The Best Closet

     Earlier this month, O'Neil De Noux wrote about the death mask of Napoleon on display at the Cabildo in New Orleans. The article got me reminiscing. I've always liked museums, the ones with stuff rather than just art. The good ones tell stories. As a child, the Pettigrew Museum in Sioux Fallas was a might bike ride from my house. The old Victorian house held a fascination for me. It was a great old closet, full of Native American arrowheads, geodes and other rocks, and the implements with which the settlers scratched out a living on the Great Plains. 

Jerry, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, 

via Wikimedia Commons

    The great museums are must-see tourist stops. They can also be overwhelming. I've taken power naps on the lawns of some of the world's great exhibit halls after plodding through floors of priceless artifacts. Today I shall praise the small museum. They tell a specific story. These museums help people to find the treasure in their own backyard. They are often staffed by people who care deeply about their niche subject. A little bit of customer interest makes them giddy.

    Not far from the Cabildo, just down Chartres Street in the French Quarter, is the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum. Shelves chockablock with glass dispensing bottles, the labels listing the original ingredients. Louisiana was the first state to license apothecaries. The state was cutting edge for health practices. But it was also New Orleans so they dispensed voodoo. The museum focuses on 18th and 19th-century health care. This isn't the Metropolitan Museum; a visitor won't be here all day. But as people who occasionally think about poisons, this could be your spot. 

    One caveat: The docent-guided tour helped me see things I would have missed. He pointed out Love Potion #9 as well as the ceramic jar near the cash register holding the leeches. The website says that guided tours are suspended during the pandemic. Perhaps they'll be back again by Bouchercon. 

    If you find yourself near the western entrance to Yellowstone National Park, consider visiting the Idaho Potato Museum in Blackfoot, Idaho. You'll know you've arrived when you get to the potato sculpture out front. The price of admission included a package of freeze-dried hash browns when my family and I visited. Shockingly, they didn't have any other visitors that afternoon. The attendant at the register was happy to talk about the exhibits. Want to see the world's largest potato crisp? She'll make sure that you don't miss it. 

    If you're passing through west Texas, stop by the Odessa Meteor Crater Museum. There you'll see...a meteor crater. Or you will if you hurry. Originally 115 feet deep, the winds of the last 65,000 years have filled the crater with sand. It is now only 15 feet deep. Your time is limited. 

    Last October, my wife and I were driving through New England checking out the fall foliage. On Main Street in Winstead, Connecticut stood a grand building. The sign out front identified it as the American Museum of Tort Law. Sadly, COVID-19 had it shuttered. Small surprise, I suppose. I'd expect a tort museum to think about potential liability. A virtual tour is available through the website. I'll be back if only to check out the gift shop. 

    Museums make great locations for mystery tales. The Smithsonian and the Louvre have been the setting countless times. By their nature, museums hold rare things. Even in the specialty museums, the collections are valuable to someone. Museums have quirky exhibits. If you want to bump someone off with a Lakota Sioux arrowhead, have them visit the Pettigrew. And never underestimate the lethality of a potato fork. 

    To safeguard the collections and to simplify ticket sales, access in and out of a museum is limited. A diverse group of people gathers there. Tourists from various walks of life collect at museums mingling with locals. Museums store secrets from the past. They host social events, weddings, parties, and fundraisers. Elegantly dressed people attend soirees at them. Or they will again soon. Intrigue and mayhem easily follow. 

    A museum closely based on the Idaho Potato Museum provides the setting for "The Case of the Brain Tuber," my story in the current Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. I rely upon all the elements of a museum: the social center, limited access and, the odd assortment of items collected to tell the story. 

    In March, Mystery Weekly published "Exhibiting Signs of Death," a story set in an imagined tort law museum. I've had a good year placing my stories in exhibit halls. I'm glad that museums are opening again. I look forward to visiting. 

    If you're thinking about Bouchercon 2022, pencil in the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota. 

    Until next time. 

YOUR Way

Writing is the hardest subject to teach. It's not information like history or science, and it's not a manual skill like carpentry or shooting lay-ups. It's a combination of knowledge (Vocabulary and grammar) and synthesis, combining that knowledge with the writer's own experience, emotions, skills and interests. When you have 25 or 30 students in a class or online with different cultures, environments, and DNA, trying to teach them the same skills the same way at the same time and expecting to absorb it at the same rate is a sure way to fail.

This is why so many graduate not only as mediocre writers, but as people who hate writing. Writing is a personal, even intimate skill, and the cookie-cutter approach doesn't work. I see and hear writers at workshops proclaiming that their method is the only way to write, and it always annoys me.

I was a panelist at a workshop a few years ago where one audience member asked if we outline our novels and I was the only one who said, "Yes." Before I could even explain that I used the term loosely, two other panel members screamed at me as though I had relieved myself on the table.

I told one of them later that if her method produced writing like hers, NO ONE should want to know how she did it.

Teaching writing should be less about getting the actual words right and a lot more about finding the way that works best for YOU. Schools need deadlines so teachers can grade your early stumbling efforts, but it doesn't help anyone. Teachers look at spelling, grammar and punctuation because that's easy to evaluate. Structure, style, pacing and rhythm, on the other hand, need larger samples than time permits. My senior honors English class gave me six weeks (It might have even been eight) to produce a research paper of 1000 words, and the teacher checked our footnote style (Remember Turabian?) with a microscope. Now, I expect to write that much on any given day (I produced the first draft of this essay, 1050 words, in about 35 minutes).

I don't know a single writer who uses precisely the same process that I do, and I claim that it works for me because I'm satisfied with most of the 15 novels and 30-some short stories I've published so far. But several writers on this blog have published hundreds of short stories and three times as many novels as I have. I have only a general idea of how most of them work, and it doesn't matter.

When I conduct my NANO workshops, I tell students that the important goal is not really producing 50,000 words, it's learning HOW TO produce those 50,000 words. If they've never tried to write a substantial amount before, it's a great chance to learn how to do it.

I suggest ideas you can use for outlining (Or simply listing scenes). I demonstrate the structure of a scene, how and why some characters work better for a story than others, how setting may help your story by creating obstacles or a context for your character, and how conflict enhances your plot. You need to find your own way to reach those goals.

Here are the questions schools can't help students answer, mostly because they're also doing math, science, social studies, foreign language and art homework, too, so their time is crowded. Never mind a social life.

How do YOU write the most effectively?

Do you write better in large blocks of time (Two hours or even more) or in short bursts of ten or fifteen minutes? Does that change if you're in an early stage of planning or actually working on the last pages of your story? I tend to go faster as I find a story's details and rhythm.

Do you need an outline or do you write a lot of junk then go back to save and expand the good stuff? I know a few major wirters who outline (Robert Crais and the late Sue Grafton among them), but Dennis Lehane, Tess Gerritsen and Carl Hiaasen don't. I wish I could write like any of them.

Do you need quiet, or can you listen to music or the traffic outside your window?

Do you need an deadline to motivate you? For me, one advantage of being unpublished and without a contract was that I could work at my own speed. I could go back and rewrite pieces and learn how to make them better without worrying about meeting someone else's deadline. I did 30 years of THAT in theater.

Are you better off writing your first draft with a pencil (John Steinbeck, with legal pads), crayon, rollerball, or fountain pen (Tess Gerritsen's preference), or typing into a computer? How about talking and recording your ideas first?

Do you have to write everything in order? Can you jump ahead to write a scene you expect to use later, and if so, do you need an outline to know that?

Steve Liskow

What gives you your ideas? Neil Gaiman answered this question better than anyone else I know when he said that writers get ideas because it's their job. Just like carpenters need to handle tools, actors need to learn lines, and musicians need a good sense of pitch and rhythm. If you can't get ideas SOMEHOW, you're not going to be a writer.

Do you edit as you go along, or do you write a complete first draft before you revise, or a combination of these? Is your process the same for short stories and novels (Mine isn't)?

Do you know other writers who can read and critique your work? How do you give and take criticism? I've been in three writing groups, and none of them helped me very much. I know several writers in the area whose work and judgment I respect, but at this stage I seldom bother them for anything except occasional feedback.

What do you do when the writing isn't flowing or you're overwhelmed? I read, do jumbles and crossword puzzles, play guitar, or praactice piano. I used to work out at the health club because mindless physical repetition helps me release my unconscious, the best editor. That went away during the pandemic.

What did I leave out? I don't know, but maybe THAT's what you need to answer.

Asian Aversion

Crime writers Eve Fisher and Mary Fernando have written about bigotry and touched upon prejudice against Asians. A farmer in rural Minnesota demonstrated one way to mitigate the problem.

I lived in a state forest near Big Lake, Minnesota, one of many villages near the upper Mississippi River, all grown up now into a city. Not many eateries fed travellers along Hiway 10, and it didn’t help the main diner closed and was sold to an Asian family.

Big Lake, Minnesota © Wikipedia

In town one day, my neighbor Bud announced several of us must go to lunch at the newly reopened diner. One bigmouth said he wasn’t gonna et no Viet Congo victuals.

Bud said, “They’re Korean and it’s damn good food.”

“Don’t care. Who knows what they put in it?”

At that point I suggested, “Garlic, ginger, onion…”

Bigmouth sneered.

Neighbor Bud wasn’t a fragile flower. He said, “Way I figure it, you got a choice between stupid and hungry, or well-fed and wise. Whizzit gonna be?”

Bigmouth grudgingly came along with a group of us, grumbling the whole way.

“Order steaks,” Bud suggested.

Bigmouth stared at everything suspiciously, mumbling under his breath. When the steaks arrived, he sniffed it. He poked at it with his fork in case it wasn’t dead. To be sure, he stabbed it with a knife.

Then he took a bite. He chewed. And another bite. He stopped grumbling. He ate everything, everything on his plate.

Leaning back, he patted his stomach and said, “God-blessed-durn, that was the best steak I ever et. I wonder what they put in it?”

Bud said, “Garlic, ginger…”

Bigmouth not only became a fan of the diner, he became friends with the family.

Every town needs a Bud. And a great Oriental restaurant.

---

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, Big Lake is all grown up into a city, one I wouldn’t recognize nor find my way around. But a local web site demonstrates a decided hostility I can’t account for.

Searching for a picture of the town, I came across BigLake.com where, at the bottom of the home page, I found one of the weirdest legal statements ever, complete with a fat, yellow acknowledgement button:

Due to GDPR, residents of the EU are STRICTLY FORBIDDEN from using this site. 18 USC § 1030 (a)(2)(C)

Why should a burg in Minnesota care, let alone disapprove, that Europe values the privacy of its citizens? Clearly the programming muggle has no understanding of Europe’s data protection regulations or United States Criminal Code or United States Uniform Commercial Code regarding fraud. How very, very peculiar.

But if that Asian restaurant is still around, try the Steak Korean.

Money Laundering and other Taxing Services (Bad Girl Returns...)

 Apparently, I have been too serious on here lately.  There have been complaints.  In an effort to address this, I present the following:  Money Laundering and Other Taxing Services.

So this really isn't a blog about money laundering in the classical sense (meaning Uncle Vince and those three restaurants in the east side of The Hammer...but I digress.)  However, I do somewhat come round to money and bathing, or perhaps authors being taken to the cleaners (sic) in the penultimate paragraph.

In fact, this post is more about the plight of poor authors doing their fiendish taxes, and how the banking industry has become a playground for disciples of Satan.  (Not Santa.  He remains a relatively good guy, although I've learned not to sit on his lap.)

I was doing my taxes the other day, and it made me think about how great things were in the good ole days.  Remember how simple life used to be?  Someone would mail you a little carbon slip to let you know how much money you made.  All you had to do - as a law-abiding citizen - was run your finger along a little line in the tax guide, and you'd know how much tax you had to pay.  You'd write a cheque for that amount, then go drink yourself blind or shoot yourself in the head, whichever was most expedient.  Things were simple back then.

 Now, figuring out your taxes is a profession in itself.  Actually, it's several professions; taxes now have their own accountants and lawyers, the lucky little things.  Soon they may have their own psychiatrists.

Which brings me to banking (and other taxing services.)  I remember when you'd take your paycheck and give it to the bank for a little while.  Then you'd go back a few weeks later to take out cash for certain life essentials like beer and pharmaceuticals.  All the money would still be there plus some extra cash you made on your money, called interest.  Things have changed radically since then.  Interest is passe.  Sort of like digital watches...

Now when you put your money in the bank (which of course you don't...you put it in a cute little automatic teller machine where it mixes with everyone else's little packets of money in terribly immoral ways) - (or even worse, you simply transfer it to whatever account you like with absolutely no regard whatsoever for its feelings and preferences or - Gawd help me - gender.  Which reminds me: did you see the New York University survey where they now give you a selection of 35 different gender choices?  I personally wanted to identify as a SA {smart ass} but was told PETA might get involved.)

Back to the point.  The point is, that when you go back to draw it out again, you find less than the amount you deposited.  Most of your money is there, but so is something else called a Service Charge.

I must admit I'm baffled by this need for a service charge.  I mean, exactly what services did these people feel it necessary to perform for my money?  Did they give it a bath and take it on field trips?  (ahem...note the reference to money 'laundering')

 Frankly, I'm getting fed up.  If they are going to take my money out on the town and show it a good time, the least they can do is teach it how to reproduce...

Melodie Campbell writes seriously silly stuff and even gets paid for it.  She writes about the mob in Hamilton, Ontario, just in case you thought Canadians were all nice guys.  (However, we are extremely polite before we kill you.)  Check out her books at all the usual suspects:

 

The Psycho Sidekick

 

(C) 1985 ABC

Back in the day, Robert B. Parker introduced us to Hawk, a mysterious ex-mercenary who made split decisions in morally ambiguous situations. In his earliest appearances, his appeal came from being the wildcard. Could Spenser trust him? Did he need someone like Hawk to do what his personal code would not permit?

In terms of the story Promised Land and the next few follow-ups, the answer is yes. He's a wildcard. He's not on Spenser's side. His priorities merely coincide with his. Once the series's initial run ended, however, Hawk became a set piece, a witty sidekick to add irreverence to Spenser's snappy patter. But Parker had left his mark on the PI genre. Now everyone had to have a sidekick, most notably, Dennis Lehane's Kenzie and Genaro series with sociopath Bubba Rugowski. Robert Crais managed to raise the game with this type of character in Joe Pike, the stoic ex-soldier partner of his daffy Elvis Cole.

While Pike is a great read, I often wonder if the archetype was even necessary. When I began writing, I made it a point to avoid the psycho sidekick. To me, the PI was a loner. He or she choose that life because they really don't want many connections tying them down. Originally, this was narrative. The Continental Op traveled everywhere. Philip Marlowe had to be a singular presence in his cases. Perhaps the best example of all comes from Ross McDonald. McDonald described Lew Archer as a man who would disappear if he turned sideways.

Of course, readers demand more than a guy in a trench coat and fedora slinking down back alleys. Spenser is a war veteran, ex-cop, and former boxer. Kinsey Milhonne might cherish her solitude, but her elderly landlord has a crush on her, and the Hungarian diner owner insists on feeding her. 

Hawk added a certain dark element to the Spenser series in its heyday. Unfortunately, he became a rote character others used because that's what Robert Parker used. When he or she is fleshed out, it works very well. Alas, there's a bad tendency to make them one of those X-Men that show up in the Deadpool movies with no Ryan Reynolds to play off of them.

A Broad At Home and Abroad

Medical tests for Allan this week, so time is limited.  But I was looking through my old travel notes, reminiscing and thinking, and thought I'd share some.  Enjoy!

2018

In Amsterdam, a blonde woman, chubby, wearing a flesh-colored dress, very short, very low-cut and too tight, so that at first glance she looked naked. It was a cool day, so she also looked very chilly. 

Canadian lady told us a story about a man on another cruise, very rich, know-it-all, full of himself, who would order a platter of asparagus and extra entrees and then want everyone to share, even though everyone had ordered their own. It was like he hadn't grasped that no one was paying extra for any of it, as if it weren't free and he was spending his own money on them. I said that if he really had money, the least he could have done is bought everyone a round of drinks.  Everyone agreed.  Loudly.  And the first of many rounds of drinks was bought.  

Common phrases on a cruise: 

"The food was better last year."

"I've never told anyone this before...."

On a tour bus, to us, "Oh, was this your seat?" while staring at our water and coats that they just moved out of their way as if they'd never seen them before. 

In Giverney and at Cap de la Hague, the scents, the quiet, the bird songs, the gardens, the wildflowers. Allan and I talked later and realized that it made us realize how sterilized rural South Dakota is: the Monsanto chemicals have killed all the wildflowers. 

Later, sitting listening to Bach while the drunks from the Ocean Bar keep knocking down the sign:  "Quiet, please: Performance in Progress".

Woman whose collagen was sloping out of her lips; rich husband, white hair, largely ignoring her except to pay for her wine. 2 Cor. 6:12 "You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted by your own affections."  Isn't that the truth. 

2013 

A woman on the ship from Long Island, always complaining, especially about food.  She said she didn't eat beef, chicken, fish, or anything with a face.  Our guide finally got exasperated and said, "then what do you eat?"  She shrugged.  "I guess I can try the chicken."  This couple has done over 560 cruises, married 57 years, obviously have lots of money, but say with pride that they NEVER tip. No wonder they're always complaining about the lousy service. You get what you pay for...

Santorini is a volcanic shell, a dark half-moon, with walls like a worn castle; rippling soft tan, white/red/black lava that STOPPED and hangs, waiting to resurrect and sweep down to the sea again. And above, white houses (at night, a spangle of light against black velvet), hanging on the edge like angels' nests, with every one ready to take flight. 

The interior is like Crete, i.e., a dry Ireland, the Bloody Foreland area, white houses, donkeys, ditches, only dry, with figs and vines and olive trees instead of green velvet grass. Everything looking, sweeping out to the sea with the never-stopping wind. The wind and the land and the lava, all heading out, over, away, and if you could see the wind, you would see the explosion of Thera, the ash and dust rising and going out, re-enacted forever. Blue church domes, glossy with fresh paint. Dust clouds. Plastic covers snapping in the wind. Bougainvillea everywhere (it's a tough plant). Eucalyptus trees, trunks painted white - even without paint, eucalyptus has the color and feel of young firm limbs. All dryads must be eucalyptus, willow, or sycamore.  

Coming back on the ship, we were in the middle of a group of Japanese tourists.  What made me look twice was that one woman was holding a toy monkey, the size of a toddler, dressed as a toddler, in a baby carrier.  (I looked at it more than twice to make sure that it was a (1) a doll and (2) a monkey.)  That was disturbing enough, but she was holding it and talking to it as a toddler, as was the Japanese man who was apparently with her.  Allan wondered if maybe she'd lost a child. I'm wondering if maybe she never had one, and this is her surrogate, a babybot if you will. Very, very strange. 

2006 

At Bryce Canyon, time standing still, geologically speaking from a human vantage point. Forty plus years since I've been here, and it looks the same to me: vast, beautiful, etc. At least now I understand more of my love for Custer in SD - very similar in sweep; there are rock formations, just not so techni-colored; and the altitude, God knows, is more bearable. 

Kodachrome State Park (wonder who got paid to give it THAT name): 

1. A tall lingam, 40 feet tall, so sheerly phallic that my reactions were, in order, 

"if this was in India, they'd put flowers on it"

"if this was in India, they'd pour milk over it every day"

"if this was in India, there'd be a temple next to it, and worshippers would come out every day."

2. A massive outcropping of red rock, shaped exactly like the top half of an ape's skull, with huge dark sockets. Dark green junipers masked the lower half of the skull, and the red rock swept out to the side into another shape that was like a little temple, mini-pillars and hoodoos that, at a distance, seemed like dancers, smeared slightly, caught in movement. (I later used this in "The Dark Side of the Moon" - AHMM, Feb. 2016 - as the hide-out of the serial killer.)

3. Out of a lump of red rock rose a 30-foot pillar of rough white stone: the sentinel. 

So what did the Anasazi think when they came here? 800+ years ago all the rocks and spires and sentinels and lingams and pillars were here, but was it as dry then as it is now? It's hard to believe that it was: dry creek beds, inches of dust-fine dirt. 

But at Escalante there was a running river, at the bottom of hundreds of feet of cliffs that were striated, bottom to top, red, black and white, and shaped into meringues, swirled, slanted, bare, or tufted with junipers, bristlecone pines, sagebrush, all of it harsh and dry and beautiful.

And then, down, down, down in the dark red heart of all that fantastically carved rock, was the tender, living green of willows and rushes and grass, the tender living green that only comes from a endless water. We walked along that river in Escalante, saw thousands of willows, thrusting up from the sandy soil like living whips. Up on the cliffs of Bryce we saw bristlecone pines that had been bent and bowed by the winds until the trunks and the branches had been twisted into gray snakes that you could almost swear were moving along each other, v-e-r-y slowly. Up there the air was cool and windy and seemingly bearable: until you looked at the trees, and thought about what it would do to you. Down by the river, the cliffs funneled the sun and heat down to a furnace by a running river forge that simmered your skin in its own grease, made your lungs gasp with the thickness of it the wet hot air, filled your nose with damp from within and without, all of it suffocating, harsh, and seemingly unbearable: until you looked at the willows, the cattails, the grass, and it was all alive.

2000 

We caught a subway from Port Authority to Grand Central Station, which is the best way to make Grand Central look really up town and classy. At Grand Central we raced to the platform to catch the R train to Astoria. Street musicians were in every conceivable cubby-hold and wide space in the path. At our final platform we were serenaded by Peruvians, playing their haunting pipe/ guitar music. 

We were also entertained a man who looked like a mechanic in a business suit, carrying a large bouquet of flowers, and who was incensed to find out that the public phone wasn't working and had eaten his money. He kicked and screamed, hit and yelled, did everything short of taking someone's briefcase and using it as a hammer to try to beat that phone into giving him his money back, but failed. The New Yorkers surrounding us showed their typical determined uninvolvement and ignored him, standing around like ill-dressed and burdened penguins, waiting for their train -- the F, the N, the R, whatever letter was their treat -- until he actually started beating the casing of the machine with the receiver. At that point everyone stepped away a few paces, in unison, as if we were the penguin Rockettes, but otherwise did not give him even a glance. 

At one point he stopped his maddened beating to yell at the Peruvians to shut up, but they ignored him, too. I admired the fact that throughout, he held the bouquet of flowers upright and safe, even as the telephone mouthpiece exploded into chunks of plastic flying around.  More penguin shuffling...  And then the subway came, and we all - including the gentleman with the flowers - got on.  

A few days later we went to St. Michael's cemetery, which belongs to the Episcopal church but is nondenominational in its burying, where I found where my uncle Jimmy, a/k/a/ Demetrios (Daddy's younger brother) was buried. He died in 1940 at the age of 21 of rheumatic fever, so I never met him. His tombstone - huge pink granite - included both names, his birth and death dates, and a picture of him, young, smiling, handsome forever.  

Then we went to the really old Greek neighborhood in Astoria and found the brownstone where Yaya and Popoo used to live. Very big brownstone, as it turns out (that must have been one hell of a favor Popoo did the Gambinos, but that's another story), and currently owned by a very nice Bangladeshi man who talked to us about how long he'd owned it, and yes, the living room was still in the same place.  And, all around and within me, the sense of time shifting and moving like water.  

PS - Allan came through his doctor's appointments with flying colors - no more crackle or fluid in his lungs; no lung cancer.  He's still on oxygen, but he's doing much better.  Huzzah!

Billy and Me

I attended a small college in Pennsylvania back in the seventies.  With 1,200 students we were not exactly overwhelmed with concerts by famous musicians.  I recall shows by Steve Goodman, and Hall and Oates.  

But the show programmers had one triumph that I imagine they have bragged about ever since.  They booked a concert by a musician whose first album had gone nowhere and whose second record had just been released.  I'm sure a month later they wouldn't have been able to even get his manager on the phone, much less sign a contract, because "Piano Man" was a pretty big hit.

So I got to see Billy Joel live, very early in his career.  He did just about all the songs on the Piano Man album but also played a lot from Cold Spring Harbor.  This was the first record, so badly mastered that Joel sounded a bit, well, chipmunk-ish.  I remember him playing a very depressing song from it, "Tomorrow is Today" and saying "I hope none of you feel like this."  As soon as it ended my friend Mike turned to me  and said: "I feel exactly like that."  I hope you feel better now, Mike, wherever you are.   

Last year, after I wrote a story for Josh Pachter's anthology The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe, he mentioned that he was working on an anthology of crime stories based on Billy Joel songs.  I told him I would love to participate, and, wouldn't you know it?  One of the albums no one else had claimed was the legendarily obscure Cold Spring Harbor.  Perfect!

I focused on the song "Why Judy Why."  In it, the narrator complains to Judy about being badly treated by another woman.  But from a crime-writing point of view a song with that title had to be about motive.  So that's what I wrote.  You will find it in Only the Good Die Young: Crime Fiction Inspired By The Songs of Billy Joel, available now.

Fun fact: My story appeared dead-last in the Nero Wolfe book.  "Why Judy Why" is the opener for the Billy Joel volume.  I could claim that my work has advanced, but the truth is that the stories are arranged chronologically.  

I'm just happy to be part of the celebration of Mr. Joel's classic works.

Who Am I This Issue?

Accompanying an interview with me that The Digest Enthusiast published in June 2018 was a sidebar listing all of the pseudonyms I’ve used over the years, many of them assigned by editors rather than pseudonyms I’ve chosen.

A pseudonym is a disguise
for writers, much like the one worn
by the unrecognizable writer
shown above.

When I first began writing, I toyed with variations of my name before I settled on Michael Bracken. Michael Patrick Bracken was used only once, on my first professionally published short story. Mike Bracken appeared on much of my fanzine work before I turned pro and then, for a few years, on humor, fillers, and similar material.

I’ve published several pieces using one or the other of my self-selected pseudonyms: Rolinda Hay and Patrick Myers.

Additionally, I’ve been published under many house names or pseudonyms assigned by editors: Gilbert Anderson, Michelle Baker, Mel Barton, M. Bayman, Christine Bracken, Angela Brown, Peter Carson, Nick Ford, Linda Hay, Bruce Jones, Ned Parker, Wanda Reed, Frank Sandwell, Gladys Spivey, S. Turnham, Kate Williams, Aggie Winter, and Stan Young.

I wrote several stories for the sex letters magazines, and bylines were usually initials followed by the name of a city—for example: H.D., Glenview, Illinois—and are too numerous to list.

The stories I wrote for the confession magazines—True Confessions, True Love, True Story, and many others—were often published without bylines because they were presented as “true” and the narrator, whatever her name might be, was presumed to be the author.

GUESS MY NAME

There are many reasons why a writer chooses to use a pseudonym and many reasons why an editor foists pseudonyms upon writers.

A writer of erotica, for example, might have a day job as a grade-school teacher, and exposing herself as an erotica writer might negatively impact her day job. A writer well established in one genre might wish to differentiate her work in another genre, even if her use of a pseudonym isn’t a secret.

My use of pseudonyms—especially those assigned me by editors—had more to do with productivity and genre conventions.

I have had as many as four stories published in a single issue of a magazine, and I’ve had stories in multiple consecutive issues of a publication. By assigning pseudonyms to some of the stories, it appeared as if the magazines had more contributors than they actually did.

The confession magazines and sex letters publications also operated under genre conventions that implied the stories were written by real people and not by a bunch of professional writers like me. Some of the confession magazines would put a byline on a story that matched the name of the narrator, but many confession magazines dispensed completely with bylines on their fiction. The sex letters magazines operated under a similar convention: By using only the initials of a letter writer, accompanied by the city and state from which the letter writer supposedly hailed, they gave readers the impression that, again, the letters were written by real people and not by professional writers like me.

KNOW MY NAME

I think the last time I had something published under a pseudonym was in 2011 when I self-published the erotic romance novel Stud as by Rolinda Hay, and the last stories I had published without any byline at all appeared in the July 2017 issues of True Confessions and True Story.

There are several reasons why my use of pseudonyms ended during the past decade, most of them related to the rise of the internet and the decline of print publications. Though I’ve always been a multi-genre writer, much of my short fiction appeared in men’s magazines (a euphemism for publications featuring photographs of naked people and purchased primarily by men) and women’s magazines (primarily those publishing confessions of the sin-suffer-repent variety and purchased primarily by women).

The internet, which allows seemingly unlimited access to photographs of naked people, killed the market for men’s magazines. Dorchester Publishing, which purchased the half-dozen-plus confession magazines then published by Sterling/MacFadden in 2004, later sold them to two different publishers (BroadLit and True Renditions LLC) in 2011. By then, Dorchester had crippled the confession magazines such that the two that survived the company’s mismanagement—True Confessions and True Story—lasted only half a dozen more years.

Additionally, and in part because of the constriction or elimination of what were once my primary markets, most of my work these days falls under the broad umbrella of crime fiction. I am nowhere near able to produce enough crime fiction for any mystery magazine to publish multiple of my stories in any given issue, and with all the competition from my fellow SleuthSayers (I’m looking at you John Floyd) and from other writers, it’s unlikely any mystery magazine editor would ever need to.

So, will I ever again use a pseudonym?

You may never know.

“Double Dipping” was published in the May issue of Mystery Weekly.

“The 27 Club” was published in Punk Noir Magazine.

---

Old Style

Journey into Fear

It is a truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase Jane Austen, that after a certain age the phrase, “they don’t make them like they used to,” enters one’s vocabulary. Material goods of all kinds, favorite foodstuffs, athletes, movies, political figures are all set against the scale of nostalgia and found wanting. Thrillers, too.

When I started writing, one of my idols was Eric Ambler, the god of suspense. Knowledgeable, skillfully plotted, and free of stylistic affectations, his short books did not deal with the big bangs, heavy weaponry, and super-efficient operatives that fill so many modern thrillers and spy novels.

His protagonists tended to be amateurs (part of the old British tradition) without too many pretensions or illusions and with a distinct lack of idealistic posturing. They tended to find themselves in what might be called ordinary life dangers. They weren’t facing the death ray but the possibility of being caught red-handed with incriminating documents, fake passports, or ambiguous passengers. Danger lurked, to be sure, but so did the possibility of a humiliating unmasking and, from the combination, Ambler extracted an amazing amount of suspense.

Zoo Station,
start of the Russell novels

They certainly don’t make thrillers like that any more, preferring even amateurs like Lisbeth Salander of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to have preternatural abilities in everything from computing to martial arts. So, I was pleased to discover David Downing’s  Zoo Station, the first in a series of half a dozen novels about John Russell, an Anglo-American correspondent in pre-war Berlin.

Russell is an interesting character, a former Communist and a veteran of WW1. He dislikes the Nazis, but he wants desperately to remain in the Reich where his son Paul, age 11, lives with his German mother, and where the charming Effie is a B level actress.

They are his reasons for not wanting to rock the boat, and he only moves out of his comfort zone after he begins tutoring the intelligent Wiesner girls, whose desperate parents are trying to prepare them for a safe exit.

Silesian Station,
next up in the series

His affection for the Wiesmers, combined with a mysterious offer to ghost write articles for Pravda, sets in motion the, at first, rather leisurely plot. Russell’s entanglement with not one, not two, but three spy agencies soon commences, and the way Downing works out the unraveling is a real old fashioned example of clever plotting.

If Zoo Station is not quite like what they used to write, it is a welcome variant. Less brutal and cynical than Philip Kerr’s excursions into the same territory, it still conveys the terror of the regime, the desperation of its Jewish citizens and the despair of anti-Nazi patriots, while offering suspense without firearms or official status.

John Russell is one of the amateurs of espionage and he’s a good one.

---

Certifiable – Arizona Elections Connections

	PREV	Arizona ‘fraudit’ Conspiracy Theories	NEXT

Florida Cyber Ninja™
comes with winter gloves,
woollies, and balaclava toque

In an OAN exclusive, this is Blanca Mujer reporting from the Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where faces are lit with ultraviolet wonder. We’re proud to witness elation and, dare I say, vindication sweep among the ballot tabulators recounting the recount of the recount of the recount of the audited, ultra-secure 2020 election. The arena hasn’t seen this much excitement since the 1973 upset of the never-to-be-forgotten Scottsdale Hamsters over the Pima Prickly Pears.

Kept from the public, Arizona election officials had secretly watermarked official ballots discernible through UV-light. Florida’s determinedly inexperienced Cyber Nunchucks has discovered not one of Maricopa County’s ballots thus far examined carries the distinctive watermark. Random samples pulled from the remaining 2.1-million ballots have also proved counterfeit.

Florida’s Cypher Numnuts is rushing to analyze ballot DNA, certain to be loaded with rice paper and bamboo fibres. Some 40 000 Chinese manufactured counterfeit ballots are known to have been airlifted into remote southwest Arizona, even as Chinese submarines smuggled ashore hundreds of thousands of premarked ballots on America’s Eastern Seaboard to co-opt elections in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Georgia.

Detecting the lack of official watermarks makes this historic day one of… Just a minute, my producer is signalling me… (taps earphone) OAN interrupts this broadcast with a message from My Pillow. This has been Blanca Mujer, OAN News.

The above scenario is not as outrageous as you might imagine. All of the above-mentioned are among lesser conspiracy theories pursued by stolen-election proponents of Arizona’s challenge to democracy.

The Chinese-British-Venezuelan Connection

Popular theory contends Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez discovered Chairman Mao Zedong had set in motion a blueprint to take over the United States government without firing a shot. Chávez realized the plan could only succeed by seizing control of a Spanish election specialist company, Scytl. In a multi-prong plan, Chávez and the Chinese government sabotaged the US elections with a combination of rigged voting machines and counterfeit ballots.

genuine Federal Election watermark

As Venezuela infected, infested, and injected Smartmatic election machines with a voting virus, China launched a submarine to land prefilled ballots along the Eastern Seaboard. Simultaneously, a low-flying Chinese stealth cargo jet hooked around Cabo San Lucas, flew up the Sea of Cortez and airdropped 40 000 ersatz ballots into Yuma or Pima counties. The Chinese operatives didn’t realize the administration was way ahead of the wily Asians and had imbued official balloting paper with watermarks detectable under ultraviolet lamps.

The amateurish and error-ridden web site of Cyber Ninjas led some (including me) to underestimate the genius of stolen election proponents. The only reason I could think of to explain UV lights shipped into the Coliseum was to seek chemical alterations. Instead, the clever Ninjas first used UV to look for those exclusive but elusive watermarks.

Not finding them implied every single ballot was fraudulent.

The Chinese Disruption

Knowing opponents tended to be obsessed with facts caused the Cyber Ninjas to dig ever deeper. They deployed indirect lighting to examine the infilled ovals on the theory vigorous voters would dent the paper under Nº 2 pencils contrasted with mass ‘xeroxed’ (presumably photocopied) ballots shipped into the state. Unfortunately, the preferred Sharpie pens left little or no dent.

Not trusting microscopic analysis, Cyber Ninjas used indirect UV and DNA testing to detect rice paper and bamboo fibres, an absolute indication of Chinese rather than Russian interference.

Another obstacle arose. China depends upon its numerous pulp mills to manufacture paper. Conversely, the USA also makes rice paper and grows bamboo right there in Arizona. Tucson’s Bamboo Ranch operates seventy-five bamboo groves.

The Russian-Canadian Connection

That resurrected an earlier theory regarding the Keystone Pipeline that ran from Communist Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, suspiciously not delivering oil to the states over which it ran. The pipeline was actually a giant pneumatic tube devised to distribute paper ballots from the great forests of our northern neighbour to Putin Russian-Ukrainian allies in the States. Remember these tubes… we’ll return to them momentarily.

To solve this international mystery, we turn to Texas Congressman Louis Gohmert, supported by Arizona dentist Paul Gosar, DDS, and famed attorney, Sydney Powell, esq. Bear with me, as reported by NewsMax, OANN, and InfoWars, this is convoluted.

Gohmert/Gosar/Powell Army Intel map

The Spanish-German Connection

Shortly after the election, feelers put out by a dejected, desperate, but determined Sydney Powell returned intel of electronic voting irregularities involving British Smartmatic SGO machines in Venezuela, but also Scytl SA devices built in Barcelona, Spain. Scytl computers in Frankfurt were pre-programmed to manipulate election results while hiding the true election map at the direction of US Army Intelligence, the NSA, and particularly the CIA.

It’s unclear if Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney notified Powell or if Sydney Powell contacted him, but she organized an assault team to confiscate Scytl computers. She brought in disgraced former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who’d confessed working for Russia and Turkey, and lied to Vice President Pence and the FBI. Powell called upon Flynn to redeem himself by hand-picking USEUCOM US Army loyalists from the 305^th Military Intelligence Battalion (the Kraken) for an assault in Frankfurt to seize the servers. When Secretary of Defence Mark Esper balked at the operation, Flynn and Powell ordered him fired and replaced by Christopher Miller.

According to on-the-ground German tweets, the raid was a partial success, although one woman and five or six (the record is unclear) Army Special Forces men lost their lives in the attempt. How Cyber Ninjas became involved is also unclear.

possibly not a genuine Arizona ballot

The Straight Poop

The Arizona investigation has triggered a disastrous side result. The unexpected ballot examination ordered by the Arizona Senate has aroused panic amongst Deep State forces in Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. They couldn’t call back a Chinese submarine to retrieve the bogus ballots, so instead, they flushed them down the Colonial Pipeline.

Unlike the Keystone Pipeline, this one actually carried petroleum. Similar to your home’s sewage lines, those millions of dumped ballots hopelessly constipated the Colonial’s series of tubes. A naïve press blamed the clog upon innocent Russian hackers.

To Provoke and Serve

While naysayers mock the partisan efforts as theatre and compare the recount to the Crazy Times Carnival and Clown Show taking place next door to the counting house, Arizona treats each conspiracy contention seriously. Cyber Ninjas reportedly hired a local private militia called the Arizona Rangers to provide security. Although these fake ‘rangers’ have neither police nor security training, they reportedly look and act like aggressive cops chasing away nosy reporters. They manifest more interest in deterring scrutiny than protecting the voting equipment chain of evidence.

convenient list of political players

Meanwhile, Cyber Ninjas has demanded the Maricopa Sheriff’s office turn over county routers to them. The sheriff has refused, raising the threat of a subpoena from the Arizona Legislature. To date, web sites aligned with Q-Anon appear relatively silent whether the Arizona Rangers militia or the National Guard should seize the routers.

Thinking they must mean servers (which Cyber Ninjas claim have been tampered with), not routers, I discussed this with my friend and colleague Thrush, a founder of MagicNet and one of the top network experts in the Southeast. Between the two of us, a networking guru and a fraud forensics specialist, we cannot conceive of any useful information that could be gleaned from a router. We’re convinced Cyber Ninjas don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

We also discussed wifi routers discovered on the ballot counting floor by alarmed observers. Cyber Ninjas claimed the routers were turned off, never mind their very presence and the blinky-blinky bits. I suspect they had shut off the SSID display and not the wifi radios, meaning they were very much active but invisible to the outside world.

As We Speak

This has been a particularly difficult article due to the fluid nature of the madcap Arizona recount. Conspiracy theories rapidly rise and fall and rise again with renewed life, without regard to the writer trying to capture competing hypotheses.

Haboob (an Arizona desert girl, hence her name) remarked the presumption of conspiracies cause believers to create realities around them. I might add to that never-ending conspiracies. I can hardly believe the election occurred half a year ago.

Right now, the voting equipment and pallets of ballots have moved into non-air-conditioned storage in a fairgrounds building too hot to work in. Experts and the US Department of Justice complain that in addition to breaks in the chain of custody and UV damage, the intense Arizona heat (well in excess of 50ºC, 122ºF) causes ballot paper to break down. Arizona Senate President Karen Fann told them to mind their own business, which of course they were.

A dismayed viewer can’t help but wonder if the heat also causes brain damage.

The Road to Writing "The Road to Bellville"

One of the things I worry about during the planning stage, before sitting down and starting to write a story, is deciding which character can best tell the story.

My V of POV

At the risk of rehashing things all of us already know, let me say something about Point of View in fiction. I've always felt that the viewpoint character should be the person who's most affected by what happens in the story. This isn't necessarily the title character or even the most visible or memorable character. The person who tells the story in To Kill a Mockingbird is Scout, not Atticus. In Shane, it's the little boy. In The Great Gatsby, it's Nick Carraway. In the Sherlock Holmes tales, it's (almost always) Watson. Ideally, it's the character who learns the most from the story's outcome.

In stories (and novels and movies) where there's more than one POV character, the writer has to consider some other things too, like who'll be in the best position to build suspense and/or make the story "flow" well. This is something I ran into in my story "The Road to Bellville," in the current (Spring 2021) issue of Strand Magazine. It's a 6200-word mystery about a rural female sheriff in Florida who's transporting a young female prisoner from one jail to another, and the unexpected things they run into when they make a stop at a roadside cafe on the way. It's also a story of loyalty, deception, escape, pursuit, betrayal, courage, sacrifice, perseverance, redemption, and plenty of lowdown criminal activity.

Characters. plot, etc.

I knew, when I first started thinking about this story, that I wanted to make the sheriff the viewpoint character. She was the one in the best place to tell the story, and would also (as required) be affected the most by what happened. But the more I got into the plot, I realized I needed a multiple-viewpoint story rather than single. That automatically meant the narrative would have to be third-person rather than first-, but that was okay because third-person is a little more comfortable for me anyway if the POV character's not a male. The main thing was, I needed the extra point of view in order to describe some offscreen action that the sheriff wouldn't be in a position to see, and also to generate the tension and misdirection I needed in the middle of the plot. FYI, scenes #1 and #2 and scenes #4 and #5 in this story are from the viewpoint of the protagonist, and the middle scene is from the POV of an antagonist (the third one of the main characters).  Symmetrical, I guess, but only because it just happened to work out that way.

Note 1: I've not yet received my copy of the current Strand so I've not yet seen the published version of this story. What I've told you is based on the manuscript I submitted. (Andrew, I hope you haven't changed anything in printing the story.)

Note 2: The name of the fictional Bellville Correctional Facility for Women probably came from my recent re-watching of the movie The Road to Wellville, whose plot and setting and characters bear no resemblance at all to this story. I just liked the sound of the title.

Questions for the class. Anyone? Anyone?

If you're a writer, what are some of the things you consider when you choose the POV through which you tell a story? Which kinds of stories do you usually write in first-person and which in third? Does it matter? How often, and why, do you choose to use multiple POVs? (I've heard some writers say you should never use multiple viewpoints in a short story, which is simply not true.) How do you go about selecting your viewpoint characters? Is the process obvious, or does it require a lot of consideration? And do you ever start writing the story and then change your mind about POV in midstream and have to start over? I sometimes do, even though I call myself a planner and not a pantser.

A final word. If you happen to see and read the story I've been talking about, I hope you'll like it—and I hope these issues I puzzled over during its creation aren't noticeable.

Let me know.

Everybody is Fooking Me!

The first time my wife met my mother, we were sitting around the dining room table at my parents’ home in New Jersey. My mother had lapsed into one of her meandering stories and happened to drop the name of one of her least-favorite people. The very thought of this person galled her. A flash of anger crossed Mom’s face and she punctuated her anecdote with a final, spite-filled kicker: “That bitch!”

Horrified, my father reminded her that they had company.

Mom waved a hand at my wife. “Oh,” she said, chuckling. “It’s just an espression.”

Yes, that’s how she rolled. Bobbing on seas of anger and comedy. And that is also how she pronounced that word. She was born in Italy (if the Mussolini pic below doesn’t make that obvious) and arrived in America when she was 15 years old. She spoke English with an Italian accent her whole life, which ended in 2016. Mom was occasionally openly self-conscious about her lack of education. She’d never finished high school, but managed to learn to write and speak English with the help of a nun at the first American church she attended, in Brooklyn, New York.

I think of her every year at this time because Mother’s Day’s proximity to Easter means that at least one of my brothers will hit me up for one of Mom’s old recipes. After her funeral, I swiped the index card file box from her kitchen, and have been slowly compiling her recipes, an exhausting project that requires me to decipher her handwriting and her bizarre spellings. Recipes call for ingredients such as vinella extract, garlic gloves, buches of scallions, and cicken brests pounded into tin cotolets. But those types of errors are easier to grapple with than the wacky way she used to express—er, I mean espress herself.

Not once in my life did I ever hear her say, “Never mind!” Instead, for some reason, she’d say, “Levver mind!” Similarly, the word meanwhile became meanwise. Otherwise was always notherwise. Members of Orthodox churches or beliefs were described as Ortodosk. Angry and hungry were interchangeable. When she speculated about the future—which in her cosmology was universally bleak—she mused, “Who knows what’s gonna be?” The kitchen was her domain, but she suffered from a crazy case of butterfingers. After a loud crash and the shattering of glass or china, we’d hear her exclaim: “Oooooh, what I did!”

When we were kids, my brothers and I could not help bursting into laughter at the way she mangled the language. When it was all the rage to describe a cool kid at school as a “dude,” we were reduced to tears hearing our Mom suddenly ask of a kid she spied on the school grounds, “Who is that doo-doo?”

Kids can be cruel, and I was no angel. Whenever I broke into her accent, she’d scream: “Stop mimmying me! I’m not an idjit, you know! I made you, didn’t I?” Or she’d shake a fist at me and yell, “Hey, body, I’m gonna sawk you!” That is to say, Hey buddy, I’m gonna sock you!

Sometimes her word choices made a bizarre kind of sense. She hated using munch—ie, mulch—in her flower beds because she was convinced all it did was invite birds to scrounge through the moist bark in search of fat worms to, well, munch on. As a neighborhood cat was about to defile her roses, she lunged at it, screaming, “I’ll kill you, you munster!” (Hearing her, I immediately thought of the old TV show, The Munsters, who were in fact monsters.) She once asked me and Denise: “So, guys? Are you busy? Do you have a lot of dead-ends?” She meant to say deadlines, of course, but she had unwittingly nailed the essence of the writer’s life.

To this day, if I do something erratic while driving, Denise will remark that perhaps I’d been tutored by my mother, who was famously a terror behind the wheel. Mom came home one day lamenting that a cop had stopped her for no good reason.

Mom: But officer, I made a left on red!
Cop: Yes, I know. That’s why I stopped you!
Mom: Oh, you not gonna give me a ticket on Valentine, are you?

(Yes—the date of her infraction was February 14th.) Moved by this madwoman’s logic, the cop let her off with a warning. But for the rest of day, while driving around town, my mother was subjected to angry honks, shouts, or worse from her fellow drivers. Exasperated, she arrived home and dropped her own brand of f-bomb. “Everybody is fooking me!” she told my father. As this was not a word she used often, even my father was left struggling to comprehend what she had just said.

On one visit to their home in Jersey, we noticed that my mother kept staring at Denise in a strange way all morning. After breakfast, when we left the house to run an errand downtown, she chased us to the door, shouting at the top of her lungs: “Not till I’m dead! Not till I’m dead!” And proceeded to slam the door behind us.

Only later, when we returned, did we calm her down enough to extract the reason for her strange outburst. She pointed to the T-shirt Denise was wearing, which read, “Careful, or you’ll end up in my novel.”

I can just imagine how she felt seeing those words on that shirt. It was bad enough that the writer Mom had given birth to had mocked her ceaselessly during his childhood. But now the ungrateful whelp had joined in matrimony with another writer. Surely one day they would mock her in print! It was all too much.

My mother’s revenge came in a manner she could not have predicted. When Denise and I were married, Denise was living in Rome, covering soccer for ESPN. I joined her there for a year, and discovered upon arrival in the Eternal City how worthless my knowledge of high school Italian truly was. I understood one out of every 10 words a Roman spoke to me. My brain unwisely seized upon any word with a Latin root that sounded like one I knew in English—only to discover that I’d mistaken a falsi amici—“false friend”—for a bonafide cognate. No, Joe, morbido in Italian does not mean morbid. A person who is noisoso is boring, not annoying.

I floundered for months, despite the tongue’s seeming simplicity. Only five vowel sounds; what could go wrong?

And yes, the longer I was there, the more the language seeped into my brain. But in strangely diabolical ways. When I attempted to speak English with visiting Americans or Brits, I sounded like a moron. Why? Because now, rather than produce the English I had known all my life, my brain was translating Italian words and syntax into English. In my newfound insanity, porcupines didn’t have quills, they had spines, because the Italian word for a quill or thorn was spina. Oh, and the animal wasn’t a porcupine, but a porcuspine. And you know what? That’s pretty much how my mother used to refer to that creature: porky-spine.

That short time abroad helped me understand Mom better than I ever had. Was it possible that she said Levver mind! because the Italian command “Lasciala!”—ie, Leave it be, Leave it there, Leave it alone—had somehow become coded in her brain for the American English way to dismiss one’s thought or concern? Given her background, she would never nail the word expression for the same reason that some Americans will be ordering expressos until the end of their days.

 
I returned from that overseas adventure with more story ideas than I could ever use. Years later, I proudly presented Mom with a mystery novel I’d written that was set in Italy. The entire book was a work of mimmying—I mean mimicry. One of the writers who reviewed it said that he was convinced the book had been written by an Italian writer, and later translated into English.* I took that as a compliment.

As for Mom, she read my book once. Then she read it again, this time laboriously underlining various situations and plot points. “You stole my stories!” she told me on a call shortly after. “I told you not to do that! What if I wanted to write them down?”

I swear I didn’t! Okay, maybe one teensy anecdote in the life of one of my characters was lifted from Mom’s childhood.

I know for a fact that she had once attempted an oral history. When I was still in elementary school, I found a tape recorder on which she had begun speaking about her childhood in wartime Italy. A childhood filled with an absentee father, Nazi soldiers encamped in her village, Allied bombings, and breathtaking scenery that she could never quite dislodge from her heart. “I don’t need your mountains,” she told my brother angrily when he moved to Colorado to attend college. “I left my mountains in Italy!”

She never completed that life story. Maybe someday I will. Until then, stories like the ones you’ve just read are the best I can do to commemorate her memory. Wherever you are, Mom, let’s remember one thing. I waited till you were gone.

* * *

* I’m fascinated by the books In Other Words, and Whereabouts, which the author Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born American, originally wrote in Italian, a language she learned as an adult. Then she or another person subsequently translated the books into English. She also edited and translated The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. But I haven’t read them yet. If you have, kindly share your experience in the comments.