HEY GANG! LET'S GO TO THE MORGUE!

Writer’s don’t know everything about everything, but they like to pretend they do. 

As mostly a short story and article writer, I really enjoy the wide scope of topics offered by those forms of writing. My stories have been about private investigators, sweet middle aged gardeners who kill with a purpose, gangsters in the 1930’s, business men who channel ghost energy in Victorian Scotland, robots at the 19XX Chicago World’s Fair, incompetent bank robbers, serial killers, conversations between the body cells of a recently murdered man, real life PIs in Denver, Odessa, Cherokee lands in North Carolina, the Mississippi Delta and West Texas, and an obsessive movie memorabilia dealer who cheats his customers. 

The writing is revealing and exciting, sometime hard work, often an opportunity to learn. Speculative fiction writers will tell you to be careful with your research. The gathering of information is addictive and world-building can consume all your time so that little writing ever gets done.

I enjoy reading private eye stories, especially Raymond Chandler, Samuel Dashiell Hammett, Micky Spillane and Dr. Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyne. Of course, I tried it myself, and my stories were failures. They were stuffed with cliches from bad TV shows and B movies. I decided I needed to do some self-education, so I began to read books and to view Youtube videos. Don’t laugh, some of those are pretty good. Yes, some surrender to the cliche too, but many are right on the money.

I recommend The PI Guy, who I know personally, PI Education and Private Investigator Advice. Bypass all videos where the presenter thinks he’s on Miami Vice or he/she is wearing sunglasses indoors. Watch videos by female PIs too; top investigators are often female. That’s Not just another cliché, Kinsey. 

PIs are licensed to operate by the States, so I looked into what States listed for licensing requirements. Many States have extensive websites for PI licenses. At the time, Colorado even published a booklet on the steps anyone (except convicted felons) could follow to earn a license. Some States have a complex licensing structure with different licensing requirements for your intended business: armed, or not, security guard, a license for the agency if there were more than one PI in the office. Some States had huge requirements, and extensive education and experience requirements. 

Which States are the toughest? Remember the cliché, the paradigm built on decades of dime novels, black and white movies and cheap TV shows. The toughest are California, Nevada, Florida, Illinois and New York.  Where were all those PI stories based? LA, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago and NYC.

So, I studied, learned, took the open-book test and passed. I bought insurance and shazam! I was a PI. I rented an office, bought a computer, got licensed in New Mexico too, and ran my one-person office for almost 8 years. The variety of cases still feeds my stories. The problems people have! You can’t imagine. I belong to the State PI Association, Senior Member, and I still pay attention to the craft, which finally circles back around to the Morgue. 

I joined a tour co-sponsored by my Association and the Sisters in Crime Chapter. Massively informative, Nothing like you see on TV. And when the tour walked into their operations room, there were three of the recently passed. The group was really quiet, as you might imagine. Routine autopsies are amazingly quick. I absorbed data “not in books”. The sound of the rib cutter, for example.  I won’t go into further detail, unless that’s what you want to read about.

In my working life, I’ve been an Air Force Officer, Intelligence Officer, satellite operator, film & stage actor, commercial actor, forest fire fighter, janitor, PI, pilot and amateur race car driver.        Writers need an imagination.  Experience feeds that.    STEVE PEASE

Bartz v. Anthropic Update

 by Sybil Johnson

Last November I wrote a post about the Bartz v. Anthropic class action lawsuit. You can read it here.

Before I continue let me note that I am not a lawyer nor do I know much about the law. So I’m not an expert in this. This is my take on the subject. 

Basically, there are two parts to this lawsuit: (1) use of works without publisher’s or author’s permission to train AI and (2) use of pirated copyrighted works to train AI. A settlement was reached for the pirated portion. The judge deemed use of works that were bought as fair use, even if they didn’t have the publisher’s or author’s permission. I don’t really agree with that, but I’m moving on. We’ll see what happens with the other same or similar lawsuits currently going on. Maybe some other judge will decide differently.

As I noted before, I’ve been keeping tabs on this not only because I’m an author but because three of my books were used in training.

Things are starting to move. I received an email recently with a link to an online portal and passcode where I could verify the distribution of the money between me and my publisher. I viewed, I verified it was 50-50 (the standard), I gave them my SSN. And now I wait. Rumor has it that they’ll be starting to send out checks in November. We will see. The estimates for payouts seem to be $3000 per work minus fess and costs. I saw one article that estimated that would come out to about $2200 per work. We’ll see what actually happens.

My claim fell into the No Disagreements category so I didn’t have to do anything special. Phew.

There are, however, a lot of claims that fall into the Disagreements category where there is some disagreement about claim distribution between authors and publishers. Some publishers are allegedly claiming 100% of the settlement. An article from Writer Beware noted that some of these disagreements may actually be mistakes so an author should check with their publisher if they fall into this category. Authors can contest the distribution. 

Also note that if you’re published with a University press or textbook publisher, things can get more complicated. And, even though some of them would like to be, agents are not part of the settlement.

The Authors Guild and Writer Beware have good articles that go into more detail about what’s currently going on. 

Authors Guild: https://authorsguild.org/news/important-information-regarding-anthropic-copyright-settlement-claim-notices/

Writer Beware: https://writerbeware.blog/2026/09/04/anthropic-copyright-settlement-publishers-are-making-incorrect-claims-on-authors-payouts/

Obsessed With Small Towns

Catherine Dilts

The only time I’ve been pepper-sprayed was a few years ago when I was in the Black Hills at the beginning of the Sturgis motorcycle rally. Thousands of bikers – and a preponderance of biker wannabes – swelled the population of tiny western South Dakota towns temporarily. I was glad our August vacation was ending before Sturgis officially began. The biker culture is not my cup of tea.

More to my liking was crewing for a RAGBRAI bicycle team this July. Thousands of cyclists pedal across Iowa, from the Missouri River to the Mississippi River. The week-long event travels through Iowa farm country in a peculiar caravan of bicycles, buses, and RVs. Entire tent cities pop up for a brief moment in time, housing cyclists and crew, until pulling up stakes the next morning. I was enchanted by several of the overnight and midpoint towns. My daughter and her husband, riding their bicycles across the entire state of Iowa, visited many more tiny towns the support crews did not get to see.

RAGBRAI bicyclists invading Dyersville, Iowa

Surely this is a peculiar phenomenon. Thousands of people descending on small American towns for unusual events?

The third experience sealed it for me. These are not isolated incidents. Especially considering the longevity of the Sturgis motorcycle rally (over 85 years) and the RAGBRAI bicycle tour (53 years).

The Mesa Verde Literary Festival is new. 2026 was only the second year for the event. It followed a sold-out writers’ conference in Mancos, Colorado.

With a population 1,282, I was doubtful the remote town could attract enough literature fans to make the trip worthwhile. Instead, I was delighted to witness yet another small-town takeover.

What is this obsession with small towns? As a cozy mystery writer, I understand fans craving stories set in charming villages, burgs, and hamlets. The world is insular. The clues promise to be attainable. While the protagonist risks rubbing elbows with the criminal – or murderer – she or he also has access to law enforcement and reliable cohorts eager to solve the mystery. Preferably best buds, book club members, or unassuming little old people.

Back to Mancos. This agricultural town has the added appeal of re-birthing itself as an artists’ colony on a miniature scale. You can see it in the sculptures and murals. The Mancos Common Press is reviving letterpress printing using the original equipment still on site. There is a bookstore. Two coffee shops.

Mural outside the Mancos Common Press

The Festival was recommended by my daughter’s friend Fleur Bradley. Because it is in our home state of Colorado, we decided to give it a try. Keep in mind that Colorado is a large state. With mountains. We talked our husbands and one granddaughter into going. The men drove our RVs. The trip took seven hours one-way.

We camped at an RV park that promised it was a short walk to downtown. I tested that claim after we were settled in at the campground. Granted, my crew is all fit. We walk and bicycle frequently. It was, as promised, a short and easy walk to everything.

The Festival opened Friday with an author reception. A meal’s worth of healthy snacks were provided, as well as beverages – soft drinks, beer, and wine. Mark Stevens gave a short welcoming speech.

Mark Stevens welcoming authors to Mancos

Saturday was fun. I especially enjoyed walking from the Mancos Community Center, where writers had books to autograph and sell, to author chats and panels. Many venues were outdoors. The weather was fabulous.

My co-author and daughter Merida Bass and I had our author chat tucked away under the pergola of a cantina. Later in the afternoon, we were outdoors at the library.

Jenny Dandy, Serra Wildheart, Antonio Farias, Merida Bass, Catherine Dilts

We were pleasantly surprised by the crowds. I did not expect much turnout, considering the remote location. The Mesa Verde Literary Festival was worth the drive.

That’s the thing I’ve learned about small towns. When they host an event, they turn out. To volunteer. To play host with accommodations, food, and drink. In this case, to participate. To buy books. Merida was anxious to see whether her newest book, Someday’s Garden, would be well received. People bought it, and her other children’s picture books.

Merida Bass with her newest release, Someday's Garden

If we’re invited back next year, I will attend the Festival again. I will try to justify the drive time by making more of an extended vacation, though. With Mesa Verde National Park only a few miles away, there's no excuse. Mancos is a great base camp for adventures. And an unexpected artists’ colony in the Four Corners region.

While other folks are flocking to huge conferences and participating in big-city literary events, I might stick to my comfort zone. That small-town vibe is where I’m most comfortable.

(I probably need to explain being pepper-sprayed. A gal in tight jeans riding on the back of a motorcycle may have accidentally activated her self-defense spray. A cloud emanated from her general hindquarters region and drifted to the sidewalk where we were walking. A painful experience I don’t care to repeat.)

Minefields in Writing

 Donis here. Glad to be back, Dear Readers. It's been a strange few months around Casa Casey, mainly due to both our elderly house and our elderly selves falling apart and having to be handled without delay. I'm still writing as best I can on a new novel which has been in production for over two years. Considering that some days I can only manage a couple of sentences, I'm not that unhappy. 

The current WIP is not a mystery, really, but a true historical novel, set in the U.S. between 1863 and about 1900. The protagonist, if you can call her that, is the child of Irish immigrants living in New York in complete destitution. While still a child, she determines her goal in life is to be rich. That's it. She figures the way to do this is to go to San Francisco. Her travels and adventures across the country turn her into ... well, that's what we find out.

 I've written about self-censorship before. It's something I have to seriously consider every time I write a historical novel set in the U.S. My self-censorship problems have to do with the mores of the times and the places I’m writing about. In the 19th and 20th centuries there were a lot of common and wide-spread attitudes that we in the 21st Century find unsavory in the extreme - casual racism, even among people of good will who would never knowingly harm another person of any color; assumptions about women and people of other ethnicities; the treatment of children. Can you imagine what would happen today if a parent took a belt to a whiny child in the grocery store?  Language, too. Words that today would give the hearer a stroke were tossed about with abandon and nobody batted an eye. And I don’t mean just racial epithets, either. My grandmother, a farm wife with the straightest laces you can possibly imagine, used all kinds of what we would now call scatological words. In her society, crude words for excrement didn’t have nearly the cachet they now have, probably because people were up to their knees in it every day of their lives.

I am Public Opinion. All Men Fear Me. 

 

There are times, though, when the story you are telling just calls for something shocking, or it won’t ring true. In my two earlier series, set in Oklahoma and California in the 1910s and '20s, I don’t want readers to judge my characters by modern standards and think less of them. Nor do I want to present early 20th Century societal shortcomings in a way that makes light of them or seems approving. 

But in those earlier series, my protagonists were people of good will. In my WIP, the protag is an amoral survivor. How to create a character you'll disapprove of and yet root for? How do I deal with the rampant misogyny and racism of the time and place? How do I show the way downtrodden, despised, and discriminated-against people coped and figured out ways to flourish? Very, very carefully, let me tell you. 

But you know, I love a challenge.

Toward the end of his life, my late great author friend Jon Talton wrote a wonderful book called City of Dark Corners, set in Phoenix during the Depression. He included at the the beginning a "Note On Language", which said: "This novel in set in America of nearly a century ago. I have generally used the vernacular of that era. But readers should be aware that this included commonly employed racial epithets that would be highly offensive today. Even polite references to ethnicity or gender in this era would sound hurtful or disrespectful to twenty-first-century ears and sensibilities."

I think that's what one has to do – a disclaimer. I don't want to whitewash the past. I want readers to see how hurtful and disrespectful it really was, and what some people had to put up with and overcome. And yet there are some words and situations I can't bring myself to put on paper, no matter how authentic they may be.

So here is an interesting question for an author - how much do you censor yourself, and why? Of course, we all keep our target audiences in mind, and try to write material that will not offend them so much that they won’t buy our subsequent books. We don’t want to be killing any kitties or puppies unless we absolutely have to for the integrity of the novel. Nor do we wish to go too far beyond the language/sex/violence parameters set by our publishers or agents or editors lest they decide no longer to publish us. 

Here is what Dan Baldwin, another prolific author friend, recently wrote about self-censorship and political correctness: 

"I feel a need to state an often-overlooked fact of the writing life today: political correctness is censorship. Sadly, for many of us it is now an accepted and even encouraged form of self-censorship. Self-censorship is by definition a denial of self and a writer’s duty to honesty. PC is a term for language designed to be the least offensive to whomever might possibly perhaps could be maybe I don’t know what do you think offended by an obvious and well-established fact of life. Observance, which these days borders on a religious movement, reminds me of Newspeak from George Orwell’s 1984. The purpose of Newspeak is to control language by using simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary to prevent people from thinking critically. A minor character, a lexicologist named Syme, sums it up brilliantly.
 
“By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of The Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like Freedom is Slavery when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
Dan Baldwin

Do you agree, Dear Reader? How far is too far, or not far enough?

What Are We Thinking?

 “Who knows what bugs are crawling around in someone’s head?”  That’s one of my favorite lines from my fourth book, Shadow Hill. 

A few weeks ago, I spoke to a group of Rotarians about writing and, more specifically, a little bit about my books. The first book I talked about was Random Road , where six nude bodies are found hacked to death on an island.  The book also goes on to talk about sex clubs and swingers. 

In the second book, Darkness Lane, my protagonist, Geneva Chase, has a brief, tawdry affair with a lascivious actor.  

The third book, Graveyard Bay, is about escaped convicts, the Russian Mafia, dungeons, a dominatrix, and S&M.

As I spoke to this group, I could see eyes widening and looks of surprise.  You see, before I retired, I worked at a day job as the president of our county’s Chamber of Commerce. A straight-laced, conservative organization by definition. I think the Rotarians were a little shocked. 

This past Thursday night, my wife and I attended a social/business event, and one of our community leaders came up to me and told me she had read all of my books, including my latest, Whisper Room, which is about an escort service run by women.  She smiled at me and said, “You know, I held out your latest book and told my husband that he should read this. He won’t believe that this all came out of your head.”

I get that a lot, from friends, from readers, from neighbors.  Where on earth does this stuff come from?  Often, they’ll ask my wife, “Aren’t you concerned?”

Cindy dryly replies, “I sleep with one eye open.” 

Before my stint with the Chamber of Commerce, I worked for newspapers and magazines for over thirty years. I've seen some strange things, been in some decadent places, and met some scary people. So, I can draw upon that while I’m writing, but more importantly, I depend upon my imagination.  

As writers, the characters that we create might share some characteristics or bear a resemblance to people we know, but they’re figments of our imagination.  That includes the good guys as well as the bad guys.  And let’s be honest, aren’t the villains fun to write? Isn’t it a kick to be evil, even if it’s just on paper, to increase the tension and the suspense of a story? 

In my books, I’ve killed an old boss or two.  It’s cathartic.  It really is. 

The good guys, the bad guys, the peripheral characters…they're all us, the writers. In my opinion, writing fiction is about as close to being schizophrenic as you can be. As a writer, don’t you hear voices in your head?  Is the dialogue playing out while you’re driving to the grocery store? A plot twist appears when you least expect it, like while you’re taking a shower or having breakfast?

Once, a friend of ours, who also happened to be a fan, told me, “You think about death a lot.”

Yeah, crime novelists think about death a lot. I think we all have a lot of dark shadows lurking in our heads, rattling around in our skulls.  Mystery novelists just allow those shadows to slither out of our heads and onto a blank sheet of paper. And man, is that ever fun 

More UFOs

 by Sybil Johnson

Some years ago I wrote a post on Type M about my UFOs. No, not the mysterious lights in the sky, but the unfinished objects that were around the house. It was called the Year of FPIS (Finishing Projects I Started). 

I find myself, once again, working on UFOs. All of these unfinished projects that have accumulated over the years are weighing on me a bit psychologically. I really do like finishing things. I feel a sense of guilt if I’ve even temporarily abandoned a project. So I decided it’s time to get back to some of them.

I have a lot of unfinished craft projects. One of them was an afghan kit I bought probably 30 years ago. After having crocheted a number of Woobles, I decided the time was now to work on the afghan. That I knew enough to proceed. When I pulled it out a few months ago, I realized that I'd attempted to start it once before with little success. At the time I clearly didn't understand the instructions. Now I did. So I jumped right in and finished it. Here it is. 

(After taking this picture, I immediately shoved the afghan off me because it's been hot and muggy here in So. Cal., even at the beach. One of the few times I wish we had air conditioning.)

I have some painting projects and other craft projects to finish off as well. I vow to get back to those soon. I also have stories I started writing and never finished. Not because they were bad stories, but because I had to focus on something else or I was stuck on a plot point or ...(place excuse here.) 

One of those stories was Deadly Consequences, which I wrote about in a previous post. I finished it and it’s now out for consideration to EQMM.

The short story I'm working on now involves my repo twin characters and their grandfather, Gus, a former bit player in Hollywood. They appeared in 2 short stories, Cemetery Plot and Some Like It Raw, both published in Mysterical-E many years ago now. They’re still available to read for free there.

The story was almost finished when I abandoned it. I was stuck on figuring out the ending. Now I'm working on it with fresh eyes and realizing that it’s not that far off from being done. I also have a book idea that involves the twins. Just barely started taking notes on that one. Then there’s the historical I vow to get back to soon.

As I mentioned in one of my posts back in 2017, I think the hardest thing about finishing an abandoned project is making the decision to sit down and do it. I still believe that’s true. There are times, though, that I think that abandoning a project isn’t all bad as long as you get back to it at some point. That maybe, as in the case of my afghan project, the reason it’s been abandoned is it’s not the right time to work on it. That you need to learn something to help you finish it.

I suppose there are projects that should be permanently abandoned. I haven’t found any writing ones of those...yet. Probably because I like to finish things.

This isn’t the Year of FPIS like it was for me back in 2017, but I do plan on making a concerted effort to make progress on projects, particularly writing ones.

What about you? Do you have any unfinished projects you’re itching to get back to?