Frankie Bailey, John Corrigan, Barbara Fradkin, Donis Casey, Charlotte Hinger, Mario Acevedo, Shelley Burbank, Sybil Johnson, Thomas Kies, Catherine Dilts, and Steve Pease — always ready to Type M for MURDER.
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Everyone keeps on talking about how much extra time they have these days. I admit I'm a little mad about this because, well, not a whole lot has changed for me. I'm still writing, though I don't get as much done as I should. I attribute that largely to not having a hard deadline, but a little bit to the state the world is in. I'm still doing my usual exercise routine, which was indoors anyway so no change there. Construction is still going on across the street, into the 2nd year for this particular house, and almost 10 years of continuous construction on our street.
One big change is that I don't go out on errands much anymore. Not that I went out much before. Now it’s even less. Only when absolutely necessary do I venture into the great unknown. My husband does most of the grocery shopping. I only occasionally accompany him.
Still, I find that I probably don’t have the best of attitudes these days. I get more annoyed about things, especially the idiots across the street. Hey, you deal with not knowing if you can get out of your garage when you need to and picking up their lunch trash every single day and you’ll get annoyed too. I’m coming up with all sorts of scenarios I could work into a story some day. So that’s good, I guess.
Still, I find that bits of fun can change how I feel about everything. So here are a few things I’ve discovered that you might all find fun. They give me a little relief from life’s annoyances and the grim statistics I read about every day.
Google Fun:
You can search on “Google Fun” in your browser and find all kinds of fun things. My favorite is the Wizard of Oz:
Type “Wizard of Oz” into google.
Click on the red shoes in the results window. (Be sure you have your sound on.)
Jigsaw Puzzles:
If you’ve run out of physical jigsaw puzzles you can go to jigsawplanet and do some online. You can also create a puzzle using your own image. These can be either public, available to everyone, or private, ones you can only play yourself.
Best British Home Cook:
Then there’s the Best British Home Cook, which I recently discovered on Hulu. I’m not sure where else you can find it, but if you get a chance check it out. The cooks on BBHC all seem to genuinely like each other and they often help each other. A really lovely attitude that I wish was more prevalent these days. Plus Mary Berry is one of the judges so if you miss her from the Great British Baking Show, you can get your fix here.
Music:
Someone sent me these links to 3 version of “Ode To Joy”. The first one is a quartet playing together from their balconies. The other two are orchestras playing the piece together from their homes. Really enjoyable, all of them.
In these most novel of times, everyone has had to face new realities and new ways of doing things. Hell! We have had to come up with less than new ways of living our lives. The pandemic shutdown has locked us all in cages, nice ones if you enjoy your living quarters, but cages nonetheless.
One seemingly good offshoot of this is time. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job where you can work from home, everyone should have more time to do things that they normally wouldn’t. If you’re unfortunately not working, well all you do have on your hands is time.
But something is going wrong.
I was speaking with a musician-friend yesterday. He was lamenting that even with hours on his hands every day, he wasn’t getting much done. Sure, he was practising a lot, but he had other musical goals (recording, arranging new pieces, learning a new recording program he’d bought, but somehow he never got around to these things in any meaningful way. “I feel completely stalled.”
That really resonated with me. I, too, seem to be spinning my tires more than would expect. Part of that is due to the curse of the internet. Even though it’s like watching a slow-moving car crash, I can’t resist reading about current events on various platforms. It’s appalling and fascinating at the same time. Like being in the middle of a great novel, I’m constantly thinking, How is this all going to end? At least we don’t have a TV…
That’s my main time-waster, but there are others. We have bird feeders right outside our back door and I can easily spend a half-hour dawdling over a cup of coffee and watching our guests — especially since a pair of Baltimore orioles arrived last week. There’s also another male hanging around, so there’s lots of chivying going on. (Birds can be really quite nasty to each other.)
You get the picture on how much time can be wasted during the day. I’m sure many of you have similar stories to tell.
So this morning I woke up and vowed that I was not going to allow myself to keep being distracted, keep myself on a schedule and actually accomplish the things I want to accomplish — and above all, not waste so much time!
First off, make a list. Always make a list when you wish to Get Things Done (that’s my mom talking).
Here’s today’s list:
Write Type M post: 1 hour
Take birthday present over to our granddaughter (she’s 4 today!): 2 hours
Practise! : 1.5 hours
Record 2 flute pieces for darling wife’s students: .5 hours
Change water in fish tank: 20 minutes
Make dinner (ratatouille): 1.25 hours
Finish song arrangement and print parts while waiting for dinner to cook: 2 hours
Get the picture? You don’t see anything on there about writing, do you? This is how all my days seem to go. Sure, it does take more time whenever you have to go out to the store. It’s not currently a matter of bopping our to the , grabbing what you need and arriving back home in under half-an-hour. It just doesn’t happen.
Something’s got to change or I won’t be able to call myself a writer anymore.
Starting today, I have a timer at my desk and I’m going to use it. Need to ? I set the timer for my budgeted time and when it goes off, I stop cold and move on to something else.
In my creative writing class that I was teaching for our local college, cut short by the pandemic, I stressed the value of ratcheting up tension as your book progresses.
Well, welcome to the real world, where the tension is rising nearly every day.
On Friday, the governor of Michigan shut down the Capitol in Lansing in fear of armed protesters. For the past week, lawmakers have been debating how to safely enable lawmakers to work and vote in session while the state’s laws allow people to bring firearms into the capitol building. The debate grew in intensity as some lawmakers read about threats to the governor’s life on social media, which were published in the Detroit Metro Times.
There’s a tense video on YouTube filmed by a female customer in a Trader Joe’s, arguing with a young worker who was trying to enforce company policy by asked the woman to wear a face mask. The discussion grew heated, the young man called the police, who never showed up, and the woman finally left. When she did, the other customers in the store applauded.
A Target employee in California ended up with a broken arm as she helped escort two customers who also refused to wear masks.
In Pennsylvania, a female convenience store clerk refused to sell a man who refused to wear a mask a pack of cigars. He punched three times in the face.
In Texas, a man was told he couldn’t ride a public bus if he didn’t put on a face mask. He shot another passenger who ended up in the hospital and the gunman was arrested.
Then in Flint, Michigan, a security guard outside a dollar story insisted that a customer wear a face mask. The guard was shot and killed.
On a much lesser note, but still ugly, I was in line at our Food Lion, wearing a mask. As the lady behind the counter checked me out and I place my groceries in my cart, I turned to put my credit card in the machine to pay. I saw a man and woman standing right next to me, neither of whom were wearing masks. I politely asked the man to please step back. In a loud belligerent voice, he said, “Where do you want me to go? The back of the store?”
Wanting to defuse the situation, I didn’t tell him where I really wanted him to go.
The poor clerk smiled sadly and told me, “Have a nice day, honey.
I’m working from home and in my spare time, I’m working on edits for my fourth mystery, Shadow Hill. But it’s difficult not to fall down an internet rabbit hole when an alert pops up on my phone letting me know when some new kernel of news has arrived. Usually it’s bad news.
It’s not productive. At some point I just switch it all off and lose myself in my work. It’s a little like a movie or a book where the tension has nearly peaked.
So my advice is that when the world serves you more tension than you think you can handle, turn it off, go for a walk or open your work in progress and lose yourself in that.
It suddenly dawned on me (Donis) that it's time for my Type M entry. I'm amazed I remembered, because as far as I know, the date is Thronday, Maprilune the twenty-oneteenth. I was wondering whether to muse on the pandemic yet again. Have we all heard enough? Then I read Barbara Fradkin's excellent entry, below. "As artists, we document the emotional reality of our times," she said, and I couldn't agree more. The great Barbara Kingsolver notes that “a novel works its magic by putting a reader inside another person’s life ... The power of fiction is to create empathy.” As an example, she says that a newspaper will give you the facts of a situation, say a plane crash, but a novel will show you just how it felt to be one of those hundreds of people who were killed in the crash.
We will convey to future generations what it felt like to live through this pandemic. Many times I've been reminded of the absolute indispensability of nurses at times like this. Doctors may get all the glory, but it's nurses who really do the work, especially when science doesn't know the answer and tender loving care is all that keeps people alive. That's the way it was during the 1918 pandemic and that's the way it is now. In 1918 there was a war going on and the government censored the pandemic news because nothing could be allowed to interfere with war production. There was no cure, anyway. No one knew why this strain of flu was so bad. A person could be well in the morning and dead by sundown. The great heroes of that time were the Red Cross volunteer nurses. When I did the research for The Return of the Raven Mocker, my historical mystery set in Oklahoma during the pandemic, I didn't have to make up any stories about the heroism of the women who took on the job of helping the sick. I just used the stories I read about in the papers and heard from family members who lived through it. Here's an excerpt from the book:
“There are fifteen of us left,” Martha said, as she showed the doctor around the makeshift command post. “Eight other volunteers have either come down with the flu themselves or decided they don’t want to risk it. We all meet up here at dawn and make our plans for the day. Usually somebody stays here at the school to make soup and deliver messages. We have tried to let folks know that they should telephone here or send a message if they need help. We have access to a telephone in the school office. We divide up house calls. We go to anybody who asks for us, but lately a couple of us will ride or walk up and down the streets looking for a red ‘X’ on the doors. That is the signal the town council decided that everyone should use to let folks know that there is influenza in the house.” "What do your nurses do for their patients when they call on them, Mrs. McCoy?” “Whatever we can. Try to see that they are clean and fed, that the house is clean and the air in the sick room is not too warm or too stale. I carry aspirin in my kit, and menthol rub, and lemons, when I can get them. My mother and some other ladies in the area make useful tonics and medicines for fever, the cough, nausea, and for diarrhea. Sometimes the best thing we can do is stay with the patients for a while, especially folks who have nobody else to look after them.” “How many in the vicinity have died?” Hattie and Martha exchanged a glance. Often when they knocked at houses with the sign, no one would come to the door. Sometimes someone inside would yell at her through the door, or gesture to her from behind a closed window. Go away. We’re better. Don’t bring more illness to this house. Other times no one would come to the door because no one could. Martha could tell the difference by the smell. Her nose had become acutely sensitive to the odor of sickness. In that case she would simply open the door and walk in, praying that she would find everyone ill but still alive. She wasn’t always so lucky. On the day that she and Cousin Hattie revved up Scott’s touring car and made the circuit of nearby farms, they found that both Fosters and their five children had all succumbed during the night. The women wrapped the bodies in blankets, dragged them into the parlor, and laid them on the floor in a row for the convenience of the gravediggers. Then they filled a washtub with well water, washed themselves with carbolic soap as best as they could, took another dose of garlic honey, and drove to the next farm. “I don’t believe any of us have wanted to take a count. There have been several,” Martha said.
If they lived through it, the women (and it was mostly women then) who voluntarily put themselves in danger in 1918 suffered shell-shock afterwards just like soldiers who had done battle. So here it is 2020 and we're living through our own version of a little-understood plague. Screw the politicians and protestors. We know who the real heroes are here.
For weeks now, our Type M blog posts have circled around the central player in our lives - the pandemic. We have talked about the inability to write, the question of whether to include the pandemic in our stories, the lament over lost opportunities to celebrate and promote our books, and the ups and downs of our moods. As I tried to figure out what to say today, I thought "Can anyone stand one more blog about the damn pandemic?" Are we sick of it? Do we want our lives back? Can't we at least pretend things will go back to normal?
Then I realized this is our job. As artists we document the emotional reality of our times. Economists will talk about job losses, stock market rollercoasters, and accumulating debt. Scientists will talk about advances in virology and herd immunity, epidemiologists about infection curves and deaths per million, etc. Social scientists will analyze lockdown fatigue, crowd contagion, and the delicate balance of maintaining public cooperation. Ecologists will describe the return of the animals and the blue of the sky.
All important for the historical record. We are living through possibly the most significant global event in a century, in terms of its scope and impact on every single person (and indeed on nature and the planet). Other crises have had a more drastic effect on specific parts of the world, such as the world wars, the Holocaust, and the Khmer Rouge. And even then, much of normal life went on in the streets and towns. But this crisis is against a single enemy worldwide, and has changed almost every aspect of our daily lives, from hugging our families to trying to buy yeast.
People's experiences and reactions are all over the map, and as several posts have already pointed out, they change from day to day and evolve over time. Artists have always been a mirror to our inner life. Psychologists and other mental health researchers are going to dissect our adjustment and struggles minutely. They are going to subject us to surveys and statistical analyses and possibly even experimental re-enactments. All this is going to be very valuable for future planning, but trust me, as someone who worked in that field for years, it's going to be dry as dust. It will not bring to life the essence of being alone on Mother's Day, staring at your one-year old grandson trying to eat the phone his parents are using for Zoom. It will not capture the sound of your silent wail. Nor the hummingbird restlessness you feel some days after listening to too much news. Shall I bake cupcakes? Watch Netflix? Or even, horrors, wash the floors?
The blogs, poems, paintings, and short isolation videos that artists are producing all over the world will serve as a record of our times, a mirror of our feelings and thoughts at the moment we go through them. And any books that come out of it, whether about the pandemic or not, will be a testament to these times. So feel free to create and to put it out there, to be shared online across the world. Someone will be listening, and equally important, history will be listening.
I’ve got some things on today that will prevent me from writing a post this week — in fact, I should have posted this early since I knew what would be going on.
Anyway, I will be back with more deathless prose next week, full of cogent thinking and sparkling ideas. Ha!
Having your life so suddenly constricted has been a curious and, in an abstract sort of way, interesting experience. Before I say anything else, I need to declare my privilege - I have a comfortable home, a nice garden, endlessly helpful neighbors, a supportive family and a husband whom, even after almost fifty years I actually like.
So when I say that some of the results of lockdown are beneficial, I'm all too aware that this doesn't apply to everyone. And certainly, for the first two or three weeks I was to some degree in shock, finding it hard to concentrate or settle to anything. There was a frantic scrabble to arrange the practicalities of life and all I could think about was whether we would have milk, or butter or eggs. Toilet rolls, not so much.
It struck me this was similar to the pattern in some of my books where the character has been hit unexpectedly by tragic life events - a murder, say. There is the
initial shock of bereavement, then the hectic pace of practical
arrangements and investigations before the emptiness and the slow adjustment to life as it has to be in
future. I will have more insight into that in the future.
But as a wise friend of mine once said, 'You cannot sustain crisis.' However hard something is at first, sooner or later the rhythm of life reasserts itself. I'm back to working my normal hours again and slowly the book is taking shape. The hours I would have spent on traveling, entertaining, shopping and socialising are empty now.
The weather here, for a Scottish summer, has been amazing - weeks and weeks that have been dry and sunny. As I sat in the garden watching leaves unfurl and new flowers appear every day for, I think, pretty much the first time in a busy life, I felt time slow to a crawl.
I've never been much of a one for personal introspection. I've never forgotten what my mother said when I was an angst-ridden teenager, 'If you spend your time looking inwards, you'll find it's like peeling an onion - when you take off the last layer there's nothing left.' I've found it good advice, but
there has been something very soothing about having the time to let thoughts unfold like the leaves.
It has helped to keep me cheerful - mainly. Though today is a bit hard: as I write this, I
should have been in London rehearsing for a scratch performance of the
Mozart Requiem in the Royal Albert Hall. ( small sob.)
Colorado is now in a "partial reopening." I don't have the slightest idea what to do. The prohibitions have been in place just long enough to scare the hell out of me and change my behavior.
My state of mind isn't helped much by the dire news accounts of angry customers shooting clerks trying to enforce their company's mask policy.
I've convinced that we will never return to the "old" normal. We certainly didn't after 9/11. It was a whole new ball game. We learned to accept tightened security measures and inspections. The "new normal" back then became policing children's safety at school and an enormous increase in people carrying guns. We were forced to absorb one mass shooting after another. Our country continued to function under the new rules. We became suspicious and vigilant. We also became more anxious.
As is the case with most writers, self-isolation isn't as hard on me as it for people with extroverted personalities, although last Monday I went back to the regular routines that have always served me well. It was time to stop lying around.
Nevertheless, I'm feeling very vulnerable. I'm diabetic and if my miserable allergic responses to spring are any indication, I certainly have a compromised immune system. My age doesn't help ether.
This week I wrestled with melancholy. I was struck by our blogmaster, Rich Blechta's post. He said that nearly every musician was unemployed. I was stricken with the awareness that I couldn't go to Rocky Grass this year. It won't be happening! I recalled all the dances I've attended--the joy of music and concerts. Even if the events take place, I won't feel safe attending venues with large groups of people.
God speed to all the scientists who are struggling to develop a vaccine.
2020 marks 90 years since Nancy Drew’s first appearance and she doesn’t show any sign of stopping. (Okay, well, there is the graphic novel, Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys: The Death of Nancy Drew, but we’ll talk about that later.)
Being a big fan of Ms. Drew, I decided to read her debut novel, The Secret of the Old Clock, in both its original 1930 version and the revised 1959 version, the one I remember reading when I was a kid. And, of course, I had to analyze the differences because, well, I love doing stuff like that. Some of you may remember a previous post here on Type M where I analyzed the differences between the original and revised versions of The Clue of the Leaning Chimney. You can find that here.
This analytical exercise suits me right now. It calms me down, brings a smile to my face and keeps me sane in this corona virus world we live in. So here we go...
First the statistics. The 1930 version is 25 chapters and 210 pages long. The 1959 version is 20 chapters and 180 pages.
In all of the original versions, Nancy is 16 years old and, apparently, has finished school. She runs the household for her father and occasionally does errands for him. They have a maid, Hannah, but Nancy’s the one in charge. “On the death of her mother six years before, she had taken the entire management of the establishment.” Quite a feat since Nancy was 10 years old at the time!
In the newer versions, she’s 18 and has finished high school. Hannah has been upgraded to housekeeper. She runs the household so Nancy is free as a bird to do her sleuthing.
I’ve always thought that River Heights, the town where Nancy lives, is in the mid-west somewhere though I don’t remember ever seeing that in the newer books. But in the 1930 book, Nancy is “a true daughter of the Middle West” and takes great pride “in the fertility of her State and saw beauty in a crop of waving green corn as well as in the rolling hills and the expanse of prairie land.” Sounds like the mid-west to me! But then they mention the Muskoka River, which seems to be a river in Canada, so maybe she’s been a Canadian all this time and I never knew!
The story line in both books is basically the same: Josiah Crowley dies leaving a will that gives all of his considerable fortune to a really, really annoying and undeserving family, the Tophams. But there are reports he drew up a new will when he died, naming far more deserving people as his heirs, and hid it somewhere. (Could it be in an old clock, perchance?) Nancy, of course, finds the will and the more deserving people get life-saving money. On a side note, Josiah Crowley’s wife in the 1930 version was said to have died in the 1918 flu epidemic. Seems rather timely given the current state of the world.
There are quite a few differences between the books. The 1930 version starts with Nancy talking to her father about the Tophams and saying what a shame it was that they inherited a lot of money. The 1959 version starts with Nancy driving her dark blue convertible along a road and witnessing a child fall off a wall. She, of course, stops and saves her. That’s how she meets the Turner sisters who are a couple of the deserving people who should have inherited. The topic of the will is brought up here. It also introduces the storyline involving thieves who steal silver and what not from unsuspecting people. She’ll meet up later with them when they’re stealing furniture etc. from deserted summer homes on Moon Lake. We don’t find out about the thieves in the 1930 version until Nancy meets up with them at the Topham’s summer cottage.
In the original version, Nancy doesn’t save a child. There’s not even a child in the story. She also doesn’t save a dog like she does in the 1959 version. Not sure why they added those bits, but maybe they just wanted to immediately portray her as a good person, hence the saving of the child in the first scene and the dog later.
They made a few other changes to Nancy’s personality. Later in the story, Nancy is in possession of the old clock mentioned in the title. She got it out of the moving van of the thieves. In the 1930 version she hides this fact from the police while in the 1959 version she fesses up. Also, in the 1930 version she doesn’t mention to her father the real reason she wants to go to a camp on Moon Lake (sleuthing!), but she's aboveboard in the 1959 version. I suppose they didn't want to give young girls any bad ideas. She'd become a role model by then, after all.
There might be a few differences in her personality between the editions, but she’s still capable of changing her own tire and fixing a boat engine in both books.
But, I don’t know what it is about having Nancy drive her car. In the older books no man suggests he should drive her car, they just hop in the passenger seat and away Nancy goes. But, in the 1959 book, a police officer offers to drive. At least he doesn’t insist. It’s not quite as bad as “The Clue of the Leaning Chimney” where Ned drives her car pretty much every time they drive somewhere together. Yes, people, Nancy can drive!
Another difference between the versions was in the profession of one of the young women. In the 1930 version, she keeps chickens and wants to expand to having a chicken farm, but needs money to do that. In the 1959 version she has a lovely voice and wants to be a singer, but needs money for lessons. An interesting change in story line.
There are some other differences that are probably because the story is moved to a different time period.
The woman in the book who is described as older is over 80 in the newer version instead of being over 70.
A $100 bill is used in 1959 instead of a $20 bill
The caretaker of a house on Moon Lake in 1930 is black (not described that way, btw) and is just described as elderly in the newer version. Here is one place where I think the story was much improved. The way the caretaker in the 1930 version was portrayed and gotten out of the way by the thieves was quite racist. The way they got him out of the way in the 1959 version was much more believable.
There’s a shootout between the police and the thieves in the 1930 version that Nancy witnesses! (Hard not to think of the potential for our heroine getting shot.) No guns in the 1959 version, thank goodness.
Procedures for how they get access to a safe deposit box are different and more detailed.
So those are my thoughts on the differences in The Secret of the Old Clock.
While I was immersed in the books, I did some googling and discovered a couple interesting things. First, there’s a Nancy Drew Mystery Podcast hosted by two women, one who read Nancy as a kid, one who didn’t. I listened to their thoughts on the Old Clock, which was quite fun. They only read the 1959 version. I wonder what they would have thought if they’d read the original as well. You can learn more about the podcast here: https://nancysmysterypod.podbean.com/
At the end of the podcast, they played the song “Nancy Drew” by Kathy Johnson. (With her permission.) It’s quite fun and catchy. I may start singing it around the house! You can listen to it here:
The other thing I discovered was this graphic novel Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys: The Death of Nancy Drew. Apparently, Nancy is killed and the Hardy Boys investigate her murder! No, say it isn’t so! That’s all I know about it. For all I know, Nancy faked her death and is helping the boys investigate the mob or something.
Still, there’s a bit of controversy about this graphic novel. They’ve been accused of comic “fridging”. This is where a female character is injured, raped, killed or depowered, used as a plot device to move a male character’s story forward. That’s putting a female character “into a refrigerator”. Hadn’t heard of that one before. Probably because I’m not into graphic novels at all. Thought it very interesting though.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my Nancy Drew musings. Now, I think I’ll learn the words to that Nancy Drew song.
Over the years I’ve become more and more aware of this defect. There has been many a conversation that I’ve totally dominated. It’s not done out of conceit or an I_don’t-care-a-fig-about-you attitude. I just get on a topic and roll with it. Afterwards I kick myself in the behind for being a social jerk.
But I’m trying to do better, honest I am!
If there’s one good thing that’s happened to me during this time of pandemic, it’s that I’ve had the chance to really hone my listening skills, to learn to step back and let other people lead a conversation.
Why has this happened? It’s all due to video conferencing software.
No matter the platform, be it FaceTime, Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, Houseparty — I could go on but you get the picture, I’m sure — the way they all work is only one person at a time can speak. When multiple speak, everything becomes incomprehensible as the software struggles to handle multiple feeds when it can only handle one at a time. If you’ve been on one of these, you know what I mean. It just doesn’t work.
Over the past two months, I’ve taken part in professional meetings, get-togethers with colleagues and friends, and conversations with my family. There has even been a birthday party.
For some reason, I find myself pulling back on all these occasions and only contributing a comment or statement here and there. On occasion people have asked me if anything is wrong or if something isbothering me. (I guess my listening continence looks rather dour.)
It’s only that I’m listening, really concentrating on what’s being said and who is saying it and how. Maybe I feel a bit as if I’m on the outside looking in. I don’t know.
But it has been illuminating.
I find it interesting to observe how idiosyncratically everyone speaks. They have a consistent rhythm if you will to how they express themselves. Taking it a step further, I’ve found myself thinking, How would I craft dialogue for this person?
Anyone who writes well knows that dialogue taken down verbatim seldom works well on the printed page. People don’t speak in full sentences, and those sentences will often jump the track and take a completely different direction — sometimes multiple times. (I’m thinking of a certain world leader here.) It can often lead to confusion for the reader.
If I were trying to write that down to include it in a novel, I’d have to alter it in order to try to make everything comprehensible to a reader.
People also ramble when they speak — heaven knows I suffer from this affliction — and so judicious pruning is often required or the writer risks readers losing interest, the “get-on-with-it” syndrome is what I call this.
So if you’re on a video conference with me and I’m just sitting there not moving, seldom speaking, and with a dour expression on my face, just know that what I’m doing is re-writing what you’re saying so that it would make good dialogue in a novel.
Not that I would ever actually use something like that!
Bad boys and bad girls…why do we like them so much?
During this time of quarantine, my wife and I are binging on shows we’ve found on both Hulu and Netflix. We just finished season three of Ozark and we’re in the middle of season two of Killing Eve.
Both have antiheroes who are the lead characters.
In Ozark, the program focuses on a married couple who are laundering money for a drug cartel. They started out as nearly normal in episode one of the first season, but as the program progresses, the fall deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. In order to save their lives, they had to break the law. But as the show unfolds, they’re clearly outstanding at what they do and, to a degree, are enjoying it.
In Killing Eve, the show is about an MI6 operative who is chasing down an international assassin. While Eve, the operative, is interesting, it’s Villanelle, the killer, who is endlessly fascinating. Villanelle has a childish quality and is a charming psychopath.
Then again, so was Ted Bundy.
Tony Soprano from the HBO series The Sopranos. Walter White from Breaking Bad. Don Draper from Mad Men. All antiheroes.
A few literary antiheroes? Jay Gatsby, Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Tom Ripley, Lestat de Lioncourt from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles.
How about James Bond? He’s an assassin with a license to kill, drinks heavily, likes to gamble, and is an incessant womanizer.
What about anti eroes draws us to them? I think it’s their depth of character. I’ve written that a protagonist can’t be too perfect or they’re deadly dull. They have to have flaws to make them human.
For an anti hero those flaws are much more pronounced. And in many cases, becoming an anti hero was the result of a noble cause. Walter White in Breaking Bad learns he has terminal lung cancer and wants to leave a financial legacy for his family so he turns to cooking meth and selling it. And he becomes damned good at it. And through the course of the show, devolves more and more into a monster.
So, an antihero should be good at what they do. Don Draper was an awesome ad guy. Tony Soprano would do most anything for his family and he was adept at staying one step ahead of his enemies.
In all of their cases, they can rationalize their bad behavior because they think they’re doing it for a good reason.
And when I talked about depth of character it can also mean being colorful. Of the two female lead characters in Killing Eve, the MI6 operative starts as a boring but likable protagonist. As she chases her killer quarry, her behavior becomes more and more questionable and I’ve found that she's becoming more interesting. More like the assassin.
The second lead in that series, Villanelle, started as a colorful character and never lets up. When she kills a target, it’s macabre theater.
In the end, we're fascinated with antiheroes because they’re damned entertaining.
Just as a side note, years ago I wrote a thriller where the lead character was an antihero. He worked as a bartender in a strip club, was dating one of the strippers, and in his spare time he was a con artist. One of his cons gets him in trouble the Mob and he and his girlfriend have to go on the run.
I never found an agent for the book and it was never published.
However, the agent I’m working with now told me that she recalled reading the first fifty pages of the book when I'd submitted it to her. Then she said that the reason her agency didn’t take it on was that she immediately didn’t like the lead character.
Writing anti heroes is a tricky business. So, who is your favorite antihero?
I used a balled up piece of aluminum foil to clean a casserole dish after I burned what I was baking. As I was rising my sparking clean dish, I thought of this character who was known for unconventional solutions to problems at hand.
I'll hum while the theme music of this game show plays and you think.
Did you get it?
The character is "MacGyver", and the game show is Jeopardy.
I really did use that ball of Reynolds Wrap to clean my oven-ready casserole dish. As I was cleaning I couldn't remember the magazine that had offered me "10 clever ways to use aluminum foil." What I did remember was MacGyver. I felt really clever when the mess cleaned right up -- clever because I had remembered -- and I thought again about my long list of things I'd like to know how to do.
Never having been a Girl Scout, I have a small collection of those hardcover books for children with the instructions on how to do things like start a fire without matches or find your way in the woods. I also have a go-to book for adults -- The US Army Survival Manual. In fact, my protagonist, Lizzie Stuart, has read the Army's guide to surviving in challenging situations. She is engaged to a man who was an Army Ranger, a military police officer, and a homicide detective. He also has a master's degree in criminal justice and FBI training. Lizzie likes people who know how to do things. She finally learned how to swim because he does and she thought it was time she overcame her fear of the water. And wouldn't you know that at some point that knowledge would come in handy. Two books later, after mentioning in that book in the next that she was taking swimming classes, she found herself in danger of a watery death. She wasn't ready for the Olympics, but she was able to do what she needed to do..
But I started this post intending to write about iconic characters like MacGyver or Sherlock Holmes or Adrian Monk. Characters who are so unique or groundbreaking that if you mention their name that's sufficient to explain what you mean. For example, I can say to a friend of mine that I had a "Monk moment" when I dropped something on my kitchen floor and she knows exactly why I threw out my expensive steak instead of rinsing it off and cooking it.
I don't know about you, but I would love to have a character like the one whose name comes to mind when someone says, "I went down the rabbit hole." I still go down that rabbit hole with Alice. That book was one of the inspirations for my near-future police procedural, The Red Queen Dies.
Who makes your list of iconic characters? Alice was the only female character I mentioned, but there are others. However, I have to get to work. My notifications are popping up.
Here's a list of some of the things I've resolved to do during the quarantine:
Make pancakes.
Learn Italian.
Get back to my drawing and guitar/piano playing.
Start another book.
Have I done any of those? Well, yes, all of them. Kind of, in a desultory way. Just don't ask about housecleaning.
I find it fascinating to read the entries that my blogmates and other writers share about their time in lockdown. I have to admit that I feel better about my own lack of progress on … anything … when I see that others are struggling as well. It didn't help me feel better about myself when I watched a Poisoned Pen Bookstore Facebook video interview with author Jenn McKinlay this morning. She was touting the release of her twelfth cupcake shop mystery, Pumpkin Spice Peril. This is like, her 40th book in the past decade, and they're all good. Jenn has two teenaged sons and a husband and more energy than anyone has a right to have and manages three, four, five books a year, most reaching the NYT bestseller list.
As for me, not so much. I've recently finished writing a book, Valentino Will Die, the second in the Adventures of Bianca Dangereuse series. Sadly, it was originally scheduled to come out in November 2020, but I was recently notified that the publication date has been pushed back to February 2021. I’m disappointed, but by that time, I hope I’ll have the third book ready to go, so maybe there won’t be such a gap between books. We'll see. I usually have a period of complete blankness after I finish a book, and this hang-fire period of corona virus quarantine doesn't help my thinking processes. I’m pretty pleased by the way Valentino turned out, so I hope you’ll like it, Dear Reader. In the interim, I’m cogitating about starting another Alafair Tucker mystery. Wish me luck in coming up with a great story idea. These days I feel lucky if I manage to get out of bed before ten.
There was a starred review in the April 15 Booklist for the audio version of the first Bianca Dangereuse tale, The Wrong Girl, read by the talented Romy Nordlinger! Here’s an excerpt of the review:
“Nordlinger easily depicts lecherous cads and despicable older men and fluidly differentiates between the female leads: a childlike, inexperienced 17-year-old; a spoiled, privileged, but big-hearted star; and a stabilizing, practical assistant with a bare hint of a Southern Black accent. More impressively, she subtly shows each woman’s voice variations over time, reflecting in phrasings and darkening tonalities their changes in attitudes and expectations, as well as discoveries of unexpected capabilities and strengths as Blanche/Bianca’s life unfolds—leaving readers impatient for the sequel.”
Stay safe, read lots of books, and wash your hands.
Recent posts (including my own) have noted that the pandemic has changed our work as writers in many ways. For many of us, our concentration and focus are shot. We find ourselves easily distracted and sidetracked by Facebook and email alerts, news bulletins hovering just behind our manuscript, and a general feeling of restless malaise that drives us to the fridge or the window several times an hour.
We also wrestle with whether to include the pandemic and its aftermath in our work in progress, which will likely come out in 18 - 24 months. It is difficult to pretend the huge upheaval we are living through did not exist. But it's also difficult to know what the world will look like by then, so we are trying to imagine and write about a world that is still out of sight. In addition, will the concerns and struggles of our characters – indeed the central drama of the book – seem irrelevant and perhaps even trivial in the brave new world our future readers will be living in? Right now, as I write my novel, it certainly feels like that.
Or is it possible that reading a story that contains no reference to the pandemic, that transports us back to that flawed but normal world we used to know, will be a welcome relief? Who knows?
So I am proceeded at a snail's pace through my first draft, writing in fits and starts as I feel my way forward and avoid the mental distractions and sloth we have all been experiencing. As if that isn't difficult enough, I've encountered yet another problem with writing in the pandemic age. I am a realistic writer. I research as thoroughly as I can the locations and details I am writing about. The Internet is an extremely useful tool but it is no substitute for real-life location scouting and interviews with experts, etc. I am used to visiting locations, talking to locals, and walking though all the steps my characters take. I am used to going to the source to verify police, coroner, and scene of the crime procedures.
Researching my Alberta book, THE ANCIENT DEAD
I can't do much of that now. I wanted to visit the Ottawa courthouse not only to get the lay of the land but also to attend a trial and watch how the lawyer and police worked, what they wore, etc. None of that can happen now. I wanted to visit Ontario Provincial Police detachments in nearby rural communities and talk to the local staff on the ground about how they would respond to certain situations, how resources would be deployed, how they would liaise with the specialist teams, etc. I can phone, but a cold call in the middle of a pandemic will likely not garner much cooperation. First responders are probably busy and focussed on other (more important) things.
I wanted to stroll through the small villages, poke around for potential burial sites, and talk to people, but that too is now a challenge. In the old days, my questions would have roused curiosity and a good laugh, but now... Who knows what kind of feelings I might be treading on?
Rural village in my latest book
I managed to do some of the research before the writing began, but more questions always come up as the story evolves. So all I can do not is rely on Mr. Google and my imagination, make the stuff up, and hope I can fact-check before the final manuscript has to be submitted.
My final plan will be to apologize in the acknowledgements and blame the pandemic for all the things I got wrong. This too is an evolving story.
I’ve got more on the whole non-permission book piracy thing.
First off, I heard back from Linwood Barclay. I won’t share the exact email response he sent to my query — it’s rather tart and too-the-point — but I can say he found what I told him “outrageous” and he was going to contact them immediately.
Apparently he was more successful than I’ve been (in many ways!) because his novels that were on the site are now completely gone. Good for you, Linwood! You’re my new hero.
I’m going to find a friendly lawyer — since I play in a big band, the Advocats, that has several — to get a letter crafted that Internet Archive will be inclined to obey.
Now the Hidden Gems site is for helping authors get reviews of electronic ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) of their works. They charge for this service. If you wish to poke around the site, you will quickly see how it works. It seems that the focus in on individual authors to sign up for some easy self-promotion. It seems a bit pricey considering all the service provides is reviews, and obviously, you’d only want to use the good ones. Also anyone can review these ARCs, so they don’t carry the weight of a review by a professional (i.e.: paid) reviewer.
'We would be sorry if our wishes were gratified.' Aesop.
'Beware, my lord! Beware lest heaven hate you enough to hear your prayers!' (French novel, 1881)
'When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.' (Oscar Wilde).
We can't say they didn't warn us. Yet how many times did the words, 'I wish I had more time!' pass our lips? With an irony that the most sadistic satirist couldn't better, we've got our wish. Now we have time. Lots of it.
I can remember when I started writing I had so many demands on my time that I could write only in short snatches - a couple of hours, here and there, if I was lucky. A long, uninterrupted session with my new book was an almost unimaginable luxury.
When we went on holiday my treat was to be allowed to get up at six when no one else was allowed to come downstairs till nine. This was when we had a favourite French gite that we went to for years; it had a wonderful terasse looking out over a peaceful valley. It was chilly at that time with just the first light of dawn and I sat working with a rug over my lap as the bats went home to roost in the abri - Mmme la Voisine thought I was crazy, shaking her head as she handed fresh peaches over the wall. The valley would turn golden before me as the sun came up while the only interruptions as I scribbled as fast as I could to get the story out of my head and on to the laptop would be the calls of the golden orioles, the tree-creeper to watch on the ash in front of me and occasionally the kee of a Bonelli's eagle that would have me jumping up with my binoculars to see it as it regularly patrolled its patch.
Today, there's no reason why I shouldn't spend eight hours working on my new book. But I won't. Will you?
We all complain about stress, but psychologists tell us that a certain amount of stress is good for us. It's usually what prompts us to action and when it's removed we're at risk of that medieval mental illness, accidie, defined as spiritual or mental sloth.
'Granting our wish is one of fate's saddest jokes,' said James Russell Lowell.
I imagine a lot of you are like me, stuck in this lockdown with the passing time smearing into a blur. Here in Colorado I think we're into week six or is it seven...eight?
To cope with the anxiety of the quarantine and the virus and the economy, I've been channeling my thoughts into a cartoon series called Cats In Quarantine.
You can follow the daily offerings on my Twitter feed, my Facebook page, or on Instagram.
But this economic meltdown did present an opportunity, of sorts. Earlier this week, when oil dropped to less than a dollar a barrel, I got the great idea of making lots and lots of money. I'd buy the oil now when it's dirt cheap and hang onto it until after the economy opens up. People will start driving. Airlines will be flying. The economy will be moving again, literally. When that happens, then oil will shoot back up to $40, $50, $60 a barrel. Buy low. Sell high. I'd be rich. Not Jeff Bezos rich but further ahead than where I am now. Then a friend with experience as a professional trader explained to me using short sentences and small words the folly of my plan. As background, if you looked at my bank account and my standard of living you'd see that my financial acumen is on the shy side of dazzling. Turns out that oil is a commodity and when you buy oil, you are buying an actual quantity of oil. You can't hang on to that oil for long unless you take physical possession. Which is why you have dudes scheming to lease tankers brimming with cheap oil and holding on to them until the price is right. There are instruments such as oil options, oil futures, oil EFTs, and others, and my friend cautioned that the road to financial ruin is paved with guys and their visions of easy money. And to underscore how perilous gambling on the stock market can be, the Wall Street Journal ran a brief article where US Senators - a class of people you'd think would have their thumb well positioned on the pulse of the financial world - have a worse track record than the regular investor. So my plans for quick bucks went poof!
This morning I looked up all the details for Clay's Compromise of 1850. It has five parts. I forget what they are already. Also, I'm sure you will all be interested in the exact Latin translation of mea culpa. Did you know that it's really too early to plant canna bulbs?
Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. and not only made everyone in Rome mad, he left us with cute phrases such as "crossing the Rubicon," and "the die is cast." When contact makers ask for "power" on their on-line prescription form it doesn't match up with anything on the optometrists sheet.
Last week I finished a really hard book review about an academic book, When Sunflowers Bloomed Red. It was hard because the editor only allowed 150 words for a really complex book. I also joyfully jumped right into the edits for my very short novella. It took me one day.
And now. . .clearly I'm descending into some kind of Google craziness wherein it seems really, vitally, extremely important to look up something this very minute.
Oddly enough I have all kinds of essential household projects I could be doing. I want to go through all my files and papers before I die. I want to finish quilts for my grandchildren. And oh yeah, the photos. But I can't get motivated.
One of my very best and most admired writing friends once told me "writers who aren't writing are prey to a sort of free-form anxiety."
Little did she know that writers who swear they don't mind the coronavirus isolation are even more susceptible to Google Fever, and electronic consumption in general.
Is there anyone out there who is taking advantage of this social sequestering to complete all the tasks they have put off in the past?
I live and work at a New England boarding school. To say COVID-19 has impacted the school and my work in it would be a gross understatement. I’m charged with overseeing a dorm of 60 teenagers and an English department of 15 teachers. That means many, many face-to-face conversations, meetings, and classroom observations.
However, I write this post seated in a four-story brick dorm designed for 220 teenagers that now sits empty. Wondering the halls makes me feel like I’m in a scene from The Shining. Worse, students’ belongings remain in their rooms (they left for spring break unaware that they would not return). “Teaching” these days means talking into my computer via ZOOM from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. The sports fields are empty. The theater is dark. The library is locked. The faculty is sequestered at home. A post-apocalyptic experience.
And I must say that I feel blessed to be here. I can get outside, walk the dog for 30 minutes, and not see a soul.
All the while, I’m writing the final scenes of a new book. It is set at a boarding school (I know, don’t say it, at least I can claim to write what I know). How much of the current pandemic should be in the book? I’m one year and 450 pages into it. When I began writing it, boarding school life, at least parts of it, resembled the way it was three, four, even five decades ago. “Kid work,” that is, the social interactions we make time for –– checking on students, reading the nonverbal cues, the body language –– was done face-to-face. But when I start final revisions (fingers crossed, in a week or two), I absolutely will add references to the pandemic. It has changed the way we deliver instruction and has changed the culture within this small society. “Kid work” now is done via Zoom, via text message. And the new normal will continue to evolve.
Of course, the pandemic goes far beyond the tiny world in which I live and write. Societal changes are happening hourly. In a scene I just completed, my antagonist needed to enter a building undetected. He had to be incognito. It dawned on me that given a book’s publication timeline, i.e. sale to shelf (will we still have bookshelves post-COVID-19 or will Jeff Bezos simply send me a Kindle reading list?), I’m actually writing for the book to be read 12 to 18 month from now. Why not have the character wear an M95 mask, sunglasses, and a hoodie? A year from now, it probably won’t be striking to see someone wearing a mask on a New England city street.
The world in which my day-to-day life and work takes place has been upended by this coronavirus, and the fictional world I’m writing about has, too.
To write the pandemic into your book or not to write the pandemic into your book.
