Listen

audible.com

One day while I doom scrolled Twitter, a writer declared listening to audio books to be cheating and not really reading. I may have unfollowed him or some other petty overreaction to all things social media. I also told myself he's entitled to his opinion no matter how wrong it is. 

Audiobooks are about a third of the books I consume in any given year. Last year, it was half. And while it's not reading with one's eyes, it is reading. There's even an editing technique having Word play back a manuscript. (Use that only for yourself. Edits for clients should contain track changes, and listening to that would be torture.) So, instead of whatever your inner narrator sounds like as you scan the page, you get an actor. Or several in the case of scifi author Gareth Powell.

I listen to audio books during my commutes to the office (only two a week now as we've gone hybrid.) and when I'm out taking a walk. Sometimes while doing the laundry or yard work. My listening lists range from memoirs to history to fiction off the beaten path (or can't get to with my towering stack of books and Kindle editions) to ancient texts to classics. I'm currently listening to The Iliad, read by Dominic Keating. Keating played Reed on Star Trek: Enterprise, so it's great to hear him perform something besides an overworked security chief on a balky starship. 

And often, it's the reader that makes the difference. Some, like Alice Walker, are authors reading their own work. In the case of Walker, who is also a lecturer, it's perfect. Walker wrote The Color Purple in dialect and could read it properly. Other times, it might have been nice if the author hired, if not an actor, then maybe their teenage niece or nephew who just did the high school musical.

Other times, publishers or authors hire a reader. Wil Wheaton has a thriving second career doing audio books, and he reads with a wicked sense of humor that was perfect for The Martian (after the publisher decided it didn't want original reader RC Bray, himself no slouch.) Other times, like some apocrypha I've been listening to, the reader probably needed some caffeine. I kept making fun of one reader but aping his annoying monotone as a forgotten Bible character asking God why he snored during his prayers. "Oh, Jedediah, my son. I would listen but your monotone has caused me to rest an eighth day, and lo, all the Heavenly host are face down in their lyres."

But is listening reading? Depends on how you define it. Sometimes, I choose by performer. Johnny Depp is hilarious reading Keith Richards's autobiography, Life, even doing a stoner Keith from the 1970s before Keef himself takes over. (And Keith is actually not a bad reader, but I often wonder how many takes he had to do, given his propensity to mumble.) One of my favorites was Jean Smart, she of Designing Women fame, when she did the VI Warshawski novels. She was VI Warshawski.

But if reading is consuming text, then yes, listening to audio books is reading. If you're adamant reading is done with your eyes, and listening is just hearing a dramatic performance (except when Mr. Monotone prompts the Almighty to nod off. Then it's not so dramatic.), then no.

I listen to Audible exclusively right now. I may roll back to the library's offerings if I slow down, and the subscription is no longer worth it. But until then...

I'm not done with the book until I hear that voice say, "Audible hopes you've enjoyed this program."

Pulled From The Ether

People ask a lot of questions when they find out someone is a writer. Some show a distinct lack of knowledge about what writing pays. Either the person is chronically unemployed or already has their retirement funded nine times over. In reality, most of us have day jobs or are retired. Some are about research. Of course, I wrote here a couple of times about where characters come from, and, of course, my favorite topic: setting. One question, however, sets almost every writer's teeth on edge.

"Where do you get your ideas?"

From the reader's, or at least non-writer's, point of view, it's a fair enough question. Most people may daydream, but they don't spend a lot of time trying to spin it into a story. Or if they do, not something beyond telling tales in a bar after it's too late to drive one's self home. So, why does this bother writers so much?

Well, ideas come from just about everywhere. I don't care if you're Harlan Ellison cooped up in a hotel room banging out the original version of Star Trek's "City on the Edge of Forever" on your ancient Underwood manual typewriter or my buddy Rick Partlow dictating the first of 5000 words a day while in the shower. You don't know where the ideas come from.

Stephen King often talks about this. Once, he referenced Ellison (I think. The memory is fuzzy after so many years), that famous master of sarcasm, who said, "Oh, I have a service in New Jersey I subscribe to for $25 a month." I read that in 1985, so I'm assuming, with inflation, it's now $75. Seriously, though, while I won't even try to fathom what went through Ellison's mind, I have seen where King's ideas came from.

Carrie - King's breakthrough novel and his debut is also his least favorite. (Me, personally, I don't like Christine, but I like Cell a lot less. But I'm just a silly consumer.) It came from working as a janitor in a high school and cleaning the girls' locker room. What are those weird dispensers on the wall? This was 1973, after all, and that stuff just wasn't talked about. Why were high school girls so mean? What about two girls he went to high school with who were outcasts? His contact with high school resulted in his first three novels: the Bachman books Rage and The Long Walk, and Carrie. He regrets Rage for what happened after the fact, but Carrie ended up in the garbage after a handful of pages. Why? He didn't get the main character. Fortunately, Tabitha King did and helped him finish it.

Pet Sematary - One of the king boys, I think it was Joe Hill, was a naughty little toddler and liked to run out in the road. At the time, the King family lived in a Maine logging town, and little Joe (or was it Owen?) nearly got squished by a logging truck barreling through at a pretty good clip. The incident, of course, prompted King to write his own version of "The Monkey's Paw," but was this latest edition to the Castle Rock continuum made up? A couple of years ago, my family and I toured New England. Driving from Burlington, Vermont, to Bar Harbor, we went through a hamlet situated between a mountain and a large foothill. I told my wife I thought this looked familiar. Might have been the buildings along one side of the road. And then a logging truck blew past us, its wake shaking the car. I said, "Oh, my God, Candy! We just drove through Pet Sematary!"

Cell - My least favorite King novel and a pale copy of The Stand. King hates cell phones. Get off his lawn. What if these idiotic gadgets set off the zombie apocalypse? I appreciate the sentiment, but not the execution. Although this was one of the first novels written after his accident, so give him credit for at least getting back on the horse. (Much prefer Duma Key.)

That's just Stephen King. Some ideas come from more bizarre directions than this. My first novel Northcoast Shakedown had its genesis in some balcony work at an apartment complex where I lived. What if someone pushed the guy off the ladder? On the scifi side, I came up with TS Hottle's Gimme Shelter when I saw a video game ad with ordinary people grabbing assault weapons to ward off aliens, all to the strains of... Well... "Gimme Shelter." I've had short stories inspired by getting stuck out in the rain, obsessive scifi fans, and the titles of Deep Purple songs.

Anthologies provide the best hooks. A few years ago, I was invited to one with a theme of Steely Dan songs. More recently (and unfortunately, I pulled out too soon), I submitted to a one-hit wonder themed anthology and came up with "Black Velvet" and its Elvis-themed lyrics. My favorite, though, was when someone wrote a story based on "Kid Charlemagne," the song itself having a real-life inspiration. 

One never knows when an idea will strike. I walk along railroad tracks a couple of times a week on my way home from Ye Olde Day Job. Between Norfolk Southern's woes and my still-childish need to see a train once in awhile, there may be a toxic heist in the offing.

I'm In The Story, Part Deux: This Time It's Personal. Or Maybe Not.

Last time in this space, I talked about one of my least favorite types of story: the roman à clef. I used Valley of the Dolls as my example. Roman à clefs are usually bad because they try to force fit real people, dialog, and events into a fictional narrative. Either the disguise doesn't really work, or you get flat characters and wooden prose.

Some people in the comments, however, objected, saying they either read or wrote characters based on real people. I countered that Frederick Forsyth often inserted real historical figures - Well, they were more like present-day notables at the time of the writing - into his work. That's not the same thing. Nor is using a real person as inspiration for a character. That's pulling ideas out of the ether.

In the first novel I wrote, Northcoast Shakedown, I based a few people on neighbors and friends. A couple people read it and picked out who immediately. But George, the apartment complex manager, was not Lee, the neighbor across the way. For starters, I think Lee would have fainted dead away with some of the stuff George had to do. The landlord who died might have looked like my landlord, but his demise was inspired by a neighbor he hired to redo the balconies in our complex. And the building itself just lent itself to the storyline. My coworkers at the time tied themselves in knots trying to guess who, at Terminal Tower Insurance, was really someone among us. I told them I didn't do that because, again, using real people as characters often backfires for one reason or another: bad writing, hurt feelings, or those damn characters doing whatever they wanted.

My stepson had trouble understanding this when I wrote the TS Hottle novella Flight Blade. I had my two pilots try to cover the one's oversleeping by saying they had miscommunicated and did not realize they were leaving early. The flight commander aboard their starship was named for my stepson and a lieutenant commander. "Why am I not an admiral?"

"I named the character after you. He's not you."

"But why am I not an admiral?"

It took a few go 'rounds to explain it. Then I read him the passage.

"Oh. I like that."

To quote said stepson, "Uh-huh."

What a lot of non-writers don't understand is characters are easy enough to pull from the ether. Someone else said every person is actually a hundred people, only one or two coming out in certain situations. The writer is a person who can pull all one hundred onto the page at the same time. One could actually look at a real person and spin four of five characters from them if they know that person well enough.

More often, the real-life inspiration is either an actor or a notable figure. Actors' performances sometimes crystalize an idea. I once wrote a character I pictured as Bill Pullman after seeing Independence Day. However, the way I wrote the character, someone else suggest Denzel Washington. Today, it would probably be Ryan Gosling and Idris Elba. (Actually, Idris would be the better fit if I still wrote that person. He has the same sense of humor, but can turn on the Luther/Stringer Bell intensity when needed. Plus the English accent would totally work.)

Notables are either ones with larger-than-life personas, or compelling life events that may inspire the story itself.

If you must know, I pilfered a couple of names from real life for Holland Bay, though the characters are not their real-life counterparts. I based one character on Ken Bruen after he gave me some input. But then Ken blurbed that book, so now the character is named Kearny. There's no Jack Taylor in Kearny. The others might have taken cues from real people, but they evolved on their own. Branson, Murdoch, and Armand Cole are all cut from whole cloth. Rufus had some television inspiration, as did Baker, who is what another character from another story would be like if the original wasn't a manipulative idiot. In reality, I liked the actor. The original character I couldn't stand. One has to be careful when using fictional inspiration. The gap between custom archetype, homage, and plagiarism is painfully small.

Using real people as a basis for a character is not roman à clef. It might surprise you to learn there was a real-life Beavis whom Mike Judge used as a model for his monumentally stupid creation, Beavis. However, the real Beavis had the name, the voice, and apparently in sarcastic moments, the laugh. But the hideous appearance, lack of intelligence, and disturbing fascination with fire all came after Beavis and Butthead had a few episodes under its belt. Let's hope the real Beavis had a sense of humor. Since he used to hang out with Mike Judge (whose normal voice is that of Butthead without he lisp and a larger vocabulary), I'm going to assume he got a big laugh out of it. A real one, not "Huh huh. Huh huh huh huh huh."

Of course, again, the difference here is the real person - notable or familiar - is the starting point. Once the character is in the story, they're going to do what they want, including flesh out an entirely new backstory. Which is what they're supposed to do.

I'm In That Book, Aren't I?

 Ah, yes. We get that question all the time, don't we? We write a book and immediately, the main character is always the author. Yeah. I'm a 21-year-old interstellar spy of Indonesian descent according to the scifi book I released today. Or I based that character on someone I know. Or the person asking the question. Or some celebrity.

Of course, I did. Because never, in the history of writing, has any author anywhere made something up. Well, someone had to. I'm currently reading Gilgamesh as I write this, and even characters in Greek mythology would say, "Dude, that's just too weird to be real." 

That's not to say writers don't base characters on real people. Some inspire them. I had a bubbly, party girl neighbor once who became a villain in a Nick Kepler novel. But no one would mistake the character for the real person. There are even whole novels where the characters are thinly veiled versions of real people. These make up a genre known as the roman a clef. 

And most of them are awful.

The most famous example is Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. It's still a bestseller, but I can't imagine how happy Judy Garland (who died not long after the book appeared), Ethel Merman, or Dean Martin could have been when Valley hit the bestseller lists. Certainly anyone who knew Carole Landis at the time of her death squirmed reading about Jennifer North's suicide. It might have been a bestseller, but it was never a classic. In one memorable scene from Star Trek IV: The Search for Nuclear Wessels, Leonard Nimoy, playing the emotionless, unflappable Spock, can't keep the sarcasm out of his voice when Kirk rattles off the names Susann and Harold Robbins. "Ah," he says in a dry tone that does nothing to hide what Nimoy the actor is thinking, "the giants."

Jacqueline Susann did manage to sell a lot of books. But try basing a character on a real person and getting it to work in the framework of a fictional story. I have tried. I always have to either reduce the character to a walk-on, emphasizing personality traits that made this sound like a plan, or throw out the character altogether. The fact is, when I or most writers create a character, the character doesn't care where I got the idea that brought them into being. They are in a fictional world I created, and they're going to go do what they want. So, you're weird friend from high school whom you thought would make a comedic version of Jeffrey Dahmer ends up being the annoying used car salesman instead. (Actually, I think my one weird, creepy friend does sell used cars now. Bad example.) 

I did successfully pull it off one time. There is a very short Nick Kepler novel in the drawer that has Nick dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He goes into a restaurant called Candy's Home Cooking, owned by a short, vivacious Kentucky girl named Candy. I just happened to marry a short, vivacious Kentucky girl named Candy who used to cater. It did work, but notice the book is not published and not likely to be in the near future.

I've had characters people assumed were me. Jeff Kagan from the Holland Bay series. JT Austin from my scifi. But Kagan is the son of one of the Mafia's pet cops. JT stormed out of a life of wealth and privilege only to blunder into an interstellar war. My parents were neither rich nor knew anyone in the Mafia. At least, not enough that it affected them directly. And anyway, I have more in common with Jessica Branson, the once-disgraced detective trying to revive her career. But I married a short, vivacious Kentucky girl who used to cater, not shacked up with a lovable hairy nerd.

The fact is, most characters come from the ether. There might have been a real person there in the beginning, but even obvious avatars of real people end up with their own histories. It goes back to a possibly apocryphal story about Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci had an enemy he so despised that, while painting The Last Supper, he put the man's face in for Judas. But he could not get the painting to work. He used a different face, and now the painting hangs in a convent in Milan that is considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So, if da Vinci couldn't do the roman a clef, it's probably a hard no for anyone else.

Da Vinci was nearly sued by Moe over use of his bar, as well as being portrayed as Judas.
Said the master artist, "D'oh!"
Source: Fox

Only Immortal For A Limited Time

Source: jeffbeck.com

I'm writing this the day after the great Jeff Beck passed away at the age of 78. Together with the other two Yardbirds legends, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, Beck played a huge role in expanding my musical palate. Every kid of a certain age came up on Clapton's blues and country influenced rock, though it's his work with Cream and shortly thereafter that caught the attention of us metal heads. Then there's the lick master, Pagey. If you were a Gen X male in the Midwest, Led Zeppelin dominated your playlists. In fact, I often joke that, in 1989, I had a mullet, all Zeppelin on cassette, and a Camaro. No photographic evidence exists of the mullet. The Camaro died of benign neglect. But Zeppelin when straight to CD as soon as that format became available to me.

At the center was Beck. With Ronnie Wood (later of the Rolling Stones) and Rod Stewart, he formed a sort of proto-Zeppelin.But alas, it was Page and John Paul Jones and, eventually, Bonham and Plant, that went for the heavier sound. Beck turned to his true love, jazz, to reinvent rock and roll, with a whole lotta Miles Davis as inspiration.

And now he's gone. So is Bowie. And Neil Peart. And Charlie Watts. Emerson and Lake, leaving only Palmer. Mick Mars of Motley Crue, who thrilled many of my high school classmates (I was a Deep Purple, classic metal kinda guy. No Ozzy for me. Gimme original Sabbath, who sounded like a garage band. A really good garage band.) had to retire because his joints are freezing up. Chris Squire, the sorcerer on bass, and his partner, drummer Alan White, are gone. I mention this to my brother every time we lose another legend. And he always says the same thing.

"We're getting to the age where we're losing our heroes."

In a way, that's sad. I like to point out that there are still three Beatles alive. Paul and Ringo, of course, but also Pete Best, who's still working. Maybe at a less noticeable level than the two surviving Fab Four, but enough to annoy the hell out of Decca Records.

It's funny because I don't respond the same way to the deaths of other artists the way I do musicians. And I'm not a musician. I probably could have been had I gotten an instrument in my teens and practiced, practiced, practiced. Even 76-year-old Robert Fripp still practices and points at guitarists I would consider lesser talents and say, "Another reason I still need to practice." But I'm not a musician, I'm a writer.

I'm sure Stephen King's eventual demise will rattle my cage. But I did not respond to the loss of Robert B. Parker, Philip Roth, or Sue Grafton the way Tom Petty still has me in mourning over five years later. And actors? Anymore, I can't keep up with the younger ones, and the older ones I often catch myself saying, perhaps tactlessly, "He/She was still alive?" (Alan Rickman was an exception. That one hit hard.)

But musicians are a different breed. They shine brightly in the beginning, achieve a certain level of success that lets them do what they really want, then use the original glory to support their music habit well into old age. (Yes, Willie Nelson is still working in his 90s. I suspect the Stones will be the first centenarian rockers. Well, rocker. They are slowly turning into the Keith Richards Band.)

It does, however, go back to living memory. During my childhood, the echoes of World War II still rumbled loudly, even overwhelming the Cold War. Though my grandfather did not serve, he worked for GM during the war, and many classmates' parents and grandparents served in some capacity, military or civilian. Moreover, our reruns and special guests on sitcoms worked in that era. If the president wasn't a WWII vet - Nixon, Reagan (whose eyesight confined him to Hollywood), GHWB - then they served in Korea: Ford and Carter. But that generation is rapidly disappearing the way the World War I generation vanished before my thirtieth birthday. It might explain the confusion and uncertainty of today. Where do we go next?

For Gen X, especially the older Gen X, along with the youngest Boomers, we have music. Music brought rebellion and freedom in the sixties, unexpected flights of fancy and walls of sound in the seventies, complete reinvention in the eighties, and back to basics in the nineties. And now we're losing the ones who made that happen. That's our living memory. Perhaps in twenty years, reality stars will begin to pass on from something other than excess or accident. Old age, cancer, the next great plague will take them. And Millennials and Gen Z will feel it the as acutely as I still feel the loss of Tom Petty and Jeff Beck.

2022 Rearview

Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

By the time you read this, I will be finishing up the 104th book I've read this year. This includes Audible. It's rare I can read that many books in a year. Had I not learned to speed read, I probably would not have pulled this off. With the ability to speed read certain books, I actually could give them the attention they deserved (or didn't.)

The Herculean reading list was driven in part by wanting to finish Stephen King's canon. Assuming only one book in 2023 for Mr. King, I probably will wrap up this years-long project with Holly in October. As I finish up the two latest, Gwendy's Final Task and Fairy Tale, I'll turn my attention to the Bachman books. Rage, which is now out of print by King's request, will likely be the most difficult to read in this era of school shootings. Road Work, though short, will probably be the slog I remember when I first read it twenty years ago.

I also rotated through some classics – Twain, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, as well as Harold Bloom's list of novels from How to Read. One from this last list proved to be a massive disappointment. Another I decided to save for later due to its sheer length and a lack of an Audible version that wasn't a glorified radio drama. So what did I read this year?

I'll skip science fiction unless it fits a category here.

First Book: Galway Girl by Ken Bruen. Until this year, I made it a point to start with one of Bruen's Taylor novels. Due to a release date issue, I read is last in November. But Galway Girl seems to be a mulligan for Em's fate in a previous book. A new foil, a virtual clone of Em (deliberately so, as we find out), comes to menace Jack. It's not bad, but gone are Ridge and Maeve. Father Malachy is a more reluctant antagonist. And Clancy is nowhere to be seen except in a couple of scenes. We're left wondering just how much more Jack can take at the hands of his creator, meaning Bruen. We find out in the follow-up, A Galway Epiphany, which I also read this year.

Last Book: We can look at it two ways: on the day I'm writing this, I finished King's On Writing, one of a handful of books I reread annually or every other year. But on the day you read this, I'll be wrapping up an ARC of Right Between the Eyes by Scott Loring Sanders. So far, Right Between the Eyes is turning into a cross between a Stephen King novel with its small-town New England setting and an SA Cosby book, semi-rural crime with lots of secrets and lies.

On Writing, of course, is a must-read for any writer. The book never seems the same to me twice. Maybe because, while I reread it more than other books, I don't read that often.

Best Book Read This Year: Under Color of Law by Aaron Philip Clark. Clark's Detective Trevor Finnegan is setup to fall as he investigates the death of a brother officer. Finn, as he's called, decided to be a cop to "make a difference," even giving up a promising art career to do it.

Rather than a tirade on race, Clark paints a nuanced portrait of LA's racial tension. He does point a finger at the LAPD of the nineties for the present undercurrent of distrust. But Finn is uniquely positioned to see both sides. Yes, police brutality and systematic racism are very real, but Clark manages to convey something that gets lost in the narrative. With each shooting of an unarmed civilian and each violent protest that follows, police officers feel something they're paid not to show: Fear. And each incident makes it worse. Yet Finn understands why a black man also feels fear, so it's double for him with a foot in each world. 

Clark gets the whole picture, all the while having Finn confront the same corrupt department politics we normally see. His solution doesn't give his would-be rivals the satisfaction they crave.

Biggest Disappointment: Portrait of a Lady. And some heads are probably exploding over this one. Too bad. I pulled this one from a list of novels recommended by the late Harold Bloom in his book How to Read. Harold owes me an apology. The book begins with the author doing his own literary criticism, which left me screaming, "That's not how this works! That's not how any of this works!" And then we're treated to fifty pages of the problems of rich people. I am aware I said this as someone who also watches The Crown and Succession. The former, though, is history through people who are supposed to represent it. The latter is watching the 1% trip over themselves trying to rule the world. (And let's be honest, it's a joy to watch Brian Cox work.) This started with a bunch of bankers sniffing disdainfully at how it must be sad not to be a rich Victorian. I barely got to see the lady of the title before I bailed. 

This is one of those books we're supposed to read, and somehow, King found it praiseworthy. King also likes Roger Corman films whereas I generally skip them unless they have three silhouettes at the bottom making wise-ass comments. (Mind you, Corman has mentored generations of filmmakers, so he can make a movie about Prince Harry's grocery list for all I care. The next Tarantino may learn something from it.)

Biggest Surprise: Ohio: A Novel. This one hit a little close to home. These were Millennials growing up in a town not too dissimilar to the burb where I grew up. It's even set in NE Ohio, my old stomping grounds. My mind's eyes supplied Lucas, Ohio, a town near where my parents spent their final years, as the set surrounding this drama involving five local kids who return as adults for the funeral of a classmate who died a war hero. Ohio captures the despair of the Rust Belt from a generation that doesn't remember when Big Steel and Big Auto ruled. A sixth member of the group is missing. It seems she's gone to Southeast Asia and disappeared, but her actual fate is teased out over the novel It becomes clear that Ohio is less about a fallen war hero who was not the paragon from his eulogy and more about this missing woman who mysteriously still writes home.

Newest Addiction: SA Cosby. This year, I read Blacktop Wilderness and Razorblade Tears. Had to wait until December for the rerelease of My Darkest Prayer, which will be second read of the new year. Cosby does what Ken Bruen does: Paints a dark portrait of a very real place. Instead of Galway, we get Virginia, away from the Beltway and the DC suburbs. Like Pelecanos's DC, which ignores the "visitors," Cosby writes about the south, how religion and race and poverty all go into the stew that is southern culture. Some pieces are quite unpleasant, but the whole is not. And if we're going to call it a stew, then SA Cosby is a master chef.

The Pros And Cons of Rideshare

 I've done rideshare for a while now. It's an easy way to make exrra money and get a leg up on bills. Gas hasn't been too bad for me. But I live in Ohio, and my car gets decent mileage.

But lately, the job hasn't been as much fun as it once was. Some of that comes from not driving so late. I don't do the 12-3 drunk rush on Saturday nights. The people who get into my car are generally sober. They're also rather subdued.

But that's not a stressor. I drive less now partly because the service now pays bonuses for twenty runs a weekend. That's good. I get tired more easily these days. And that's one reason I want to wind down my rideshare career.

• Fatigue - I always got tired driving. But I used to drive set times, some of them until the wee hours on Saturdays. Now I notice it more knocking off at 10 or 11 PM. 
• Wear and tear - This is a nice car I drive. I'd like to not buy another one for a few more years. Yet that dreaded 100K number is coming up.
• Driver shortage - You'd think this would be a plus. Fewer drivers mean more money. But the runs are longer. At one point, I got sent almost into Dayton. I live fifty miles south of there. Not a good night.
• Karening - I had a passenger who complained when I slowed down to look for an address. She reported me for falling asleep at the wheel. I reported her for being disruptive. I got $100 for having my account suspended for an evening. 
• Violence - It's in the news. Violence is escalating. Random shootings have happened in Over the Rhine, the bar district where I've made a lot of money. It's not been a problem. Yet. The shootings tend to happen after I log off for the night. Still, one evening, I stopped at a Shell Station in Cincinnati's Price Hill neighborhood. Literally, it looked like a scene from The Wire. There was no question what was going on. I had four toddlers in the backseat while their grandmother ran inside to pick up something. I never locked the door during a shift before. I did this time.

Some would say, "Hey, this is a great opportunity for crime fiction." True. But if you've read just my stories, you know being in the story is not much fun. 

Canon Shots

 Some people make it a mission to read everything a writer puts out. Some multiple writers. I have several, plus a list from Harold Bloom.

Harold Bloom's List

Harold Bloom could be both fascinating and infuriating. But he did put forth an interesting list of novels to read going all the way back to Don Quixote and ending with recent novels Blood Meridian, Invisible Man, and Song of Solomon. For the most part, I've liked about every book on the list, though I found Crime and Punishment difficult. (A native Russian and one who knew the language said it loses something in translation.) I skipped two, one for sheer length and one for... Well...

I'm not exactly sure about the merit of a book where the author begins with his own literary criticism. I won't say who it was.

Still, it's a good exposure to classic literature, though there are some titles I wish he'd included.

William Shakespeare

The Bard is the English language writer. Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and A Midsummer Night's Dream are all cultural touchstones. The Tempest even gets remade periodically as science fiction. (Forbidden Planet anyone?) Getting a proper chronological list of plays is tough. Sometimes, they contain plays we have no copies of, like Loves Labours Won and Thomas More.

I started with all three Henry VI plays. For such a weak English monarch, it always puzzled me why he got three plays. Parts I and II were actually written later, but in the interest of continuity, I read them as a whole.

My favorites so far are A Comedy of Errors and Richard III. Romeo and Juliet is next up next. I read it in junior high, but that was a have-to. This is a want to. Loves Labours Lost was fun in places. I thought it read like an Elizabethan rap battle. Some, like Edward III, are slogs. In Shakespeare's defense, you can tell he was brought in to save Edward as it was disjointed and doesn't even read like one of his histories

I started going through the Bard's canon about six years ago. It'll probably take me another six to finish. 

Source: stephenking.com

Stephen King

Of course, he's the most popular American author in history. Somehow, a horror writer has supplanted writers of a literary bent. But King's horror is not the cheap horror of the sixties and seventies. It's not the all-out horror of Lovecraft (of whom Kind is a fan.) No, in King's novel, the devil moves next door, seems perfectly normal, and even asks to borrow your mower. Only he's worried about the guy that moved in across the street. He's the monster.

Like Shakespeare, he has his hits (Salem's Lot, The Stand, It) and misses (Cell, anyone?) King's real genius is world-building. The fictional Maine is as real as the one in our world. Castle Rock, for all its northern New England quirks (and monsters) is the small town everyone knows. It's how Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption resonate without being horror, but we're also sucked into various versions of It and The Stand when they come to television. He's even ventured into crime with the first two entries of the Bill Hodges Trilogy and Billy Summers, though End of Watch took a supernatural turn. So vivid is his worldbuilding that Richard Chizmar, his coauthor on two of the Gwendy books, wrote the second installment of the series solo while hitting all the notes that make Castle Rock Castle Rock. I've been reading his books in order, not counting the Bachman books, since about 2010. Now reading one a month, I plan to finish up, including the Bachman novels, next year. And the guy who wrote Fairy Tale is not the same one who wrote Carrie. Any writer worth his salt should find out how by reading his nonfiction masterpiece, On Writing.

 

Mark Twain

I dove back into Twain when his full autobiography came out. Twain didn't so much write his life story as he wrote the extended travelogue his publishers did not have the capacity to release. Tales of his early career and life sound either like backstory for Tom and Huck, the extended version of The Innocents Abroad, or one of his sarcastic essays where Mr. Clemens is as much the target of his satire as anyone else around him. When we get to the middle of his life, his narrative is both heartwarming and heartbreaking as he talks about his wife and daughters, two of whom he would outlive. His final years saw a dark cynicism, and possibly a bit of cruelty that he dutifully presents as an unreliable narrator. There's a reason he stipulated the work not be released in its entirety or in chronological order until 100 years after his death. I went back and reread Huckleberry Finn while waiting for the final volume. Then I went back to the beginning and read his travelogues, essays, and novels in order. I must say I actually prefer Twain's nonfiction to his fiction, but then if there were no Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, there would have been no Hemingway, no Chandler, or even Stephen King.

And as one who appreciates a good smartass, I appreciate Twain as much as I appreciate his spiritual ancestors, Washington Irving and Benjamin Franklin.

What's In A Name? Part Deux: Electric Boogaleux

 Back in ye olden days, when we would take the Maxwell down to the local druggest, gather around the soda fountain, and listen to the swingin' sounds of Rudy Vallee on the store's Victrola, I decided to write under the name Jim Winter. The how and why and origins of the name are best left in the murk of the 90s. (Oh, how I miss the 90s. Just not dial-up Internet.)

When I decided to this "for real," I used Jim Winter convinced I was the next Dennis Lehane, then riding high with Mystic River. But I also heard tales of well-known authors having manuscripts shoved at them by hopeful neophytes under the stall doors of restrooms, of Stephen King's home invaded by obsessed fans, or just not being able to finish a meal at a restaurant. I decided to cloak myself in anonymity, calling myself "Jim Winter' and not even showing my face until my first novel came out. (The publisher said, no, he wanted a head shot for an author photo and pointed out it was in my contract. Jerk.)

So I became Jim. I also signed badly. Starting revolutionary technology firms or car companies or even just a respectable business out of one's garage is the stuff of legend. Out of one's garage, like my then publisher? Not so much.

But sign badly I did. Had I waited two weeks, I'd have had an agent and possibly a respectable career as a crime novelist. That did not happen, and here we are. The thing is there is a still swath of people in the crime fiction community who still know me as "Jim."

"Well, gee, um, Jim, you write this column as Jim Winter. What's your point?"

Quiet. I have bushes to beat around!

Flash forward a few years. I had an agent, but the partnership really didn't work out. I decided the one standalone novel I wrote, Road Rules, made a good candidate for the Kindle Revolution. A note on revolutions: You want to get in early. I did not. But I did finish off the first three Kepler novels, a novella, two short story collections, and, of course, Road Rules. Might have been nice if I understood how to make covers and format manuscripts back then. I might have done better.

But I also wrote an early version of Holland Bay, which made the number of plot threads in Game of Thrones look like a two-page outline. I wrote. I rewrote. I thought I had another agent. That fell through. A towel got thrown in, and off I went to become science fiction writer TS Hottle.

A funny thing happened on my way to failing to become the next John Scalzi. My wife read Holland Bay and told me to send it backdoor to a friend at a Big Five Publisher. (Never mind which one. I do not want to get this person in trouble.) It bypassed the slush pile, made it up to the C suite, and an acquisition editor proceeded to do due diligence. Only...

I had trashed the Jim Winter platform. No more web site, Facebook, or even Twitter. This editor searched for TS Hottle on teh intrawebs, and...

The Children of Amargosa is a scifi novel. So is Second Wave. So is Tishla. No Road Rules. No Northcoast Shakedown. No The Compleat Winter. 

Oops. They passed. 

But...

Jim Winter, renaissance man!

TS Hottle, handsome devil

Someone referred me to Down & Out Books. And for that to work for them, I had to resurrect Jim Winter because I had already down two short story anthos as Jim.

So, for science fiction, I'm TS, stuck in his own universe. For crime, I'm Jim. And sometimes, I'm Maurice, 'cuz I speak from the pompatus of love.* Jim does not wear glasses or a hat. TS wears glasses. And a jaunty hat. Worn, as required, at a rakish angle.

 

*I can't back that up.

Amish Mafia. In COLOR!

Source: Discovery Networks

 So about eight or nine years ago, Discovery ran a show supposedly about The Amish Mafia. It centered on a Lancaster, PA man named Levi who never entered the faith but was tasked with "collecting" for an Amish benevolent society. His methods were... um... questionable. Part of the show took place in Holmes County, Ohio and centered on a religious zealot named Merlin, who would declare to the camera that "Amish do not..." whatever it is had his dander up that particular moment.

In interviews, Merlin would boast about how he was a wanted man in Holmes and nearby Stark County. 

Yeah. About that.

I am tangentially related to the sheriff in Holmes County. He was the one who got word back to my family that my dad died. His niece is my first cousin once removed. And her grandmother (my aunt) grew up Amish. So, what did the sheriff of Holmes County think of one of his most dangerous citizens having a reality show?

"Honestly, I never heard of him until this show came on the air."

It gets better. My cousin knows all about the Amish not only from her grandmother but from spending a good chunk of her childhood in Holmes County. You can't not do business with them, nor would you want to try. Fire wood, food, furniture, these are things they excel at and sell to us "English". Plus, they're the neighbors. Usually, good neighbors. So when my cousin tuned into this show listening to Merlin pontificate about what is and isn't Amish (or better still, watching Levi tool around greater Philadelphia in a Cadillac Bruce Wayne would love to retrofit for his fleet of Batmobiles), let's just say her head exploded.

My personal favorite was Merlin declaring, "The Amish do not drink!"

I heard some snickering coming from the direction of a cemetery in nearby Fredericksburg, where my parents are buried. In fact, given that I was in suburban Cincinnati at the time, I'd say it was a hearty guffaw from beyond the grave by my late father. Dad once informed me that the Amish not only drank beer, but they brew their own. And apparently, steeped in German purity laws (for they are German and Swiss), their beer will knock you on your ass. (And they don't sell it, which kind of sucks as I haven't known any Amish on a first-name basis since about 1990.) The Amish do indulge in a lot of things Merlin declares are just not done. But Amish communities are so insular and segregated that guys like Levi and Merlin can make a bullshit show depicting a supposed Mafia (of which both considered themselves dons.) 

In the interest of diversity, some of those on the show were Mennonites, 'cuz Mennonites have cars and electricity. However...

Quite a few have televisions. I assume not that many watched Amish Mafia. And then there are the Brethren. The show has them wearing a lot of flannel, suspenders, driving older cars, and basically being Amish for the twenty-first century.

Uh huh.

Allow me to set the record straight. I grew up Brethren. At the age of four, I discovered Star Trek when my parents subscribed to cable (In a valley. You watched cable or the NFL wasn't happening.) and bought one of those large color TVs that were basically furniture. My dad drove a 1971 Fairlane he bought new. Mom listened to Johnny Cash and Elvis. When I came of age, I blasted KISS and Blondie.

So, how does a Brethren family get away with that if Amish Mafia says their Amish-lite?

If you haven't picked up on it by now, Levi (who is also executive producer of the show. Hmm...) and Merlin are selling a fantasy. I suspect one or both of them read a lot of Elmore Leonard. Too bad we're not getting Justified out of the deal. Now that was a show. The Brethren do, in fact, have their roots in what's called the Anabaptist tradition. Which also gave us the Baptists. Who drive new cars, stream, and listen to a lot of Blake Shelton and Imagine Dragons. The Brethren are more Baptist-lite than Amish-lite. Indeed, my parents walked away because they leaned into the hippie movement more, and they wanted to be more traditional. The pastor when I was in junior high went to Woodstock, argued about the merits of Deep Purple with me (He was more a coffee-house acoustic guy), and was trying to restore a battered Alfa Romeo in his spare time.

In other words, they were no more bizarre than your office coworkers. (Bad example. Some of my coworkers over the years have left me questioning my own sanity.) 

Amish Mafia reached peak absurdity after it was canceled by Discovery. Levi and Merlin decided to appear on Dr. Phil so Phil could mediate their "dispute." They basically took over the show, which is the only time I actually sympathized with Dr. Phil. 

More recently, I sent out a novel for a read before I do final revisions and give it to my publisher. I got the most curious note back. "Is there really an Amish mafia?"

There's probably something like it, but, as the actual Sicilian mafia would say, "Our thing is secret." The Amish struggle with the same things as everyone else, which means someone somewhere in one of the communities is exploiting the culture's rigid customs to their advantage. It's hard to say because they don't call the police until it gets beyond their capacity to deal with it. Plus, with few phones (usually a community phone or an English neighbor's mobile), 911 is not the push of a button it is for most of us. 

But most Amish I've known over the years are honest, hardworking, and shrewd. I'd venture to say that my cousins with the formerly Amish mother got their business sense from them. Two of the brothers run a thriving angus farm that took over for their father's dairy operation while the oldest is a real estate wizard.

And not a Levi in sight. Unfortunately, because Merlin prowls my old stomping grounds in NE Ohio, I'll probably run into him at some point.

Maybe I'll ask him if he can get me Dr. Pimple Popper's autograph. My young cousin will think that's hilarious.

You Said What About the Bard?

Recently, someone told me what a rebel he thought he was for giving Stephen King a three-star review on Goodreads. "Look at me. A nobody. And I dared to give Stephen King a three-star review. I had to point out that I once wrote a review in a forum that Cell was utter crap. I, too, am a nobody, but as a reader, I have to be honest. And believe me, I'm going through King's entire canon, a years-long project I may wrap up next year.

Years earlier, in a chat room where a bunch of mystery types hung out, Shakespeare came up. I had recently seen The Tempest performed. Now, The Tempest is a great story that's been the template for a lot of subsequent tales, quite a few science fiction. Prospero, the exiled duke, is a terrific archetype for someone powerful cast out of society or even a mad scientist. And why not? He's both. But during the chat, I mentioned, "But I can't stand Ariel. She's like the token female." One could make that argument about Alaira in Forbidden Planet, which sets The Tempest in space, files off the serial numbers, and no one calls Leslie Nielsen "Shirley." However, Altaira, while providing the leggy eye candy many fifties movies required, is an active participant. Ariel bored the hell out of me. The response?

"That takes a lot of balls to criticize the Bard!"

Really?

First off, William Shakespeare deserves his place among English language writers. He did more to drag English into the modern era than anyone else, dragging it kicking and screaming into the modern era and away from Canterbury Tales. It also helped standardize English to the point where Pacific Rim countries use English because, as I sit here, there are at least six languages, not counting Russian, from Northern Japan to Malaysia, including several in China. Learning English is simpler. I'll leave the debates about cultural imperialism and colonialism to someone else. The point is, English, like French before it and still alongside it in some places, is an international language.

That said, Shakespeare was a writer like any other, human and prone to mistakes. He was very good at catching mistakes or, like a musician who doesn't have a modern producer interfering with his work, good at exploiting mistakes. He makes the most judicious use of anachronisms of any writer in any language, which helps make his work timeless.

But dare one criticize the Bard? Let me ask you this. How often do you see King John performed. John was a fascinating figure, a tyrant who'd be right at home among the tech moguls, autocratic leaders, and arrogant CEOs of today. But there is a consensus among scholars that Will did not execute his take on the Plantagenet's most unpopular heir very well. One even suggested they liked Mel Brooks's version from Robin Hood: Men in Tights better. Brooks is no Shakespeare. On the other hand, a collaboration between the author of MacBeth and the creator of Blazing Saddles would be hilarious. That's another topic.

The point is that yes, he has earned his place in the pantheon of English letters. So have a lot of writers. But Shakespeare occasionally wrote garbage. So has Mark Twain. And Hemingway. And there's no shortage of people lining up to lecture you on why Stephen King is overrated. Some other time, I may Jimsplain why they're wrong about King, but not today.

So, why would I criticize the Bard? How dare I? I'm the one Will worshiped. I'm the audience. I'm the reader. If he's not connecting, or he's rubbing me the wrong way (Titus Andronicus is a recently read example.), I'm going to say something.

The flip side of that is that Shakespeare's reputation is safe. No one's going to rethink their position because some minor crime writer from Ohio thought that Titus Andronicus or King John are weak plays. On the contrary, because he wrote MacBeth and Richard III and Romeo and Juliet, I can finish up Edward III. (In Will's defense, I think he was brought in to salvage that one at some point, since it was a collaboration.) But not to say anything?

We hold Philip Roth up as a man of American letters, but there is no end of criticism leveled at Operation: Shylock. Looking at King, even King will tell you there are a few books he wished he hadn't published, and I don't mean the violent, disturbing Rage (of which I have a copy.) He claims no memory of Cujo or Christine, mainly because his chemical hobbies interfered with his writing. And the aforementioned Cell was one of the first novels started after his accident. There are explanations, but it doesn't change that two of those books were ordeals to finish.

So, why not the Bard? We love him. We read and watch his plays endlessly. He attracts us whether we love Hallmark or scifi or history. Richard III is the ultimate political thriller. The Taming of the Shrew is a raunchy version of the latest Lacey Chabert offering. The Tempest manages to get remade as a scifi movie or TV episode every couple of years. So, why not come out and say when something doesn't work? Do we not learn from the mistakes of the greats the way we learn from what they get right?

The Town Tamer

CC 2011 Bradford Timeline

One of the most tired cliches from Westerns is the town tamer. And you can thank Wyatt Earp for it. In the 1920s, no one had heard of Tombstone, Arizona and the OK Corral. But Earp, who had been a US Marshal in places like Dodge City, Kansas and Peoria, Illinois, still considered frontier land four years after the death of the state's favorite son, Abraham Lincoln.

The OK Corral is an iconic legend of the Old West. But it really didn't enter the public imagination until Earp drifted into Hollywood as what's now called a technical consultant during silent film's heyday. Earp told a screenwriter or a director or possibly even Tom Mix of how he, his brothers, and his consumption-wracked pal Doc Holliday took on a gang of outlaws. Back before Tinsel Town lost the ability to do anything more than remakes or franchises and charge you a second mortgage to see the latest James Bond, they never met a cool story they didn't like.

Nor did a writer named Dashiell Hammett, who decided to adapt the concept for his Continental Op series. The Op, never named, rolls into Personville, Montana, dubbed by the locals as "Poisonville" for its violence and its filthy ground and air from nearby mining. Hammett moves Tombstone north, swaps out the Earp brothers and Holliday for the Op as a solo operator, and uses a recent labor dispute in Butte, Montana (the real-life inspiration for Personville) as a jumping off point.

Thus, the town tamer was born. And it shows up again in the twice-fictionalized tales of Sheriff Buford Pusser (one of Joe Don Baker's surprisingly decent acting turns and a miss for Dwayne Johnson), Jack Reacher's debut (well-adapted for television on Prime), and one of the better latter-day Spenser novels.

What is it about the town tamer that's so intriguing? Earp, after all, was a law man who hired his brothers and deputized the local dentist. Pusser, in the original based-on-a-true-story version of Walking Tall, was a local sheriff.

Source: Amazon Prime Video

The Op and Spenser are professionals brought in to solve a problem. Reacher blunders into a small Georgia town that looks like a gentrified version of The Dukes of Hazzard, minus the idiot sheriff and lovably corrupt county boss. (Ironically, Reacher's casual girlfriend is named "Roscoe." I'll let Lee Child explain that one.) Reacher isn't a professional. He's like the Op, except he doesn't even freelance. He's just there to hear some blues music from the source.

But it's one man taking on the system. And in each of these stories, the system has gotten complacent. Earp may have been taking out a local gang of thugs easily knocked over these days by the likes of The Wire's Stringer Bell or one pissed-off police district (or even a bar brawl that goes horribly awry for them.) The Op took on a mining concern that counted on fear to get its way. Reacher goes after counterfeiters who made the mistake of killing his brother. Spenser knocks over a Mexican gangster who decides he's kingpin from Daredevil (either version. It's the same guy.) Usually, where this happens, someone gets too comfortable with their reign of terror. And one thing that such people forget is that reigns of terror require actual terror. If the one coming at you isn't terrified, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

Sometimes that works in real life, but it's a staple of our crime fiction, even scifi and spy thrillers. Someone turns "Boo!" into a superpower, and someone else not really feeling it becomes their kryptonite.

Three Books in 2022

Since about 2011, I've kept a spreadsheet of what I've read over a given year. Thanks to multiple formats, the number's been as high as 100. Thanks to Audible, it's never gone as low as 30. Last year, I read 52. One of them was a book on speed-reading.

I read widely. I'm working my way through Stephen King's back list, and with any luck, Billy Summers will be one of the last books I read this year. I do a rotation. Non-fiction of some sort, crime, science fiction, an indie writer who's caught my attention, a classic, and King. Part, but not all, of the classic side includes Harry Bloom's novel list from How to Read. I'll spare you the rest as the non-fiction tends to be all over the map, and SF is not really the purpose of Sleuthsayers. So, let's focus on crime.

Every year since about the mid-2000s, I've started off with Ken Bruen, mainly the Jack Taylor series. Assuming 2022 does not involve kaiju, nuclear annihilation, another great plague, alien invasion, or Ken writing one more Jack Taylor, I will probably finish the series in January of 2023. For January, 2022, I'm reading Galway Girl. I was not a big fan of Em when she appeared in the series. I couldn't figure out if Ken was passing the baton to a young woman even more rage-prone than Jack or something else. (Spoiler alert: Something else.) But then, at the end of In the Galway Silence, he introduces a woman who is a clone of Em, and, it seems, by choice. She calls herself Jericho, and yes, she is there to make Jack's life a living hell. Only, whenever someone wants to torment Jack, they have to get in line. At the head of the line, they inevitably find out Jack calls that "Tuesday."  Ken doesn't so much write a novel with the Taylor series as much as write violent epic poems set in Galway. Galway Girl is proving to be a dark, bleak novel full of nihilism and death. It's a marvelous way to start off a new year full of hope and optimism. (Or at least the fleeting hope that the hangover from 2020 will finally lift.)

The next crime novel on the list is SA Cosby's Razor Blade Tears. I'd like to compare Cosby to Ken Bruen, but the first thing by him that I read, Black Top Wasteland, I found too optimistic. Seriously, though, I read Wasteland last year after connection with Shawn online. It was probably the best crime novel I'd read in a long time, so both Razor Blade Tears and his upcoming All Sinners Bleed are on this year's TBR stack. Cosby writes about the South, does not shy away from race, yet writes about a world not too dissimilar from where I grew up, which was seventies and eighties Rust Belt. Like Blacktop, Blade is about an ordinary man without privilege who has his life upended by crime, in this case, the murder of his son. What's amazing about Cosby's work is the characters may lead a different life from most of us, but the landmarks on their path are quite often all-too-familiar.

Third on the list is Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. Set in 1954, its premise has a lot in common with SA Cosby's work. A young man released from a juvenile work farm is driven home to Nebraska. He intends to pick up his recently orphaned brother and head for California to start a new life. Two of his fellow inmates have secretly tagged along with another plan: They want to take him to New York. Lincoln Highway covers more familiar territory for me geographically, rolling across the Midwest, though it's a time when the steel mills still roared, Studebakers still rolled off the assembly lines alongside Packards, and steam powered the railways.

There will be more, obviously. Someone who read 52 books last year, with every sixth Kindle, paperback, or hardcover a crime novel, these three are only enough to get me through early spring.

So, what's on your TBR stack for this year?

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

 Every couple of years or so, I find myself traveling somewhere that takes me out of my comfort zone. When my wife and I dated, I had intended to propose to her in Put in Bay, a quaint summer village on an island in Lake Erie. Yes, it's in Ohio, but it's an entire world away from there. (The ring didn't come back from the jeweler in time, so I had to propose when we got back.) 

Put in Bay is many things. Historically, it's where Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry launched his famous counterattack against the British during the War of 1812. But the pace of life there is slower. You're surrounded by a large inland sea, and the sound of water lapping against the beach reaches the entire island.

These kinds of trips always have some sort of impact on my writing. No two places are the same. When I attended Bouchercon semi-regularly, I loved going to Toronto, Chicago, and Madison. (Indy is close enough to my home to be familiar.) Writing trips to Baltimore and even Frankfurt, Kentucky, an evening drive round-trip, took me away from normal. And it always finds its way into my writing.

Two years ago, my wife, her mother, and my stepson took a long-awaited trip down Route 66 that included me taking a frantic phone call at work. Candy informed me that she was driving through a blizzard.

In Arizona.

Four days before Memorial Day.

I couldn't get a full two weeks off at work but I wanted my own cross-country drive. So after meeting the family in San Francisco for the weekend, my stepson and I took a rented Ford Fusion back to Cincinnati, which took a week. We saw snow again on Memorial Day, drove through the alien landscape that is the Nevada desert, visited Vegas and Hoover Dam, snapped a photo of me holding a cup of Starbucks over my head in front of the Mormon Tabernacle (My former mother-in-law was offended, my ex-wife thought it was hilarious, and Candy's cousin, a Mormon preacher, thought that was the funniest thing he'd heard all summer.)

Every state was different. Arizona was freaking gorgeous. I got why the original Mormon settlers came to Utah in the first place. Wyoming is literally the big empty, and Colorado is nothing but mountains. Big mountains. We won't speak of Kansas other than to say after staring at a horizon curving away from me for six hours, flat earthers should be ashamed of themselves.

Which brings me to the most recent trip: New England. Through two marriages and even my dating life, I'd always wanted to take whoever the woman in my life was at the time on a romantic tour of the six states east and north of New York. Candy's health has made the romantic getaway a bit unfeasible, but we made it a family vacation. 

But because Burlington, Vermont, where we stayed our first night in the region, is so remote - No major airport and not really on any of the main Interstates - we used Buffalo as a layover. So, Niagara Falls served as our stop on the way up. And let me tell you, you need to see the falls up close and personal at least once in your life. That much water moving between two inland seas is amazing. And the Seneca tribe of New York have built a really nice resort nearby.

The next day, we had to go cross western New York to get to Burlington. Candy's health prevents her from going more than seven hours a stretch by car, and the trip to Burlington went past that limit. We ended up getting lunch in Rome at a little hole-in-the-wall diner. While this was not a truckstop, it still proved the adage "Eat where the truckers eat." Had Eddie's been near an exit, they would have eaten there.

Vermont and New Hampshire were mostly pass-through states, and what pass-through states they were. Driving through the mountains, we saw our first bear, a cub crossing the road. But no moose. Lots of moose signs, but no moose. Maine, however, was the entire point of this trip. Specifically, Bar Harbor. Crossing the state put us in the real-life inspirations for Stephen King's fictionalized Maine. We even drove through the town that inspired Pet Semetary. Naturally, while in Bar Harbor, I bought a copy of Mr. Mercedes. Of course, I'm going to buy a Stephen King novel in the state where he lives. What kind of writer would I be if I didn't?

Bar Harbor is on an island, and there is something different about life on an island. Yes, Bar Harbor is crammed with tourists, even during the pandemic, but life is still slower paced. And the island is bigger than Ohio's South Bass. So there are multiple towns on it. The rest cater to boaters and hikers in search of Maine's Acadia National Forest.

Most of our money went into Bar Harbor. But most of our time was spent there. Massachusetts was almost a pass-thru, but we intended to stop at Quincy Market to get chowda from the source. (No kidding, both chowder shops we saw spelled it like that.) Had it not been raining so bad, we'd have toured the Samuel Adams Brewery as well. Rhode Island was most definitely a pass-thru, but I count it among states visited. Connecticut...

My wife fell in love with Connecticut. We stayed in Hartford and walked around the city center that evening. She wanted to move there. I wanted to move to Burlington, Vermont, but Hartford most definitely was easier to get to and from. A stop in Buffalo on the way back introduced us to the original Wings (the Anchor Bar) and weck (Schwabl's, which predates the Civil War) and home again the next day with a stop in Cleveland to see my brother.

Every town and every state had its own vibe. The further from the major cities we traveled, the more laid-back the attitude. But even Hartford, whose metro area bleeds into Boston's, seemed calmer than the industrial cities of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. It had none of Boston's traffic congestion or cramped streets, nor did it bustle like New York City to the south. It was the perfect balance between urban area and isolated region. If I worked in NYC, I could see myself taking the train from Hartford and back daily.

And now, as I wrap up the follow up to Holland Bay (out November 22 from Down and Out Books. Thanks for asking.), I have a week spent in a part of the country I've never seen before. The history, the accents (I said "Bah Hahbah" and "Baston" for over a week), where the roads are laid out differently, the dialect is different, and so is the food. I crushed a lobster dinner. My wife got to indulge her inner shutterbug. And now I have a deeper well to draw creative inspiration from. "Write what you know" might be a cliched and ultimately debunked bit of writing advice, but it does make it a lot easier to make stuff up when you have more to model from.

Feast or Famine

 

 Years ago on a writer web site, I wrote about doing a screenplay as a writing exercise. "What's the worst that could happen?" I said. "Someone buys it?"

A few writers who did shop screenplays piled on to tell their horror stories, but I think they missed my point. I had no interest in selling it. I just wanted to see if I could do it.

So, before the pandemic, I submitted Holland Bay to Down and Out. I did not expect an immediate response. My policy with a manuscript once the publisher asks for it is to forget it exists. I work two jobs, care for an ailing wife, and labor under the delusion I'm the next Robert Heinlein (minus the ideological pretensions.) So, in the interim, a fellow SF writer told me, "Hey, your stuff's a good fit for my publisher, but they want a long list of material because they release fast. Can you spin up an arc?" As I worked up a good rant about how busy I was and how I needed to finish my original trilogy, I went into the restroom at work before telling him off, and came back to say, I had an idea for a nine-story arc.

Um... Yeah. But I didn't expect it to overwhelm me, especially since I had nothing scheduled beyond the trilogy I was wrapping up. And come pandemic time, I discovered I can dictate. So dictate I did. But the publisher passed on all that work. Meanwhile, Down & Out pulled the trigger. No problem. I can work on revisions and publicity while I shopped this monstrosity around.

Well... No. CHBB not only took it, they work faster than Down and Out. So now I've got a scifi novel coming out next month and will have to go through final edits between now and then. Meanwhile, copy edits came back on Holland Bay. Somewhere in there, I'm taking a long-planned vacation to New England.

From the be careful what you ask for department...

West of Hollywood

Libby Cudmore

In this world, you have to ask for what you want.

In some cases, you have to pick a lock and break in.

When I heard that Brian Thornton was putting together a pair of crime-themed anthologies based on the music of Steely Dan, I knew I had to be part of it. It didn’t matter that the slate was already full.

Over the past several years I have positioned myself as the Queen of the Dandom, a mighty figure in the realm of Steely Dan Twitter, and as the author of the critically-acclaimed mixtape murder mystery, this was the project I had been waiting for.

I emailed Brian this:

Hi Brian, I just saw your article about your Steely Dan anthology and I think it is the GREATEST IDEA EVER IN THE HISTORY OF ALL IDEAS. I was wondering… room for one more? I am a huge huge HUGE Steely Dan fan (I've seen them six times; am wearing my "The Dan Who Knew Too Much" tour shirt as I write this) and I know I could write you an amazing story… plus I'm quick! Please and thank you!

Brian told me he liked my enthusiasm and my Dan credentials (since then, I have seen them another four times, bringing the grand total to 10 shows, plus The Nightflyers / Dukes of September) and although he initially told me he couldn’t make any promises.

I told him that if not this one, I’d love to collaborate on another. A few days later, he responded with this:

All that aside, I value passion, especially when it comes to music, and doubly so when it comes to GREAT music. I have no doubt that this collection will be the stronger for your participation. So congratulations, kid. You’re in! I’ll make it work.

I was ECSTATIC. If the first lesson is shoot your shot, the second is to always be gracious and forward-thinking. Being a jerk gets you nowhere.

Settling on a song was the difficult part. So many of the good ones were taken – including “The Second Arrangement” – but I wanted to go with something a little off-beat. I’ve found a lot of fans underrate Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go, so my initial thought was to write a stalker story around “Lunch With Gina.”

But the story wasn’t coming together, and with the deadline clock ticking down, I switched over to “West of Hollywood” from Two Against Nature. There’s a cold undercurrent of broken passion there that fascinated me, something wild that had since crumbled to dust. I based it around a pair of con artists and former lovers who reunite for one job in the Hollywood Hills.

As soon as I settled on the concept, the story came together in almost one draft. I like to think it was guided by the spirit of the late Walter Becker.

But never one to keep all the good stuff for myself, I was also able to recommend that Brian bring in my friend/fellow Steely Dan fanatic Matthew Quinn Martin in, and he wrote a devastatingly good story based on “Pretzel Logic.” Both stories will appear in the second volume, titled A Beast Without A Name, available from Down & Out Books on Oct. 28.

It never hurts to ask for what you want. Be prepared for a no, which makes celebrating that YES even better. I am forever grateful to Brian for making space for me in this anthology, and I’m really looking forward to sharing “West of Hollywood” with all of you when it comes out.

"Hi, this is Jim from Uber..."

A couple of years back, I got into rideshare as a side hustle. Since 2017, I've gotten married, bought a house, a new car, and had my wife stop working for health reasons. So life's gotten expensive (but so worth it.)

A couple of people have asked me if driving for Uber (or Lyft, for that matter) provides me with any fodder for crime stories.

Like the man once said, "Boy, howdy!" Let me tell ya, brudda!

A frequent conversation I have with passengers is what the job is like. Most of the time, it's fun. But they ask me about problem passengers, which actually only make up about 5% of my business. I tell them that 5% can serve as entertainment for the other 95%. Even then, Uber drivers rate their passengers as well as getting rated by them. I've only 1-starred maybe 5 people out of nearly 2000 rides in two years.

There are certain things you just don't do in my car. Most of them could go sideways into a crime story, and I may just spin a few of those out. Why don't you play along and consider these story prompts if you're so inclined.

The first thing you don't want to do in my car is hurl racist insults at… Well… Anyone. As a majority of my passengers after 8 PM on a Saturday night are drunk, I cut just a little slack, which four college girls came close to using up one night in Cincinnati's Banks district. I picked them up on Freedom Way, the main drag through the Banks to take them all to the Hilton up in the Business District. A couple was pushing a baby stroller across the street as we started to move.

The one girl, clearly approaching the pass-out stage of drunkenness, said, "Oh, my God! Who does that in this neighborhood?" (Incidentally, the Banks is considered rather safe compared to even my neighborhood, and I live in the suburbs.) "Oh, my God. They're black people. Black people are so stupid."

The knee-jerk reaction, which I would not fault any other driver for going with, is to slam on the brakes, kick them out of the car, and reset for the next passenger(s). I took a different tact. I simply said, "One!"

The girl missed the hint and continued. "No, seriously. Black people always…"

"Two!"

Ladies and gentlemen, we do not get to three. Instead, I pull the car over, inform everyone that the ride has ended, and report the occupants to Uber. (Yes, Uber and Lyft allow us to do that.) Pray we are not in the wilds of Clermont County or on the Brent Spence Bridge (which has no berm. You would be left on I-75 in traffic) if this is you, because the ride ends now.

Instead, one of the other girls said, "Dude, shut up. You're pissing him off."

We enjoyed the rest of the ride in silence. They got a one-star for being disrespectful.

Other things that will get you kicked out that may not be good story fodder: messing with my dashboard while I'm driving (A teenager did this to me last weekend), give me bad directions (after midnight, I just ignore them anyway as I assume people are drunk), backseat driving, and being abusive to other people in the car or, if you're calling ahead to get an ETA, being abusive after I clearly inform you that (1) I'm with a passenger and (2) you're on speaker because I'm still driving. I have a 2% cancel rate from my end, so this is not usually a problem.

But one thing the rideshare services want us to be on the lookout for is whether someone is in the car of their own free will. I've had a couple of gentlemen get in the car with their girlfriends and start talking smack (to me) about them. As you can imagine, Uber Support got an earful. I'm not shy about that. It's also a story I generally don't regale passengers with. Drunken stupidity is funny, even when you're the drunk. Abuse is not. I'll shame a racist. I don't think a woman with a bad boyfriend needs that story spread for the entertainment of strangers.

But what is the absolute worst thing you can do in my car that might get turned into a crime story?

Go ahead. Yell at the cops, as one passenger did one night. Already, as you can imagine, there are probably a dozen or so stories you can spin from that. After this incident, it's an automatic end to the ride and an invitation to the friendly (well, friendly before the passenger opens his mouth) officer to whip out the handcuffs.

The incident that spawned this policy began with a pickup at my stepsons' favorite bar. (Bad move. Everyone there knows the twins, and I talk to the twins often.) These boys wanted to hit Waffle House for some after-hours grub. I'm all for that. I very nearly went there myself. However…

We drove by a really bad accident with at least four vehicles in various states of disrepair parked on the grass, three cruisers surrounding them keeping traffic out of the way. One of the passengers rolls his window down and starts screaming obscenities at the officers. I pull the car over.

"You do that again," I said, "and I turn around and let you pull them out of the car. I'm not going to jail for you. If anything, I'll drive you there myself."

They shut up. But from that point on, the ride ends automatically.

"So, Jim," you ask, "why do it if you have to put up with these people? Or people getting sick in your car?"

They're memorable because they are rare. And as for getting sick, there are ways to manage that if you know what to look for. Most of my passengers and I forget each other after we part ways. A lot of the rides are fun. On Saturday nights, many of them bring the party to my car. Others just want to ride in silence. One couple…

Well, this is a crime blog. Maybe I'll send that story over to an erotica blog.

It's not as gross as you think. But very, very strange.

Besides, you get to see humanity at their best and their worst and everywhere in between. It's a writer's dream job.