A Hurricane By Any Other Name

Hello from Cape Cod MA, where we were so fortunate to dodge most of the wrath Hurricane Sandy hurled at most of the Northeast this past week. Unfortunately, close family in New Jersey weren't so lucky, and are still struggling along with no power and no gasoline. Governor Chris Christie has ordered gas rationing -- hope it helps. The choice of name for this hurricane was a poor one for our family. Our daughter-in-law's name is Sandy, and believe me, she's been the brunt of a lot of wisecracks because of it. The Sandy name thing got me thinking along more book-related lines. For example, has anyone ever (unintentionally) used the name of a real person in a mystery, and then had that person contact them, irate, and demand the character name be changed? Just wondering. After all, a rose by any other name....

Images In Sand

by Leighton Gage

In northeastern Brazil, in the State of Rio Grande do Norte, the dunes overlooking the sea are permeated with salts and minerals.

And the same is true here, in the sandstone cliffs of the Morro Branco, in the State of Ceará. 

In both places, the presence of such salts tints the sand into an astonishing variety of very distinct colors.

And the availability of that colorful sand has given rise to a uniquely Brazilian art form.

It would be wrong to call it bottle painting, because what you see here hasn’t been painted, or even sketched in advance.

It’s formed by adding layer after layer of sand, and by the shaping of each layer with a wand inserted into the mouth of the bottle.

The artists pass on their techniques from generation to generation.

And, with few exceptions, the designs follow traditional patterns.

You’d think they’d be costly, wouldn’t you?

But no. It’s one of the poorer regions of the country and labor, even skilled artisanal labor, is cheap.

The smaller examples of this work can be had for as little as two American dollars.

When We Aren't Writing Mysteries....

by June Shaw

Lately I've been fairly happy and annoyed, actually about the same things. There's too much to do -- even though I've left my teaching job and am now a full-time writer. Or so I'd like to think.

There are lots of times, though, when I really enjoy just doing my thing, whatever that happens to be at the moment.

I've joined various clubs in town. Many groups keep asking me to speak to their groups and do book signings. Both are great fun. But keep me away from my writing.

I spend lots of time with my loved ones, children and grandchildren and other friends. I thoroughly enjoy doing this. Should I complain? Absolutly not.

This week I'm reading HOW TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR PET GHOST, the picture book my young grnaddaughter wanted me to write with her, at area libraries, along with book signings.

Today I'll be speaking on a panel in Baton Rouge at the Louisiana Book Day Festival, followed by a signing.

I have this post due now so sorry, I often get behind), and was just reminded that I need to create my newest quarterly article for our Chamber of Commerce newspaper. Good grief, it's due Tuesday.

So am I complaining about all these things I'm doing or trying to do. Absolutely not! How fortunate I am. I can write when I want to, which is normally every day. But boy, when those other deadlines come around. Okay, I'll put on a big smile and get to the next fun thing in my life now.

Ghosts From My Past

By Jackie King

I was about four when my older cousins started scaring the crap out of me with ghost stories. These were told in the bright sunshine, but at night I had to creep up creaking stairs to get to my bedroom at Grandma’s house. These monsters lurked along the way to terrify me. I can still remember the dread and the sick empty feeling in my belly.

The Good Old Days
Grandchildren weren’t pampered in those days, at least not by my grandma. She married at 14 so I doubt she ever had a childhood, at least not as we think of it these days. I realize now that she wasn’t a cruel woman, just one who had endured hardships, and in her declining years had received me on her doorstep while my mother trained to be a teacher. She did the best she could.

The Million Mile Stairs
There was no electricity to illuminate the steep stairs, so I was given a lighted candle and told to blow it out after I was in bed.
 

But what waited at the top?
 

Was it the murdered man looking for his golden arm? Would he chop off my head with his ax when he learned I didn’t have it, as he had with two dozen other children?
 

And the candle was sputtering.
 

Terrified of having no light, I’d put one foot in front of the other, knowing that I had no other choice. And finally I’d reach the landing. The soft glow of the candle lighted only a small circle, and each step into the blackness seemed almost certain death.
 

Finally, I reached my bed, set the candle on an orange-crate used for a bedside table and climbed in. It was summertime and hot, but I still pulled the dusty smelling bedspread over me. After a quick puff to blow out the candle the room was black as a witch’s hat. The counterpane (as Grandma called it) was the only protection between me and the evil ghost. I’d lie stiff as a board until I finally fell asleep.
 

The next morning when my cousins came to visit, I’d beg them for another ghost story.

My one and only ghost story set in 1889 Oklahoma Territory

With Age Comes Wisdom

By Mark W. Danielson

The reason we say “with age comes wisdom” is so when we get older, we can look back and realize how fortunate we have been.  Between bad judgment, disease, accidents, and war, it’s amazing this many of us live past twenty.  The problem is we don’t realize our good fortune when we are twenty, nor do we celebrate our elders’ wisdom until much later in life.

I have survived over forty-seven years of piloting airplanes and thirty-five as a published author.  During this time my thought processes have gone through many stages from “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, to “Maybe I should give this another look.”  In laymen’s terms, I’m saying that wisdom can only be achieved through survival and perseverance.  Although writing is more forgiving than flying, in both cases we learn from our mistakes and move forward.  Rejection has always made me stronger and more determined, although I’m not sure publishing houses had that in mind when they sent their canned responses.

In the day of instant gratification, we sometimes forget that time is our friend.  Yes, some authors can crank out stories at alarming rates, but it’s usually evident when they didn’t allow their words to ferment.  If deadlines are not an issue, the best thing we can do is hide our “finished” work and move on to something else.  Months later, when you remove your manuscript from its hiding place, it’s like reading someone else’s work, except here you are empowered to edit.   It’s amazing how different your masterful writing looks after you’ve given it an extended break. 

Now that anything can be published on the web, it’s more critical than ever that our writing be meaningful.  For the sake of the industry, never publish substandard or inaccurate material.  If you think of its permanence as a reflection on yourself, you’ll see it’s worth the wait.  This advice comes from an old man – a survivor who has gained wisdom with age, and hopes to gain much more before his final chapter is written.  Take it with a bucket of salt.  I’m still scratching the surface of what I hope to accomplish, but I have reached the stage where I realize that learning never ceases. 

How to solve a writing problem

Earlier this year, I had one of those serendipitous experiences which seem to solve problems in some mystical way. Don’t worry, there’s nothing mystical about what follows; I just wanted to pass on a wee lesson which I learned and it’s this: the way to solve writing problems is to write.

See? Easy. In fact, it’s a little pearl of wisdom that came out of a displacement activity and it actually produced a book. It’s called  Alternative Dimension and this is how it was born.

I’d just finished writing two non-fiction books to meet deadlines and was looking for a way to get into my next novel. But I’d been writing solidly for days and wanted to indulge my habitual laziness for a while so, as a sort of stopgap, I thought of publishing a collection of short stories. It gave me a good excuse to put the novel on the back burner but, as I was looking though the stories to choose which ones to include, I saw that there were about twenty featuring online role-playing games. Each was a separate, self-contained item with its own characters but they shared similar themes, such as fantasy, the tension between virtual and real worlds, the dangers of assuming anonymity when online. The combined word count was around 30,000, enough for a collection, but the fact that there was a sort of coherence about the themes made me wonder if I could do more with them. So I tried to think of what that could be and how I could do it. Result? Nothing – no muse, no flashes of inspiration, nothing – but I knew I could link them somehow. So in the end I just forced myself to start writing. I knew one of the characters pretty well so I just started writing some dialogue between him and his friend.

It was OK, but only OK. Their conversation was natural enough, their characters distinct, there were a couple of gags that worked, but I still didn’t know where it was going. Then, suddenly, I had to look something up, just to get some statistics to back up a comment made by my main man. I did that and there, all of a sudden, was the solution. The character had taken me in the right direction and I could see exactly how the stories not only fitted together but actually offered a clear progression. He was no longer just a character in one of the stories, he was the clue to how they could all be absorbed into a single structure with one clear central narrative. I used some software called StoryLines to group them into categories and put a generalising label on each group. I then shuffled them around into a logical sequence that made narrative sense and, at 44,000 words, constituted a novella.

All but two of them had been written to make readers laugh but, while that’s still the overall intention of the book, early reviewers have spoken of the mixture of laughter and darkness. If I’d published them as a collection, I don’t think that darkness would have been as evident but linking them this way has worked a sort of alchemy that has changed their overall nature.

See what I mean about it being somehow mystical? Just by starting to write, without any notion of what the content would be or what my purpose was, I’d given the character the opportunity to teach me which way I should be going. As a result, instead of sitting contemplating the awe-inspiring notion that I had to ‘start another novel’, I had some specific, identifiable and eminently reachable goals. I knew there were gaps between the stories which had to be filled, passages in them that needed rewriting to bring them into a unified structure. So my character had changed the nature of the problem: instead of having the monumental task of writing a whole book, I had a series of much smaller exercises to complete. Once I was started, I couldn’t wait to get back to it every day and, very quickly, the book was finished.

So, if you’re stuck or have some writing problem to solve, just write.

Mini-Law School 2

Last Thursday I attended the second session of the Mini-Law School at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The subject was civil litigation. This was very timely since I had spent a good portion of the last two weeks sitting in on a murder trial in Boulder: Michael Clark accused of killing Marty Grisham in 1994. The professor indicated that civil and criminal litigation differ but have some elements in common. Civil cases do not involve criminal or administrative law but include cases dealing with topics such as contracts, torts and property. Litigation is dispute resolution.

To put things in perspective, in 2008 in the US there were 115 million cases of which 25 million dealt with civil matters. This is a 67% growth since 1984. Any question of whether we’re a litigious society?

95% of civil cases are heard in state courts (including traffic, municipal and small claims courts) and the rest in federal courts. If you are injured, you have three choices: 1. Do nothing, 2. Proceed independently, or 3. Contact an attorney. If litigation is pursued, the next steps are: pleadings, discovery, summary judgment (if allowed), jury selection (if a jury is involved), trial, verdict, post-trial motions, appeal (if any), effect and enforcement. Enforcement is often an issue in civil litigation. You might win but then spend years trying to collect from the other party.

The steps in a trial include: opening arguments, prosecution evidence, defense evidence, closing arguments, jury instructions, deliberation and verdict. These steps are similar to the criminal trial I’ve been following. It went to the jury Thursday at noon and the jury deliberated through Friday afternoon and will resume today (Monday). 

The professor stated that our system gives full leeway to the jury to make a decision. He cited a case where after a verdict was rendered, it was discovered that the jury was drunk, sleeping most of the time during deliberation and dealing drugs to each other. An appeal to throw out the jury decision went to the Supreme Court, but it was not overturned. The jury is a black box where no one outside can interfere, no matter how good or bad the jury is. The only times action are taken are if a jury member is threatened, bribed or a jury member does outside experiments or brings something from outside into the jury deliberations (an example mentioned was a jury member who brought in a Bible and consulted it).

Next session is environmental law.

Mike Befeler

Author of the Paul Jacobson Geezer-lit Mystery Series