Write of Way

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

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

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

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

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

Quintilian

Plato

Orwell

Zola (Nana)

Marlowe

Linton

Keats

Ibsen

Hawkes

Galsworthy

Forester

Dickens

Chesterton

Longfellow (Evangeline)

Browning

Voltaire

Chaucer

Tennyson

Lewis (Arrowsmith)

A Western Fantasy

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you in two weeks.

The Great Satanic Scare of the 1980s

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

"That's devil music!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warner Bros.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are a few of the more common ones:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(LINKS ARE HERE & HERE) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks.

The Girl from Ipanema

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Tall and tan, and young, and lovely

The girl from Ipanema goes walking

And when she passes, he smiles

But she doesn’t see

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she died when I was 17.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off With Their Heads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writers are the creators and destroyers of worlds.

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

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

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

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

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

 Just confess and most likely I'll pardon you.

The Last 300 words: A Query Letter

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, maybe just me living my best life. 

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

Can I beg off with a headache? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trains of Thought: Train Trip Fails and Foibles

It's June, and your author is out and about traveling. Not by train this year, though trains are my favorite way to get around. In the vacation spirit, I present a few of my train rides that went gloriously wrong and transcended to life experiences.

The Germans Are Coming. And In Song? (2004)

The Flying Scotsman is the famed express service between Edinburgh and London's King's Cross station. The line dates back well over a century in various livery and under prior names. 

In 2004, the route was a round trip, a four-hour dash with a pause for breath in Newcastle, and we took it. Four quick hours and we would be in rainy Edinburgh. We waited in some sort of King's Cross lounge while Great Northern Rail attended to our luggage and wine needs. 

We were gods.

As we boarded, the Flying Scotsman hissed and rumbled in the mysterious way that great trains do. Also boarding, and comprising ninety percent of the passengers, was a horde of German college students loaded with beer and ready to sing their hearts out at Germany-Scotland football match. A straight-up menchenmassen, and already the kids were in strong voice. 

Four hours. It's an eternity when set to foreign chants. 

Chunneling Your Demons (2009)

I've taken the Chunnel a few times, but the first descent is the doozy. Since 1994, the Chunnel has connected the Continent and England via a tunnel carved into the Strait of Dover seabed. You're not underwater. You're underneath seventy-five meters of rock that is underwater. For 38 kilometers of track. Oh, lots of trains and cars are down there with you, which at least means you won't get crushed alone.

You might think a bit before spending extended time under rock that's underwater. I did. Death capsules in the deep dark, I have pause. We left on Belgian Rail out of St. Pancras, and by the time we neared Dover, I was really admiring the landscapes and thinking we ought to skip Brussels and focus on white cliff watching. Two things drove me on. One, pommes frites. There is no food in the world quite like what Belgium crafts. Two, the train was clear of London and had opened the throttle to 225 kilometers per hour. I was chunneling.

Here is the thing, though. One minute I was staring at fields and towns, and the next we eased into a tunnel. It was just a tunnel, with tunnel pipes and tunnel lights. It stayed all tunnel things for a while, and suddenly there was much France outside. I wouldn't call the Chunnel boring or anticlimactic. More like clarifying.

This Guy Could Be a Character (2011)

Here's a trip with short story tendrils. I'd only just tried fiction and was in a true explorer's space. Train travel is perfect for writers. It doesn't swamp you with wait time. There is no TSA line or stowing a laptop for takeoff. From boarding to hearing your stop is next, it's just you and a patterned upholstered seat and hopefully no international soccer matches nearby. A writer can write.

This particular trip was a sweep across Provence. In Aix-en-Provence, we toured the local museum that inspired my first sale to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. In Arles, the famed Mistral wind buffeted me Van Gogh-style into a magic realism story. Before those were polished and submitted, there was what I wrote on those trains, a comic lark about overcrowded bateaux mouche in Paris. I needed a key descriptive feature for a principal character, something to make him pop. Across the aisle was a guy with a Matterhorn nose, large and peaked and textured. That story became my first piece I held in print. And I owe it to hours on rattletrap regional trains. 

The Heavens Have Spoken (2014)

Another great thing about train travel is the time management. Timed correctly and fates permitting, the window from finding the platform (not to be underestimated) to taking that patterned upholstered seat is barely a blip. Even us nervous travelers allow minutes instead of an hour.

Operative words: fates permitting. 

The surname branch of my people goes back to French Lorraine, in and around Metz. In 2014, we were in the neighborhood, Strasbourg, close enough to pay our historical respects. Now looking at a map, Strasbourg to Metz is doable even in a country the size of Texas. Two hours by timetable, and two hours did get us there. 

We should've checked a weather map instead. 

Metz boasts a soaring cathedral and dragon symbols everywhere, and after a lovely day taking that in--sure, we had the usual occasional showers--we headed back for the station. A nightcap in Strasbourg would crown the family mission accomplished. The showers picked up. And picked up. So did the wind. Finally, the heavens unleashed punishment someone apparently had coming. We had monsoons, we had gale force action, and we had zero timetable for any next train in or out of this Mother Nature beatdown.

You don't think clearly in mid-Biblical plague. I was thinking it was just water. I was thinking that even major wind can't lift trains. Let's get home for a schnapps. Nature wasn't thinking that. The longer we disagreed, the more people bunched around waiting for trains that were somewhere blocked by trees or any of obvious issues severe weather means for trains. An end of days feel hung in the air.

When we did drop into bed, no one was pouring nightcaps. Too early. I learned my lesson about random travel elements until...

Can't Get There from Here (2018)

...French rail workers went on strike. A swathe of Southern France was still on the bucket list, and 2018 was the year to taste that wine and slap those mosquitos and ride those white horses. In particular, the castle town of Carcassonne (you might've played the board game) was a setting for one of those early batch short stories. I'd walked the streets only by Google Earth. It was time to use shoe leather. 

We were in Bordeaux, and we had legitimately purchased and conservatively planned for rail tickets for Carcassonne. Texas distances, acts of God. The French rail people assured us that, given their mess of a strike-altered schedule, there were no trains to Carcassonne. Not happening. Simply impossible.

Americans think the French are rude. Wrong. The French are open and generous if you work on their terms. This means that your problems are yours. We know the dynamic, and sure enough, we had fresh options. The French Rail guy could get us to Arles. Our hotel reservations were for Carcassonne, but now destiny shone on Arles. We changed hotel reservations while the train bundled east into the southern mountains and stark Provençal light. 

A Texas-sized time lapse later, the conductor announced that the next stop was Carcassonne. And it was. We stopped there. The doors opened, a big castle loomed amid the mountainscape, and people got off to check it out. We blinked and clutched our luggage. And stayed put. 

No, the French aren't rude. Their assurances, however, might not be literal. 

Pulling Into the Station

It's back to vacation mode. Trains are great ways to see the world and to write about what you're seeing. You're still grounded and experiencing the world as the train pulls you forward. 

There's a river of life metaphor in there somewhere, but why work that hard? Just relax, check the weather forecast, factor in labor conditions, get centered about any long dark spells underground, and enjoy the ride. Maybe the dining car has good wine, or maybe you can borrow a beer from some German kid.

My father had the goods!

 

Via Depositphotos.com (under license).

I thought I’d follow up my Mother’s Day post with one about my Dad, since it’s coming up on Father’s Day as well. I’ve written about him here before, and about the hilarious connection he had to my first-ever meeting with a book editor.

First the bad news. Dad—aka Big Frank—left us forever last July, not long after his 91st birthday, while still of sound mind and creaky body. Though his own father died young, his mother’s side of the family was unusually long lived. His Mom died at 95, his aunt 100, his uncle at 103.

His was a groovy existence while it lasted. Dad was always a raconteur, a cutup, a card. I knew him to devour only two types of books—ones on psychic phenomena, and ones about woodworking. I can’t say that he ever read a single thing I wrote; it just wasn’t his thing. Upon retirement, he took to prowling garage sales, and would often brag about his finds. When I’d visit the house, he’d lure me out to the garage and show off one tool after another.

“Lookit this,” he said, showing off a plane, or a saw, or a chisel. “How much you think I paid for this?”

“No clue,” I would say.

“Fifty cents!”

I know I was supposed to be impressed, but often I thought, “You paid fifty cents for that?”

I could wax on but most of my memories would not be germane to this blog. Instead, I thought I’d focus on Dad’s connection to the first short story I ever sold to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine (AHMM). “Button Man,” which appeared in the March 2013 issue, was set primarily in New York during the 1950s. The protagonist named—surprise! surprise!—Frank is an Italian American from Brooklyn who has recently left the Army after serving during the era of the Korean War. Though he once dreamed of pursuing a career in music, our narrator ends up working as a pattern maker in New York’s Garment District.

Well, that’s pretty much my father’s resume to a T. He claimed that he never made it to Korea because the general at Fort Benning preferred him to stay put and play his saxophone. “Your papers are in my desk,” he often quoted the general as saying. “Let ‘em stay there.”

Goofing around at the barracks in the 1950s.

My dad played sax, clarinet, and flute equally well. A marching band in the Army, and a string of big bands in New York when he got back home. When one of the bandleaders he played with heard that Frank was thinking of settling down, the pal told him that music was no career for a family man. Dad took a six-week class at some technical school and ended up on glamorous Fashion Avenue. That’s one of the things you did back then if you were Jewish or Italian and didn’t have deep pockets. The making of clothing for the masses was your ticket to gainful, unionized employment.

Growing up, my brothers and I were steeped in the world of the district. We’d ride the bus from New Jersey with him from time to time, and spend a half day with Dad, especially if it was close to the holidays. Come lunchtime, if we were lucky, we’d eat with him and his buddies at a series of Jewish delis or hole-in-the-wall Italian red-sauce dives. 

I can close my eyes and instantly conjure the smell of the sweatshops he worked in. The gurgle and hiss of the steam presses, the irritating tickle of airborne fabric dust, the oppressive goddamn heat. 

We were reared in the lingo. Fashion designers were stylists. Scissors were shears. Fabric and textiles were goods, as in, “This here is a nice piece of goods.” (Often uttered while one was feeling up said goods.) Mannequins were forms. By second grade I knew words like baste-stitch, stayflex, bust dart, shearling, and pleats.

These are the largest of his shears.

To make extra money, Dad often took work home and freelanced from our garage or a series of studios he rented in our small town. I may be the only SleuthSayer who grew up in a household with two sewing machines, a leather machine, and a garage full of headless female shapes in a battery of sizes from petite to zaftig.

My brothers and I, eager to earn some pocket money, learned to wield gigantic shears and bizarre tools like notchers. God help us if we used the fabric shears to cut paper!

 

The notchers are above the shears.
 I have no idea what the spiky rolling tool was called,
but I loved using it to put holes in paper.

From time to time a truck from a mill in Paterson, New Jersey, appeared in our driveway to unload rolls of green-and-white cardstock paper or brown packing paper. These rolls were so massive my father used a hand truck to lift them slightly when he needed to unwind and sever a piece from the roll. A kid could be crushed by such an object.

Why paper? Dad’s specific role in the vast machinery of the district was to convert the stylist’s elegant sketch into a pattern—i.e. template—for the upcoming manufacturing process. Sometimes he worked from a sketch, other times from a sample garment that had to be reverse-engineered. Mostly he worked in women’s fashions. Overcoats, trench coats, spring jackets. He once did jodhpurs for the horsey set, and occasionally ventured further afield.

“Dear,” he told my wife when he first met her, “you know, I pioneered fake fur for the children’s market!”

Like me when presented with a 50-cent chisel, my wife was speechless.

His other claim to fame: a faux-leather Fonzie-style jacket for kids.

Notice that I did not say the official Fonzie jacket, because that would mean that the manufacturer had actually bothered to license the garment from the producers of the hit TV show, Happy Days. But there was a time in the mid-1970s when Fonzie jacket knockoffs were everywhere.

That was the thing about the garment industry, then and now. It was absurdly, colorfully corrupt. Knockoffs were the name of the game. If Saks debuted a line of $233 car coats, you figured out how to knock it off and sell your retails-for-$43 version to Sears, Penney’s, and Montgomery Ward. When the wife of a colleague decided to embark on her own line of fashions, she asked my father for advice. Her business was tanking. She found the industry brutal and depressing. No matter what she did, she could not seem to interest any of the department store buyers in her wares.

“How much are you paying them off?” Dad said.

“Is that what people do?”

“The bosses do, yeah. How else you think you’re gonna get into the big stores?”

As you might imagine, that’s the sort of the direction my AHMM story went. Our protagonist befriends a young Irish American garment worker, the scion of a large button manufacturing concern, who becomes appalled by the graft he encounters every day, and decides to do something about it. Publication of that story is now 10 years in the past, so I don’t feel I need to cloak any spoilers. The naive gent ends up in witness protection.

My father claimed that’s how one of his young Irish friends from the district vanished into thin air, only to phone my father years later to say hello—and goodbye. It saddened Frank to recall the story. In my version of the tale, I made up the part about the guy working for his father’s button company. I have no idea what kind of job an Irish guy would have had in the Garment District back in the day.

To date, it’s the only short story I’ve written that stems from someone in my immediate family. No worries. In time I’ll follow through on my threat to steal something from them all.

A Happy Father’s Day to all.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Who and the What and the…

 My Uncle Rick was the first person I ever met who entertained aspirations of becoming a writer. My dad wrote poetry. He just didn’t write it for publication. It was personal, not necessarily private, but not intended for eyes other than family.

As my father put it, he was just playing around with words. Not so, my uncle Rick.

I remember the first time we talked about it, because of the manner in which I discovered that my uncle had dreams of writing professionally. 

This make and model.

I was nine years old, and had just gotten a Panasonic tape recorder for my birthday. The cassette kind.
Uncle Rick gave me a couple of his used cassettes and showed me how to tape over the perforated tops of the cassettes in order to be able to tape over what he had already recorded.

As we were testing my new cassette player out, I pushed play on one of his tapes rather than record + play. The following words boomed from my Panasonic’s modest speaker in my uncle’s voice:

“This is a story about a drunk in New York City…”

And that was it.

I looked to Rick and before I could ask, he explained, “Writing a story. Was recording my story notes. I started over on a different tape. Guess I forgot I’d started here.”

I think the above anecdote probably sums up my Uncle Rick just about as well as any other I can think of. The King of Great Starts, Best Intentions & Disappearing Acts Before the Finish, my Uncle Rick was a character.

Rick was the baby in the family. The youngest of five, he was nine years younger than his eldest sibling –my father – and 10 years older than his eldest nephew – me.

With us just ten years apart in age, I grew up with Rick a near constant presence in my life. At least for a while. As an adult Ricky was nearly constantly on the move.

And so of course our relationship pretty much followed the course I laid out above: Great beginning (my childhood, during which we formed a strong bond), best intentions (he was pretty great to me. The elder brother I never had), and disappearing acts before the finish.

This isn't to say that Ricky was a bad person. I'm convinced he wasn't.

But he was an addict.

Coke mostly. Then crank. And finally meth. 

My Uncle Rick shuffled off this mortal coil in a hospital ICU in the middle of this state last Sunday. As far as I know, he had no family around him when he went.

I hadn't seen him in years. Neither had my parents and my brother, uncles, aunts, cousins. The reasons are the ones you've no doubt heard before: lies, theft, more lies, more theft.

No matter how they portray it in fiction and in movies/TV, a drug habit is nearly always that cruelest of mistresses. The human toll of untreated addiction continues to crush us as a species on nearly every front: personal, social, economic, artistic, you name it. Addiction strips away a person's dignity, health, good sense, and hollows them out a piece at a time.

I flatter myself that I have few illusions when it comes to humanity and its many failings. And had I seen Rick in the days before he passed away, I would have had mixed feelings about actually seeing him. There at the end of our time spent in each other's lives his moves had become threadbare, his motives pretty naked. The next high. The next thing he wanted that someone else could put him closer to, should he be able to charm them enough.

I can't choose to look past those moments, the ones that are tough, even painful, to remember. Other people may have that in them, but I do not.

But I can choose to also recall the many good things about my uncle and my relationship with him. The time he, a teenager, invested in a little boy, and made him feel important, and heard, and seen. The time he filled in at the last minute for my dad and took me to my first pro football game (I was twelve). How proud he was of my own writing, and the time he took to read it and talk with me about it. The time he tried to teach me to drive a stick shift (Google it, Millennial- And thanks to my father, who actually did teach me to drive a stick).

There are other things, but I'm not sure the details matter all that much. Save the Who and the What and the Why for the police reports, and let's just leave it at this:

My uncle died. My wife never met him. My son never met him. 

And I will continue to miss him.

Like A Pendulum Do

 

British Museum Bookstore

In our last exciting adventure I discussed my family's recent trip to Crete.  As long as we were on that side of the world we added a few days in London. 

Unfortunately King Charles did not clear his schedule with us so we wound up flying out the same morning  he was getting his new hat.  This meant that we were sharing the city with more tourists than we expected.

A couple of highlights of the trip were meeting face-to-face with two people I have been emailing with for years.

We shared a coffee with Jack Calverley at the new British Library (which was the most expensive public British building of the twentieth century.  It is a beautiful edifice and delightfully busy). 

Jack edited Death of a Bad Neighbour last year, which featured one of my stories. Turns out that like us he is a cyclist so we had a lot to talk about. like the fact that he is obviously crazy to bike in a city this busy.  (And they all drive on the wrong side of the road!)  Oddly, he disagreed.

Me and Maxim

We had dinner with Maxim Jakubowski who edited The Book of Extraordinary Femme Fatale Stories last year, which also found space for one of my tales. Maxim has met a lot of writers I can only dream of knowing.  Sigh...

And now, a riddle:

Q. Why are there pyramids in Egypt?

A: They wouldn't fit in the British Museum.

We spent an exhausting morning visiting a tiny fragment of that institution. I'll say this: they don't hide their light under a bushel.  Walk in to the main hallway, turn left, and immediately you see the Rosetta Stone.

The actual freaking Rosetta Stone, discovered by Napoleon's troops and eventually used to translate the Egyptian heiroglyphs. Sends a shiver down my spine. 

We got to see the Elgin Marbles which were, um, removed from the Parthenon in Athens by Lord Elgin around 1800.  When we visited Greece two years ago we saw the beautiful museum built to hold them if they are ever returned.

Our host in Crete told us that negotiations are ongoing which could result in the Marbles returning to Athens in return for which the British Museum would have first dibs on displays of new discoveries of Greek antiquities.  This seems like such a logical, fair, win-win arrangement that I assume it will never happen.

Heathrow Airport, Coronation Day

Last year I heard an Irish comedian named Neil Delamere say something much like what follows.  He was funnier and more eloquent so I apologize to both you and him.

Recently I was in the British Museum and I was thinking about all the countries who want their stuff back.  But I was also thinking how wonderful it is to be able to go to one great building and see masterpieces from all over the world, and compare them to each other.  Then I saw something from Ireland and said: 'Those thieving bastards!  Let's loot the place!'

So, there's that.  Until next time, pip pip, tally ho, and so on.

Your Story Idea Here

I was driving over the weekend and saw a billboard that prompted me to widen my eyes and think, what the ______ (fill in the blank as you deem fit; my word started with F). The billboard was so startling that I immediately thought: there's a story there. Not only what must have happened in real life to prompt that billboard but a fictional story I can create inspired by the billboard and/or using a billboard just like that. It's a great jumping-off point.

What did the billboard say, you're wondering. Sorry. Not telling. I hope to make use of it. But it suggested the idea for this blog. Billboards as story prompts. So I went looking and found some billboards that I hope might inspire you. 

This has crime story written all over it.

Prompt for a Thriller?

I'm not even sure how to use this one.
What do you think?

 

Have you ever written a story inspired by a billboard? I'd love to hear about it in the comments. And what do you think of these three? I hope you can use one or more of them in your writing.