The Art of Communication

By Mark W. Danielson

WTF?  KFC?  LOL!  That’s a teen’s description of what they’re having for dinner, sent via Twitter.  To a cyber-friend, it’s all they needed to know in nine characters.  And we wonder why we have generational communication issues.

For those of us who grew up prior to any cell phones (or a lot of other techno-inventions), it’s hard to imagine how the English language has degraded into selected letters and symbols.  Having said that, it’s unlikely we will ever return to long drawn-out verbiage we’ve seen in classic literature.  Simply put, today’s readers don’t make the time or have the patience for it.

As an airline captain, I can tell with great accuracy the age group of my first officers by their communicative skills.  Bear in mind that I am dealing exclusively with college graduates who have spent years perfecting their professional skills as pilots.  Even so, there is a marked difference between those who are a generation or two below me in how they communicate and also react to constructive criticism.

A recent Bones episode centered on brutal honesty.  While watching, I couldn’t help thinking how well agents, editors, and publishing companies fall into the brutally honest category.  “No” is not an abbreviation – it simply means, no.  “No thank you” may be a more polite version, but it doesn’t soften a rejection.  Most authors handle this well because they are thick-skinned, but see what happens when you tell a twenty-year old no.  More likely, you will hear a trail of excuses spilled in brief sentences because they aren’t used to communicating with their voices.

But rather than blame our younger generations, it’s important to understand that we made them this way by creating all of these gadgets, and now that every kid has his or her hands on a techno device, they speak in simple terms because it’s easier to type a few characters than communicate with a live person.  If you are writing about younger people, it is important to understand this because their dialogue will sound completely different from your own.  Rather than type out a sentence using a few characters, it may be better to describe the scene and use minimal dialogue.  When writing, it is always important to understand and appreciate your character’s frame of reference.  After all, that is one thing we cannot change.  

 

Being Misunderstood

Although I’m a crime novelist (it’s the reason I was invited to contribute to this blog, after all), I do write in different genres and a recent publication brought home to me how easy it might be to offend readers without wishing to. It was a fantasy story, a book about the tensions and laughs that could be generated by online role-playing games and the  way they tend to blur the separation of real and virtual worlds. It’s called Alternative Dimension and its primary aim is to make readers laugh.

Here’s the background: Joe has created a highly successful virtual world in which avatars interact according to the whims of the people who created them. He sends his avatar, Ross Magee, on a tour round it, the idea being to look at national stereotypes worldwide before concentrating in greater detail on the Welsh, Scots and English. And the key word is stereotypes because this is satire. It’s not what I believe any of these nations to be like really and some of the ideas I came up with were based on suggestions from European, Australian and American friends. And yet I’m concerned that the supposed impenetrability of ‘British humour’ might make some readers feel they’re being insulted.

This  is a sample of what I wrote.

Joe translocated to Australasia and flew around Alice Springs in a thick haze of barbecue smoke, listening to deep discussions about the relative merits of real and virtual lagers and the finer points of crocodile wrestling. He travelled through Europe sampling stereotypical attitudes to food, morality, political corruption and foreigners. All the avatars in the Latin countries were dark, brooding creatures who burst into gesticulating life when talking of women, football and either pasta or corridas, but up in Scandinavia, they were nearly all blonde and still, staring out over the fjords. Every word they typed on the screen was heavy with strange accents and symbolism.

Joe found this herd mentality interesting and spent some time acclimatising in various places. His frequent trips to the Americas made him wonder whether it had been wise to give residents so much freedom to adapt the in-world environment to suit their own preferences. Each state he visited proclaimed its pride in being part of the USA and yet the differences between them were so extreme that he began to wonder what ‘United’ meant. The south thought the north was populated by effete homosexuals while the north failed to understand the semantic lapses that led their southern counterparts to confuse the words ‘bride’, ‘groom’ and ‘first cousin’. The west claimed to be the true representatives of American history, the east celebrated a long European ancestry. And, except for a few individuals in Kentucky and Tennessee, every single resident had wonderful teeth.

To the north were the Canadians, who were thought by all to be Americans, but nicer.

Joe was more familiar with the European experience and nowhere did he find more compelling evidence of the comfort of stereotypes. Russian avatars cried a lot, drank a lot, and sang mournful songs. In France, those who bothered to build roads in the cities piled cobblestones across them to save time when the next revolution or strike came round. There was general bewilderment among them at the idea that anyone wanted to be anything other than French. The Germans would pause briefly to smile mirthlessly at this before getting on with doing whatever they were doing very efficiently. And the Dutch, anxious to be inclusive and give equal status to their urban and rural myths, would bend over their tulips, a joint dangling from their lips, look across at their bikes leaning against a windmill and, to the sound of wooden clogs on cobbles and the occasional splash as someone fell into a canal, simply go on being liberal.

That’s it. It’s all meant to be a joke and yet I’ve had plenty of emails and comments over the years that have obviously taken such things seriously and believe me to be a bigot peddling xenophobic ideas. I’m not sure we can avoid such responses so, as I keep telling myself, be careful what you write.

Mini-Law School 5

For the final session of the Mini-Law School at the University of Colorado, we learned about criminal law. Some of the important elements included common law (going back to England), statutory law (passing legislation) and precedence (calling upon earlier rulings). Criminal law differs from civil law because the penalties entail taking away someone’s liberty through jail, probation or parole. Also, during trials it is the state versus an accused party. The victim is not directly represented but may be called as a witness. 

We also learned about the changes in juvenile law, going from the 1800s where there was no juvenile court and anyone at least fourteen was treated as an adult, to significant protection for juveniles in the 1960s, to more strict sentences in the 1980s-1990s, to a recent movement to not apply death penalties or mandatory life sentences to juveniles. 

We wrapped up with a discussion of judicial activism (more interpretation where the court, in effect, makes laws) vs. independent judgment (only relying on a strict use of existing laws, in the extreme going back to the constitution alone).

This program was very useful in giving me an overview of the legal system that I can use in my mystery writing. 

The Valley of the Shadow Dec. 11th

Carola Dunn

The Valley of the Shadow, my third Cornish Mystery, comes out on December 11th from Minotaur, in hardcover, e-book (Kindle, Nook, and others), and Mystery Guild--large print and UK editions to come. 

 Reviews:

 Dunn lives up to her reputation for cozies that take on serious stuff, allowing her ragtag bunch of investigators to unearth a story with roots deep in international politics...
 Publishers Weekly
 

http://news.bookweb.org/news/december-2012-indie-next-list-preview

 “The sights and sounds of the coast of Cornwall come alive in The Valley of the Shadow.
 The rescue of a drowning Indian man leads to a race against time to 
rescue his family, trapped in the smugglers’ caves on the rocky shore. 
Feisty retiree Eleanor Trewynn enlists her fellow villagers in tracking 
down those responsible for abandoning the refugees — but will the 
smugglers find her first? Dunn gives us a thoroughly enjoyable, cozy 
suspense novel — one with a social conscience.” —Carol Schneck Varner, 
Schuler Books & Music, Okemos, MI

     ...the author introduces several village characters and draws the reader 
into the small, cozy world of Cornwall. The action moves in a leisurely manner but it 
kept me turning the pages. As the police-procedural aspect of the story kicks in, Eleanor 
and Megan make a good mother-daughter team.
      The denouement is both wild and funny, and the author ties up all the threads in a 
surprising but satisfactory ending.
      I loved this Author’s Note: “Port Mabyn is a fictional village in a fictional world 
lurking somewhere in the 1960s and ‘70s, between my childhood memories of Cornwall and 
the present reality. <snip> For information about the real Cornwall, I refer the 
reader to countless works of nonfiction, or, better still, I suggest a visit.”
Pat Browning

 You can see pictures of the setting here:
http://murderousmusings.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-valley-of-shadow.html

and read an excerpt here:
http://historicalfictionexcerpts.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-valley-of-shadow.html

Taking on a Conspiracy Theory

By Chester Campbell

Back in the early nineties, I subscribed to a financial newsletter by Larry Abraham, who headed an international investment house based in Panama. One of his pet subjects was the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group. He and Gary Allen wrote a book in 1972 titled None Dare Cal it Conspiracy. It was revised in 1985 with the title Call It Conspiracy. The book detailed his studies of the CFR and his belief that its leadership, including heads of major corporations and financial institutions, used their influence to set the agenda for the government and the economy. The Bilderberg Group, including wealthy bankers and corporate leaders from around the world, acted in concert on an international scale.

When I tackled my third book in the Post Cold War political thriller series around 1993, I cloned Abraham's theories into organizations I called the Foreign Affairs Roundtable and the Council of Lyon. The Council was named for the city where it first met, as the Bilderberg Group took its name from the hotel where it met first in the Netherlands.

Abraham said the groups involved an aristocracy of the financial elite. He said the multinational bankers had supported Lenin's Bolshevik revolution and provided loans that funded building of the Soviet empire. I used this idea in the book.

After the demise of the Cold War, dissident factions in the old Soviet Union tried to re-assert their influence and regain the power they had lost. I built the plot of Overture to Disaster around such a group seeking to undermine the work of the new Commonwealth of Independent States, formed from the former Soviet republics.

The story follows parallel plot lines, one that begins in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the other in Washington, DC where an operation is under way to remove a dissident from Iran using an Air Force special operations helicopter. The lines come together in Mexico when a Belarussian investigator meets the pilot of the doomed helicopter.

I hope to have the book available after the first of the year as an ebook for the Kindle. The conspiracy gets deadly before the end of the tale.

Chester Campbell

Visit me at Mystery Mania

The Last Great Gold Rush

by Leighton Gage

It's called Serra Pelada.

As a generator of wealth, it can’t compare with South Africa's Witwatersrand.

Ferreira's Camp, (shown above, in a photo from 1886) became the site of modern Johannesburg, and the source of 40% of all the gold ever mined from the earth.

And it isn’t as famous as the discoveries that brought the “forty-niners” to California…

…or the frenzy, in 1897, that provoked a stampede along the Chilcoot Trail into the Yukon River valley.

But it was a great gold rush. And, to date, it is still the last.


Serra Pelada (the name, in Portuguese, means “bald mountain”) is in the Brazilian State of Pará.

And it was there, in January of 1979, that a child found a 6 gram nugget of gold on the property of a farmer named Genésio da Silva.


Within five weeks, 22,000 people had descended on the region.

Pretty impressive, considering the fact that da Silva’s farm was in a rainforest, some 430 KM south of the mouth of the Amazon River, and that the only way to get there was by plane or on foot.

Earth-moving equipment couldn’t be brought-in, because there was no road. The same applied to construction materials. 

Everything had to be done by hand.

The extraction of the gold; the building of a makeshift town; everything.

The finds multiplied.

One was a nugget of 6.8 kilograms (15 pounds). And, when word about that leaked out, the influx of miners doubled. And then doubled again.


In the end, they numbered more than 110,000.


Fights broke out.

The government stepped in and tried to impose some order.

Each miner was entitled to file a claim for a two by three meter plot (6.6 feet by 9.8 feet).

Syndicates were formed, with several men working each plot.

By May, there were 4,000 such claims.

The government banned women and alcohol at the actual site. Causing the nearest settlement, until then an isolated village, to morph into a center of “stores and whores”, where thousands of underage girls worked for flakes of gold, and 60 to 80 murders occurred each month.

Half a billion dollars worth of gold was extracted within the course of the next five years.

But then it ran out.

Today, the 300 feet-deep pit, once the largest open-air gold mine in the world, is a polluted lake.

And Serra Pelada has become a community of no more than 8,000 people.

Most have no other place to go, or cannot afford to leave.

But there are some who linger-on, still hoping to make their fortune.

In a out-of-the-way place one of its residents now describes as “a hospital for people who suffer from gold fever”.

The Gift

By Mark W. Danielson

I’m often told that writing is a gift, but I’m not so sure about that.  You see, anyone can write if they dedicate enough time to it, but not everyone receives positive feedback.  For me, the gift comes from readers’ compliments.  I find this far more rewarding than any financial gain. 

I consider myself fortunate to write as a sideline.  While I take my writing very seriously, I don’t concern myself with making a living at it.  I write novels for enjoyment, and compose non-fiction articles when there is a need.  I applaud those who earn a living writing novels because the competition is fierce.  If I had to write for a living, I would probably stick with magazine articles because they pay up front.  The problem is characters never come to life in non-fiction.

Recently, I attended my twelfth Men of Mystery event in Irvine, California.  It is always magical spending time with mystery fans and meeting other mystery authors and it is truly a privilege to be invited back.  Many of the attendees have become friends and have recommended my books to their friends.  I am always flattered when I hear this, but the real beauty in attending is hearing positive feedback directly from my fans.

This year one lady came up to me at my signing table and said she bought Danger Within for her son.  She started reading it to make sure it was suitable for him and said she couldn’t put it down.  Her son didn’t get it until she had read it all the way through.  Another lady spent several minutes talking about how she loved the characters in Writer’s Block.  She was happy to hear its sequel would be out next year.  I have never received a bad review or bad feedback, and I take pride in that.  For me, positive compliments are the icing on the cake.

When authors write for the joy of it, they are more inclined to produce good work than those that face publisher deadlines.  Not to say both aren’t possible, but deadlines can certainly take the joy out of writing.  It is evident when a story begins strong and then wraps up in a flash because the author had run out of time.  Whenever you write, never forget why you became an author, and never forget the gift that comes from your readers.  Without them, our words are lost.