Superstitions

By Johnny D. Boggs

I just made an emergency run to the grocery.

I was out of blueberries. Had gone days without any. Which explained why this week has been so lousy. 

Sources for magazine assignments blowing me off. Outlining a novel not coming together as I’d hoped. Sentence I just wrote reading like crud.

Here’s my morning ritual: Get up. Let the doggies out and feed the big one. Hit the coffeemaker. Shower. Get dressed. And, most importantly, make myself a smoothie.

The ingredients vary, depending on what’s available. Raspberries. Strawberries. Blackberries. Spinach. Celery. Tomatoes. Oranges. Peach. Grapefruit. Lemon. Chile. Carrots. Apple. Cucumber. Zucchini. Brazil nuts. Protein powder.

And 20 blueberries.

For good luck.

I am not so insecure and insane that I must have a 20-blueberry smoothie when I’m on the road. When I’m home, however, I remain fairly certain that failure to include those 20 blueberries dooms me to a frustrating day at the Mac. That the Kansas City Royals and South Carolina Gamecocks will stink if they’re playing. That the check I’m expecting won’t be in the mail. 

If I happen to have only 23 blueberries left, I’ll likely add the extra three. Maybe.

A 20-blueberry smoothie could be a ritual because I happen to like blueberries, though, as a native of South Carolina, I’m a much bigger fan of peaches. Maybe the specific number is just a tradition. Perhaps it’s comforting.

Or I could be superstitious.

But I have no problem stepping on cracks in sidewalks. I don’t worry if a black cat walks in front of me. Thirteen is just another number. There’s no rabbit’s foot around. I won’t walk under a ladder, but that’s because my dad was a building contractor, and there might be someone on that ladder, or there might be a hammer or a gallon of paint atop the ladder, and I don’t want a carpenter or a hammer falling on my head or being bathed in paint if I accidentally slip and hit that ladder.

When I coached Little League, I would try to wear the same socks, shoes, etc., if we were winning. Once we lost, the mojo was gone and I’d find new duds or wash the luck back into what I had been wearing. I would chastise anyone who started packing up equipment before the game was over.

And I will never step on a foul line.

Superstitions apply to writing, too.

The first book I ever sold was mailed (back when we actually mailed typed manuscripts), per the publisher’s guidelines, in 12-point Monaco. Most people that I run into these days have never even heard of Monaco, but I use it all the time. Well, if a publisher demands 10-point Times New Roman or 14-point Calibri, I’ll try to comply. If I happen to forget, I just think, Hey, Editors, all y’all have to do is hit “Select All,” and change the font and point size, silly.

Then when the editors have a bad day, they have only themselves to blame.

What You Don't Know

Sorry to be so very late today. Classes begin on Monday, and this morning we had orientation for incoming grad students -- virtual orientation with each faculty member taking 3 or 4 minutes to introduce ourselves to the students who hadn't met up during PhD student weekend. 

I was thinking about my first classes of the semester on Monday and Tuesday and the work I still need to do on my online courses when I remembered today is my day to post. 

 I was up really late last night and up early this morning. The first thing I thought this morning was the short story that I have due (for an anthology) at the end of the month. The theme is the midnight hour. I had nothing -- no ideas. Then while Googling for images from 1939 (as I thought about a scene in my historical thriller), I came across one of Edward Hopper's 1942 painting. On of my favorite paintings by him, called "Nighthawks," The nighthawks are three people and a counterman in a diner. This painting always makes me think of Ernest Hemingway's short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and of the movie based on his short story, "The Killers." 

I saw the painting, and I knew my short story would be set in a diner. I couldn't decide who my sleuths would be -- whether it would be a Lizzie Stuart mystery featuring my crime historian and her fiance, John Quinn, a former homicide detective. Or maybe a Hannah McCabe story, with my Albany homicide detective and her police partner, Mike Baxter. 

Because of a series of unexpected events -- including conversations I had with two baseball fans -- I'm now writing a Lizzie Stuart story. I have already established that Quinn is a baseball fan. And it seems that the year of the story -- the series, including my 6th book in progress, is now up to 2004. As I was informed that was a landmark year in baseball. That Red Sox curse that I then remembered. It makes sense that Quinn would stop to watch the game that he has been listening to on the radio. It's late, and he needs  a cup of coffee and something to eat after driving back to Gallagher from the airport. 

I discovered a few minutes in one of the games -- I happened on it in a video -- when play stops because one of the players is hit with a ball. That is the perfect moment for my killer to strike -- while everyone is looking at the television screen. And Lizzie, who Quinn calls from the diner decides she really wants a hamburger and fries and will sleep a lot better if she gets out of the house after spending  the day trying to finish a paper that is due. She gets to the diner just before or just after the murder.  . . 

I think it will work. But I know next to nothing about baseball. I have never been to a baseball game. I have never even seen an entire game on television. I do know a bit about the history of the game -- the 1919 Black Sox scandal, the Negro baseball league, Babe Ruth, baseball movies and documentaries. But Quinn is a fan because my friend -- with whom I talk through my plots-- convinced me that baseball is a thinking person's sport. A sport that Quinn would appreciate.

Thankfully -- one of life's blessing if you're a writer-- people who know about a topic are always willing to share their knowledge -- love sharing their knowledge. My thanks to my two guides through the 2004 baseball season.

Writing as Continuing Education

Yesterday I was thinking about a book -- a hefty volume -- that I owned years ago and probably still have on a book shelf somewhere. The title, as I recall, was An Incomplete Education. I can't remember where I bought it, but I'm sure I was drawn to this book because of the title. In spite of the fact that I have a PhD, my education in some areas has been haphazard. One thing I always wanted as a child was to "know stuff". I wanted to be well-rounded. I ended up with a deep knowledge of some topics and only enough information to know how much I don't know about others. As I recall, this book was divided into categories, such as Music. The premise was that all "educated" adults should possess certain basic information.

I remember that I set out to work my way through the book, but I was soon bored with the process.  I am the kind of learner who learns best when I am following my nose. For example, I have no interest in baseball as a game. But when I was creating John Quinn, the  homicide detective that my crime historian Lizzie Stuart was about to meet in Death's Favorite Child, I wondered what he would be interested in. I pulled baseball out of the air -- maybe I was flipping by a game on television.

I filed the baseball idea away because it was irrelevant to the first book in the series. But baseball -- a sport I still know little about -- has weaved it's way into my writing over the years. When Lizzie goes to Chicago in You Should Have Died on Monday, the fourth book in the series, she goes to a sports store to buy Quinn a White Sox cap, and -- as a crime historian -- thinks for a few moments about the 1919 World Series.

Even if I don't feel inclined to rush to a stadium, I have pondered the arguments that a friend, who loves baseball, makes  -- that there is something magical about the game, that it is a "thinking person's game," that the rituals around baseball are worthy of note. So when a new friend mentioned that he collects the figures of baseball players from each team, my ears perked up. When I joined him and his wife for dinner, I had a chance to see his collection on display. And, suddenly I had another character who loved baseball -- a secondary detective in my Hannah McCabe police procedural novels.  In one scene, Pettigrew, my detective, recalls going to a baseball stadium with his father. He has a collection of baseball players.

I suspect that one day I will go to a baseball game because, as little interest as I have in the sport, it  keeps weaving its way into my consciousness. There are other topics that I've included in my books because they are necessary to time and place. Others that I've dug into because of something that I read or saw in passing. Some have been fun to learn more about, others disturbing. When possible I've done on-location research. Here's a short list from a couple of decades of writing:
--Madame Tussaud's wax museum in London
--the artist colony in St. Ives, Cornwall
--The conception of of King Arthur
--peanut allergies
--early 20th century drug addiction
--doll collecting
--brothel cuisine
--training for half-marathons
--gangsters in 1960s Chicago
--female blues singers
--New Orleans radio
--migrant labor on the Eastern Shore of Virginia
--how to escape from a car trunk
--peacocks and their habits
--voice-over acting
--soap opera writing
--the lobster industry in Maine
--West Point and cadet life in the 1970s
--Ranger training
--phenol poisoning
--Maine coons
--Lewis Carroll
--Characters in Alice in Wonderland
--Central Park in NYC
--The Wizard of Oz and the origin of the yellow brick road
--3-D autopsies
--virtual reality
--surveillance systems
--vertical gardening
--robotics
--seances
--World War II nurses
--parrots (care, vocabulary, and response to anxiety)
--upstate New York villages
--amateur theaters in the 1940s
--Somerset Maugham and Raffles Hotel
--how to make a Singapore Sling
--the lifespan and migratory habits of eels
--1939 New York City World's Fair
--Pullman sleeping cars
--the premier of "Gone with the Wind" in Atlanta
--Eleanor Roosevelt's newspaper column

The list goes on, but you get the idea. My education may still be incomplete, but I think I might be able to make a respectable showing on Jeopardy (a fantasy of mine).

How has being a writer contributed to your continuing education?

A lesson from the one-handed man

I've decided to focus these posts on writing. I'm doing so for mercenary reasons, mainly that I want to draw more views to this blog and in particular to my postings. I've resisted discussing writing before for several reasons. One, a lot of writing advice is what's been lapped up somewhere else and simply regurgitated. Two, giving advice is easy. I felt that no matter what I offered, readers would ask, "Okay, Mr. Smarty-pants, why aren't you sitting on top of a big pile of writer money?" Yes, indeed. Well, I'm still at it and I ain't done yet. Plus, I didn't want to sound like a pompous gasbag. God knows we have plenty of them already. And I didn't want to be regarded as a Yoda-like hermit living in a swamp, dispensing crapisms like, "Do or do not. There is no try." "Write not mind but heart."

But writing can be a trek through a bitter desert, and it's good to return to the well and refresh ourselves. We can feel lost, and sound advice and positive examples help us stay on track. As firm as the journey might be in our mind, the path is never smooth. Life happens. We adjust to shifting priorities. Things don't work out like we planned. As writers, we face rejection, in fact we seek it. We pretend to show a stoic face, but the "NO" always burns. Disappointment lies in wait. We garner great reviews but sales remain lackluster. When we do manage decent sales, we learn they're not good enough and it's sayonara from the publisher. Or the publisher folds. Our agent quits, or we quit them. Tires go flat. Our dog dies. On and on.

I pay my bills as a freelance writer and one of my projects is ghostwriting a line of inspirational books, sort of like the Chicken Soup for the Soul series but--considering I am at heart a mystery writer--with an emphasis on hard-boiled drama. One of the stories was about Jim Abbott, the  baseball pitcher who--despite being born without a right hand--made it to the major leagues. At one point his career was floundering and he received a harsh rebuke from a sports critic. Abbott obsessed with what the critic wrote, and he sought him out. When confronting the critic Abbott said that his performance was pretty good considering he only had one hand. The critic replied, "That's no excuse. You have to rise above your circumstances. You're more than a one-handed ball player, you're a professional. We expect more." Abbott reflected upon those hard words and realized the critic was right. To prevail you must rise above your circumstances. Abbott decided there was much about his circumstances he had to accept, but the two most important factors that determined his success were absolutely in his control: Attitude, and level of effort.

What about us writers? What's your attitude? What's your level of effort?

No time to write? Take a look at your schedule and carve out the time. Rise early if you have to or forgo some social life to spend time on the keyboard. Or find writer friends and writer time then becomes social time.

Lacking motivation? Then ask yourself tough questions about why you're writing and why it's important to you. From there, set goals and hold yourself to them.

The green-eyed monster got you? Jealousy is not worth your energy. I've met successful writers with so many flaws that I pitied instead of envied them.

There you have it, this month's advice: Rise above your circumstances. You alone control your attitude and level of effort.