Somewhere Between Love & Pain

A "Boonie" Rooster in Guam.

Hello, Shelley here.

As you Type M readers may know, I often complain about technology, social media, AI, and the interwebs in general. But the thing is, sometimes I LOVE Google. 

It’s not that I think all internet is bad. Because sometimes it’s awesome. Truly awesome. 

How the Internet is Awesome

For instance, I’ve been on a tear lately finishing up my novella.

I’m having so much fun with this story, especially one particular scene setting. Coastal Maine town. A beautiful Queen Anne house overlooking the ocean. Night of the Strawberry Moon (June’s full summer moon, around the time of the solstice). In this scene(s) I get to write about a fancy party, preppy coastal grandma types, and NYC publishing types dressed in sharp black fashions. 

This is how it goes: Tap, tap, tap on the keys. Scene playing behind my eyes as I’m writing. Oops, what’s that? I get an image. I want to verify said image, so I click open another tab on the laptop and open a search and type in my topic. 

Voila! 

(Do I skim the AI stuff at the top? Of course. Eyes can’t help it. But I always go to links listed below to verify because we know that AI bots hallucinate.)

I realized today that all these searches are fun and I should probably create some “socials” content to share with my readers. “See, readers, this is what writers do all day. They sit in their comfy pink-flamingo pajamas and look up things like how did the Kennedy family made its money after Prohibition and what exactly IS an Aubusson carpet, anyway?”

Here are some actual topics I’ve looked up the last two days:

Aubusson carpets, specifically do they make pink and blue ones? Sort of, but light browns and pinks might be more realistic. They are French. Good quality. I want some now. Sigh. 

Ceiling medallions. House of Antique Hardware. Egg & Dart style chosen for my scene. Not the fanciest, but sometimes it’s classier to show some restraint. It’s not Downton Abbey after all. 

Peonies, specifically companion planting. I HAVE peonies at my Maine house, but this is a fancy place on the coast that probably hired professional landscapers to pick the right mix of plants. Someone crushed a peony and left a short trail of petals across the lawn. Mentioned in the garden are sea roses, lavender, and fox gloves even though this is not a poison story. 

Kennedys. Did Joseph Kennedy really make money during Prohibition by bootlegging liquor? Probably not. So I mention it as a joke and then call out the truth that it’s just a myth. No need to get Kennedys mad at you when you are small, indie-pressed author. 

Mary Cassatt artwork. My sleuth’s client has a Cassatt hanging in her office. I wanted to know how much one might cost. I want one now. 

Six-over-six windows. I knew this but wanted to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Easy check. 

Florentine glass windows. Specifically, what can you see through them. Not much. Light and blurry movement I think will be okay. 

1920s office door with window. Very cool. I want one now. 

LBD for plump woman. Side character. Needed inspo for a “tiny” but realistic detail. 

Throw Up Emoji. Considered using this in a “text” in my manuscript but then realized it probably wouldn’t translate into formatting so why go there? I sorta want to go there. I might have to look up how to do it when I format this novella. 

If someone is knocked out with a head wound, what should you do? This is where I think the AI/Large Language Models are helpful. You can ask a question in regular language, not search optimized terms or whatever. But you have to go to the links to make sure the thing isn’t hallucinating. Also, I pretty much knew this, but again, wanted to make sure. 

Kodak Camera 1980s. I had one. I wanted to use it in my novella. I couldn’t remember what it was called. 

This is just a sampling. There’s more. Oh boy, there’s more. So here is my moment of gratitude for Google and the internet. I can’t even imagine how I would have written this without these quick references. Maybe I’d have had a set of encyclopedias? Or maybe my story would have been very different. Less exact. Maybe having all this info at our fingertips is changing the way stories are detailed? It might be interesting to look. I seem to recall that Stephen King used a lot of commercial brand names and such even in his early work. 

But what about Agatha Christie? (I just looked to make sure I was spelling her name right!) I think she probably looked up train time tables and things like that, but for setting details maybe she relied more on her powers of recall. 

Am I just getting a lazy brain? Hope you all have a good weekend. It’s my 33rd wedding anniversary today. We’ll be going out to dinner in Guam. Should be fun. 

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Check out my latest PINK DANDELIONS newsletter with an essay on Romanticizing Your Life, which sounds way more Tik Toky than it is. It’s really some ideas for being in the moment and enjoying even the small, mundane parts of life because they are beautiful, or you can make them beautiful. Anyway, read the essay to get the whole gist. 

Shutting Out the Distractions

 By Thomas Kies

I live on the coast of North Carolina.  I’ve been here for nearly twenty years and in all that time, I might have seen snow twice and then it was just a dusting. Here one moment, melted into oblivion the next.  But this past week, we got seven inches of the white stuff, and the temps have been below freezing so it hasn’t gone anywhere.

I grew up in Upstate New York, so I know snow.  I even miss it from time to time.  When it started coming down this week, it was late evening and I went for a walk along our quiet lane, watching it fall, feeling it on my face and hands.  I literally luxuriated in it.

Bu then, as I recalled from my youth, the next day it turns to ice.  Driving and even walking become treacherous.  The longer it sticks around, the grayer and dirtier it gets.

What did I write while the snow was outside my window? How much of my next novel did I complete?  Nothing.  Nada.  I was distracted. 

That coupled with the political climate and ensuing chaos….well, any attempt at fiction was a bust this week.

How do you overcome distractions?  Here are a few suggestions. 

Have a place of your own that is conducive to creativity.  It’s your space to write.  It might be your office, a corner of your kitchen, or a table at the coffee shop.  For me, I have a man cave over the garage.  My desk is here, the lighting is good, and it’s quiet.  

Do you have a writing routine?  It helps to set aside a certain time of day….or night…that you can take the time to write.  I know some writers who get up early to write before they go off to their day job.  I know some writers who stay up late and hit their laptops until the wee hours of the morning.  For me, mid-afternoon is the sweet spot.

The biggest distraction?  The internet.  Notifications that chime when they come across my phone.  Emails that can’t wait, social media posts, or headlines from the multitude of websites demanding my attention---all of it sucking time. IGNORE IT!!!  Click bait is just that.  It’s created to attract eyeballs and eat your time.  

Writing a novel is daunting.  It’s huge.  Break that sucker down into manageable pieces.  For me, I think about the book in scenes or chapters.  I try not to view it as a big project but a lot of smaller projects. 

Need to take a break?  Get some exercise.  Take a walk, lift some weights, take a cruise on your bike.  Not only is it good for you, but it pumps that blood into your brain where you need it the most. 

There are so many distractions that can take you away from your writing.  Putting your words on paper is hard.  Finishing an article or column or…a book…is really difficult.  You have to have your own strategy to put you into that mindset and push out the rest of the world.  It might be meditation.  It might be a few minutes petting the dog while you have a cup of coffee.  It might be taking a stroll around the block.  Whatever it takes, do it. Writing is like being an athlete.  The more you practice, the better you are at your sport.  The more you write, the better you are at your craft. 

The rest of the world is working hard to get your attention.  You have to work even harder to keep you focus. 

What do YOU do to shut the rest of the world out and focus on your writing?

Writing in Paradise...Usually

 I’ve enjoyed some of the blogs here on Type M that detail locations where our fellow bloggers like to write and some of their writing habits.  As many of you know, I live on the coast of North Carolina.  We have a house on Bogue Banks Island, which is a barrier island south of the Outer Banks.

It sounds exotic—saying I live on an island.  It’s about twenty-one miles long and at its narrowest point, you can see both the ocean on one side of the island and Bogue Sound on the other. It’s a vacation destination with thousands of vacation homes, about ten hotels, and fabulous restaurants, boutique shops, and stores where you can buy anything from swimming suits to fishing tackle. 

In the “off season”, late autumn, winter, and early spring, it’s very quiet here.  There are times you can walk the beach and not see another soul.  That’s when I enjoy this island the most.  

But this is June and while it’s not yet officially summer, we are inundated with tourists.  The restaurants all have long lines, the grocery stores are overcrowded, and the roads are clogged with people trying to find their way around. 

I’m not complaining because this is when businesses here on the coast make their money.  Our county has a year-round population of slightly less than seventy-thousand people.  During the “season”, that grows to over two-hundred and fifty thousand people.  It can put a strain on infrastructure and that includes the internet.

Think of it as a pipeline from one end of the island to the other.  During the “off season” demand isn’t particularly stressful.  But when we have two-hundred thousand people out here, all downloading Netflix or playing World of Warcraft, that internet pipeline clogs up quickly.

Case in point, my publisher has re-released my first book Random Road. Our publicist arranged to have a Zoom interview with me and Barbara Peters from the Poisoned Pen Bookstore.  Full disclosure, Barbara has been one of the editors on all of my Geneva Chase mysteries.  

She told me that the interview would go anywhere from a half-hour to an hour, depending on how well it went.  

It was awful.

The internet kept dropping the Zoom connection.  She’d ask a question or make a commentary to which I’d start to answer and about halfway through, my screen would freeze.  The only way to get back in was to start the process over…every damned time.  Once, when I popped back onto the interview, I held up a glass of wine and said, “I’m turning this into a drinking game.  Every time I drop out, I take a drink.”

Barbara grinned at me, held up her own glass of wine and said, “Way ahead of you, kiddo.”

Unfortunately, the connection did not get any better.  Needless to say, the interview was over at a half hour.  Blessedly.

But all in all, this is a lovely place to work.  My home office has a window overlooking our front lawn. If I feel like a stroll, the ocean is a few minutes from the house.  

And now, I must get back to my WIP.  I have a July first deadline for my fifth adventure with Geneva Chase, and yet again, I’m putting the poor woman through hell. 

Ink In Her Veins

 By Thomas Kies

The headline in my county’s Sunday newspaper is “Nothing to See Here”, referring to the efforts of local politicians to get a bill passed eliminating the requirement to post public notices in the paper.  They would like, instead, to post them on the county website.  

Yet another attack on newspapers. 

The protagonist in my Geneva Chase Mystery series is a crime reporter for a small independent newspaper that’s on the brink of being purchased by a media conglomerate.  Geneva is based on several women I’ve worked with over the years when I too worked in the newspaper and publishing business.  

It’s a business that I loved.  I did everything, including working as a pressman on a Goss web press in Detroit, becoming a staff writer, eventually becoming an editor, then moving into advertising management, and ultimately becoming the publisher and general manager of a magazine publishing house here on the coast of North Carolina. 

 I even delivered newspapers during a blizzard in one of the company’s ancient, rear-wheel drive vans.   Yikes.

The business was exciting, interesting, and fun, but filled with the pressures of working on a deadline.  

Unfortunately, the business has changed.  The combination of the Great Recession, the effects of the Internet, and Covid-19 has been disastrous for newspapers.  Their main source of revenue is advertising and all three of the factors I presented have shrunk that revenue stream.  

Before the Great Recession, the housing market was booming.  Real estate companies were spending a fortune in the classified section of newspapers, along with car dealerships, and companies looking to hire employees.  

Starting in 2007-2008, the housing bubble burst followed by cascading disasters in employment and consumer confidence.  Companies who always knew about the Internet, suddenly found it very attractive.  It was cheap and easy to use.  

The lucrative classified pages in newspapers diminished to a disastrous level. The advertising in the main pages of the paper also either got smaller or went away altogether. 

According to a New York Times article in December of 2019, over the past 15 years, more than one in five papers in the United States has shuttered, and the number of journalists working for newspapers has been cut in half, according to research by the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism. That has led to the rise of hollowed-out “ghost papers” and communities across the country without any local paper. “Ghost papers” are publications what have severely cut the staff in their newsrooms making any kind of investigative reporting non-existent. 

Covid-19 has delivered even more pain to newspapers.  When the world shut down in March of 2020, stores, shops, bars, and restaurants all closed their doors for months. Advertising became even scarcer.  Even with the world starting to open back up, the number of pages in your local newspaper has become less and less.  

An unexpected circumstance from the experience of working from home, more newspaper companies are closing their newsrooms, having offsite printing companies produce their publications, and selling their buildings and assets.

A huge part of the joy of working for a newspaper was being with the people you worked with.  Yes, the pressure of daily deadlines could lead to fraying nerves and in-office tension.  But at the end of the day, these people were your “newspaper family”.  Even though I’ve been out of the business for more than ten years, I still stay in close touch with a lot of them even if it’s through social media on the Internet.

Speaking of the Internet, the way people get their news has changed dramatically.

The transition of news from print, television and radio to digital spaces has caused huge disruptions in the traditional news industry, especially the print news industry. It’s also reflected in the ways individual Americans say they are getting their news. A large majority of Americans get news at least sometimes from digital devices, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2020.

More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults (86%) say they get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet “often” or “sometimes,” including 60% who say they do so often. This is higher than the portion who get news from television, though 68% get news from TV at least sometimes and 40% do so often. Americans turn to radio and print publications for news far less frequently, with half saying they turn to radio at least sometimes (16% do so often) and about a third (32%) saying the same of print (10% get news from print publications often).

The point of this rambling blog is that even in fiction, I’m transitioning Geneva Chase, crime reporter, into going freelance, working gigs for her newspaper on occasion, and working for a company called Lodestar Analytics that does open-source research as well as instigating deep dive investigations.  

Personally, I still like newspapers.  I get the paper out of Raleigh every day (even they’ve stopped printing on Saturdays, however) and my local newspaper (which has cut back from three days a week to two), as well as the Sunday New York Times (which seems to be flourishing).

I also subscribe to a digital Washington Post feed and routinely scan other websites (all free) for news from around the globe. I’m a news junkie and the Internet feeds my addiction. 

Still, I’m happiest when I’m writing scenes where Geneva Chase is working in the newsroom.  She’s got ink in her veins. I’d like to think that I do too.

Clickbait ADHD

I know that November is Novel Writing Month, but I can barely write a novel in a year.

Why?

I have the attention span of a six-year-old. That’s a bad thing if you’re writing an 90,000-word mystery. Worse, if you’re working on a computer and you’re logged onto the internet.

First off, I’m a news junkie. Every morning, I look at the websites of the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, The Hill, Huffington Post, and the Raleigh News & Observer. The current political climate doesn’t do anything to assuage my news addiction. Scary things are happening and an absurd rate of speed.

AMAZING PICS: NASA releases image showing Sun ‘exploding’

If I just read the stories that interested me, I would most likely be fine. But I go for clickbait. Those shiny, sparkly, too good to be true headlines that always promise more that they deliver—suddenly I’m down the rabbit hole. When I should be working on Chapter 23, instead I’m clicking on something that’s caught my eye.

19 Every-day items that are actually a huge waste of money

And how much time on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is too much? I justify it by saying that they’re all marketing tools to help get the word about my books. “Liking” my friends’ photos is just being neighborly. Isn’t it?

After all, they “like” and share the reviews I post of Random Road and Darkness Lane. Facebook and Twitter, well, they're just good marketing tools.

A few years ago, a Chicago psychologist, Michael Pietrus offered an interesting theory: Maybe these distractions aren’t just an internet-age annoyance but something approaching actual pathology.

It's possible the internet is giving us all the symptoms of ADHD. He cautioned, “We are not saying that internet technologies and social media are directly causing ADHD.” But he claimed that the internet “can impair functioning in a variety of ways…that can mimic and in some cases exacerbate underlying attention problems.”

According to the CDC, an estimated 4.4 percent of adults have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It can make it difficult to concentrate on one thing for any period of time. Adults with ADHD, unlike children, aren’t hyperactive in the conventional sense. But they can be compulsive, easily distracted, easily bored. They lose interest halfway through reading an article or completing a task.

When I sit down at my desk on a Saturday morning intending to have two chapters under my belt by the end of the day and I look at my watch and see that it’s already noon and I haven’t written a word—well, that’s when I slap myself in the forehead.

How do I combat my addiction? Believe it or not--YouTube. No, I don’t download kitty videos or trailers of upcoming movies (although I love those) and nor do I download outtakes from the Big Bang Theory (even though I find those laugh-out-loud hilarious).

Nope, I’ll listen to ambient music. There’s a ton of it out there. It’s like the background music in a movie. If I’ve come to a sad chapter, I put on an hour of sad music. If I’m at a place of introspection, I’ll put on an hour or so of a chill mix. Writing a scary scene? There are some ambient style Game of Thrones soundtracks that put me in the right frame of mind.

A 2007 study from Stamford University published in the journal Neuron makes the claim that music engages the areas of the brain linked with paying attention, making predictions and updating memory.

'Cursed’ Egyptian sarcophagus reveals secrets.

That’s the last one, I promise. Time to turn on some ambient music and write that novel. www.thomaskiesauthor.com

Point of No Return

This weekend my darling granddaughter, Abigail Bieker, will be graduating from Northern Arizona State University. I'll be driving down with my daughter, her mother Mary Beth, tomorrow. We are so proud of Abby!

A college degree is an enormous advantage in today's economy. What's more, it can't be erased. It's there. Forever.

During historical interviews I've been struck at how much everything has changed. Women from a preceding generation told of canning little jars of beef to take for their food. Casually running home during a semester was unheard of. Rules were strictly enforced and expulsion was a constant threat.

Curfews reigned. Dorms were either men or women. Women were forbidden to ever, I mean ever, visit a man's living quarters. Even sororities locked their doors promptly at certain times every night. Over time the rules were relaxed and dorms yielded to men's floors and women's floor, then even that has given way to shared mixed gender rooms.

Calls home, which often involved party lines, were expensive and traumatic. Imagine chats with the parents with all the neighbors listening in. There were no credit cards, cash was scarce and skimping was a way of life. Friends chipped in a quarter to provide refreshments for a party. There was little relief from constant study.

Libraries were hallowed ground. With no internet available it was essential to devour as many books as possible to do a decent job of writing papers and responding to assignments. It was study, study, study. This was the only time one would have access to this quantity of books.

There has been a sea change globally in about every area, especially in how we do research. Having lived in small towns with limited libraries my gratitude for the internet knows no bounds. I cannot fully express my appreciation. Yet work is work. The young woman slumped over her computer knows this. The internet hasn't erased the need to think, and thinking is hard! The publishing industry is now totally dependent on electronics. A couple of weeks ago I broke my little Surface computer. I bought it in 2012 so it was ancient by current standards. I have a large desktop but it won't do me a bit of good when I'm in Arizona. I need something portable to take with me. I can and do compose in longhand a lot of the time. Especially when it comes to fiction.

But longhand is no good for transmitting documents. My weekend guest post is by the fabulous Tammy Kaehler and she has a wonderful series with Poisoned Pen. I won't be able to send her post before I leave. But the hotel has a business service center.

I've reached the point of no return. It's electronics or perish.