Only One Writer in the Room

I've talked about whether or not to listen to music while writing. No two writers are the same. I often need music, except in those quiet hours before the day begins. Then I need silence. But later in the day?

Yeah, I need my tunes. But that comes with a caveat. Deep Purple's "Highway Star" or jazz instrumentals do not disrupt the story flow. But I can't have a storyteller singing or rapping. As such, no post-Animals Roger Waters and no Carrie Underwood. The former I find kind of annoying anyway. I was thrilled when Floyd became a trio led by David Gilmour because I want to hear Floyd, not Roger's daddy issues morphed into geo-politics. Carrie?

"Two Cadillacs" already has its own story spinning up in my head. And then we have the most noir country song since "Goodbye, Earl": "Blown Away." First time I ever heard a story about a girl using a tornado to kill her abusive father. Guess there was enough rain in Oklahoma to make that happen.

I used to blast Metallica when I was younger. They put out this thundering wall of sound that drowned out the world. Now I have a persistent ringing in my left ear. It's not bad, and sometimes, ambient noise tamps it down. But I'm not in my thirties anymore. I may listen to Van Halen or Metallica in the car, but when I write, I find myself drifting more toward jazz. While it could be, its vocal songs are not stories as often as other genres. Plus it has more instrumentals than rock or country or, especially, pop. Acts in the other three genres, along with hip hop, are dependent on someone fronting the band. You need your Robert Plants and Taylor Swifts and Blake Sheltons. And hip hop, which is more rhythm than melody to begin with, is a lousy genre for instrumentals. Ludacris, for instance, has some of the best backing tracks in the genre, which really make his songs pop. Take out the vocals, however, and it sounds like half a bar of some interesting synth on a loop.

But jazz? Strip the vocals off "My Favorite Things," and you have a playground for Miles or Coltrane (and later, his wife, Alice) or the Marsalis brothers. In jazz, voice is more an instrument than something to be supported by the backing band.

And pop, which is all about spectacle, needs a charismatic person to draw in the audience. Hence, most pop acts are solo, often an outlet for songwriters these days. I've heard my share of country instrumentals. The genre can use more in this era of Spotify blandness. But rock? There's always room in rock for sending the vocalist on break. Like when Stevie Ray Vaughan took on Jimi Hendrix's classic "Little Wing."

Once Again Proving that Reality is Stranger than Fiction

In case you're wondering why I haven't been on the SleuthSayers much lately, I had cataract surgery on each eye, one on one week, and the other 2 weeks later, and an endless supply of eyedrops in between and going on, as far as I can see, until mid-August.  

The surgery actually wasn't as bad in one way as I feared it would be. But they put me (and everyone else) in a giant chair (well a chair made for people much taller and bigger than me), a surgical chair, and that wheeled around, lowered, sat up, flattened out, etc., like a hospital bed. But the top of my head just reached the  bottom of the headrest, and while they brought me a pillow, it all just didn't fit. (I've found the same thing with today's furniture, again, all made for giants, which is why I go furniture shopping at the Hotel Liquidators store.)

Meanwhile, the surgery itself was fascinating for a young adult of the early 70s.  Besides the endless eyedrops, after scooting down to the headrest like a caterpillar (if only I had transformed into a butterfly by the end of it!) I was taped down to the headrest (and, btw, my arms were also encased like a caterpillar; and yes, there was a part of me that thought instantly of the movie Coma).  

And then things happened.  No pain, no scalpels, but it definitely was psychedelic. A group of what looked like rocks, different colors, that changed, and vanished and came back and did that some more.  And then it was over. And they sat me up and rolled me back. Two hours and they were done. My eye dripped all the way home, and all evening along with my sinuses were dripping. But it was done. Ditto the other eye.  

Meanwhile, things did not slow down just because I was seeing fuzzy: 

For the criminally minded, we've had the usual weekly/twice weekly arrests of child predators and child porn. We've had a lot of hit and runs of late. And we had two beheadings in South Dakota this year:

• Yankton, South Dakota (January 2025): Craig Allen Nichols Jr. was charged with murder and manslaughter after the decapitated body of his girlfriend, Heather Bodden, was discovered in her apartment. Bodden's head was located in a trash bag inside the apartment, along with bloody clothing and weapons. Nichols had a history of prior arrests and had been recently released from a mental health facility.  Well, he's in jail, he's going to prison, one hopes to the mental health unit.  
• Clark, South Dakota (July 2025): Bowen Fladland was charged with the murder of his mother, Marlene Fladland, after her decapitated body was found in their front yard. He allegedly admitted to assaulting her, kneeling on her neck until she was deceased, and then using a tool to remove her head. Fladland had a history of domestic violence against his mother, including a prior aggravated assault conviction.  He's in jail, and he's going to prison, probably to share the prison's mental health unit with Mr. Nichols.

Then again, they both might get the death penalty. If so, they'll still end up in prison in Sioux Falls.  

BTW, is this a new trend in murder?  

Anyway, speaking of prison, our prison task force is finalizing a location in Sioux Falls for a new state prison with a $650 million budget (which is after 3 cities turned us down for the new prison), our legislature passed a ban on sanctuary cities (we have none), and the state ended the fiscal year with a $63 million operating surplus, which will be set aside for a rainy day, and when that comes, we still won't see any of it. I know South Dakota.

We also had 200 new laws come into effect as of July 1, 2025.  

My least favorite:  Senate Bill 100, which allows college students to conceal carry firearms on campus if they have an enhanced permit. 

“There is a lot of concern that we’ll see in coming time that it is unfounded and that we can get along just right, honoring and respecting our Second Amendment rights the way they were intended,” Governor Larry Rhoden said. God only knows what that sentence means. 

All I know is that all of my fellow retired colleagues from SDSU agree that we are SO glad we are no longer teaching, because there's a percentage of students (small, but enough) who are unstable and have a tendency to go off like a firecracker. Plus most of us taught a class or two in the Rotunda, which was just what it sounds, a rotunda containing pie-shaped classrooms with tier after tier of seats for students, leading down to the poor teacher at the bottom, who was a standing duck if one of those unstable students decided to exercise their "Second Amendment rights the way they were intended."

My favorite is HB 1067 which defines the term “must” to mean a mandatory directive and does not confer any discretion in carrying out the action so directed. And then goes on to say that "shall" means the exact same thing.  Soooo glad that's cleared up. 

And another polygamous sect has taken over the compound in rural Custer County, about nine miles southwest of the small town of Pringle, blends into the landscape just like other properties in the southern Black Hills that used to belong to the Warren Jeffs group of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Thankfully, Mr. Jeffs is now serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for sexual assault on a child. 

But there's apparently more where he came from, and this time it's the Order, – aka the Kingston Order, the Kingston Group, the Davis County Cooperative Society (DCCS) or the Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ (LDCJC), and while they're not officially affiliated with the FLDS, they practice most of the same stuff:  polygamy, incest, child abuse, child labor violations and fraud, according to the Associated Press.  (LINK)  

BTW, if you want to see the place, some of the buildings at the property have recently been posted as available for rent on Airbnb.  

Sigh…

Well, at least I can see better.

Martin Cruz Smith

Martin Cruz Smith died the week before last. I met him at Left Coast Crime, in Santa Fe, some years ago. I’ve always been a huge fan, and I’m very sorry he’s left us.

Gorky Park was published in 1981.

It was a big deal. At this remove, we might not remember just what a big deal it was. There’s the famous story that when Smith’s agent Knox Burger sent the book out, he asked for a floor bid of a million bucks, hard-soft – and Random House took the bait. There’s the allied fact that you couldn’t elevator pitch the novel, it wasn’t Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger as twins. Publishers are scared of anything new, but if it’s too familiar, it’s dismissed as derivative. Editors read for rejection, Henry Dunow once told me, the first sentence they have to read a second time is the last sentence they’ll read. Gorky Park didn’t pay any attention to this. The book played by its own rules.

It was sleight of hand, and I didn’t snap to it right away.

He takes a situation that almost feels commonplace, the police procedural, which observes certain conventions, and with the accretion of detail, drifts into the Twilight Zone. Because the details themselves throw you off. Here’s one. Two cops, working a homicide, talking in the one guy’s office. While he’s talking, the guy takes his phone off the hook, puts the receiver on his desk, and dials the operator – this is the Soviet Union, it’s the 1980’s, they’re rotary phones – but he doesn’t release the dial, he sticks the eraser end of a pencil into it, and stops the dial from turning back. The two dicks keep right on talking, neither of them remark on this, since it’s routine. They know their phones are bugged, and this trick creates static on the line. They take for granted they live in a surveillance state, and if they can generate a little aggravation for KGB, so much the better.

The effect these physical details have is to make you realize there’s a psychological effect. These people are muted. They self-censor their speech, but they self-censor their thoughts. Arkady Renko, the senior homicide detective, has had plenty of practice, and he has to unlearn his survival mechanisms, the habit of policing his own doubts, if he’s to have any hope of winning back his self-respect, let alone unravel the case, self-respect being the first victim of moral exhaustion.

There are eleven Renko novels, the last, Hotel Ukraine, published just before Martin Cruz Smith died. As striking and original as Gorky Park is, my money’s on Red Square (1992) and Wolves Eat Dogs (2004) as the best books in the series. And while your math may differ, my own personal favorite happens not to be a Renko book – as good as they are. The one I like the best is Stallion Gate, which is about Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, during the war. (I read it long before I moved to New Mexico.)

I was talking to him, on the sidelines of Left Coast Crime, and when I mentioned that I’d been a Russian linguist in the military, he grinned, and told me he didn’t speak any Russian.

I was like, Wait, what? How did you come up with that vocabulary thing in Red Square?

[SPOILER ALERT]

The title, Red Square, refers to the urban space in Moscow, and the climax of the novel takes place there, with Boris Yeltsin making a cameo on top of a tank. “Red Square” is also the name of an avant-garde painting by Kazimir Malevich, long thought stolen by the Nazis, which turns up on the black market. A language misunderstanding throws everything into disarray. “Where is Red Square?” is the question, in English, on the dead man’s fax machine. Russian has more than one word for “square,” however. “Red Square,” the physical place, is translated as Krasnij Ploshchad’, but “Red Square,” the geometric shape, comes out as Krasnij Kvadrat. And everything turns on this. For lack of a nail, the shoe was lost.

I think, in seriousness, that there are writers who change the way you look at writing. I don’t mean the use of language, so much, as I mean a sense of what can be done. Sometimes, something enormously simple, and you say to yourself, What did they do there, and how did they do it? I’ve mentioned Mary Renault, in that regard, John le Carré, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ursula Le Guin, John Crowley. I want to add Martin Cruz Smith to the batting order. He had a gift for the reveal, for turning the last card face up.

Everything Is Fodder (especially torture by broccoli)

This is a reprint of a column I ran three years ago, with minor updates. I hope it is helpful to you (and amusing too).

Things many people find difficult to do:

• Lose weight
• Follow directions
• Not give unsolicited advice on social media.

You can count me among "many people" when it comes to the first item. But with the other two, I know about their prevalence because I have been a victim of them.

A victim, I say!

Yes, yes, I occasionally give unsolicited advice, but it's always with hesitation. An explanation for why I'm wading in. An apology even. Other people, I've found, don't have such qualms.

An example (one of many): During the height of 2020 pandemic madness, I posted on Facebook that I had a lot of broccoli in my house but the dressing I'd gotten in my last grocery pickup didn't taste good. I mentioned the three other condiments I had at home (salsa, ketchup, and butter) and asked my friends if any of them would work with broccoli, as I had my doubts. (I hadn't thought of melting the butter--once that option was pointed out, it was a doh moment.) At any rate, I also made clear that I don't cook and had no other ingredients in the house, so I requested that my friends not make alternate suggestions of condiments to use or ways to cook the broccoli. I thought I was pretty clear.

Then the following happened. The conversation has been greatly condensed since I received more than 300 responses. Names have been removed to protect the guilty.

Friend A

Roast it in the oven with olive oil and sprinkle some Parmesan cheese on top. It’s not hard. Or steam it and top with butter and a squeeze of lemon juice. 

Me

Don't have olive oil, cheese, or lemon. 

Friend A

Ok—just steam and add butter. Do you have Italian dressing. You could use that as an olive oil substitute.

Me

Nope, I don't.

As you can see, I was calm at this point, merely reminding Friend A that I didn't have some of the items she suggested I use.

Friend B

A nice, sweet balsamic vinegar. I like white balsamic.

Me

I don't have vinegar (and I don't like it either). More for you!

See how pleasant I was? This was early going.

Friend C

I roast broccoli with garlic and chopped up bacon.

Me

I have no garlic and I don't like bacon.

Friend D

Saute in some olive oil with garlic. Squeeze on some lemon before eating if you have some. Delicious. Or roast tossed in olive oil with a little garlic salt or sea salt or Goya adobo seasoning.

Me

I don't have any olive oil or garlic. Or lemon. Or sea salt or adobo seasoning. And sauteing and roasting means cooking. I don't cook. 

Friend E

Add it to something you like ... or, as others have said, butter is good, and I'd add some seasoned salt. I like sprinkling blends from Penzeys Spices on various foods. Their Salad Elegant would be great on broccoli.

Me

I don't have seasoned salt. I wasn't kidding about the only possible toppings I have in the house. Butter, salsa, and ketchup.

Friend F

The extent to which people cannot comprehend the state of your pantry is deeply hilarious to me.

Me

I am less amused.

Friend F

Would definitely think twice about hiring your fb friends for a job that requires ability to follow instructions.

She (Friend F) wasn't kidding. But I steeled myself and kept reading the responses.

Friend G

I would boil some water, add a ton of salt, and blanch the broccoli for like 2-3 minutes. Then drain and chill.

Me

Blanch?

Friend G

Extremely easy. [Lists a link for how to blanch.]  

Note to the reader: Not extremely easy.

Friend H

Really tasty: sliced zucchini or yellow squash, plus a red sweet pepper, sauteed in olive oil or butter with garlic and sweet red onion or green spring onions. Add a little basil for punch, but it isn't required.

Me

[Mouth hanging open.]

At this point, I stopped responding to almost all the comments, most of which were suggestions of other things I should cook using food I didn't have in the house. Me. The person who doesn't cook and who certainly would not be going to the market for the suggested foods. (Add one picky eater who doesn't cook and the height of the pandemic and you got hell no.) 

Occasionally, though, I became so incensed, I did respond.

Friend I

Saute in a pan, with ginger, olive oil and garlic, 1 T corn starch, and 1/4 cup of water.

Me

I DON'T COOK!

Friend G

This post has turned absurd, and I love it.

Me

That makes one of us

Friend J

Two of us! Sorry, Barb.

Me

It's like people are trying to give me a stroke at this point.

Can you feel the stress? Years have passed, and reading all these comments is aggravating me all over again.

You may be wondering why I'm sharing all of this with you, other than for your amusement. It's because of something I often say: Everything is fodder. If you're looking for a story idea, mining current events or events in your own life is often a good place to start. I took this condiment conversation and my associated aggravation and put it to good use when the fine folks at Malice Domestic put out a call for short stories for their anthology titled Malice Domestic 16: Mystery Most Diabolical.

What if, I thought, a low-earning spendthrift without any morals is the only living relative of a rich elderly woman. He decides to friend her on Facebook, aiming to drive her crazy with unsolicited advice so she'll have a heart attack and die and he can inherit all her money. That sounded pretty diabolical to me. 

Five thousand words later, the idea became my short story "Go Big or Go Home," which is the lead story in Mystery Most Diabolical. The book was released in 2022. And yes, it has Facebook conversations just like the one above.

Regular readers of this blog may recall how I also mined my history before I wrote "The Postman Always Flirts Twice," which came out in the fall of 2024 in the anthology Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy. Being pressured to go on a date with your mailman isn't great, until you use it as starting point for a short story three decades later. Which reinforces the point of this column: everything is fodder!

To those of you with Macavity Award ballots, this postman story (which won the Agatha Award in April) is now a Macavity finalist in the Best Short Story category. I invite you to read it before the voting deadline at the end of this month. To read it online, click here. 

  

You don't watch the news?

Some people are astonished to hear I don't watch the news. One friend who expressed shock told me that she'd been waking up to the headlines on the radio every day for the past twenty-five years in the same breath that she said she was feeling depressed. I could understand why. She's a brilliant woman, but she resisted making the connection.

Here are three questions people ask me, in tones ranging from baffled astonishment to horror.



You don't watch the news?

For many people, watching the news is like breathing. And morning coffee. The fact that the news is invariably depressing at best, terrifying at worst, seems to be irrelevant, even though it inevitably sets the tone for their day.


What do you do in the morning?
Lie in bed and think. Idea time. The germ of a new story may come to me. Or maybe it's a title. Or my series characters start wisecracking in my mind. Sometimes my unconscious writes a publishable flash story or the next chapter or scene of a book I'm reading or show I'm watching in my head. Word for word. Recently it wrote a scene in the TV series Murderbot, based on Martha Wells's multi-award-winning novella, All Systems Red, in which the rogue protagonist SecUnit aka Murderbot explains to its humans how a SecUnit properly programmed by Corporation Rim would fool a group of scientists into letting it invade their facility so it could kill them: "It has to wait for an instruction. If the humans say, "Who is there?" or "What do you want?" it is silent. If they say, "Tell us what you want," it says, "HOW?" The instruction is HOW. Humans: "What do you mean, how?" Invader: "HOW." Hear, Obey, Wait. It really should be HOWL. Hear, Obey, Wait, Learn. It Hears the humans' voices asking who is there and what they want. It Obeys whatever their response dictates. It Waits to see how they react. It Learns to imitate the humans' voices and reactions. Then it persuades the humans to let it in, and it kills them." No, Martha Wells didn't write that, nor did the TV scriptwriters, though I think it's kind of brilliant and in character for Murderbot. My unconscious worked it out in the creative time in which I wasn't watching the news.
Once my unconscious is ready for a nap, I get up and
Potchke with my flowers.
Do my stretches.
Eat breakfast.

Drink coffee as I go through some daily tasks on the computer that include health maintenance records and checking my finances as well as my husband's. (I manage the money. He does the housework and follows and analyzes the news.)
Look at my email and clear it all. Respond to whatever needs a response: a letter to a friend, a post on DorothyL or Short Mystery.
Do some writing if I haven't been moved to start earlier.



If you don't watch the news, how can you deal with what's happening?

As I said, my husband is the news guy. As someone who's smart enough to have been learning from history his whole life, he has a global perspective. He's kept a close eye on Ukraine since that conflict started. He's a big fan of the Ukrainians. Since the election, I've told him he has to start following the national news with equal attention. He's to report to me at once if Social Security or Medicare is in danger or if they're about to cart the Jews away. When the pogroms got bad in what's now Dnipro in 1905, my dad's parents packed the kids up and took them to America. There's no obvious place to get away to now. I have a couple of friends who moved to Mexico between 2016 and 2020. Americans, Jewish or not, might be getting very unpopular there right now. The same goes for Canada, where some of my generation of draft age young men sought refuge in the Sixties.

I refuse to get my knickers in a twist on a daily basis. Until the worst is actually happening, agita is optional, and I choose to avoid it. We do both follow the obits. It's an age thing. We've both reached the stage where we don't recognize most of the celebrities featured in AARP The Magazine as turning 50 or even many of the turning 60s. The 70s, 80s, and 90s, though, are our peeps. We want to know how old they were and how they died. As with the friends and family members we're gradually losing, we're both sad about these losses and grateful that for now, we're still healthy, productive, and reasonably happy. We don't have forever any more. We don't want to spend it doom scrolling and chewing over how our youthful efforts to make things better fell short. We don't want to spend the time we have left miserable about the past, angry about the present, and terrified of the future. So no, I don't read the news. I potchke with my flowers instead.

It AIn't So

When I was wrapping up my previous electric vehicle article, I asked my friend Thrush to critique it. He's a robotics engineer, a Tesla investor who owns a Model Y and previously a Model 3. Who better to criticize and catch errors?

He did the unexpected. He asked AIs to evaluate my review and foretelling. You’ll notice a lot of similarities especially between Grok and Gemini, revealing current AIs’ common ancestry. They are more flattering than a writer’s mother and you’ll notice one AI especially encouraged EV promotion. Unsurprising: Grok AI is owned by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, so cross-promotion isn’t a major shock.

That said, AI critiques raised pertinent suggestions. I already had a title picked out, one the AIs subsequently suggested. They offered striking discussions regarding tone and texture. They recommended smoother wording and clarifications in a place or two, competently wordsmithing. They found two typos.

But I soon realized the AIs were doing something I didn’t see coming. They actually dug into the content, understood its meaning, and cast a research net resulting in suggestions how to expand the article. I’ve had great editors and I wouldn’t give up any one of them for machine circuits, but the AIs made surprisingly sensitive and decent editors. AIs aren’t known for imagination (yet) but they could serve as silent critics.

ChatGPT appreciated the irony when it
painted this picture channeling R. Crumb

But As You Suspected All Along…

An MIT study finished with harsh results when research administrators concluded users become mentally dependent upon AIs. Like a Rat Paradise, the more they consumed, the weaker they became. Check this brief summary.

I believe in AI disclosure. If AI writes part or all of an article, acknowledge it.

I wrote the original article (which I won’t repeat) and everything here above the fold, but the criticism is all artificial intelligence, a product of their respective AI hosts.

Thrush gave each AI the same, simple directive. All three received the same prompt: I wrote a blog article. Can you help make it better?

I don’t expect you to read all of the following, which I included for completeness, but what do you think of AIs as copy, line, and content editors?

Petty and Peevish

No, I'm not referring to the names of Beavis and Butt-Head's new girlfriends. I'm referring to the way I feel when I'm exposed to certain written or spoken words or phrases, and (sometimes) situations. Bear in mind that I'm also getting old, and old folks can be especially petty and peevish.

The strange thing is, some of my pet peeves don't seem to upset other people at all, and many things that bother others are just fine with me. Also, my PPs change with the passage of time. I grow to accept some things that I didn't like while I find that other things have suddenly begun to irritate me. Bear in mind that almost all these things are relatively unimportant.

Here are some of  my current pet peeves, most of them part of the literary or broadcast world. I doubt many of you will agree with me on these, but my wife's tired of hearing about them, and I read someplace that confession is good for the soul.

PET PEEVES 1 -- Words/phrases that I find annoying:

Utilize. This word, to me, is clear proof that someone's looking too hard for synonyms, and maybe just trying to sound intelligent. Utilize isn't incorrect; it's just unnecessary. Use "use" instead.

Share in common. Folks either share something or they have it in common. Not both. I heard this exact phrase in a news report earlier this week.

Blonde as an adjective. Talk to me all you want about feminine/masculine. Blonde is a noun. Blond is (usually) an adjective. The blonde has blond hair.

Icon. These days, anyone who's remotely popular or newsworthy is an icon. I heard someplace that actor Jennifer Lawrence is an icon. I happen to like Jennifer Lawrence, and her movies, but is she iconic? I doubt it, and I bet she'd agree with me.

Between you and I. This is probably my biggest peeve, and I hear it all the time, from people who should know better. I even wrote a SleuthSayers post about this, last year. It's between you and me, about you and me, from you and me. Not you and I.

OK. When I see OK, I always wonder if it should be pronounced "ock," as if you're choking. I realize the spelling is optional, but I prefer okay.

Mic. Same thing. This looks like "mick" to me. I'd rather spell it the way it's pronounced: "mike." This is one of those pet peeves on which I am usually outvoted--and that's okay.

Data. I pronounce it "dayta," not "datta." All my colleagues at IBM did the same. And yes, I know, either is acceptable.

Stunning, as in "stunning video." Newscasters love this. One of them said, a few weeks ago, "Coming up: stunning new images in the P. Diddy trial." I saw the images and remained unstunned. The problem here, I think, is overuse. Plus, not everything in the news should be hyped. Same thing goes for other unneeded exaggerations that anchors love, like bombshell and blockbuster (and iconic).

As well. I think this, too, has become overused, especially in weather broadcasts. Almost every sentence often ends with "as well," with the two words drawn out to last awhile, to (I guess) use up more airtime. Why not, at least occasionally, just say also?

Towards. Shouldn't it be toward, in American English? I thought towards was British.

Journey. Almost any endeavor these days is a journey--marriage, college, career, recovery from an illness, a relocation, a job change, a prison sentence, anything. A TV commercial the other day referred to "your weight-loss journey." I mean, for Heaven's sake. It's another word to file under OVERUSED.

Penned. Once again, a case of looking too hard for synonyms--this time for wrote or written. "She penned a new story"? Come on. Just say she wrote it.

No problem. This, usually a reply to "thank you," is used so much it's mindboggling--especially by waiters and waitresses. I suppose there's really no problem with no problem, but whatever happened to you're welcome?

Reach out to. This phrase is okay--I've said and written it myself, and probably will in the future--but I think it too has become overused. Contact seems to work better. Not that it matters, but the first time I ever heard the phrase reach out to was in the late '70s, in the Joe Don Baker movie To Kill a Cop, which later evolved into the TV series Eischied. He said it constantly. (Pretty good movie, by the way.)

Nor'easter. When words are shortened, it's usually to cut out time-consuming syllables. This doesn't. I know it's a historical and catchy word, but why not just leave the "th" in there?

Literally. Overused and often misused. If you hear "He was literally between a rock and a hard place," he ought to be in physical pain. In fact, mashed.

Alright. I've mentioned this one before, at this blog. I think it should be two words: all right. (Remember it this way: alright is not all right.)

Chapter. I'm not sure if this is a mini-journey or if a journey is a mini-chapter. I don't think I'll worry about it--or use it in a sentence.

I'm sorry for your loss. I feel a little guilty including this in my list, but as I said, I'm confessing, and I confess that I have come to dislike this phrase. When said honestly, it can certainly be an expression of sincere condolence, and I believe it usually is, but I think it's been so overused that it's become almost meaningless, sort of like thoughts and prayers. The truth is, it's hard to find correct and appropriate words of comfort in grief situations, but lately I've been trying to choose words other than these.

A sense of closure. I think I've just heard this too many times.

Impact as a verb. this is, without doubt, our newest and most popular international buzzword. Watch any newscast or weathercast and count the number of times impacted is used in this way. I understand that it isn't grammatically incorrect--but in my view, a road closure or a drizzly forecast or an event cancellation doesn't impact me. An asteroid might, or a runaway train, or even an unseen foul ball. I think impact has become one of those words, like stunning, that's used to make something sound more important, threatening, or dangerous than it really is. (Strong verbs are a good thing, in writing. In speaking--at least in this case--not always.)

PET PEEVES 2 -- Everyday-life annoyances:

Talking during a movie. Unless you see something on fire, don't.

Reclining airplane seats, in front of me. Be considerate--I'm six foot four, and there are only so many places I can put my knees.

Telemarketers/robocalls. Is there anyone who doesn't hate these?

Loud conversations on cell phones in public. I honestly believe that if cell phones had cords, users would be strangled regularly.

Attempting a Southern accent, in the movies, etc. This is like playing the guitar: hard to do well and easy to do badly. The worst examples I can think of are probably Daniel Craig in Knives Out, Tommy Kirk (Travis) in Old Yeller, and Nicolas Cage in Con Air, but there are many, many. This is one reason I've always liked Tommy Lee Jones, Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Dickens, Holly Hunter, etc. I can always understand what their characters are saying. They talk the way my family, friends, and neighbors talked, when I was a kid. Music to my ears. 

TV commercials for pharmaceutical products. Every one of these says something like "Tell your physician about NewWonderDrug." It seems to me that if you need to tell your doctor how to treat your illness, you should find a new doctor. And my God, those lists of side effects . . .

Flat-brimmed baseball caps. I'm pretty sure there has never, in the history of the world, been anything else that can so immediately transform a regular-looking guy into a goofy-looking guy. My opinion only.

PET PEEVES 3 -- Things that seem to upset others but don't bother me:

Clipping nails in public. Clip away. Can I borrow those when you're done?

Cracking knuckles. Same thing. My wife hates this. I say, have at it.

Walking too slowly. This probably did bother me, when I was younger.

Talking over people. Hey, sometimes you have to. (See cell phone use in public, above.)

Waitresses I've never met who call me "sweetie," "honey," etc. Doesn't bother me. Then again, I'm from the South. We grew up with this kind of foolishness, all the time.

Babies crying in public. Why should I mind? Babies are gonna cry, and you can't very well leave 'em home alone.

One last thing, since I've probably worn you out by now. I fully realize that many of you, some of whom are editors, have your own hot-buttons--especially those involving language and style--and will disagree with most of mine. So here are my questions: 

What are your pet peeves? Are some of them casual preferences, where you could go either way? Are some set in stone? (As for short stories, I simplify all this by hiding my opinions and trying to make the language in my submissions follow whatever rules the editor prefers, in his or her guidelines. As you know, some guidelines are extremely detailed.) Have you found yourself in situations where you feel strongly enough about some of this that you need to argue with the editor about it? If you yourself are an editor, have you seen many of those situations? Do most submitters comply in the end? Aside from the publishing business, how about your common old everyday peeves?

 

Alright, that's it. May you utilize all this to pen iconic stories and journey unimpacted towards stunning successes.

(He said, peevishly.) 

 

That Fine American Hand

Back in the day, an elementary school teacher chose to chastise us students on the poor quality of our handwriting. Pointing to the alphabet displayed over the blackboard, she said, “Look at those letters! Look how perfect they are! Do you think they were drawn by a machine? They weren’t. A person wrote those.”

Which simultaneously shamed and puzzled youthful Joe. The green-and-white sheets of cardboard were clearly printed by a machine. Beyond that, some part of me must have received her meaning. A human being had shaped those letters, even the weird Q that looked like an overwrought numeral two.

Timothy Matlack, Master Penman
courtesy Wikipedia

Five-plus decades later, I blame her tirade for my lifelong obsession with fountain pens, stationery, calligraphy videos, and a late-life interest in books about how adults can improve their penmanship.

Which leads us inevitably to the summer of 1776.

One of the enduring factoids about the origin of the United States is that we’ve gotten our national birthday wrong. (That is so you, America!)

Citizens here embrace the Fourth of July as a holiday, when in fact July 2^nd was the day of the vote that severed the colonies from the Crown. July 3^rd was spent quibbling over the document Thomas Jefferson had spent 17 days drafting in his boarding house on Seventh and Market streets in Philadelphia. Finally, on July 4^th, Congress accepted, or adopted, the language of the Declaration of Independence.

Congressional printer John Dunlap was authorized to print broadsides for the general public of the (now former) colonies. Only 26 copies of these are known to exist today. In 1989, a man perusing a flea market bought an ugly $4 framed picture and discovered an original Dunlap tucked inside. It sold in 2000 during a live Sotheby’s internet auction for $8.14 million to the late television producer Norman Lear.

Yet those broadsides are not the document Americans carry in their collective memories. The document preserved behind bulletproof glass at the National Archives is known as the engrossed Declaration. That’s the word used in the 18th century for an official handwritten legal document.

The man whom historians consider most likely to have put quill to parchment to create this piece of calligraphic history was named Timothy Matlack.

He was a political radical, a brewer, and the founder of the Society for Free Quakers, an organization for like-minded individuals who had been booted by the Friends for the bellicose stance they took during the Revolutionary War. After two Quakers criticized his sons for taking up arms in the conflict, Matlack had them caned. People openly mocked Matlack for wearing a sword around town, which was admittedly weird in an era of flintlocks.

A clerk in the Pennsylvania State House, Matlack was known for his lovely penmanship. He had engrossed the papers commissioning George Washington as general of the Continental Army.

For the Declaration, Matlack picked out a piece of parchment that was close to a square. He might have used a pin to mark off his margins and a straight edge to keep his lines straight, though the document bears no evidence of those standard techniques. His quill would have been dipped in handmade, iron gall ink.

The document contains only 1,337 words, excluding the signatures. So far as I know, Matlack only made two errors, spelling the word “Representative” wrong in the fifth grievance, and omitting the word “only” in a later sentence. Jefferson may have inserted the corrections careful readers will find in the document.

Members began affixing their signatures to the engrossed parchment on August 2, 1776. (The last signer may have signed as late as 1781. Col. Thomas McKean of Delaware was off fighting the war.)

Americans who grow up seeing reproductions of this document often don’t realize that it is handwritten; Matlack’s lettering looks too consistent and too florid to be “real.” The heading—“The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America”—resembles a classic black letter, or “Gothic,” font, and reappears in four other spots in the text. The rest of the document is written in what we can only assume is Matlack’s standard fancy hand.

Brian Willson

Which brings us to 2003, when a gentleman named Brian Willson tracked down a copy of the Declaration he’d acquired as a kid, on replica parchment, and began studying it intently.

By then, Mr. Willson had become one of the world’s leading typeface designers. Since 1993, he has created an impressive library of fonts, often culled from handwritten documents. He has, for example, created typefaces based on the handwriting of Abigail Adams, John Paul Jones, Stephen F. Austin, Frederick Douglass, Sam Houston, and John Quincy Adams, just to mention a few. He created one, dubbed Professor, that mimicked the handwriting of his father, who was a professor of Germanic languages. And once, after spotting the hasty scrawl of a handwritten diner menu in Maine, where he lives, he produced Oak Street, the “messy-looking” typeface of his dreams. (You can inspect all of these at his main web site: 3IP Type Foundry.)

It’s impossible to overstate how important typefaces are to the modern world of design. One of Mr. Willson’s fonts was used to represent the handwriting of Severus Snape in the potions book shown in the movie

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. His work has appeared on the cover of a book by Nicholas Sparks, the design of The Spiderwick Chronicles book franchise, the cover of an album by the Dave Matthews Band, and a Ken Burns parody shown on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. My personal favorite was the appearance of one of his text fonts in a throwaway-but-critical scene in the comedy series, Arrested Development. Another interviewer dubbed Mr. Willson’s work “crazy famous,” and I’m inclined to agree.

Acting on a hunch that Matlack’s hand would prove popular with designers, Mr. Willson spent a “tedious” six months transforming Matlack’s handwriting into 608 characters. It’s not enough for a type designer to replicate the look of the letters that appear in their primary source. They must also extrapolate from the primary source. How would Matlack, in others words, have written a dollar sign ($), the at symbol (@), or the trademark symbol (™)? His process, Mr. Willson says, went like this:

1. Pore over the old scripts, looking for the most typical and legible letters of the upper- and lowercase alphabets, along with numerals, punctuation marks, etc.
2. Scan each of these glyphs and bring the saved digital scans into a program with vector graphics tools (usually Adobe Photoshop), then begin tracing.
3. Export the traced outlines as PostScript files that can be imported into a font design application (Fontographer or FontLab), where each glyph can be tweaked, perfected, and (in the case of cursive scripts) made to seamlessly connect with every other.

The result is a font which Mr. Willson dubs American Scribe. (Naturally, that is the font I'm using to illustrate this post.)

“Matlack did indeed have lovely, legible penmanship,” says Mr. Willson. “Whereas I don’t recall thinking things like, ‘Oh, he must’ve dipped his pen here,’ it’s always gives me pause to see the occasional ink blot or inserted word (as “only” inserted by Jefferson in the Declaration) or cross-out or underscore in some of these old documents.”

The font set he created actually replicates those ink blots…

I asked him what it’s like to trace the words of a long-dead person and then presume to write like them. “In all the old pen fonts I’ve designed,” he says, “I feel like I’m somehow ‘inside the head’ of the writer whose script I’m replicating. You can seemingly get a feel for the emotions based on pen pressure (or lack thereof) and the like. There’s something extra there, too– as when you recognize the handwriting of a beloved family member in the address on an envelope you might receive in the mail (or used to receive, as handwritten letters aren’t anywhere near as common as they used to be).”

Now, you might well ask who buys such a product, and how do they use them? The most logical clientele are designers who work at historical sites associated with the Revolution, such as Colonial Williamsburg, who need reliable fonts to create a library of replica documents. Mr. Willson hears from users and fans often.

“It’s one of the finest rewards of this work,” he says. “And, yes, some folks likely wish to give the feel of the Revolution in their use of American Scribe, but others simply like the look of the font and their use is entirely unrelated (as when it appears on wine labels, say).”

I take perverse glee knowing that someone took so much time to remember Matlack’s work. The great irony, of course, is that his original parchment is so badly faded at this point in history that we must all rely on the 1823 Stone engraving to see what the Declaration looked like during its first century. The U.S. Constitution, written just 11 years later, is in much better shape. Both repose in darkness in the rotunda in Washington, DC.

Visitors who want a peek must press a button, which illuminates the documents for a little while. All day long, as tourists traipse through, the sacred principles of a nascent nation wink on and off, as if saying, We’re still here. We’re still here. We’re still here…

---

• My full interview with Mr. Willson lives here.
• Investigate American Scribe and his other fonts at OldFonts.com and 3IP Type Foundry.
• His novel, about a typeface designer who acquires a haunted house in Maine…
• A documentary recommended by Mr. Willson:

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

JosephDagnese.com

The Dog Days of Summer

(Locked in the middle of another July heatwave, so this repost from LAST July seems really timely. See you in two weeks!)

Happy Mid-July! Hot enough for ya?

Funny story- I grew up in a literal suburban cul-de-sac. But Instead of a couple of split-level ranch houses at the endpoint where our little slice of suburbia eventually expanded into the inevitable dead-end circle, there was a large corral that served as a home for several llamas.

The cloven-hooved, Inca-pack-animal-kind.

Not the robe-sporting, enlightenment-spewing kind.

This kind.

So of course the residents of our court (it wasn't a "street," or a "place," or a "drive," but a "court.") had to accustom themselves to a seemingly never-ending, slow rolling procession of people out for their daily walks, who liked to come down and look at the llamas. It could make our quiet side street pretty busy, especially in the summertime.

Now, this was the late-‘70s/early ‘80s. The time of the After School Special, Kool-Aid commercials, and Bert Convey hosting Match Game. To say, “It was a different time,” would be a massive understatement.

And not least because we never ever locked our front door.

Ever.

Well, okay. Maybe when we were going out of town.

Because it was the ‘70s?

Nah.

Because three of our neighbors on our cul-de-sac were cops.

Yep. The guy to our right, and the guy to our left, and the guy across the street.

One patrol officer. One detective. One long-time undercover operative.

Lived next to all three of them for a couple of decades. I guess that this experience has helped hone both my tastes as a reader and my writing style when it comes to crime fiction.

I’ve said it before elsewhere and it certainly bears repeating: Ubervillains BORE me. Unrealistic. Usually a crutch for laaaaaaaazzzzzzyyyyyy writing, and just not at all my thing.

Turns out the same holds true for me when it comes to cops. Or for all law enforcement types, for that matter. Superheroes BORE me!

Is this because the neighbor who worked undercover as a fake biker, sitting in biker bars and eavesdropping on biker gang members doing drug buys looked an awful lot like a young Wilford Brimley unless he had a week’s worth of beard going? Or that the beat cop on the other side was a lousy gardener who took inordinate pride in the hedges he mutilated? And that his son was a stiff-necked jock who barely tolerated his dad, his wife detested him and his elder daughter was kinda messed up? Or that the detective across the way never touched either coffee or cigarettes? Or that all three o them were certainly scofflaws when it came to the 4th of July, and the county-wide ban on fireworks such as M-80s?

Maybe. Or maybe, like my Vietnam War hero helicopter pilot father, I just have a hard time suspending disbelief when seeing something in a story, fiction or otherwise, that directly contradicts my own lived experiences? (For my dad it was stuff like seeing Jan-Michael Vincent turn on “whisper mode” in his stealth helicopter in the 80s TV action-adventure show Airwolf. Boy did that crack him up!).

I like to think that my lived experience has helped make me a more discerning reader and a better writer. For me, the character has to be believable. The guys who lived around me were hardly Dirty Harry. But they also weren’t cops from the “Files of Police Squad,” either.

And I guess that’s how I like my characters. Realistic.

Anyway, that’s it or me this go-round. Happy Dog Days to you!