Aging Can Be a Writer’s Best Tool

by Jackie King

Being a woman of a certain age has its advantages, especially for a writer. Looking back on my life, each decade seems to be a series of stories filed in my head and ready to be played when needed. It’s convenient to think back to age ten or age 16 or age 33 and remember how I thought and felt and acted at that time. And of course, I use this history to form my characters and bring them to life.

The entire country is obsessed with staying young. This energy, in my opinion, could be put to better use. Improving and enjoying your situation whatever age you may be, being foremost.

“Old Age Ain’t No Place for Sissies,” said Bette Davis. Years ago, when I first read this quote, I laughed. Everyone does, I expect. I was much younger then and was very fond of older folks, but seldom considered that I might one day become one. (Here I smile and sigh.)

Recently, and all of a sudden, it occurred to me that I myself had grown old. Not overnight, of course, although it seems as if life passed very quickly. Advanced maturity creeps up on us. All of my life I’ve had friends of all ages and liked it that way, never giving thought to anyone’s age except in character developing.

After the initial shock of admitting the truth of this revelation, I decided that maybe it wasn’t so bad. Young men step up to open doors for me; I can get by with saying most anything, and can dress as eccentric as I wish. (Sometimes it’s convenient to wear your jammies to the grocery store.) Lots of perks for us old ladies. (Cats and old ladies do as they please. I hear.)

When we start falling apart it’s inconvenient to take time out for repairs. Years earlier, things started to deteriorate, and at the time I didn’t even notice. I just used this firsthand information in fleshing out people in my stories.

In my mid-forties my arms grew too short and I was forced to buy glasses. Not even Dorothy Parker’s words, “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” bothered me. Dorothy was just plain wrong. I had lots of friends who wore glasses and received plenty of passes. (This was in the days before everyone wore contract.

Bifocals were a pain and then a few years later my hearing started to go. I knew this because my snarky husband (now Ex) kept making an issue about it.

“Huh?” I’d say when he mumbled something at me. Then he would yell the sentence at the top of his lungs, probably damaging what hearing I had left.

So I had a stapedectomy which was supposed to improve my middle ear. The procedure didn’t work, so I had another, which worked for a while. But finally, when technology improved, I bought a hearing aid.

The wonderful thing is, for a writer, each experience, regardless of how painful or embarrassing or ridiculous it may be, can be used as grist for our writing mill.

In the next few posts, I’m going to talk of some of the degeneration that happens in aging, and how I may use each experience into a story.

I’d love to hear your opinion about the world’s fixation with staying young. Let me know if you’re comfortable with your age wherever you are in life’s journey.

Cheers,

Jackie

A Day of Remembrance

By Mark W. Danielson

Ask any adult about where they were when two airliners crashed into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and they can tell you without a pause.  Like Pearl Harbor, September 11^th, 2001 was a day in infamy that left permanent emotional scars.  Last year on its eleventh anniversary, patriotic music blared from the 9/11 memorial in front of Newark’s cargo flight operations building, the new World Trade Center was lit up in red, white, and blue, and the two iconic blue beams representing the old World Trade Center stretched to Heaven.  This year when I flew out of Newark at virtually the same time there was none of that.  I found that odd, particularly since our nation is teetering on involving itself in yet another Middle Eastern War.

Considering this, I wondered if I was the only one confused by our forgetfulness.  I’m equally confused over video games portraying virtual combat with such authenticity that it numbs the senses and yet the majority of these gamers would never consider joining the military to defend their country.  When President Obama first addressed attacking Syria, the vast majority of those polled absolutely opposed intervention, but the legislators ignored their constituents, instead, swaying with the President to protect his reputation.  I am baffled by their actions.

My generation was the last to be affected by the Selective Service Draft.  For those too young to know, the draft was a lottery that determined whether you were going to enter the military service against your will or not.  A lot of young people who were drafted during the Vietnam War died there.  And even though statistically more volunteers died than draftees, people flocked the streets to protest our foreign occupation.  Twelve years after 9/11, we are still in Afghanistan, turmoil in the Middle East is spreading because cleric extremists are replacing toppled leaders, and few seem concerned as they scan their smart phones in Starbuck’s.  On this anniversary, how many will think about those who are still fighting and dying overseas, or remember the over three thousand civilians that died on that fateful 2001 day?

Each of us have an obligation to keep memories alive, particularly when it comes to important historical events.  We can do this by talking about it in casual conversation, or spreading it through the social media.  We need to come out of our shells and stand united against foreign occupations.  We need to recognize that the United States is a population rather than a geographical border.  We must focus less on ourselves and instead develop a greater social conscience.  We should all strive for peace.

If you haven’t already done so, please take a moment to close your eyes and remember where you were on September 11, 2001.  Remember the horror of watching people leap to their deaths from the World Trade Center, splattering like watermelons on the streets of Manhattan.  Remember how our nation pulled together and stood united against Bin Laden.  Remember the over two thousand soldiers who have died in Afghanistan because their country sent them there.  Honor the fallen and injured, and understand that those without physical scars can be every bit as handicapped in their struggle to achieve normalcy.  If everyone took a moment to remember our past, we might begin to alter our future and bring our soldiers home.

     

Unsafe Acts

One of my claims to fame (he says, as if there were several) is that I earned an acknowledgement in Ian Rankin’s dagger prize winning novel Black and Blue. Members of the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association are asked to list any areas of ‘special expertise’ so that fellow members can contact them if they need information on different topics. I’ve written countless videos and DVDs  about offshore safety as well as actual safety induction programmes, so that was one of my ‘specialisations’. In Black and Blue, Rebus had to make a trip to an offshore platform and Ian wrote to ask what sort of thing that involved for a ‘visitor’. I wrote back and thereby got myself a mention.

So, apart from name-dropping, why am I writing this? Because I recently had to check the text of Unsafe Acts, the fifth novel in my Jack Carston series and, as the cover image and the title suggest, it involves an offshore platform and safety. It also involves homophobia and deplores the fact that, even in the 21^st century, its corrosion is still highly active.

It’s been through several drafts and, as I was reading through it again, I experienced once more the strange feeling I often get that, while I know I’d written something and my name’s on the cover, it’s hard to remember how it happened. When something’s out there as a self-contained thing – whether in tangible form as a paperback or in the same completeness as an ebook – it somehow seems instantaneous. The book has become a self-contained fact. When you’re writing, you’re always poised on the edge of wondering what the characters are going to do, where they’re going to go. The process is one of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. So for me the writer, Unsafe Acts was a succession of instants which eventually stopped. But for me the reader, it’s a complete, set thing with its own internal logic and a journey which has only one path. I suppose for readers coming fresh to it, the uncertainties are still there because they don’t know where the characters will take them until they’ve arrived.

The other question I sometimes ask myself, when I’m reading a novel I’ve written, is the one that most writers hate: ‘Where did this idea come from?’ And again, it’s often difficult to answer. With Unsafe Acts, I know that the seed was sown in a casual remark from a friend, Mike Lloyd-Wiggins, who said one day ‘You ought to write about an offshore platform. There’s plenty of stuff going on out there.’ (This was the same friend who also said, a few years ago ‘You ought to write a story about a figurehead carver’. So thanks, Mike.) But that’s just the seed. When you see the dense vegetation that’s grown from it (I know, it’s a lousy metaphor, but I’m lazy) you really do wonder where all these people were hiding, what made them appear. Where did they get their attitudes?

One other interesting thing about this book (for me anyway) is that my detective is a different Jack Carston from the one I first met when I wrote Material Evidence. Of course, I’m different now from the person I was then but I don’t think that means we’ve followed the same path. He now seems so fed up with the hoops he has to jump through to satisfy his superiors and tick the right administrative boxes (this time, the metaphor’s not only lousy, it’s mixed, too), that I really wonder whether the next book will find him leaving the job altogether. The alchemy of reading is always fascinating but when it’s your own story you’re reading, the mystery has a different edge.

Mystery Novels and Senior Housing Options

Since I write geezer-lit mysteries, I’m very interested in topics that affect seniors. Because of this, I volunteered to join the Boulder County Aging Advisory Council, a group that makes recommendations, reviews and allocates funding for programs that support older citizens. Given the explosive growth taking place in the older population, we need more housing options that include co-housing, shared housing, low cost rentals, independent living (retirement homes), assisted living facilities and nursing homes. The original concept of a three-legged financial stool of savings, pensions and social security to help older people get by has evaporated. Low income individuals have not been able to save, needing to use their funds for subsistence, few companies are offering pensions any more, and social security can’t cover all requirements. Consequently, there is a need for low cost housing alternative for the bow wave of seniors.

In my mystery novels I indirectly discuss some of the housing alternatives. Two of my novels, Retirement Homes Are Murder and The Back Wing, take place in retirement communities (independent living). My protagonist, Paul Jacobson, also lives with his son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter for a time in Living with Your Kids Is Murder. In Senior Moments Are Murder, he lives in an apartment above a garage. In my recent, Care Homes Are Murder, Paul visits friends who live in a care home (assisted living facility). Being released next year, in Nursing Homes Are Murder, Paul is in a nursing home. Not to worry. Paul doesn’t become decrepit and require around the clock nursing care; he helps the police solve a crime by going in undercover.

Mike Befeler

Historic Poisonings

The discovery of poisons occurred when prehistoric tribes foraged for food; an often deadly experience. Primitive poison experts were people to be reckoned with, and they either served as tribal sorcerers or were burned at the stake, depending on whom they practiced.

Our first written accounts of poisonings are from the Roman era over 2,000 years ago, although the Chinese, Egyptians, Sumerians and East Indians had practiced the art of poisoning for centuries. Cleopatra allegedly used her slaves and prisoners as guinea pigs while searching for the perfect suicidal poison. She tried belladonna and found that it killed quickly but was too painful for her own personal demise. She also tried an early form of strychnine but it caused facial distortions at death, so she chose instead the bite of an asp, a small African cobra, which produced a quick and painless death.

People in some cultures were so afraid of being poisoned that they consumed gradual amounts of various poisons on a regular basis to build up their immunity. Dorothy L. Sayers, in her book, Strong Poisons, had her villain doing just that, as did Alexander Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Food tasters were employed by most royals. If they survived after sampling each dish, the king would consent to eat his meal. The job must have paid well, or a steady stream of prisoners were employed against their will.

The use of poison-tipped arrows during the Renaissance period paved the way for modern pharmacology. Drugs such as astropine, digitalis and ouabain evolved from plant concoctions used for killing both people and animals. And as we now know, thousands of people are killed each year with pharmaceutical prescriptions.

The Roman Borgia family of the fifteenthnth century century was a dynasty of poisoners, according to Serita Deborah Stevens in her book, Deadly Doses. If Casare Borgia was offended by something someone said, the unsuspecting person was invited to attend a party and would leave seriously ill or in the back of a mortician’s wagon. Borgia's poison of choice was arsenic, the favorite of assassins of that era.

Bernard Serturner isolated morphine from opium in 1805, but the formal study of poisons began with Claude Bernard, a physiologist, who researched the effects of curare, a South American poison the Indians used to tip their arrows. Chemical analysis could detect most mineral compounds by 1830, although not organic poisons. By 1851, a Belgian chemist discovered the technique of extracting alkaloid poisons while investigating a homicide caused by nicotine, a very deadly poison. Jean Servais Stas was the first to isolate nicotine from postmortem tissue.

The use of poison as a means of murder declined when modern methods of detection were perfected and physicians began saving many of its victims.

~Jean Henry Mead

Chemical Weapons give New Thriller Immediacy

The history of my new thriller involving the theft of Soviet Army nerve gas has an interesting twist. It was written back in the early nineties and accepted by a large New York agency that let it sit on the shelf for a couple of years. Why? I have no clue. After changes in the agency's management, the book was submitted to editors. I only saw one rejection letter, which came from Tor-Forge. The editor liked the book but said it was "dated." The irony is that his comments came about the time of the sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway in May of 1995. If the manuscript had been sold in the first year the agency accepted it, the book would have been published about the time of the sarin attack.

Fast forward eighteen years. After languishing on my office floor for eons, I re-edited and revised the manuscripts of my Post Cold War Political Thriller Trilogy. Night Shadows Press published the first two as ebooks, then paperbacks. The third, Overture to Disaster (click to view), has just been released for the Kindle. It appears in the midst of the widespread news coverage of a sarin gas attack on civilians in Syria. A different twist on history repeating itself.

The "political" slant of the book came from my reading of Gary Allen and Larry Abraham, whose conspiracy theories dwelt on the New World Order. I created the Foreign Affairs Roundtable (FAR) and Council of Lyon to mirror the organizations Allen and Abraham accused of being shadow groups behind efforts to create a New World Order.

Their writing claimed that international bankers helped finance the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union over the years. I quote the FAR president as sharing their view that there was never any credible threat of a Soviet military strike against the West. He insisted "The top communists were not about to bite off the handouts that were feeding them. Gorbachev, good soldier that he was, had fought to the end to preserve the status quo. His big problem lay in his outmoded economy that was sinking of its own dead weight. He had just about worked out a method of holding the union together when that group of dull-witted underlings had staged their amateur coup."

This led the FAR to support a dissident group of hardliners with plans to reorganize the former Soviet republics into a new socialist government the one worlders could more easily deal with. What they didn't realize was the depths to which the plotters would go to keep the U.S. President out of the picture. The three principal characters in Overture to Disaster find themselves the only hope of thwarting the use of nerve agents against a large crowd.

Read more on my website.

War Eagle

Obama seeks Congressional approval for Syria strike.

By Mark W. Danielson

Most of this is a re-post.  At a time when our President seeks to involve the U.S. in yet another war, it seems appropriate that some of us make some noise.  Bear in mind that we cannot right all of the wrongs in this world, that no one else is interested in becoming involved in the Syrian mess, that this part of the world does not respect us, nor will be better off because of us, or that we have the highest deficit in our nation's history because we pay everyone off and start wars where we have no business.  With this in mind, please take a brief moment to reflect on what I previously posted and ask yourself why are we still "over there."

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The movie, Across the Universe, stirred thoughts about our military’s involvement in Vietnam and its current deployment to Iraq.  This movie accurately portrays life during the 60s and early 70s when thousands of young soldiers were dying for a cause that few believed in.  This war split our country apart in much the same manner as the Civil War of a century before.  During high school, I worked in downtown Berkeley, California, where protests frequently turned violent.  Eventually, National Guardsmen were situated on street corners while helicopters flew overhead spraying tear gas on unruly mobs.  Across the Universe vividly brought back those memories, and that is good, for we should never forget this turbulent period.

As a retired fighter pilot fortunate enough not to have dropped bombs in harms way, I compare Vietnam with our war in Iraq.  The draft may have ended after Vietnam, but that didn’t prevent thousands of volunteers from defending our country.  Every day, volunteer soldiers are giving their lives so ours can continue uninterrupted.  While time has made the Iraq War as unpopular as Vietnam, few people ever mention it.  I can only come up with two reasons why Americans are so indifferent.  First, it appears many believe those soldiers who died did so voluntarily.  Second, our populace is too self-absorbed to care about overseas matters.

As an international airline pilot, I see the world as few do.  I find the Internet a valuable tool, but it rarely portrays events accurately.  People would rather base their opinions on what the media portrays than seek the facts.  US newspapers gloss over world affairs while international newspapers devote entire sections to international issues.   

Sadly, our government has learned little about foreign policy since the Vietnam War.  Even worse, too many countries call upon the US for aid and then later blame our government for their woes.  No doubt, the US has made many serious foreign policy blunders since 1973, but if the United Nations had any clout, those errors would have been minimized.

If people wish to make noise about something, then question what the United Nations is doing to resolve the conflicts in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the numerous African countries in dire straights.  The United States cannot and should not be the World’s police force.  If our civilization is to survive, then every country must become involved in the process of spreading peace across the universe.