interview I saw years ago. I'm paraphrasing here, but he said something like "Literary fiction is about extraordinary people doing ordinary things, and genre fiction is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things."

I think we can all agree that the very best stories and novels and movies have great characters AND great plots--they're not mutually exclusive. That's why Lonesome Dove and To Kill a Mockingbird and The Silence of the Lambs and The Godfather will be around forever. The rest of us writers should be so lucky.


Your turn . . .

If you write stories, which do you come up with first? Always the characters? Always the plot? Sometimes a mix of the two? And which do you think is more important to the story? Let me know, in the comments section.


See you again on July 2nd.


17 June 2022

Five Things That Convinced Me to Dump Social Media


I recently deleted the last two significant social media accounts I used for years, Twitter and Instagram. I have plenty of reasons for taking that step, but rather than dwell on those, I think it might be more interesting to share with you some of the resources and examples that inspired me to take this step. I’ll devote a future post about reasons, feelings, and choices I’m making going forward.


Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier (Henry Holt and Co., 2018).
Lanier is a virtual reality pioneer and technologist. I met and interviewed him while writing an article for Discover magazine in 1999. He impressed me then as a profound thinker, but not until I read this book did I perceive him to be a decent, compassionate person and father who is concerned about what social media algorithms are doing to our brains. As he explains it, Silicon Valley has a very high opinion of its social media software, but it is still quite crude, designed primarily to hook us and enrich its creators. Apps distort politics, promote bad behavior, cultivate binary thinking, stoke triggering behavior, and make us cranky. Before reading the book I thought I could simply delete the apps from my phone and just take a break from social media. (I did this one year and was impressed.) An optimist, Lanier believes that the software can be written to be more decent, but he argues that the firms involved won’t change their game until a significant number of people delete their accounts. Big difference. 




The Social Dilemma (Netflix, 2020).
The most compelling thing about this documentary is that all the talking heads are people who worked for major firms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and came to see how destructive their products were. It’s fascinating to hear their arguments for why social media must change—and their fears. The line that gets repeated often: “If you're not paying for a product, you ARE the product.” If you could take back some of your own autonomy, agency, and privacy, wouldn’t you? I also recommend the documentary Fake Famous (HBO, 2021). Journalist Nick Bilton chooses three young people at random and tries to see if he can transform them into Instagram influencers overnight. The secret of his success? Buy them a bunch of bots! It feels like a trivial project and film (lots of fun, lighthearted moments) but it’s scary how many millions of people are playing this pathetic game for real.



Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport (Portfolio, 2019). Georgetown University computer scientist Newport is probably best known for his book Deep Work, which I’ve discussed before. The newer book helps professionals put technology in its place. He recommends reducing your online and screen time to the bare minimum for, say, a month, then only add back what you really need. If you need Twitter in order to do your job effectively, then you need to carefully set up a system that allows to you get in, get out, without turning your brain to mush. (And yes, there are such people, like the scientist who analyzes language on Twitter to track epidemics.)


Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari (Crown, 2022).
I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve heard someone say that they just can’t read or finish books anymore. This comment usually comes from longtime readers, who are surprised that they can’t sit still, focus, and blow through a book in a matter of hours, the way they once did. They profess shock and shame, but British-Swiss journalist Hari says none of us are to blame. Our attention spans have been steadily eroded and fractured by 12 forces in modern life, which he carefully distills by interviewing a phalanx of scientists who are studying various aspects of the phenomenon. Yes, he says, social media and smartphones are one reason, but it’s not as simple as deleting your apps or depositing your phone in a time-locked safe. You might enjoy this brief interview with Hari in which he says:
I went away without my smartphone for three months. I spent three months in Provincetown, Mass., completely offline, in a radical act of will. There were many ups and downs, but I was stunned by how much my attention came back. I could read books for eight hours a day. At the end of my time there, I thought, “I’m never going to go back to how I lived before.” The pleasures of focus are so much greater than the rewards of likes and retweets. 
Then I got my phone back, and within a few months, I was 80 percent back to where I had been.



The example set by Wiley Cash.
Wiley is not a resource, he’s a New York Times Bestselling author of dark literary fiction, a two-time Gold Dagger award winner, and an Edgar finalist. He’s also a friend here in North Carolina. (At the 2015 Edgars, Wiley—far right—had the distinction of wearing a tux more handsomely than Stephen King!) A longtime Twitter user, Wiley deleted his account a couple of years ago, even though he previously enjoyed using the platform to comment on books and the politics of our day. He is in the process of de-platforming entirely from social media, seeking ways to engage with readers via a new creative program, This is Working, launched on his website. I’ve always admired his writing, and his principles. For years, he was the guy we knew who dared to give up his iPhone. Sensing that he was becoming distracted by the device’s bells and whistles, he “down-teched” to an older model flip-phone. I don’t think I could do the same, but I understand the logic behind it.


See you in three weeks!


Joe


josephdagnese.com

16 June 2022

Fear and Loathing in the Midwest


I spent the first weekend of June doing an Alternatives to Violence (AVP) Workshop at the pen - my 46th workshop, BTW.  (We all have our hobbies.)  

Anyway, we hosted a bunch of brand new inmates, who were still being processed, i.e., watched and classified. That takes about a month, during which they have plenty of time to experience apprehension and remorse. Maybe.  

So we had a boatload of new inmates, and they all really got into it, and it wasn't just that they were bored s***less in their cells. (Being locked down 23/24 is harder than it sounds, especially if you're not allowed books or other entertainment.) They were impressed that we weren't Bible-thumpers, or some kind of recruitment for treatment centers (although we certainly recommend AA/NA/Al-Anon), etc. All of them wanted to go to the next workshop, and all of them said the program is desperately needed outside. (Tell me something I don't know.) 

Meanwhile, during and in between exercises, war stories were told. Most of them were in for addiction - drugs, alcohol, gambling - or addiction related crimes. 

"Meth is everywhere," one guy told me. "You can't go to a party where someone isn't loaded with meth. You can't hang out with your work buds without someone offering it to you."

"And they're all crazy," another guy said. 

"Yeah, this one guy, he was tweaking for 24 straight, and he finally crashed, right. Right on the living room floor. And then when he woke up, he woke up just freaked, totally paranoid, and started shooting everyone in the house."  

"Yeah, these days they'll kill you. They'll shoot you and don't know why they're doing it. They'll shoot you first and then figure it out."

"Somebody's gotta do something about meth, man." 

"Yeah, you're a hell of a lot safer here than out there." 

(Tell me something I don't know.)  

Of course, some kind of drugs have been everywhere for quite a while.  At least in California, where I grew up. In the mid-1960s, the junior high school girl's bathroom reeked of marijuana, but that's another story.  There were reds (downers), whites (speed), acid (blotter, orange barrel, windowpane, Mr. Happy, and other pharmaceutical concoctions), other hallucinogens (mushrooms, mescaline, peyote, etc.), hash (fresh off the boat or from the pressure cooker), heroin, and cocaine (very expensive).

There was also crystal meth which was, I was told, very cheap. But meth-heads then shot it up, which put it in the "Oh, hell no, I'm not doing that!" category for me. (We all have our standards.) Plus crystal meth users were as crazy then as they are today. True, they were less violent back then, but there were also a lot fewer guns around, especially since I avoided biker gangs if at all possible.  Turns out the biker gangs were the ones who controlled most of the production and distribution of crystal meth, which I did not know at the time, and only found out in writing this blog. (HERE)  

Anyway, crystal meth users were nuts. I had a neighbor at the infamous Blackburn Hotel who used crystal meth. He had a theory that, if he could get his body speeded up fast enough on meth, he would be able to run through walls. He tried that theory out, over and over and over again, with all the bumps, bruises, and smashed bits you'd expect. 

Another feature of modern drugs is, of course, fentanyl. Now there's a conservative talking point (making the rounds for quite a while) that drug addicts die because they're "doing fentanyl", as if they're actually buying fentanyl by name, and so they deserve to die of an overdose. (Sigh; the cruelty really is the point.) But fentanyl (which is apparently ridiculously cheap) is what today's drug dealers cut their expensive drugs with. So heroin - always notorious for being dicey in strength - today is cut with fentanyl. And a lot of junkies die. 

Back in my day, heroin was generally cut with milk powder, which was very cheap, but at least non-lethal. What was lethal was when some really pure heroin went around, and junkies who were used to the cut stuff OD'd left and right. Now it's fentanyl that's killing them, but it's heroin they bought. The same with the fake oxy pills that are out there - cheap fentanyl with some cheap other thing put together in a makeshift lab to look pretty much like oxycontin or oxycodone pills. Only these will kill you, and of course nobody tells you. It's a dangerous world out there. 

Of course, not all the drugs in my day were stepped on with benign substances, either. Orange barrel  acid was cut with strychnine, supposedly because it made for more intense colors in the hallucinations. I don't know anyone who died of it, although I did hear of a few people who had intestinal cramps.  

One thing that strikes me in the difference between then and now is that back then, most drugs were still either a plant (marijuana, peyote, mushrooms), or derived from a plant: hash, opium, mescaline, morphine, heroin, and cocaine. These were all processed in some way, but at least there was some natural substance behind it, and (lacking adulterants) wasn't nearly as toxic as the drugs of today.  

Today, however, most of the drugs are all synthetic - meth, oxycodone, ecstasy (MDMA), synthetic cannabinoids (known on the streets as K-2, spice, synthetic marijuana, bath salts, etc.), and fentanyl, all made in a lab, highly addictive, highly toxic, with a tendency to psychosis.  And it shows.  I see a lot of meth-heads (my generic term for people who've been on synthetic drugs for too damn long), and it doesn't take 30 days for them to detox - it takes 2 years. If then. They just aren't right. Sometimes they never get right again. Not to mention lesser issues like loss of teeth, skin sores, etc. (Warning:  Graphic PHOTOS HERE)

NOTE:  And even these drugs are cut, too - in some cases with brodifacoum, a rat poison that causes bleeding, or fentanyl. 

NOTE: I understand Fox News pundits are worried sick about "pot psychosis-violent behavior link". But pot doesn't do that. "Synthetic marijuana" does, but it's not marijuana. Apparently this is hard to figure out, especially if you're paid just to bulls*** about it.  (Wikipedia, The Wrap)

NOTE: So just get it over with and legalize marijuana nationally, so law enforcement can move on to stopping meth and synthetic cannabinoids, etc. because the boys are right, meth is everywhere, and meth and K-2 can transform people into psychotic monsters.  

God help us all. 

And now, a lighter note:

I don't know if you remember or were there, but if you stood in line at a drugstore in the 1960s and 1970s, you found all sorts of over-the-counter products that were chock full of amphetamines. That's what most prescription diet aids were were made of. Also all the No-Doze type study aids for sale, which now (I am assured) have only caffeine in it. But a lot of prescriptions are still made with amphetamines - like Adderall. 

BTW, am I the only one who remembers Ayds diet candy? There used to be a shelf of them by every drug store register. Yes, sales collapsed as the AIDS epidemic spread in the 1980s, and it folded. (HERE)  Note my favorite of all the ads:  how to control your weight during pregnancy, using Ayds...  




And, of course, back in the late 1800s, early 1900s Coca-Cola's main ingredients were cocaine and caffeine. Since 1929, Coca-Cola has used a cocaine-free coca leaf extract. But my mother, who was born somewhere around 1917 (exact date a little hazy), well remembered her father going up to the drug store on Saturday night for a pail of Coca-Cola, which was Coca-Cola syrup mixed on the premises with soda water. "And that was the best Coca-Cola I ever had. It's never been the same since they put it in bottles." 

Finally, a last word from South Dakota:

From February, 2022:  We had two successive Sioux Falls police officers arrested for possession, manufacturing and distribution of graphic, hard core child porn.  (Argus

From June 13, 2022: 2 Sioux Falls men were charged & arrested as part of a white supremacist group planning a riot at an Idaho Pride Parade. One of them, James Michael Johnson, moved from Denver to Cheyenne, WY, where he tried to make the world a safer place for himself, if not democracy by "march[ing] around downtown armed with a gun or a baseball bat, claiming to be keeping us safe." And then moved to Sioux Falls, because Cheyenne didn't appreciate him enough. (Dakota Free Press)

Seems like something rotten is going on in Sioux Falls that we we really need to pay attention to.

Ah, South Dakota, where we talk like Mayberry, and act like Goodfellas...



15 June 2022

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sophocles, and I



 I have a rather unusual book beside me as I write this, courtesy of Flame Tree Publishing.  They are a British firm that publishes beautiful volumes, including their Gothic and Fantasy line.  The latest example of that series is Chilling Crime Short Stories which features nine original stories plus tales by Poe, de Maupassant, Dickens, Sophocles (an excerpt from Oedipus Rex), Sir Thomas More (about the princes in the tower), F. Scott Fitzgerald, and... me.

Rather daunting company, that.

Before I move on some of you may be wondering what Fitzgerald wrote that qualified for this volume.  Well, the new book includes the entirety of The Great Gatsby.  This might shock "mainstream" readers who think of it as one of the great American novels, but the fact is you can't reduce the plot of that book to a single sentence without outlining a classic noir novel.  

But forget about Fitzgerald; let's talk about me.  They reprinted my story "The Present" which appeared originally in The Strand Magazine.  I had read that Flame Tree was looking for stories that would fit the theme of Chilling Crime so I submitted the story and they bought it.  

This was not the first time I have been reprinted.  I also successfully submitted two stories to a now-dead story-publishing site called Great Jones Street. I point this out because submitting  is not the way things always work in the world of reprints.

For example, last year, Barb Goffman reached out to me, wanting to republish my story "Shanks Gets Mugged" in Black Cat Weekly.  I was happy to agree.  As I have said before, being paid for a reprint feels like getting away with something.

The first time a publisher approached me about reprinting my material it was an Italian firm.  I had just won an award and they thought they might be interested in publishing my winning book in Italy.  (I assume my Sicilian surname was a factor.)  I told them that my winning work was a short story but I did have a novel available.  I sent them Such A Killing Crime, about murder in Greenwich Village during the Great Folk Music Scare of the early 1960s,  and they wound up publishing it under a wonderful title that translates Folk Crimes. 

A few years later I received an email from an author who had been contacted by the same publisher.  Suspicious, she did her research and saw my name among their works.  She asked: Is this a scam?  I replied that if it was it was one of those rare scams where they pay you.

More recently my book Shanks on Crime was translated into Japanese with a title that Google tells me translates roughly as Sunday Afternoon Tea With Mystery Writer.  O-kay.  That one sold so well that the publisher decided to produce an otherwise uncollected set of my stories with the English title The Red Envelope and Other Stories and the Japanese title (according to Google) Solve Mysteries on the Holidays at the Coffeehouse.

Since then several writers have asked me how to get their books published in Japan. I told them the process is simple: Open your email and find a note from Tokyo Sogen asking if you would like to sell them the Japanese rights.

Simple, yes.  I never said it was easy.


But the most delightful experience I have ever had with a reprint had to be the two books below, both of which contain "The Street of the Dead House," originally published in nEvermore!


The only downside is that in order to have a story reprinted you first have to write it, so I better get to work.  Can't let Dickens and Poe get ahead of me.