Rookies

In the past two years, I've become a professional editor in addition to writing. I'm still good at writing as a writer, editing as an editor, and reading as a reader. When I'm doing any one of these things, my brain doesn't want to do the other.

But after fifteen books for Down & Out plus a couple of freelance jobs, some things do make my inner editor scream. One is the inevitable neophyte writer's rant online about "The Rules." We're all familiar with Elmore Leonard's list. 

It's a good list. It's also written based on how Elmore Leonard wrote. Ever read Elmore Leonard? This is how he got good. But his rules and Lawrence Block's rules and Stephen King's rules are all different lists. I'm not talking about those lists. I'm talking about the temper tantrum of a newer writer getting frustrated with the editing process. I recently ran across such a list. My wife found my own "Get off my lawn!" rant toward it quite entertaining. Really, it showed the writer's lack of experience. And it's not unfamiliar to me. I used to think the same way. What were they complaining about?

• No head hopping - Now this one infuriates me, even if it took me the longest time to understand it. What brought it home was Tom Clancy, an unrepentant head hopper. Clancy would give you whiplash starting in Jack Ryan's head, bopping over to some sonar technician's POV, then ending with some admiral's or politician's. I can't read it anymore. Head hopping is disrespectful to the reader, who has to follow the writer's ADHD-inspired point-of-view shifts. Now, I violently disagree with the "One POV Per Chapter" rule. I always thought that was stupid because it makes for short, short chapters. But one POV per scene should be an ironclad rule. Only four writers I know of since World War II have managed to head hop smoothly: Frank Herbert, Stephen King, George Pelecanos, and SA Cosby. Everyone else needs to remember someone's gotta read this at some point, and more people will if they can follow along.
  
  
• No adverbs. Okay, editors need to really chill about this one, but outright rebellion? That needs to be stamped out aggressively. Mind you, I'm spoiled. I've only beta'd (but not fully edited) one neophyte writer, so the adverbs are usually at a minimum. By the time I get them, they're invisible. But my first professional editing job came from a guy who's been writing longer than I've been alive. (And my puberty began to the strains of Blondie, which was not a bad way for a pre-teen boy to get his hormones flowing. I digress.) So by the time I get most manuscripts, I'm not treated to a flood of "ly."
  
  
• No repeated words. Now let's be clear. I don't have long lists of overused words. I do a crutch word check. I'll leave about 33% of passive voice intact, either for context or because it's been about three pages since the last instance. But repeated words. Yes, you'll use a word multiple times in a manuscript. That's a given. But let's take a word like "peculiar." Unless it's a verbal gambit, that word shouldn't appear again for at least another page. Twice in the same paragraph? There's a reason we do multiple drafts. While I'm not a big fan of thesauruses--I've seen them abused too many times--you may want to pick one up if you find yourself leaning on one word to say the same thing.
  
  
• Show, don't tell. I've got a whole rant about why editors and veteran writers really need to give this one a rest. But I saw this on one of those "lists" and realized writers like this are never going to let editors or veteran writers give it a rest. My problem with show-don't-tell is overzealous beta readers who love rules lists too much and people who can't sell their fiction selling writing courses. (You know who you are.) But ignoring this rule leads to lazy writing. "I don't need to describe Sarah's reaction. I'll just say she was angry.)
  
  Oh, no. That's precisely why editors and more experienced writers won't ease up on this. The inexperienced writer tends to use this as an excuse to write less. If Sarah's reaction is a minor detail, then yes, just say she's angry. Better yet, cut the anger altogether. It will likely become obvious further into the scene. If Sarah is the POV character, we need to see her jaw clench or fists tighten, hear her growl, see her vision turn red.
  

There are others. Passive voice, which is abused by experienced writers as well, including this one. The fact that some writers use "that" to join dependent clauses too often. 

But when a writer says they're going to ignore all these rules? That just shows inexperience. I know. I used to say this myself. And a friend who started writing a couple of years ago needed to be guided, particularly in POV issues. He's now an editor for Running Wild Press. And he calls me when he gets overwhelmed by a neophyte writer who thinks the rules are, "Like, oppression, man!"

 The rules exist for a reason. They work when they're applied with nuance, which means you have to know how to use them to know how to break them.  Ignore them at your own risk.

Holiday Tradition: A Very Tom Waits Christmas - An Homage to the Master

Author's Note: I've posted this annually, more or less, every year since the mid-2000s. It's going here this year.

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh
Christmas Eve was dark, and the snow fell like cocaine off some politician’s coffee table
Rudolph looked to the sky. He had a shiny nose, but it was from too much vodka
He said, “Boys, it’s gonna be a rough one this year.”

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh
The elves scrambled to pack up the last of the lumps of coal for deserving suburban brats
And a bottle of Jamie for some forgotten soul whose wife just left him
Santa’s like that. He’s been there.
Oh, he still loves Mrs. Claus, a spent piece of used sleigh trash who
Makes good vodka martinis, knows when to keep her mouth shut
But it’s the loneliness, the loneliness only Santa knows

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh
And the workshop reeks of too much peppermint
The candy canes all have the names of prostitutes
And Santa stands there, breathing in the loneliness
The loneliness that creeps out of the main house
And out through the stables
Sometimes it follows the big guy down the chimneys
Wraps itself around your tannenbaum and sleeps in your hat

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh
We all line up for the annual ride
I’m behind Vixen, who’s showin’ her age these days
She has a certain tiredness that comes with being the only girl on the team
Ah, there’s nothing wrong with her a hundred dollars wouldn’t fix
She’s got a tear drop tattooed under her eye now, one for every year Dancer’s away

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh and
I asked myself, “That elf. What’s he building in there?”
He has no elf friends, no elf children
What’s he building in there?
He doesn’t make toys like the other elves
I heard he used to work for Halliburton,
And he’s got an ex-wife in someplace called Santa Claus, Pennsylvania
But what’s he building in there?
We got a right to know.

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh
And we’re off
Off into the night
Watching the world burn below
All chimney red and Halloween orange

I’ve seen it all
I’ve seen it all
Every Christmas Eve, I’ve seen it all

There’s nothing sadder than landing on a roof in a town with no cheer.

Why Marlowe?

Open Road Films

Last year, Liam Neeson appeared in Marlowe, the first Philip Marlowe movie in years. Marlowe's been scarce on the big and small screen until recently, but there seems to be a need to continue his story beyond Raymond Chandler's death. Most notably, Robert B. Parker finished the last Marlowe novel by Chandler, Poodle Springs. One blurb stated emphatically one couldn't tell where Parker picked up from Chandler. Spoiler alert: Not only is it glaringly obvious, the dialog changes mid-scene with Marlowe suddenly talking like Spenser. Still, Parker would have been my first choice to finish the last Marlowe novel.

There are other characters who have been as timeless as Philip Marlowe. James Bond is always a product of his times, with Connery and Lazenby's versions aficionados of Playboy while Daniel Craig's iteration had more of a conscience. Sherlock Holmes has also proved enduring, but with the exception of some films during World War II, Holmes remained rooted in the Victorian Era until the twenty-first century, with versions set in present-day London and New York, each using aspects of Doyle's work to justify the updates. (Then there's the Margaret Colin movie where she wakes up Holmes from suspended animation in the 1980s. Let us never speak of that one again.)

Like Holmes, Marlowe has usually been stuck with his original period on the big screen. But subsequent post-Chandler novels have been all over the map. This year's novel, The Second Murderer, takes place in the 1940s while others move the knight errant forward in time to the 1970s or 1980s. Unlike, say, James Bond, Marlowe is a product of his time.

On the big screen, filmmakers were able to do present-day Marlowe as long as the present day was within 30-40 years of his debut. Robert Altman's controversial The Long Goodbye was a product of the 1970s, complete with Altman's off-beat shooting and writing style and then-baseball celeb Jim Bouton as a supporting character. The 1975 remake of The Big Sleep, a TV movie from the same people who brought you UFO and Space: 1999, aged Marlowe, put him in London, and cast an aging Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. It was an uneven turn from the same actor who played Marlow in Farewell, My Lovely a few years earlier. There, his presence gave Marlowe realistic aging by setting the story in the 1940s.

For some reason, Marlowe also has yielded experimentation. After his conventional debut in Murder, My Sweet, 1944, Robert Montgomery directed and starred in The Lady in the Lake, in which we literally see the story through Marlowe's eyes. The entire movie is shot with the camera as Marlowe, taking the first-person narrative as literally as possible. And of course, Altman took the novel The Long Goodbye as a polite suggestion and sent Elliot Gould muttering about 1970s LA. But perhaps the best-known, best-loved iteration of Marlowe on the big screen is Humphrey Bogart's 1946 turn in the original The Big Sleep. Bogart plays a warmer PI than his almost sociopathic turn as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. The movie is one of the most faithful adaptations of a Chandler novel. Yet it sizzles with the obvious heat between Bogart and costar/future wife Lauren Bacall (22 and already one of the classiest presences on screen.)

For the post-Chandler books, Marlowe receives uneven treatment. Parker, of course, kept him aged in the 1950s as that was where Chandler left him when he died. The next novel, Perchance to Dream, gets meta and has Marlowe in the 1940s work with a writer named Raymond Chandler on a case. The last Marlowe book I read, however, was set in the late 1980s, with Marlowe trying to stay retired in Mexico and running into drug cartels. Denise Mina, however, takes him back to his roots, placing him in the 1940s. 

The trouble with Marlowe is that authors either try to imitate Chandler's trademark similes, expected from Parker, or they ignore it altogether. The result is either a pastiche or a story about a guy named Phillip Marlowe. 

Neeson's Marlowe, based on Benjamin Black's The Black-Eyed Blonde, probably comes closest to the original Marlowe. Neeson, probably needing a break from threatening people with "I will find you!", is the perfect choice to bring Marlowe's world-weariness to life.

But why new Marlowe novels? And why does he endure? Like Bond, some of his original stories inspire cringe in the present day. Holmes is infinitely adaptable, and as someone likely on the spectrum, has a renewed sense of chic. His mind doesn't work like most people's and keeps him eternally interesting. Bond, however, is cinematically a present-day creature. Connery and Lazenby's versions would not have worked in the 1990s or even today, whereas Brosnan's Bond is a halfway point. But why Marlowe?

Marlowe is a product of the Depression, with the world in a post-Victorian hangover, not to mention bracing for another World War. Nevertheless, he's persisted, showing up in the 1970s, a brief revival in-period in the 1980s, and several authors keeping him alive from the 1990s forward. But why? In an era where the PI is either a relic or off fighting right-wing extremists hiding in the shadows, Marlowe is still going down these mean streets.

It's probably because Marlowe's foes are still with us. Gangsters might have changed, but they never really went away. Drugs remain a scourge, even if pot is either legal or decriminalized, depending on where you live. And the crimes have gotten worse: human trafficking, child porn. All these are in Philip Marlowe's wheelhouse. And Marlowe makes no pretense of being virtuous, something his spiritual descendants insist on with their Hawks and Bubbas doing all the dirty work. (Even Robert Crais's Joe Pike, but he's a special case.) 

Many question the need to reboot James Bond after Daniel Craig's version died in No Time to Die. The enemies seem to be within. Holmes inhabits a realm that never really goes away. There will always be theft. There will always be murder. And there will always be a fascination with an unconventional mind that disdains the rules.

Marlowe, however, seems to be finding a new niche. It's a cold and confusing world. Who better to fight the good fight than a world-weary man who faces the nastiness with a wisecrack?

Scaling Mount TBR

CC 2.0 2007 Evan Bench

Last year, I read 104 books, including audio and advanced review copies. I could make that number more impressive with the number of manuscripts I've edited. That job, by the way, is usually great fun as I get to see something before everyone else. But I don't count that. After all, it's work. It's why I don't review anymore. And while editing can be a chore at times, it's not cramming in a book to write three paragraphs.

But I read 104 books in 2022. I did it while writing under two pen names, working a fulltime job, and taking care of an ailing wife. For 2023, it's likely, but not guaranteed, I'll make 105. It's unlikely I'll read nearly as much in 2024. Why?

One of the reasons I used the lockdown to learn speed reading was to get more books in. I always believed a writer should read widely and much. Every so often, I'll come up with a list I want to get through, and those often take years. One list in particular drove this year's reading: Stephen King.

Yes, I've read Holly, unexpectedly added Storm of the Century (a screenplay, but it should have been a novel), yet skipped Faithful. (If it's not the Reds or the Indians/Guardians, I'm really not interested in baseball books.)

But to get King's canon finished this year - Fifteen years is long enough - I had to read twenty-five pages at a sitting. Hard to do during the day. Back when working at the office was a regular thing, I had to deal with interruptions: The coworker who took an open book as, "Oh, cool, you're not doing anything" and the needy manager who already sent me a Teams message and an email. (Pro tip: IT guys probably get it after the first email. Use Teams to follow up. Even a gregarious one such as me doesn't want to people much while working.) You sometimes have to steal time outside of breaks. And my wife thinks 5 PM is a hard deadline to stop work.

But I read Holly in sips. And while I devoured Rick Rubin's The Creative Act (like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, it's now an annual reread.), I'm going through Don Winslow's City of Dreams slowly. At 311 pages, I'd normally have this done in three or four days. I started it on Monday. The library already bugged me once I would need to return it or renew it.

So 2024 will probably see me read half as many books. But just as there are benefits to reading much and widely, there's a bonus to reading less and more slowly.

On some books, it cost me. I read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I loved. However, I also had the impression if I'd only read 10-15 pages in a sitting, maybe with fewer sittings, I'd have understood why that book made Harold Bloom's list from How to Read. (My problem with Bloom was how vocal he was about what he didn't like. It's like Star Wars fandom, only with classics and literary fiction. And I am so over Star Wars for that reason alone.) But I also don't remember much about A Midsummer Night's Dream. I can't remember the last crime fiction book I read, and it was only a month ago. And with editing, sometimes the manuscript blurs a little with whatever's on my end table at the moment. (Winslow is blurring with my current author, which actually put a smile on my face yesterday while working on it.)

But I sipped Holly. I'm sipping City of Dreams. By the time this publishes, I'll probably be into another Twain novel.

One thing that hasn't changed is audio. Audio imposes its own pace. And these days, I prefer audio to music in my headphones and in my car. My musical odyssey began with the Beatles, detoured into Deep Purple, and landed on jazz in recent years. I revisit the Beatles often, but good God, Purple has become fingernails on chalkboard to me. How many times can you listen to "Highway Star" before realizing you're a middle-aged man in a boring sedan? Detroit doesn't even build sedans anymore! So I listen to audio books. And I am an addict.

Audio has its own rotation: Non-fiction, fiction, banned book, and what I call “not Harold Bloom”. 2023 had spiritual books in it, which doubled the amount of ancient texts. (Side note: Those of your putting the holiest of your beliefs or apocryphal texts on audio need to hire better narrators. Some of them would have been more interesting if the guy didn't sound like he slept through it. It’s not reverent; it's just dull.) Ancient epics were the most fun. Star Trek’s Dominic Keating and the great Ian McKellan read The Iliad and The Odyssey respectively, and I found myself disappointed when both stories ended. Same with Beowulf, which I finished the night before writing this. The narrator was one I was unfamiliar with, but he was Irish, like translator Seamus Heaney. So even Heaney’s voice in an afterword came through.

I wondered if I was a freak of nature reading this many books. 104? 105? Once, getting to 100 was a badge of honor. But when it gets to be a chore, and you find yourself padding the list with a lot of filler, is it really useful or relaxing?

Reading should be in service to writing. It should also be relaxing (probably why I love audio so much.) When it becomes an obligation with no purpose or a time suck, then what's the point?

The Last Stephen King Post. For Now.

Stephen King © Rolling Stone

It finally happened. Last night, I finished Holly, the latest Stephen King novel, which concludes my reading of his entire canon. There was, of course, a sense of "What do I do next?" (Answer: Read someone else. Congratulations, Mark Twain. I'm already halfway through your canon.) Something tells me I'd have enjoyed this journey more if I'd have started with Carrie in 1974. My mother did, and as my eighth birthday was a month away the day Carrie debuted, Mom was not about to let her oldest boy read it. My oldest brother had just turned one. My youngest brother had yet to appear.

Mom loved scary novels. Not an out-and-out horror fan, she did, however, enjoy The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. Then again, she and Dad every Friday night religiously watched the schlock horror show Ghoulardi/Houlihan and Big Chuck/Big Chuck and Li'l John, introducing us boys to its UHF counterpart Superhost. So the spooky, despite some early religious admonitions, was always there for them. 

But The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby were a different kind of horror from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the lurid type of paperbacks King referred to as "Just Plain Books." I bought a few of those when I turned eleven and never really got through the first chapter of Hand of Cain. Amazingly, I also bought a Western from such a desolate rack and somehow held onto it into middle age. I'm glad I did. It was written by Elmore Leonard. 

Carrie fit the mold of The Exorcist, but the writing also attracted Mom. (Dad was a TV-and-movie guy and went to his grave sick to death of Star Trek. Sorry, Dad. I might have been a little overzealous.) She eagerly snapped up Salem's Lot when it came out in paperback. By then I was ten, and while again, I was not allowed to read it, I was allowed to watch the miniseries three years later. And then I saw why mom loved King.

I didn't read The Stand at that age, and missed The Shining and Firestarter. I did see the Kubrick movie. Despite King's protestations how Jack Nicholson was wrong for the part of Jack Torrance and Kubrick missed the point, there was a vibe that would inhabit all the best King adaptations and even one of the worst. Lawnmower Man retained only the title, but the script they slapped it on could easily have come out of King's trunk.

So my first King novel was actually The Dead Zone, which bewildered me. I, being a sheltered, naive teen, didn't get a lot of the adult references. I did, however, take special glee in the fate of Gregory Stilson. I went back and read Salem's Lot. Tell no one this, but I like it better than Dracula (which I've reread a few times.) My first King to be gifted was It, which I absolutely loved as I was in that stage halfway between child and adult. I even had a mental cast for the movie. I was disappointed the miniseries did not cast Marilu Henner as the adult Bevvie.

The original Mrs. Winter bought me Gerald's Game shortly after our wedding, partly knowing I loved King, partly as a gag, and mostly as a... hint. By then, I was stuck on Mr. King from Maine. I missed a few novels and came back to them over the years. Hated Christine. Found some of the 90s books meh. Was impressed by the effort of the Dark Tower Series but not really connecting to it.

And absolutely fell in love with On Writing. Harold Bloom should have been made to read it aloud to students before his death. OK, I'm still bitter about Portrait of a Lady on his novels list. 

And so here we are, in 2023. I started in 2010 to read his entire canon, minus Faithful, a collaboration about the Red Sox season in which they won the World Series. Sorry, Steve, but I came of age in Cleveland when the then-Indians were owned by a dead guy. When your team becomes a farm team for the Yankees and the Blue Jays, then you can talk to me about true sports suffering. (And Cubs fans would like a word.) But I even read the screenplay Storm of the Century. 

But I just finished Holly last night. It's a straight-up crime novel, a serial killer novel actually. There are references to Brady Hartsfield (who became supernatural in the third Bill Hodges novel) and the Holly Gibney novels The Outsider and If It Bleeds. But Holly laments her quarry is a pair of plain ol' evil human beings (and wildly off their rockers, which you figure out within the first 50 pages.) One thing odd about this particular story is King's tendency to go off into the past and tell a related story. Sometimes this works. Often it doesn't. Instead, he uses flashbacks to show the reader what horrific monsters the nonegenarian Harris's are, not to mention racists, homophobes, and intellectual snobs. You just want to punch Emily in the face despite her nearly debilitating sciatica. And Rodney? Oh, my God! Some people should not be permitted to read Jonathan Swift, and he tops the list.

That said, finishing the book, which I enjoyed very much, capped a years-long personal project for me. King is by no means done. He has a collection due out next year, You Like It Darker, and that always accompanies a novel. So what next?

Does there have to be a next? I edit. I write. And there are thousands of books out there, some of which we talk about here. Some of them we write. But I got through this author's canon, and I'm glad I did.

Now, off to read Tom Sawyer Abroad.

The Bachman Books - Or, Not Stephen King

Photo by Shane Leonard

Once upon a time, an underpaid, overworked schoolteacher from Maine wrote some books. A lot of books. He loved horror, but he also knew that might limit him. So, on horror he put one name, using another for decidedly not-horror books, with one exception. As his first published novel was a story about a teenage outcast with telekinetic powers, you can tell which type of story he liked to write.

The novel was Carrie by Stephen King. But the other books, three dystopian thrillers and a noir story about a guy who ain't givin' up his house, didn't really fit the King mold. Not when he had a major streak of successes with his first four novels: Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Stand, and The Shining. All these are not just horror classics but, in the case of The Stand and The Shining, literary masterpieces the snooty MFA-prof-having-dirty-thoughts-about-student set cannot bring themselves to acknowledge. Maybe King will have to die first for them to accept him. Except he's already rejected him, so it'd be like inducting the Sex Pistols into the Rock Hall.

But what of those other books? King originally took his mother's maiden name and the name of someone he knew and combined them into "Gus Pilsbury." Now, I have a hard enough time selling books as "Jim Winter" (a Star Trek reference only one person in 30 years ever figured out. Captains April and Pike would be so disappointed.) Stephen King is an easy-to-remember name. Gus Pilsbury makes me think of biscuits or cinnamon rolls or... Oh, look. Laura Lippman (another market-friendly name and one, like King, gracing her birth certificate) has a new one out!

King picked up on this. After Carrie and Salem's Lot, he wanted to see if he could do it again. So out went "Gus Pilsbury" and in came "Richard Bachman," complete with a fake bio and a picture of one of his editors as the author photo. King even listed a religion for Bachman. (Rooster worship, for the curious.) As Bachman, King had four books in the trunk. Actually, he had five, but he wasn't happy with one until he took it out in the 2010s. What were they?

Rage - Inside the mind of a mass shooter. When King wrote this, he was a schoolteacher and one not that far removed from the high school angst and anger that power this story. Also, mass shootings were rare. Then came Columbine. The shooters admitted in their journals they took inspiration from this story. So King decided to kill his own novel. But how is it as a novel? Meh. There are little King flourishes in it. His catch phrase, "friends and neighbors," shows up. But it's a lurid trip into the mind of a teenager who loses it with fatal consequences. You can still get it in older copies of The Bachman Books, but otherwise, no recent reprintings. It will probably stay that way for decades to come.

The Long Walk - King embraces his inner Ray Bradbury, then gets dark. Really dark. Every year, a select group of teenage boys participate in the Long Walk, starting at the US-Canadian border and following US 1. In theory, they could make it all the way to Key West, but no one can stay awake that long. Why do they do it? The Prize. In a gambit King will repeat in The Running Man, the boys risk getting shot in order to get the Prize, implied to be more money than God has and never having to worry about food, housing, health care. It's a sham run by a militaristic figure called "the Major." The America depicted in it could be taken straight from The Handmaid's Tale. As a non-horror novelist, King is finally finding his groove.

Road Work - Probably my least favorite of the Bachman books, but I understand where it comes from. King wrote this as his mother was dying. A single mom who had to keep as much of her struggle from her kids as possible, she was the center of his universe, at least until he met Tabitha Spruce, aka Tabitha King these days. The novel is a bitter, angry story about a man who resent eminent domain long before it was abused to put in shopping malls and overpriced housing. In this case, a fictional Midwestern city is adding a bypass which will go through where his job and his house both sit. Rather than move and take the money, he sits on his hands and ignores the warnings. He loses his job and his wife, and it doesn't end well when the construction crews finally show up. 

The Running Man - Probably the best known Bachman book. Soon after King was unmasked as Bachman, he sold the film rights. It became an Arnold Schwarzenegger action romp. King wasn't happy with the movie, but both are fun dystopian stories. In the book, Killian is a black man who is a grinning, sleazy figure arranging for the poor to participate in fatal gameshows to keep the masses entertained. Had they followed the book, one might picture Laurence Fishburne channeling his inner Marvel villain in the part. In the movie, Killian is the host, played by Richard Dawson of Family Feud fame. In both, Ben Richards kills him off, only more directly in the movie. While it has the dark dystopian themes of the earlier Bachman books, it's probably the most fun to read.

Thinner - Really, a thinly disguised Stephen King book, and the one that unmasked him. Billy Halleck runs over an old Romani woman and is cursed by her son to grow ever thinner. At first, this is great for the overweight Halleck, but soon, he starts resembling a concentration camp survivor. This hasn't aged well, but is the novel which blew his cover. While the references to Gypsies and their culture have not aged well, there's no mistaking Portsmouth, NH is really Derry. It reads and looks like a King book. Yet sales of the book suggest the next Bachman book scheduled, Misery, would have broken through and put "Bachman" on the bestseller list. Instead, King got an inspiration for The Dark Half.

The Regulators - King's not even trying to hide it now, especially since the four-volume Bachman Books collection had been out for years. It's a sequel to Desperation, which is not my favorite King novel. There's a meta-story here where Bachman, whose bio now says he died of cancer in 1987, wrote the sequel without meeting King or reading Desperation. It doesn't really work, and King puts Bachman to bed for close to two decades.

Blaze - King calls this a trunk novel. It isn't even dystopian, nor is it a thinly disguised King novel. When Stephen King did not know what kind of writer he wanted to be, he penned this noir novel about a slow-witted, brutal man nicknamed Blaze. Blaze does some horrible, evil things, yet he isn't evil. He is a victim of circumstances. Ironically, King had even less faith in this story than he did Carrie, but once he dug it out, he rewrote it in American Typewriter font to recreate the vibe he had when he wrote the original. It's probably the best of the six books, but maybe because he wrote it with an innocence one eventually loses writing over time.

On Stephen King...

Photo by Shane Leonard

 As I type this, a copy of Holly, the latest Stephen King novel, sits in a TBR stack I keep in my living room. It's a few books down and obviously not the last King book I will read. I've read most of his canon in the order published, segregating the Bachman books at the end. But until You Like It Darker drops next year, I'll have read everything he's published with a few exceptions. Some of the screenplays, some uncollected short stories and novellas. I definitely never read The Plant because King put the kibosh on it when his ebook experiment (pre-Kindle) did not work. I also did not read his book about the Red Sox recent World Series run.

King is an odd choice to occupy his place in American literature. He's an unabashed horror writer who's recently shown a penchant for crime fiction. To his annoyance, some complain when he eschews the supernatural for crime, but the Bachman books show he's just as at home there. In fact, only two Bachman books, Thinner and The Regulators, are overtly supernatural. Rage and Road Work are out-and-out noir, while Blaze, an admitted trunk novel, takes its cues from Of Mice and Men. The Long Walk and The Running Man are both dystopian thrillers with one foot in noir and the other in science fiction. One wonders if this is what they watched on TV in Gilead in A Handmaid's Tale. 

Yet horror is King's wheelhouse. Horror is not supposed to produce classic novels. Yet The Stand, The Shining, It... All these are cultural touchstones. They might owe some spiritual strands to HP Lovecraft, but they're hardly Lovecraftian horror. (Well, It is basically Cthulhu in  a clown suit chewing scenery and inspiring Bill Skarsgard to channel Tim Curry. Bad example.) But horror is just a canvass for King to paint on. 

His real talent is making a fictional place seem real. Castle Rock, or rather Castle County, gets its first mention in Blaze, written before Carrie. You really believe there's an Overlook Hotel (or was), You expect George Bannerman or Alan Pangborn or Norris Ridgewick to answer your 911 call. And we just won't mention Salem's Lot or Derry. By the time of the Gwendy trilogy, Derry is actually more dangerous than the Lot. 

I always described King's horror as this. The guy next door who borrowed your mower is Satan. And he's not the problem. He's worried about the weird stuff going on across the street. But the horror takes a backseat to the characters and the story. Jack Torrance in The Stand is already headed over the edge. The ghosts and the isolation of the Overlook just give him a not-so-gentle shove. The Stand takes ordinary people and tosses them into the post-apocalyptic battle between good and evil. 

But perhaps his greatest monster is not Pennywise or Leland Gaunt or even Randall Flagg. It has to be Annie Wilkes, the obsessed fan of one writer's work who suddenly has him in her clutches. King actually imagined Annie offing poor Paul Sheldon and feeding him to her pig while she enjoyed his last novel lovingly bound in his skin. If you've read the book or watched the movie, it's almost a surprise that was not how it ended. Annie is that most dangerous creature: The one unaware of their own evil and convinced of the righteousness of their cause.

Next year will be sixty years since Carrie was published. Naturally, there are hits and misses. Cell is a huge misfire, a lightweight Stand that doubles as a rant against cell phones. The Dark Tower Series is uneven until King figures out what he wants it to do (and manages to plug it in to most of his canon.)

King himself has lamented that his best regarded work came early in his career. The Stand and Salem's Lot are cultural touchstones. But listening to my share of rockers, I'm not surprised. There's a certain quality that comes with a lack of inhibition and ignorance of the rules. King will tell a story in a long, rambling style. He'll go off on tangents, but the tangents are stories unto themselves. And the man has an eye and ear for character. In his brilliant nonfiction tome, On Writing, he relates the accident that nearly killed him and may have revitalized his passion for writing. In describing the man who hit him in his minivan, King says, "I was nearly killed by one of my own characters." Years later, as Roland crosses into our world from that of the Dark Tower series, both King and the late Bryan Smith, the driver, do become characters when another character literally comes out of the story to badger the author into finishing. (Methinks the later Dark Tower books were therapy as much as parts of a longer epic.)

 The next time I land in this space, I'll either be reading Holly, his latest, or have finished it. But next time, I want to look at King's alter-ego, Richard Bachman.

Do You Speak the Language?

 I've been an editor for Down & Out Books now for about nine months. One of the challenges has been dialect. I apply the normal rules of editing to each manuscript, though I'm not nearly as dogmatic about it as some. For the most part, I've only had to worry about foreign variants of English. I downloaded a trial version of PerfectIt to handle a manuscript from an Australian author. Not UK. Australian. Yes, there's a difference.

But Australian English, like UK or American English, is a formal dialect. It evolved in a certain country with its own rules and variations. Likewise, Canadian English is not American English, and if you use the wrong word choice, you hear about it. Boy, do you hear about it. (BTW, editing tool makers, I have yet to read an American writer who writes "leaped" instead of "leapt." Whoever's programming your AI needs to back off a bit.)

But then we get to local dialect, usually evidenced whenever a new actor becomes the Doctor on Doctor Who. Of course, the real explanation for the Doctor's sudden change in speech is Patrick Troughton did not talk like Tom Baker, who did not sound like Christopher Eccleston, who did not sound like Peter Capaldi. In fact, the most hilarious reaction to Jodi Whittaker's turn as the first female Doctor was, "Really? We go from Geordi to London to Scottish and get a Yorkie?" Past actors have tended to waffle between the RP, London, Scottish, with the odd detour to Northern England. (Hence, a few of them sound like Geordis. So... Brian Johnson of AC/DC is a Time Lord?)

And then we come to America. Like it's big neighbor to the north, America is big. Really big. People who do not live in North America assume there are only three accents on the continent: Midwestern, Southern, and some bastardized Scottish accent where people say "aboot" and "Eh?" I invite you to talk to someone from the Maritimes or Quebec. Tell me someone from Georgia sounds like a Texan or one of those old Tidewater families in Virginia. While Californians definitely speak with Midwestern accents, you can tell you're not in Cleveland or Chicago. In fact, just within the state of Ohio, the accent changes every two hundred miles or so.

Clevelanders have this nasally accent, the product of a lot of Slavic and Irish immigrants in the last century. Cincinnatians have a slight southern accent due to their proximity to Kentucky and speak slower than their northern counterparts. In the middle of the state, you have Columbus, which, while having a larger population than Staten Island in New York, is somewhat isolated. Unlike the two big cities at either end of the state, Columbus did not spawn a megalopolis with its neighboring large towns and smaller cities within sixty miles. 

But it was Dana King's The Spread that challenged me. Dana lives in the Pittsburgh area, and his Penns River series is set in that area. Pittsburghers speak a dialect called "Yinzer," as in "youins are." It's a mix of East Coast, Pennsylvania Dutch, Slavic accents, and West Virginia dialect. So the dialog had to break rules. It's a tightrope. I would never want to edit Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins series or the late Bill Crider's work. Both wrote in that clipped East Texas dialect, which has more in common with Huckleberry Finn than Raymond Chandler. My editing brain tells me to yank out 75% of the apostrophes. Bill, whom I knew fairly well for a time, would have been offended. Mosley would give me a lecture about disrespecting not just Easy and Mouse's past, but even a lot of the white people from that region. It's as much their identity as anything else.

Even more of a shock, I discussed editing with a potential client from the same area as Dana. Her husband did a sports podcast in Pittsburgh. I mentioned I learned to adjust for "Yinzer." Had I permission, I'd copy one of her emails here as her rendition of the local speak was even more dead-on than Dana's toned-down version, which was clearly written for a wider audience. (Incidentally, The Spread is an awesome book from Down & Out.)

Even milquetoast Cincinnati, where everything (according to Twain) happens ten years after everywhere else, has it's verbal ticks. You can literally tell the Eastside from the Westside by the accents, references, and even personalities. But Cincy has its own speak. For instance...

 

"Please?" - I haven't heard this in about a decade, and even then, only on the Westside. But this Cleveland boy had to learn to respond to people saying "Please?" instead of "I beg your pardon?" or "What was that?"

"Three-way" - Notoriously uptight Hamilton County has had its share of sex controversies, but three-way actually refers to Greek meatsauce on spaghetti with cheddar cheese piled high, aka Cincinnati-style chili. A four-way is with either beans or onions. A five-way is beans and onions. There are two six-ways: jalapenos on top (Blue Ash Chili) or fresh garlic (Dixie Chili.)

"Pony keg"/"Drive-around" - In most places, this is called a drive-through, as in a drive-through store, not a fastfood joint. Drive-around seems to be a Kentucky-derived term, but pony keg is the more common phrase for that sort of convenience store.

"Big Mac Bridge" - I-471 traverses this wide bridge supported on either side by two large yellow arches. Starting with former traffic reporter John Phillips, locals started calling it the "Big Mac Bridge" (actually the Daniel Carter Beard Bridge) due to its resemblance to the McDonald's logo. Sidenote: I totally stole this when I wrote Holland Bay. 

"Cut-in-the-hill" - The cut in the hill refers to the man-made trench leading from Dixie Highway and the large bluff overlooking the Ohio River into Covington, the riverfront city across from Cincinnati. It's a mile-long steep grade which sees semis slow to twenty-five miles an hour uphill. There is a second cut in the hill that refers to an excavated gap along I-71 leading into Kenwood, a northern section of suburban Sycamore Township. That one is often called "the Kenwood Cut in the Hill."

"Warsh" - Wash. Whereas New England flattens out all the Rs, Cincinnati tends to add them.

"Up the pike" - Often said alongside "up the street" and "up the road." Many roads here are called "pike," such as Princeton Pike, Springfield Pike.

"CVG" - The airport code for Cincinnati Airport. The code stands for "Covington." The airport is actually in Hebron, Kentucky, one county over from Covington and most definitely not in Cincinnati.

"Where'd you go to high school?" - How to identify a fellow local's background. Elder/Seton are dead giveaways for Westsiders.

"Carryout" - Carryout is not only food you pick up, it's the corner store, like a pony keg. Or a drivearound.

Cincinnati is not the only city with its own language, as I discussed with Yinzer speak out of Pittsburgh. Seattle has a local dialect even more distinctive and hard to pick up for outsiders.

 

Poisoned Pen

A friend of mine sent me this article asking if I knew anything about it. The long, tortured affair took place in Circleville, one of those small railroad towns that dot the Midwest. This one is north of Columbus and not on any of the Interstates. I grew up on the fringes of the Cleveland area, spent six months in Amish country, and have lived in Cincinnati ever since. So, no. I barely knew of Circleville.

Which is interesting because of the town's long-standing mystery. Who's writing all the nasty letters?

It began in the 1970s. A bus driver named Mary Gillespie began receiving letters accusing her of having an affair with the school's vice principal. The harassment continued for some time until her brother-in-law and his wife tracked the letters back to one of Mary's coworkers, a man named David Longberry. Longberry was never charged, though he was later charged with sexual assault in an unrelated case.

But before the letters stopped, Mary's husband received a phone call. Angry, he went to confront Longberry with a pistol. Almost an hour later, police found his pickup off the road, him dead.

While Longberry was never charged, he came under some unwanted scrutiny. The letters stopped.

For a time. Then they started up again, along with signs on Mary's bus route detailing her alleged affair. The number of letter recipients increased as well, as more and more Circleville residents began receiving their own poisoned pen letters. Things escalated when Mary attempted to rip down a sign along her route only to find one crudely booby-trapped with a pistol.

The perpetrator attempted to file off the serial number, but a forensics technician recovered it. The gun traced back to a brewery employee in Columbus, who in turn sold it to his supervisor, who then sold it to someone else. The gun belonged to Paul Freshour, Mary's brother-in-law and the one who fingered David Longberry.

Before long, the sheriff began looking at Freshour.Eventually, he was convicted and sentenced to prison. The letters stopped.

Again, only for a time. Eventually, Unsolved Mysteries got involved, sending a production team to the small town. Soon, producers received their own poisoned pen letters threatening the crew if they showed up. Spoiler alert: Robert Stack totally did a segment on the unknown letter writer. Perhaps feeling the heat, the letter writer soon went silent for good.

Longberry and Freshour have both since died. Curiously, letters continued after Freshour went to prison. Only when Unsolved Mysteries showed up did they stop. The long story sounds like the beginnings of a Stephen King story, although King would have made the perpetrator supernatural or had him run afoul of the supernatural. More likely, it has much in common with SA Cosby's semi-rural Virginia tales, should Cosby opt to write an homage to Sherwood Anderson.

The motivations and machinations behind such episodes are familiar to anyone who grew up in small towns, exurbs, and even suburbs. Like the Cleveland-area town where I grew up, Circleville is exactly the type of American or Canadian town described in the song "Subdivisions," existing between the bright lights and the far, unlit unknown. Most of us who grew up there hear whispers, half-heard gossip. So-and-so is having an affair with someone-or-other. The bus driver grows pot on an abandoned farm. The undertaker enjoys his work too much, or the small bank president is skimming the receipts. Undoubtedly, the original letters arose from something like this: misplaced outrage or perhaps jealousy. Over the years, someone else became a copycat, the way some serial killers or burglars will copy some of the more outlandish of their chosen crimes. This person or persons saw a way to lash out at small-town hypocrisy. Unlike burglars, robbers, and worse, their crime is one of nuisance. It can flare into deadly confrontation, but the reason the person or persons behind Circleville's ordeal could continue for so long is one of resources. Small town police and rural/semi-rural departments are understaffed while urban agencies have a higher number of murders, rapes, robberies, and property damage to deal with.

And of course, now I have a pitch for Down & Out Books.

Not In My Backyard?

 Recently, I saw a post on Facebook suggesting (I hope humorously) one bury murder victims upright because satellites can look for people-sized six-foot holes. Of course, I had to check it out. Turns out, the tongue-in-cheek post had a kernel of truth. Using animals and donated cadavers, scientists in various countries took ground readings. A fresh body will cause the ground to bulge out. A decayed body will cause a depression as the organic material dissolves.

Of course, disposing of a dead body poses all sorts of issues. Living near the Ohio River, I hear at least two stories a year about either bodies disappearing in America's third longest river or turning up in or near it. A few years ago, a police officer fell off the Clay-Wade Bailey Bridge downtown and disappeared. It took several weeks to find his body. However, in the process, police departments in Ohio and Kentucky solved quite a few cold cases. They found bodies, just not the officer's body until about two months later. On the other hand, two children, both killed by their mothers' boyfriends, remain missing after the killers each admitted dumping them in the Ohio River. Different incidents within a month of each other, same result. Both killers are behind bars now.

But it makes me wonder what people have buried in their backyards. I often wondered if I could successfully bury gold in my own backyard. Not gold purchased through some weird website advertised by a dork who makes Vanilla Ice* look gangsta. I mean getting a hold of gold coins, gold jewelry, etc. and stowing it beneath my lawn. Sink a concrete vault and slip out at night to put my ill-gotten booty back there. There are a number of problems with this, not the least of which is my neighbors can all see me digging a big hole back there. Shades of Tom Waits's "What's He Building in There?" And besides, gold's not all it's cracked to be as an investment. One ill-timed boom, and good luck pawning Grandma's wedding ring. (I got more for my silver wedding ring from a previous marriage than my wife got for a gold ring her father gave her.)

But the 1950s were boom years for bomb shelters. Many remain intact, assuming developers haven't planted McMansions over them. Most are used for storage anymore. Some have become man caves and she sheds. (Is that still a thing?) A few prepper types keep their supplies in them. Most were left abandoned. An old bomb shelter, particularly connected to a house by a tunnel, can hide all sorts of ill-gotten booty (or bodies.) Going back to my idea of sinking a vault in the backyard, there are some things to consider. For instance, my house sits on a man-made rise to lift it above potential flash floods. Additionally, my neighbors have an in-ground pool. Every spring and fall, my backyard is... Moist. The stagnant water potential is enormous.

But where do you hide something you don't want others to find? If you own property that stands vacant, you're further ahead of the game than most. My aunt and uncle divided their old dairy farm into lots for their sons. Two built houses. The other, who prefers urban life, built a private campground. If they so chose, something valuable or someone inconvenient could spend years there never to be found. (Given one of the family is related to the sheriff in that county, this is probably not a wise idea. But I'm a writer. I make things up using what I know or find out.)

Closer to home, I used to know a former IRS agent who sank his earnings into property. Now, if I were to buy houses or buildings, I'd likely rent them out as quickly as possible. My friend did not. My friend was the most organized hoarder you'll ever meet. He would go through Big Lots and buy whatever struck him and just stash it. When he ran out of room at his house, he started using one of his vacant properties. Then another. He had at least two houses full of stuff he bought at Big Lots or flea markets or yard sales. Why did he buy all that stuff? Even he can't explain it. But I'll bet his hoarding stash was neater than your house or mine. (And my wife is a clean freak.)

Then there's the wilderness. Only in the eastern parts of these United States, where I live, there's not a lot of wilderness left. The closest to me is the Wayne National Forest, which covers a large swath of Southeast Ohio. But the region is crawling with hikers year-round. Your buried treasure or that business partner who "left town" before he could ruin you is just a stumbling tourist away from being found. Out west is better, where you can drive nearly a hundred miles between gas stations. I drove through Nevada a few years back and realized I could drive right off the road into the desert and leave something (or someone) out there never to be found. If it's something I want back, this is probably a bad idea, since I'd have to remember where I left it. The Rockies and, back east, Appalachians might be a better bet. Mountains have certain features that change little and are seldom visited. Probably better for that haul from your bank heist than your rich relative who put you in the will. 

*Vanilla Ice flips houses these days. Which means he's better with money than he is rapping. Also smarter than the dork in the gold commercial.

The Author Is Not The Protagonist. Until She Is.

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 On the scifi side, I once had a newsletter serialized novel beta read before putting it out as a book. I wrote the thing in pieces over two years, intending it to be a novella I could release as a PDF for that author name's newsletter. Now betas are the poor man's editor. Usually, as with the Holland Bay books, it's a writer who gets the type of story I'm writing. Once in a while, though, you get one with an axe to grind. Like one had a tantrum because a book had too much American stuff in it. Like tea bags. (I asked a British friend and a Japanese writer. They found this hilarious and asked who steeped their tea anymore in a pandemic-era world. Answer: Not many.) On this novel, though, I have one planet patterning itself after present-day China without the military pretensions. The note I got back: You shouldn't impose your politics on the reader.

I kindly sent back a note stating that was how one corner of my fictional world did things. Other areas did not. Then I mentioned another planet being a libertarian paradise. Same comment. I less politely said, "You can't call me both, especially in the same chapter." I suspect my beta reader suffered from a delusion many readers do: The attitudes and opinions of the characters are those of the author, not the author getting into the heads of his or her creations.

Theodore Sturgeon called these people morons. I'll be a little more charitable and call them lazy. 

But I'm thinking moron.

Put simply, a writer's job is to create characters who live and breathe. Some of them have vices. I've written alcoholics. You can't go through life without knowing a few addicts. I've written cheaters. I've written thieves. I don't do racists well because I have to dumb myself down for them. That does not mean I'm an addict, a thief, or a cheater. But I not only have to write these people, I have to believably write them. 

One reviewer pointed out the corruption in both Holland Bay and The Dogs of Beaumont Heights. but when I wrote them, I didn't think of it as that. Oh, Deputy Chief Roberts, Linc, and Ralph Smithers are corrupt as hell. I just didn't think about that. I wrote them as the heroes in their own dramas. Smithers's world is crumbling and rage eats him alive from inside. Linc thinks it's his turn to be on top. Roberts believes he's been passed over for chief too many times.

One thing the Holland Bay books don't feature that I can't say about Nick Kepler or my scifi is there is no "me" in the story. While I'm not really an ex-cop turned insurance investigator or a wealthy heiress's runaway son, Nick Kepler and JT Austin are my conduits into those series. But the closest would be Jessica Branson in the Holland Bay books. While hers is the easiest head for me to inhabit, she is most definitely not me.

"Wait a minute. Didn't you just do two articles about basing characters on real people being bad?"

Yep. And I stand by those articles. Conan Doyle is clearly Watson, whom Holmes finds smarter than

CC 2009 Mark Coggins

Doyle wrote him. Lew Archer is Ross MacDonald, such a thin version of the author that he disappears if he turns sideways. Then there's that other Santa Teresa detective, Kinsey Millhonne. Sue Grafton once said Kinsey is "moi had I not gotten married."

Of course, it's dangerous for an author to project oneself into a story. As I said before, the characters' opinions and attitudes are not those. Some, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, can turn into what's known as a Mary Sue, an idealized version of the author. 

So the protag is not the author. Until he or she says they are. 

Then it gets interesting.

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.