In the MidJourney of Our Life

On a recent trip to the west coast I spent an afternoon immersed in one of my nephews’ latest obsessions, an app called DALL-E. It’s a program that uses artificial intelligence to (fairly instantly) generate works of art suggested by a simple caption written by the user.

For example, if the user types the prompt, “an armchair in the shape of an avocado,” they are rewarded with several images like this:

Avocado chair.

The AI scours the internet in search of inspiration, and reconstitutes its findings into the images you see here. The prompt “an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog” generates the following images.

Walking daikon.

You can imagine how a couple of teenaged boys who are addicted to pop culture might use this immediate-gratification brain to conjure up images juxtaposing Jedis and Jesus, Captain Marvel and pizza, and so on. I don’t have access to any of the images I saw on my nephew’s phone that afternoon, but from that brief crash course I had the impression that the software had a long way to go. Most of the human faces it generated were…off. Even the images we asked it to generate—of pop culture icons such as R2D2, Ernie & Bert, Spider-Man—were suggestive of the thing being asked for, not flawlessly clear.

So that was my experience of the hot new thing all the cool kids were playing with about a month ago. The thing could barely draw. If it got lucky, it would turn out a nice picture of a radish. Cute, but so what?

Cut to this week, when a professional book cover designer I follow and whom I have hired to create covers of some of my self-pubbed titles sent around a newsletter in which he sang the praises of MidJourney, yet another AI art app that also debuted about a month ago. When the designer typed the following prompt: “jack the ripper hiding in a smog filled london alleyway with red eyes,” the AI thought a moment before generating the following four images.

I think we can agree this is pretty stunning. And when the designer asked the AI for variations, he got increasingly stunning images of an atmospheric landscape.

Again, this is a machine surfing the internet, gleaning from it how things look, and then spinning off tweaks of its findings as quickly as possible in a new form. Compare the Ripper images above to, say, a the cover of an old issue of The Strand Magazine, or the cover of a book of Sherlockian pastiches. 

Both of these covers were taken from works of art created by humans and licensed by the publishers. The MidJourney images were made by software that can be yours for $10 a month, or $30 a month, depending on the number of images you think you’d like to create.

As a writer, I have zero need for such software, but I can absolutely understand why the book cover designer who sent these around to his clients was excited about this brave new world of art. Most designers I know lament how hard it is to find usable, abundant, or appropriate images on stock photo agency sites. It takes an endless amount of clicking page after page to assemble, say, five good images, from which you knit together a composite image and layer in enough special effects via Photoshop or Illustrator to make it look beautiful. That can be hours of work, for which you can charge an author, perhaps $700-$800, tops, for the resulting cover image. Imagine instead being able to type, click, create, and tweak an image in seconds—and charge your client for the AI’s results.

My last sentence is a bit of a fantasy. The designer told his followers that, actually, it still takes him a long while to coax the appropriate image from the machine—as long as it does when he’s searching stock agencies for photos—but what the AI produces is wholly original, one-of-a-kind art.

From the handful of articles I’ve read, people are already up in arms, in the same way they were when programmers started teaching AI programs to write like human writers. Some of the criticisms I’ve heard:

• These art programs are racist and/or sexist. If you don’t specify the type of person you want them to generate, inevitably they’ll return a white male. When women are depicted, it’s often in demeaning or violent settings. (Software engineers say they are correcting this tendency.)
• This means the end of decent paying careers for artists! (I don’t think so; not just yet.)
• If you write, draw, or create science fiction, fantasy, and horror, you’ve come to the right place. The rest of the creative world has no need for this type of crap. (If you have a strong stomach, you can check out some images intended for horror fiction here.)
• If indeed the AI is “borrowing” references from other images online, will it not inevitably infringe upon the work of a living artist? (I suspect not, but the monkeys have only begun to bang away on the typewriters.)
• An art director who hires many artists to create book covers recently waded into the fray, reassuring artists that they are not being replaced, and pointing out that the US Copyright Office does not permit art to be copyrighted unless it was created by a human being. You will probably already know this if you remember that story a few years ago about a photographer who wanted to copyright a photo that was taken by, yes, a monkey who stole, operated, then abandoned the photog’s camera.
• Already, AI work has won art awards, and human artists are pissed.

So, in other words, we are once again immersed in a kind of moral panic over something very smart people have dreamed up. I think it probably can’t be said enough that if a computer program is sexist, racist, or whatever, and it’s using as its creative input the freaking Internet, then we are truly reaping what we have sown. To the extent that images look lovely or appealing to our eye, that too is on us as a species.

That all said, I created a free MidJourney account and had a look around the communal chatroom where the bot is fed its prompts and where users can download the results of their queries. (You’re allowed 25 free uses before you are asked to subscribe.) I could immediately see that I was in the virtual presence of users who had a distinctly artistic mind. With experience, many of these users had come to know exactly how to word their requests. To get the bot to spit out an image in a particular style, they used buzzwords such as “unreal” or “hyperrealistic” or referenced specific artists or designers. Here are two highly specific prompts I encountered:

• Ethereal humanoid sphinx, Art by Peter Mohrbacher + h.r. giger + Zdzisław Beksiński + Tsutomu Nihei , unreal engine render , intricate details , hyper details —stylize 5000

• post-apocalyptic cebu city unreal engine cinematic digital art

Little ol’ unartistic me stepped up to the plate, and fed the AI the following prompt: “a detective named sleuth sayers who says sleuthy things.” Within seconds, I had these (admittedly male-seeming) images:

When I asked the AI to generate variations  on this theme, it returned the following:

Was it something I said?

* * *

See you in three weeks!


Joe
josephdagnese.com

The Pig War

I wrote my master's thesis on one of the many adventures of Charles Elliot (1801-1875), British Royal Navy officer, diplomat, colonial administrator and, to put it bluntly, semi-secret agent.  His major adventure was the First Opium War, and there is not enough time or space to relate even half a smidgen of that.  Let's just say he instigated it, fed and watered it, seized Hong Kong (giving the British an excellent island War Room and great revenues for the next 150 years), watched (and participated) as his cousin George and the British Navy fought it, and signed the first peace treaty.  

Then he was recalled home and sent off to his next adventure, as the British charge d'affaires and consul general to the Republic of Texas from 1842-1846, which became the subject of my thesis, "The Man in the White Hat:  Charles Elliot in the Republic of Texas."  

I could also have called it "A Parcel of Rogues", because the Republic of Texas had an almost unbelievable cast of characters, beginning (of course) with Sam Houston.

In 1842, Texas had been a republic for 6 years. Samuel Houston, was in his second term as President of Texas. Houston was known for having spent years living among the Cherokees (hence his nickname "The Raven"). In 1827, he became Governor of Tennessee, but had to resign in scandal when he divorced his wife in 1829. (Even Andrew Jackson tossed him to the wolves on this one.) Houston left and went to Arkansas, to live with the Cherokee again, and eventually went to Texas territory. And the rest is kind of  history. And some legend. Probably a lot of legend. Some of it told by his own fair lips.  

One legend was told on, by or about the French charge d'affairs, the Comte de Saligny, who came to hand his credentials to the President of Texas.  He found President Houston sitting crosslegged on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, Indian style, while de Saligny was in full diplomatic gear, and probably sweating heavily. De Saligny began boasting and pointing out his medals, and when Houston had had enough, he leaped to his feet, throwing off the blanket, and stood, stark naked, pointing to his scars and screaming, "These are my medals! These are my credentials!" 

But then Houston hated de Saligny. Everyone did. Including de Saligny's own boss, French Foreign Minister Guizot.  

De Saligny lived a wildly fraudulent life.  To begin with, his real name was Jean Pierre Isidore Alphonse Dubois, and he was of bourgeois origins. He had to leave France due to involvement in a fraudulent corporation in Paris and a tendency to counterfeit money. Somehow his family managed to wangle him the job in the Republic of Texas, despite its importance. (Both Britain and France wanted to keep Texas independent, for a variety of reasons, which is why they both sent diplomats to do whatever they could.)  

Well, Dubois got to Texas, and gave himself the title of Comte de Saligny. Most of the newspaper articles and letters call him de Saligny, and some Comte, but then Texas was the kind of place where everyone went to get away from their past and start over. Look at Houston. 

Meanwhile, Dubois didn't have much use for Austin, Texas, especially after Paris: It was still in construction, with unpaved streets, wooden shanties, and not much promise of civilization on the march, especially after Paris. And one of those wooden shanties was Dubois' residence, the "hotel" of Mr. Bullock. 

Now Dubois had started over, but with the caveat that he continued to pass counterfeit money.  Including to pay his rent.  His landlord was not pleased.  This laid the basis for the infamous Pig War, which while short, lives in legend.  

Mr. Bullock had pigs. And in Texas (indeed in most of the world back then) pigs ran mostly wild, living off what they could find, because feeding pigs anything but scraps doesn't pay (this goes back all the way to the Middle Ages, and Thomas Tusser's 1573 Five Hundred Good Points of Husbandry). Mr. Bullock's pigs ran wild around the streets of Austin, not to mention the yard around Mr. Bullock's boarding house. And they ate corn that Dubois had bought (probably with more counterfeit money) for his horses. Claiming that the honor of France had been insulted when the Government of Texas, i.e., Sam Houston, refused to either back him or repay him for the corn, he refused to pay Bullock's bill. 

Dubois ordered his servant Pluyette to kill Bullock's pigs, which he did, although there's disagreement as to how many hogs died. Bullock assaulted Pluyette in the street, throwing rocks at him and threatening him with an ax, and there were skirmishes in the press. At one point Bullock was arraigned, but Dubois wouldn't let Pluyette testify, citing "The Laws of Nations".  To which Texas basically replied, "Yeah, right. Pull the other one." 

Later that night, Dubois and Bullock got into it at the door of the inn, and Bullock actually grabbed Dubois and shook him by the collar and then the arm! Dubois walked away, congratulating himself loudly & publicly on his composure, which he totally lost when he found out that the Texas Secretary of the Treasury, John Chalmers, approved what Bullock had done, and said that if Dubois had laid a hand on him, Chalmers, he'd have pulled out his gun and killed him.  

Well, shortly thereafter, Dubois decided that the greater part of valor was to flee the whole sordid mess, and he did. In the middle of the night.  To New Orleans.  Specifically, a brothel in New Orleans, which became his home away from home for a quite a while. 

NOTE: I remember sitting in my graduate student's carrel, reading my way through the French diplomatic letters of that time. All my fellow students were bored to death by their research, while I was practically howling with laughter as Guizot - from 8,332 kilometers away - wrote letter after letter cursing, hounding, pleading, ordering, and cursing some more in his desperate attempts to get Dubois to go back to Texas and get some actual foutu work done!  

Meanwhile, up in New Orleans, Dubois apparently wasn't content with les demoiselles du New Orleans, but had moved on to adultery. He was challenged by a woman's husband, but refused to duel, at which point he was hounded out of town for cowardice. All of this was why the French had no role at all in any of the stuff that happened with the Republic of Texas, leaving the field free for my guy Elliot.

BTW, years later, the French, under a misunderstanding that Dubois had actually served in and knew America and Mexico well, sent him as French ambassador to Mexico in 1860, where once again he fiddled with the money. He was recalled to France in 1863, in disgrace, and never served again as a diplomat. But he did marry a young, ultraconservative, wealthy Mexican woman and took her back to France. He bought a chateau and estate in Normandy, where he spent the rest of his life.  

But no one liked him there, either. Rumors of cruelty to wife and servants led to an interesting result.  After his death in 1888, he was buried but later the cemetery was moved from the town square to the area behind the church. Everyone's casket was moved except his. Dubois was left in his place, in the square, and every time there's a festival - to this day - the locals dance on his grave. Now THAT'S a grudge.  (Kenneth Hafertepe's A History of the French Legation in Texas.)  

As for my man Elliot?  He was beloved by both Anson Jones and Sam Houston, even though they hated each other.  Anson Jones named one of his sons Charles Elliot Jones.  Sam Houston eulogized him on the Senate floor after Texas was incorporated into the United States:

"England was represented by a gentleman whose intelligence would compare with that of any representative from any country... He was a man who sympathized with Texas, and he proposed nothing but what was for the interest of Texas... The character of that gentleman was preeminently praiseworthy and patriotic, and it would be seen that Texas appreciates him when she writes her annals. And as a statesman and diplomatist, he was entitled to all the respect and gratitude of Texas."  (Writings of Sam Houston)

Elliot went on to become Governor first of the Bermudas, then of Trinidad, as well as an Admiral.  He died at 74, and no one danced on his grave.

From the BBC to you.

 

For the second week in a row I am going to discuss British audio.  Pip pip and all that.

I have written here before about enjoying audiobooks through the Libby service my library makes available.  I also listen to podcasts.

Recently I discovered BBC Sounds, a free source of tons of radio from Old Blighty.  Let me tell you about some relevant favorites.  (Keep in mind that some of these have expiration dates.)

My Sister the Serial Killer.  A novel by Oyinkan Braithwaite, read in condensed form.  Korede tries to protect her sister but it is awkward because Ayoola is indeed a serial killer, although a million miles from the stereotype.  A bizarre novel from a writer  with a truly original mind.

A Charles Paris Mystery.  Bill Nighy stars as the cynical actor in an excellent dramatization of Simon Brett's A Doubtful Death. Charles goes to Oxford for an "experimental" production of Hamlet and finds a possible case of murder.

Raffles.  Dramatization of short stories by E.W. Hornung about A.J. Raffles, the original gentleman thief, created as a sort of anthesis of Hornung's brother-in-law's famous creation, Sherlock Holmes.

McLevy.  Radio dramas about a Victorian Scottish policeman.  The current series finds him in the United States. 

Miss Marple. June Whitfield plays Agatha Christie's legendary sleuth in Nemesis.

And here are some more that I haven't listened to yet:

Dead Cert.  A dramatization of Val McDermid's novel.

How to Kill Your Family.  An abridged reading of a novel by Bella Mackie.

The Reckoning.  A dramatization of Charles Nicholl's book about the murder of Christopher Marlowe.

Annika Stranded.  You may have seen the show Annika on PBS, about a Norwegian policewoman.  These are readings of stories about the same character, written by her creator Nick Walker.

And moving away from crime...  I discovered this website because BBC's Friday Night Comedy is no longer available on other apps. That program usually consists of a rotating series of news-related comedy shows, but over the summer they switch to a serial.  At the moment they are running a second season of the hilarious Party's Over, starring Milo Jupp as Henry Tobin, trying to adjust to normal life after a brief and disastrous term as Prime Minister:

Reporter: "Prime Minister, which of the many catastrophes over the eight months you were in power do you think was the biggest? The petrol crisis? Losing Gibraltar?  The school dinner dog meat scandal?"

Henry Tobin: "Many of these events could be viewed as successes. You call it a petrol crisis.  I call it more Britons using bicycles than ever before."

Happy listening.   

 

Road Trip

     As this blog posts, my traveling companion and I are pulling out of our driveway. This morning, we embark on our trip to Bouchercon 2022 in Minneapolis. Traveling through America's heartland, we will be preparing ourselves to cannonball into the deep waters of mystery fiction. Today, I'm wading slowly into that mystery pool. I'd like to consider the contributions to the mystery genre of some places we'll pass by as we motor up I-35. 

    Unless we stop for a fried pie in the Arbuckle Mountains, we should arrive in Oklahoma City in a smidge over three hours. I don't come to "The City" without remembering The Long and Faraway Gone. Lou Berney's book, set around a pair of crimes in Oklahoma City, explores memory and the continuing consequences of crimes. As I think about my writing, I try to remember what Berney taught me about damaged characters. If you've not read it, pick it up. Bring it to Bouchercon. He'll be on a panel moderated by Michael Bracken. 

   Another four-hour jump north will bring us near Topeka, Kansas. This selection, I'll acknowledge, is a total cheat. Perhaps I should go with The Late Man by James Girard or In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Rex Stout, however, was raised in Topeka before attending the University of Kansas. He created Nero Wolfe and his assistant, Archie Goodwin, in Fer-de-Lance in 1934. Although there are books and authors more closely associated with Kansas, Mr. Wolfe's devoted fans, the Wolfe Pack, have been kind to me. Their Black Orchid Novella Award recognized my first published short story. I'll think about Rex Stout on our drive across Kansas. We might even pass the time listening to Too Many Cooks. In that book, Nero Wolfe left his New York brownstone and took a road trip. It seems fitting. 

    BTW: The Man Who Went Down Under by Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson, this year's Black Orchid Novella Award-winning story, was in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine's July/August issue. 

    Four hours later, we'll be solidly in Iowa. I just finished reading The Fields by Erin Young. This 2022 mystery is a procedural set in Black Hawk County, Iowa. The setting is a smidge east of I-35, the road we'll take through the state. But it couldn't be helped; I don't have a good Des Moines mystery at the ready. 

    The Fields is dark with an engaging female protagonist, Sergeant Riley Fisher. It opens with a murder on a family farm. Combining small-town life with the threats of corporate farming, the book moves at a quick pace. It may be located east of here, but it is not hard to imagine the setting as we slice through the corn belt. 

    Journeying northward, we'll cross the Minnesota state line. The first town we come to on that side of the border is Albert Lea. To the east, the next town is Austin, Minnesota. On this small sample space, the state appears organized alphabetically. If that's true, then Aurora County must be nearby.

    Aurora County, Minnesota, is the setting for the Cork O'Connor mysteries written by William Kent Krueger. And we won't find O'Connor here in the corn belt. The books are set in the state's north woods. Krueger, however, will be one of the guests of honor at Bouchercon. To commemorate this fact, I'll put forward Iron Lake, the first of the Cork books, as my state representative. I don't think I need to say much about him. Nineteen books in the series sort of speak for themselves. 

    Bonus: We will likely decide to return through South Dakota, the land of my youth. I reached out to fellow Sleuth, Eve Fisher for a recommendation on a Sioux Falls mystery. She didn't have one to offer. Instead, she suggested I try Kathleen Taylor's books set in Delphi, South Dakota. I read the first one, Funeral Food. I liked the small-town tropes. They felt authentic. When I picked it up, I expected to read a cozy. The protagonist is a waitress at the town's café. But not all the sex occurred off camera. The plot felt a little forced in spots, but the humor was genuine. I laughed. 

    The westerly swing into South Dakota means we will return home through Nebraska. (You can check the map.) The state claims the hard-boiled crime fiction writer Jim Thompson on a Nebraska librarian website. He attended the University of Nebraska for a time. Oklahoma, however, also considers Thompson one of theirs since he was born in the Oklahoma Territory. His family subsequently moved to Fort Worth. The Lone Star State also takes credit for shaping him. Thompson was praised by Anthony Boucher. He was hailed as a Dimestore Dostoevsky. That label alone, I think, is worth a mention. With his tie to Boucher and nearly every state on our return, Thomson seems the ideal writer to recognize for the trip south. (Apparently, he never paused long enough to write a postcard from Kansas.) I'm pushing The Killer Inside Me. 

    If Bouchercon has left you too tired to read, you can catch The Killer Inside Me on video. Stacy Keach starred in 1976, and Casey Affleck reprised the lead role in a 2010 film version. 

    If you have other recommendations from these midwestern states, I'd love to hear about them. I can't promise, however, that I'll read them anytime soon. My traveling companion and I will likely return from Bouchercon with a tall new stack for our TBR piles. 

    Until next time. 

Bloom Where You’re Planted

Richard Helms

Allow me to introduce my friend and wonderful writer, Richard ‘Rick’ Helms, author of a zillion award-winning novels and short stories, a man who’s received more nominations than an Iowa caucus. A former forensic psychologist, he oozes Southern charm and he’s witty and modest as well.

He and his wife Elaine live in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he still muscles out superb stories. You can find more about him on his web site. Now read on…

— Jan Grape

Bloom Where You’re Planted
by
Richard Helms

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

— Ernest Hemingway

I wrote my first full-length novel forty years ago. It wasn't published for another eighteen years, after going through dozens of submissions and two different agents. The Valentine Profile is still out there, and—being my first work—it's perfectly horribly awful, and I hang my head in shame every time I think about it. Please don't buy it. Or buy a caseload. You do you.

Despite years of disappointment and an almost legendary number of rejections, I persisted, and wrote four or five more novels, which also weren't published for many years. With each new title, I tried to stretch and improve, and each new book was incrementally better than the last.

I was always reminded of Raymond Chandler’s advice to analyze and imitate. Not surprisingly, most of my first half dozen or so novels are extremely derivative of the authors I was reading at the time—Robert Ludlum, David Morrell, David Hagberg, James Lee Burke, Robert B. Parker, and the like. It takes time to find your voice as an author, so for a while you borrow other people’s voices. There are those who still say—and they aren’t far wrong—that my Eamon Gold private eye series is still just Spenser transported to the west coast.

For years, I didn't even consider writing short stories. I didn't think I had the chops. Like many new writers, I presumed that real authors wrote novels—huge sweeping panoramas of human greed, suffering, conflict, passion, and inevitable death. I earned a Russian Studies minor in college—long story—and might have been influenced a bit by Tolstoy. Somewhere in the recesses of my autistic head, short stories were for quitters who put down Anna Karenina on only page 534.

More than that, though, I was convinced I couldn't say everything I wanted to in only a few thousand words. I thought that was a special skill, like shorthand, and I was playing hooky the day they handed it out.

This is really strange, because my most treasured physical possession is a book of—you guessed it—short stories.

It was my first ‘grown-up’ book. We were moving from Charlotte to Atlanta a week or so after I finished first grade, and our neighbors’ oldest son, who might have been twelve at the time, crossed the street as we were packing our car for the move to Georgia. He handed me a paperback book. He probably said something like, “My mom and dad said you like to read and stuff, and I had this lying around, so you can have it, okay?”

I prefer to remember the moment in the same emotional vein as the Lady in the Lake hefting aloft the mighty Excalibur, presenting it to Arthur. It was a turning point in my young life.

The book was Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction. It was an anthology cobbled together from classic pulp science fiction magazines of the 1940s. There were stories by Lester Del Rey, Ray Bradbury, John D. McDonald, Murray Leinster, Fredric Brown, Clifford D. Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, and many more. As we tooled down the blue highways between Charlotte and Atlanta, I huddled in the backseat floor—as kids did sixty years ago—and read about robots and rockets and tiny unconscious homunculi used as currency and a funny alien named Mewhu and a man and a dog transformed into Jupiterian beings and time travel and all sorts of amazing concepts I’d never thought of before.

A lot of it didn’t make sense to me and was confusing, but most of it was amazing and astounding and made my little seven-year-old heart flutter. Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction was my gateway drug to adult literature and pulp fiction at the same time. Dick and Jane? I didn’t care if they ran. I wanted to know why they ran. Why were they being chased? What horrible thing did they do? Dick and Jane might have been okay for the other second graders. I yearned for more. Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction fed that hunger, and for the first time in my life, I understood that stories didn’t just happen, as Richard Brautigan wrote, like lint. Somebody had to write them.

Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction is still my most prized physical possession. It resides in a special place on my bookshelf at home. If the house ever catches fire, I will see that Elaine and the cat are out, and then I’ll rescue the book. Everything else can be replaced. This book can’t, for one reason.

Theodore Sturgeon autograph

In 1978, I had dinner at UNC-Greensboro with Theodore Sturgeon and his partner, Lady Jayne. He was a guest of honor at a sci-fi convention at the college. He had written the story “Mewhu’s Jet” in my Sacred Book. I brought the by-then tattered paperback with me, and at a probably clumsy moment I thrust it into his hands and told him the story of how this book changed my reading life—and eventually inspired me to become a writer as well. He took one look at it, and said, “This book has been well-loved”, and he signed the first page of his story.

Sturgeon is long gone now, dead for over forty years. His autograph in my book with the added ‘Q’ with an arrow he used to symbolize “Ask the Next Question” can never be replaced. So the book gets rescued.

As illuminating as it was, Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction was also intimidating. To me, the authors in those pages were giants, superhumans endowed with powers far beyond the grasp of mortal scribblers. They captured entire universes in five or six thousand words, and I was not worthy to look upon their visages.

So, I wrote novel after novel after novel. Twenty-five now and counting. Some were squibs. Some were award finalists. Not one of them has ever sold more than 1500 copies. That’s probably my fault, as I am much more comfortable tapping on a keyboard than pressing flesh. A born salesman, I am decidedly not.

In 2006, I decided to start a webzine publishing hardboiled and noir short stories, and solicited submissions on all the usual email listservs, the Facebook and Twitter of the day. Within weeks, I was swamped with submissions, a great number of which had been penned by Edgar and Shamus and Anthony Award winners. I was shocked.

Reading all those stories by such distinguished writers gave me an opportunity again to analyze and imitate. I pulled out my old trusty copy of Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction, and I read those stories again as well. As I read, I discovered that the stories that had cowed me so completely decades earlier now made sense. I could recognize the use of a three-act structure and the economy of language in them. I had a little peek underneath the magicians’ capes. I thought, perhaps, I might be able to write in this strange, truncated style after all.

In 2006, I was mowing the grass and came up with an idea for my third Eamon Gold novel. Started working on it, and realized there wasn't enough there for a book, but it might make a nice short story. Longtime buddy Kevin Burton Smith published it on his Thrilling Detective Website, ("The Gospel According to Gordon Black") and it went on to win the Derringer Award that year. I had also written a short story for my own webzine, The Back Alley, entitled "Paper Walls/Glass Houses", and darned if it didn't win the Derringer as well.

No shit, dear readers. My first two published short stories were award winners, and made me one of only two authors ever to win the Derringer in two different categories in the same year. (The other is the incredibly prolific and masterful John Floyd.) Nobody was more surprised than I.

So I wrote another one, based on a failed Pat Gallegher novel, and retitled it "The Gods For Vengeance Cry." On a flyer, I sent it in to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and by golly Janet Hutchings bought it! It went on to garner nominations for the Derringer, Macavity, and Thriller Awards, and won the 2011 Thriller Award.

Yeah. My first THREE published short stories won awards. The fourth, "Silicon Kings" was also a Derringer finalist.

Clearly, it was time to reevaluate my writing priorities.

For almost a quarter century, before Kevin kindly published "The Gospel According to Gordon Black", I had always presumed that I was first and foremost a novelist, however obscure and failed. I had been conditioned to believe the fallacy that novels hold an exalted spot in literature. While I had enjoyed some limited critical acclaim with my novels, the sudden shocking success of the short stories left me wondering whether I had wasted thirty years of my writing life.

It’s a good thing I’m not into regrets.

Over the last fifteen years, I've embraced the idea that I might actually be a short story writer who dabbles in writing novels. I have six Shamus Award nominations (and one win) for my novels, but my short stories have garnered a mind-boggling fourteen nominations, and have won the Thriller, Shamus, and Derringer Awards. One story I wrote for anthology editor and master story craftsman Michael Bracken (“See Humble and Die”, in The Eyes of Texas, for Down and Out Books) was selected for the 2020 edition of Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories, edited by Otto Penzler and C. J. Box.

And the hits just keep coming. Several years ago, the Republican National Convention was held in my hometown of Charlotte, NC. As happens in many cities, Charlotte made a concerted effort to get rid of the many homeless people who cluster each night along uptown Tryon Street, because images of people sleeping on bus stop benches make for bad national TV. I read an article about it in the news, and my first thought was that sweeping the streets of homeless people might make an excellent cover for a murder. Kill a homeless guy, hide the body, and everyone would think he was just given ‘Greyhound Therapy’—a bus ticket and twenty bucks to go somewhere (anywhere) else.  I let the idea cook in my head for a week or two, mostly coming up with a compelling protagonist, and then I started typing. I threw in some stories I’d heard about living on the streets from my hippie buddies back in the early 1970s. The resulting story, "Sweeps Week" (EQMM, July August 2021) won the Shamus this year, and is a finalist for the Macavity at Bouchercon next week.

My wife said, “You know, you might have a knack for this.”

Sometimes I have to shake my head when I realize that one story in EQMM is seen (and hopefully read) by more people than have read all my novels put together. That's humbling, but also exciting. Unlike each new book, which might flop or fly, or even go completely ignored, the stories are being read. Nothing is more important to a writer.

I still write novels. Earlier this year, Level Best Books’ New Arc imprint published A Kind and Savage Place, which traces the evolution of civil rights in the south as experienced by the citizens of a small North Carolina farming community. Next year, their Historia imprint will publish Vicar Brekonridge, a novel based on my Derringer Award-nominated EQMM short story “The Cripplegate Apprehension.” I recently finished a massive novel called 22 Rue Montparnasse, about the Lost Generation in post-WWI Paris, and I’m about ready to set sail on another novel about Laurel Canyon in the 1960s, inspired by the music of the late Nashville songwriter Larry Jon Wilson. None of these, with the possible exception of Vicar Brekonridge, is a traditional mystery story. Writing mystery short stories has freed me to explore other genres in my novel-length works, and to write the more mainstream and historical stories that I’ve back-burnered for years.

For now, though, my plan is to spend 2023 focused mostly on short stories. I’ve discovered that they are intensely rewarding. In what other medium can you come up with an idea on Tuesday, write “The End” on Friday, and people will buy it (hopefully)? In the same way I truly enjoy diving into massive amounts of research for a sweeping historical novel, I love the spontaneous nature of short stories. They’re almost like zen paintings, executed in seconds only after days of contemplation. The typing is only the last stage of storytelling. First, the story has to live inside your head. As Edward Albee once taught me in a master class, “Never put a sentence on the page until it can write itself.”

Living on the autistic spectrum, it would have been easy to stay rigidly glued to the novel-writing path. Comforting, even. Stability, structure, and adherence to a long-standing pattern of behavior is kind of a big deal among my neurodivergent tribe. Gritting my teeth, shutting my eyes, holding my breath, and breaking out and trying something new fifteen years ago turned out to make a huge difference in my writing life, and opened the door to a level of authorly satisfaction I had never known before.

My point is this (and it doesn't apply only to writing): The secret of happiness, I think, is to find your sunny spot and bloom where you're planted. If you beat your head against a door for years without an answer, maybe you're at the wrong door. I spent twenty-five relatively unhappy years working as a clinical/forensic psychologist, but only found career joy when I followed my true calling and became a teacher. Likewise, when I embraced short stories, the flower of my writing career blossomed.

Sometimes, it's a good idea to step back, survey the Big Picture, and figure out exactly where you fit into it, as opposed to where you want to fit. Life has a way of showing you the paths you need to tread, if you’re open to looking for them. A simple jink to the left or right could change your entire life. But, wherever you land, it should be the place that makes you happiest. Living as a tortured literary artist slaving in a dusty garret may be a romantic notion, but it isn’t much fun.

Sometimes, you win by trading one dream for another.

Florida News Part 2

Continued from last time…

Kids Say the Darnedest Things

An Alaska Airlines plane was isolated at Orlando Airport after a 10-year-old lad with an iPhone radioed the plane had been hijacked. Fun fact: The minimum age for federal crimes that usually apply to planes is 11.

Lavender Lights

Mood lighting has come to Central Florida streets. For reasons authorities don’t understand, more than 600 malfunctioning LED lights have turned purple from their original white. Locals are now asking for disco balls and dance music.

Another Day, Another Gator

Social media marveled at a bicyclist calmly waiting for an alligator to cross the road. A person remarked that the cyclist must be local. Unfortunately the Bureau of Tourism appears to have removed the video, perhaps from fear of scaring away visitors. If gators are going about their business and you stay out of their way, they’ll leave you alone. Last year a bike rider was bitten– he’d fallen off his bike and landed virtually on top of the startled reptile.

And Yet Another

Alligators up to four, less than five feet (~1⅓m) are manageable, but after that, a human is outclassed in mass and strength. Imagine an 11-footer (more than 3⅓ metres) in your swimming pool. Nuh-uh, that’s a bit much even for me, especially during mating season. And crocodiles… Yiii! I avoid.

And Another

My friend Thrush sent me this item. B-b-b-bed? Seriously? Look, when raised young, they can make good, clean, quiet, protective pets, not a girlfriend. One of those arguments, “Brr. Your feet are freezing,” might not turn out so well.

And Another

The headline, ‘Florida man dies while searching for frisbees in a gator-infested lake,’ might sound of levity, but the story is sad to the extreme. We're talking pricey frisbee golf discs, and homeless men wade in lakes, hoping to retrieve enough to sell for food.

Bearly Here

Bad enough Floridians find alligators lazing in their swimming pools, but some, like my friend Thrush, put up with bears. Given a choice, I’d rather deal with a gator than a bear as this video demonstrates.

Bearly There

What‽ I have no idea how to caption this: grocery store, pitchfork, whip, stabbing an SUV… Additional information made it worse. How do you link teddy bears to pitchforks and whips?

Hog Haven

And if wild bear isn’t enough, what about wild boar? The retirement community of Sun City is supposed to offer drama-free living, but feral swine have settled in.

Homicidal Sand Dunes

If you’ve managed to avoid alligators, wild boars and bears, watch out for murderous sands. The strange fact is that lovely sand can be dangerous, even deadly, and the lethal physics of wet sand, dry sand, and dunes are all different and life-threatening in different ways. Dry sand might be the worst because you will almost certainly require outside assistance. Here are survival tips.

Another Reptile

A jewelry store owner averts a multi-million dollar diamond theft by locking the would-be perpetrator in the vault.

Hot Pursuit

Motorcycles in Florida… it’s a thing in a state where Bike Week lasts three hundred and sixty days. Osceola reportedly receives a complaint bikers are harassing motorists and waving pistols at them. Deputies follow a random rider who appears oblivious to the drama and pulls into a Kissimmee service station. They guy uncorks his tank, starts pumping fuel, and wham!

A deputy tases him. The ‘suspect’ erupts in a fireball ‘cooking him alive.’

Gasoline → fumes → spark → explosive, right?

The taser-happy deputy may have been denser than the oak of a nightstick, but he wasn’t trying to kill the guy. The victim suffered devastating burns over more than three-quarters of his body and survival is still touch-and-go. But here we have a problem.

After ages of no apparent reaction and refusals to bring in FDLE (Florida’s state police), the sheriff announced he’s charging the victim with four counts despite no evidence he was associated with marauding bikers and casually took time to top off his tank. No gun was found on or around the victim, nor anywhere on gas station premises. At this point, locals express doubt the victim was involved with an crime, suggesting Osceola County might be trying to forestall a liability lawsuit. Police should have considerable video coverage from air and road, but the Sheriff's Department is not responding to FOIA requests nor releasing video.

Senator Rick Scott

What Did You Expect?

The Republican Senate Campaign fund is missing tens of millions of dollars– perhaps a couple of hundred million– including tens of thousands for private air charters buried in a Waffle House line item. Only one man knows for sure and he’s on a yacht elsewhere. Florida’s Rick Scott who masterminded the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud in history. His fine alone was $1.7-billion, that’s Billion with a B. So when the GOP wanted a financial genius to care for precious donations, who did they put in charge? Wait, you peeked!

Twerking While Intoxicated

An arrest warrant was issued for a woman who invaded a McDonald’s, partially trashed the place, and then, er, twerked upon exiting. Fortunately we do not have video.

Driving While Distracted

A couple crashed into a FedEx truck whilst engaged in an, uh, moving violations. (So many possible puns.) I cannot improve upon the observation of the Yahoo reporter: “The only package harmed was the one being attentively gift-wrapped by the passenger of the SUV.”

The Days of Using Proper English Are Went

I'll open with a confession. I started writing late in life, I have no degrees in English, and I am certainly not a badge-carrying grammar policeman. But, like most writers, I tend to spot style mistakes in fiction and I try not to commit too many of them myself. NOTE: Two years ago at this blog, I wrote two back-to-back columns on the do's and don'ts of writing (May 30, 2020, and June 6, 2020), and even though I'm not fond of most advice when it comes to fiction writing (in my view, if it works, to hell with the rules), I still find the subject interesting. 

Here's a definition I heard someplace: Style includes grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, abbreviations, word choice, word usage, sentence construction, paragraph construction, etc. All of us occasionally make style errors in writing, and it can be embarrassing, but what's worse is to make one of those mistakes and have it turn out to be humorous. So . . . 

For today's post I have attempted to list some of the craziest misuses of written language that I've seen. Some of the following examples have been called "garden path" sentences because they lead the reader in the wrong direction, and others just involve unfortunate errors or typos. But I found all of them to be funny.

Here goes:

Missing punctuation:

I love cooking my friends and my family.

The hunter shot a man eating tiger.

No smoking food or beverages will be permitted.

Let's eat Grandma.

If you like taking your time travel can be exhausting.

No dogs please.

I work at the School for the Severely Handicapped State of Missouri.

Witnesses to the crime at City Hall were two hookers, the mayor and her daughter.

I'm sorry I love you.

We're going to learn to cut and paste kids.

Misplaced modifiers, poor word choice, etc.

I bought a vase from an antique dealer with a giant bottom.

Dressed in a diaper, Mom read a story to my little brother.

Banish all information about the case from your mind, if you have any.

I'm looking for a horse that belongs to a girl with a silver mane and tail.

The blind man picked up the hammer and saw.

The marijuana issue has been sent to a joint committee.

Spewing lava, he took a photo of the volcano.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

Having finished my dinner, the waiter brought my dessert.

His company makes combs for people with unbreakable teeth.

Grammatically correct but confusing

Time flies when you're having fun; fruit flies like bananas.

The boat sailed on the river sank.

The merry man Mary married married people. (Mary's cheerful husband was a clergyman.)

Rose rose to hose her rows of roses.

The old man the boats. (The ships' crews are elderly.)

The complex houses married students and their families.

All the education he had had had had no effect on his future.

The mouse the cat the dog chased killed ate the cheese.

Will Cook will cook. (William's willing to prepare dinner.)

He fell into the well because he couldn't see that well.

Misspellings/typos

Your the best teacher ever.

The choir will meet at my house for fun and sinning.

Mr. Ellis willingly took the stand, butt cracks appeared in his testimony.

Her hiccups were cured through the use of carbon monoxide.

Having a great time, wish you were her.

The weather will not be ass cold tomorrow.

We have a great band: Bill Jones on guitar, Joe Bennett on drugs.

If you must heave during the sermon, please do so quietly.

All our representatives are busy severing customers.

The swimming pool will be closed due to the David-19 situation.

AutoCorrect is my worst enema.

Be kind, and say hell to someone you don't know.

Signs/notices:

Tables are for eating customers only

Bed for sale. Free: one night stand

This door is alarmed

Slow work in progress

Be sure to flash after using toilet

Our teachers make a differance

Raise Your Self-Esteem meeting in auditorium, 7 p.m. Please use rear door.

Try our seizure salad

Sale: men's trousers, half off

Cows please close gate

It's a fact: tacos is brain food

No trespassing violators will be prosecuted

Today's sermon: Jesus walks on water. Tonight's sermon: Looking for Jesus.

There are of course many more; these were some that first came to mind. Please contribute your own in the comments section. Have you made any of these kinds of mistakes in your own writing? Would you admit it if you did?

That's it for today. See you in two weeks, unless, well, you know, you never know.

Novel Writing

Just watched the movie LAST CALL (Showtime Networks, 2002), a story of the last few weeks in the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It featured the always brilliant Jeremy Irons as F. Scott and a surprisingly excellent performance by Neve Campbell as Francis Kroll, the young secretary he hired, to assist him as he struggled to write. It is based on the memoir of Francis Kroll.

A scene in the movie struck me. Fitzgerald dictates THE LAST TYCOON to Kroll who takes it down in shorthand. When Fitzgerald finishes a scene, Kroll eagerly asks, “Then what?” Fitzgerald answers, “I haven’t a clue.”

It struck me because I’ve been writing my novels like that. I haven't a clue what comes next but it comes to me.

When I wrote my first novels, I always had the plot laid out in detail. I don’t do that anymore. I start with a character in a scene and follow the character though the scene and keep following from scene to scene.

My latest novel HARDSCRABBLE PRIVATE EYE starts with a double-crossed private eye left handcuffed in a cavern in the Amazon by a femme fatale. After more double-crosses, the femme fatale rescues him, leaves him again and I follow him to New Orleans where he works a series of cases before the femme fatale returns.

The PI is hardscrabbled, the story hardscrabbled and I wrote it hardscrabbled and it came out a lot better than anticipated.

We all know there are many ways to write a story. I find creating real characters, putting them in motion and following along is an arduous way to write and so rewarding when it all comes together.

A writer I respect, Roger Bull (formerly of New Orleans and now of Fairhope, Alabama) likes the many twists and turns, making the reader feel as though he was a hamster on a wheel, so many spins and twists until the satisfying conclusion.

Twists? Because I didn’t know where I was going. I just followed and wrote what happened.

That's all folks.

A Loose Compendium of the Worst Writing Advice Ever

So I recently watched a video by Paul Davids,  a musician I follow on YouTube, with the intriguing title: "The WORST musical advice ever given." Davids, an accomplished musician in his own right, went to a trade show in Anaheim, and recorded a number of musicians, well-known and obscure alike, to respond to the prompt question in no more than thirty seconds. 

The results were pretty entertaining (If you have the time, go take a look. It's not very long, and wellworth your investment), and surprisingly not far off from some of the advice I received when starting out as a new writer. And that got me thinking: what would the responses to this sort of prompt be from writer types?

So I put it out there, and got a lot of interesting responses. I've posted them below, with attribution of at least the name of the writer giving the response, with more if I knew it/could find quickly. So let's take a look, and once we've worked our way through these responses, I'll top it off with my own take on "The worst writing advice I've ever received."

Here we go!

***********

Worst for me? “NEVER EVER use exclamation points.”

I say, what about “Help. I’m drowning.” versus “Help! I’m drowning!”?

For sure, don’t overuse them, but sometimes they’re appropriate.

 – James W. Ziskin ANTHONY, BARRY, & MACAVITY Award-winning author of the Ellie Stone Mysteries. Finalist for the EDGAR, AGATHA, and LEFTY Awards.

Syd Fields in his screenwriting book says avoid bummer endings. And that killed humanist film making in the US per screenwriter/producer Kirk Ellis (John Adams, Into the West). And it wasn't just films that suffered, in my opinion.

 – David Corbett Recovering Catholic, NYT  Notable author of THE ART OF CHARACTER, six novels, dozens of stories, numerous scripts, and too many poems.

Show Don't Tell. In reality it should be Show AND Tell.

 – Robert Gregory Browne, Bestselling author of  the TRIAL JUNKIES series and the FOURTH DIMENSION THRILLERS. Co-founder and Creative Director at Braun Haus Media, LLC.

Over my career as a playwright, a few have suggested I end a play with a “button.” But I’ve learned how hollow those throwaway tags can feel. It’s better to leave the audience with an open loop (some mystery, a question) so they are still “activated” long after “end of play.”

 – Audrey Cefaly, Calicchio Prize-winning and Pulitzer-nominated playwright.

I did a whole presentation on this at @WCSUWritingMFA...but, basically, any "viral" writing rule is horseshit...there is only ONE rule..."does it work?"

 – Matthew Quinn Martin Author of the NIGHTLIFE series, and sometime screenwriter.

I was told early on to get a fall back job.  I disliked the advice and ignored it.  By my mid-20s I was making a living writing freelance, getting grants and being paid to write a feature film.  You cannot retreat if you have a fall back position.  Always go forward.

 – Richard Vetere Author of the novels THE WRITER'S AFTERLIFE and CHAMPGAGNE AND COCAINE. 

"Write what you know." Bad because it's so limiting, and destroys the joy of discovering and exploring worlds (or stories rather) that you don't know...yet.

 – Robert Alexander Wray, Marc A. Klein Award-winning playwright of over a dozen works, including LOOKING GLASS ELEGY and MELANCHOLY ECHO.

There is a great deal of bad advice on Pinterest. Some of the worst is never use big words, do not use adverbs or adjutives, keep all sentences to three words.

 – Art Rickard

You can’t edit till you finish a novel. I get why, but it’s just not my process and I lost time trying to do it this way.

 – Robin Lemke

Any writing advice that tells me I MUST do this or that - whether it's writing an outline, zero draft, or whatever. Leave me alone, I'll write my own way, thank you.

 – Marty Wingate

"Bad" advice: Any pressure or encouragement to plot/outline.

Reasoning: Outlining demotivates me, creates extra work that isn't useful to the process I follow, and (for me specifically) it removes some of the humor/zing/unexpectedness from my work.

 – Kate Baray

Worst advice ever: “Do as much research as possible before you write even one word.” For years, I wasted months on research before writing “even one word.” It was a way to procrastinate and we writers are experts at procrastination. When I finally actually started the writing, I’d often discover that because the plot wasn’t working or the characters didn’t come alive, I’d have to start all over, often not needing or using any of the material. In a workshop facilitated by Elizabeth George, she advised to FIRST spend time & energy on character development/exploration and plotting because readers connect with characters, second with plot, and lastly with the areas that need research. “Focus your time and energy on the actual craft of writing,” she advised, “and not the technical stuff.”

 – Shannon Walker

Write what you know. If that advice had been followed we'd never have had Tarzan, Conan, and many others.

 – Bob Napier

Any absolute rule. Never do prologues or flashbacks

 – Leslie Hall, writing instructor and author of the Kaitlyn Willis Roadsigns Mysteries

"Never use any dialog tag other than 'said'" pisses me off every time. "Said" is too narrow and bland for sarcasm, fury, pain, desperation, or fear.

 – Kat Richardson, author of the bestselling GREYWALKER novels.

Any advice that begins with the words "always" or "never."

 – J. R. Sanders

Two pieces of contradictory advice: 1. If you want to sell a manuscript, read what editors are currently publishing and write something like that. 2. Don't chase trends. By the time you write your story, the editors will be sick of it and switch to a new trend.

 – Thomas P. Hopp, scientist and author of such modern day disaster epics as RAINIER ERUPTS! and THE GREAT SEATTLE EARTHQUAKE.

"Spend more than your advance on promo." Bad, BAD advice. Took me years and cashing in an old IRA to pay it off.

 –Jeri Westerson, author of the Crispin Guest medieval mystery series.

Not me, but a friend was told by his high school English teacher to always use as many qualifiers as possible, that way no one can ever prove you wrong.

 – Larry Cebula

Senior year of college, "First Novels" class teacher: "You seem to be using humor to hide from true emotion." Almost ended me as a writer, took nearly twenty years to recover from.

 – Cornelia Read, author A FIELD OF DARKNESS and THE CRAZY SCHOOL.

"Get a real job."

 – Bill Fitzhugh, former radio comedian, DJ, and author of HEART SEIZURE, HUMAN RESOURCES, and THE ORGAN GRINDERS. 

"Write what you know." Makes for a very boring book.

 – Michael W. Sherer, author of the Blake Sanders thriller series.

"Write what you know." Should be: "Write what you know or can find out."

 –Ed Goldberg

Write what you loathe.

 – Michael Fowles

"Write better."

 – Justin D. Park

"Keep your day job."

 – Elizabeth Sims

"Write while you hold down a job." I wrote a little, but it wasn't very good because I have to do rewrites and "rethinks."

 – Marilyn Holt

"Write what you know."

 – David B. Schlosser

Last, but not least, I received the following from my old friend and fellow Sleuthsayer R.T. Lawton, who has been under the weather lately, and to whom I am wishing the speediest of recoveries. Too good not to share in its entirety! Thanks R.T.!

The worst writing advice I received, came from two different university English professors.

The first professor gave me a D in his creative writing class and told me I would never learn to write. Finding that I had other talents which would serve me well in a subsequent career, this final grade never appeared on my graduation transcript. Don’t ask.

As for the second professor, I had returned from my two years, nine months, twenty-nine days with the army, having been granted a sixty-day drop in order to go back to college. Shortly after arriving on campus, I took some of my war poems to the English Department and conversed with a professor. He read the poems and politely did not encourage me to continue in this endeavor. His point was made, so be it.

This does not mean my current published work is anything close to literary. Let’s just say it is commercially bent and that the two professors merely had a different view on the subject at that point in time as they looked down from their ivory towers.

It was about five years after graduation from university that I read a short story in a biker magazine, told myself I could do better and sat down to write. The process was longhand on a yellow legal pad with many scissor cuts and subsequent joining with Scotch tape, so that no two pages were the same length. The original cut- and-paste method. And, yes, I did hunt-and-peck the manuscript out on an electric typewriter before submitting by snail-mail. The biker magazine bought and published the story. I was on my way.

Had I taken the advice of those two professors, then I would never have had the pleasure of meeting at conferences, chaptermeetings, critique groups and readings all those wonderful people who write. A very interesting group. I would not have had over160 published short stories. I would also not have had the privilege of Edgar setting on my writing desk, nor of being nominated for a Macavity.

Work hard, learn and follow your dreams.

 – R.T. Lawton, Edgar Award-winning short story writer.

***********

And how's that for a last word? 

Thanks to all who chimed in. And if you've got a good piece of bad writing advice, feel free to weigh in in the comments section below.

See you in two weeks!