Mixing Crime and Coming-of-Age Stories

I have never set out to write a coming-of-age story. When plotting, I usually don't think in such broad terms. I focus on the trees--who my characters are and what I want to happen in the tale. Only later, after I finish a story or near its end, do I realize what my forest looks like. And what a lot of my forests have looked like in recent years--to belabor the idiom--are coming-of-age stories.

I didn't major in English in college, so forgive me if I mess up this definition. A coming-of-age story is one in which the main character matures from childhood to adulthood (emotionally, not necessarily in age) because of a journey or perilous situation the character lives through. Because crime/mystery tales often involve perilous situations, they are tailor-made for stories in which children, teenagers, and young adults grow.

The character development in these stories doesn't have to be positive. The stories don't have to end with the good guys living happily ever after. But the journey or perilous situation should cause the main character to see things differently by the end, to be a different person.

It was only recently that I realized how many coming-of-age stories I have written. In order of publication:

• "Truth and Consequences" is about a teenager determined to find out where her father goes each Saturday. The answer breaks her heart. This story was originally published in the anthology Mystery Times Ten, republished in my collection, Don't Get Mad, Get Even.
  
• 
  "Ulterior Motives" is about a teenager who volunteers for a political campaign. There's a mystery in this small town, and a secret, and a teenage girl at the middle of it all who doesn't think the adults around her understand much--which maybe they don't. This story was published in the anthology Ride 2.
  
• "Evil Little Girl" tells the tale of a bullied girl at sleepaway camp and what happens when her figurative cries for help fail. This story originally appeared in Don't Get Mad, Get Even.
• "Alex's Choice" is about a twelve-year-old’s quest to stop a family tragedy long after it happened and the unexpected hard choices the child faces. This story was published in the crime, time-travel anthology I edited, Crime Travel.
• "Second Chance" is a story about identical twins forced into foster care, who find each other again several years later, at age eighteen. The older brother--by eight minutes--had always known it was his job to protect his little brother, but now, the enemy he faces is someone he never expected. This story was published in the anthology Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir.
• "Wishful Thinking" is a ghost story with four tweens who creep into an old abandoned house, searching for a million dollars of stolen money. They don't believe in ghosts when they go inside, but maybe they should. This story originally appeared in issue 6 of Black Cat Weekly. It also can be
  
  purchased as an individual story.
  
• "Beauty and the Beyotch" is a tale about three girls told from two perspectives about one thing--their struggle to make their deepest desires come true. What happens when those dreams collide? This story was published in issue 29 of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine.
• "For Bailey" is about a town with a pending vote to ban consumer fireworks and the teenager determined to have the vote pass, for all the scared animals and people. She comes up with a plan, but she doesn't foresee the consequences. This story was published in the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote Volume 3: The Color of My Vote.
• "Real Courage" has four point-of-view characters, three of them teenagers. The story opens in the 1980s with a teenage girl facing ostracism. It moves on to her son in the 2010s. After promising his dying mom he would always stand up for the awkward girl who lives next door, he finds himself in a situation no one could have anticipated. This is a story about people making bad choices with the best intentions. It was published in issue 14 of Black Cat Mystery Magazine.
• 
  "Teenage Dirtbag" tells the story of a teenage guy infatuated with a girl who already has a boyfriend--a boyfriend who doesn't treat her--or anyone--with respect. The infatuated guy comes up with a plan to rectify that. This story was published in the anthology (I Just) Died In Your Arms: Crime Fiction Inspired by One-Hit Wonders, Volume 1.
• "Never Have I Ever" is about a college student playing her favorite secrets-sharing drinking game with her friends. But she has secrets she’ll never share--because she's obsessed. Because she's haunted. Because she has a plan. This story was published in the anthology Murder, Neat.
  

Eleven stories. Maybe I should put them together in a collection with a new one or two. After all, it sure seems I have a predilection for this type of tale. If you haven't read "Real Courage," it is available on my website. The story is a current finalist for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, and it was a finalist for the Agatha Award earlier this year. You can find it by clicking here.

If you have any favorite coming-of-age crime/mystery stories, I would love to hear about them in the comments. My friend and fellow SleuthSayer Art Taylor certainly has a few great ones.

Human Ecology and Meaning-Making

Last fall, I visited my granddaughter at Cornell University, where she’s an undergrad in the College of Engineering, currently a junior majoring in something called Operations Research and Information Engineering. It says something about the state of language in the twenty-first century that this writer and old English major tells her friends, "It's really data analysis," hoping this will make it more comprehensible to those of us who remember when language was meant for us to speak clearly to each other.

Numbers shine brightly in my granddaughter's mind. Her numeracy fills me with awe. But she's articulate as well and has many other gifts and skills. She plays guitar, indeed, had asked her dad to bring her guitar with him when we came to see her that weekend. She started doing competitive hiphop at age three and is on a dance team at Cornell. She even choreographed a piece for a dozen dancers last spring. And she thinks. We had wonderful conversations during the visit. I also had time to see how the university—-not only Cornell, because this is a sign of the zeitgeist—-is using language these days.

One sign that made me tear my hair even as I laughed was blazoned on the building that presumably houses what at Harvard is called the Divinity School and at Fordham, the Theology Department. It said OFFICE OF SPIRITUALITY AND MEANING-MAKING. I assume the intention was to label belief in the ineffable and exploration of the unseen, including everything and offending no one. The term spirituality is a fine one. As a crackerjack editor, I say it does the job. I'd delete meaning-making. Were they afraid atheists would picket them? They should have worried more about sticklers for felicitous prose.

My granddaughter has an eclectic group of friends. She'd told me one of her roommates had a double major in pre-med and English, so I led with that when I met her.

"Oh, I'm not majoring in English any more," she said. "Now I'm doing pre-med and fashion."

"I can't fault you for dropping English," I said. "But fashion is a major?"

"It's in the College of Human Ecology," she said.

"What on earth," I said, "is human ecology?"

"Oh, it's where they put everything that doesn't fit anywhere else."

I'd call inventing a term with that definition meaning-unmaking, though I admit human ecology has a fine ring to it, seducing us into believing that it means something. I don't know if academics or marketing professionals wrote the university catalog, but they produced some grand word salad by way of artistic verisimilitude. (I know, I know, human ecology really is a thing. I googled it after I wrote this post. Nonetheless...)

Sez the college website:

High-quality education, research and public engagement are the cornerstones of the College of Human Ecology and its academic departments, which include: Psychology, Nutritional Sciences, and Human Centered Design.

We prioritize innovative collaboration and are fueled by a powerful, interdisciplinary and applied approach to improving lives.

Our undergraduate academic majors are firmly grounded in the social, natural and physical sciences, and design to create dynamic, interdisciplinary fields of study. This allows our students to explore their interests in a broader context and to understand and analyze issues from multiple perspectives. . . there is no prescribed way to prepare for careers in business, health/medicine, or law, or just one way to be creative in the college. . .

Majors include design and environmental analysis, fashion design and management, fiber science, global and public health, human biology, health, and society, human development, and nutritional sciences.

Whatever.

I suspect it's of a piece with the headlong rush toward AI's takeover of language. In the twenty-first century, the idea is not to make meaning, certainly not clearer meaning or new meaning, but to take the meaning language already offers us and complicate, distort, obfuscate, and ultimately lose it.

AI-de-camp

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AI is everywhere, everywhere. Even where it isn’t.

You may remember my friend Thrush. Months ago, he urged me to write a non-fiction book, a layman’s guide to AI, artificial intelligence. I concluded I’d need a lot of research to bring my knowledge up to date for a full-fledged book, but an article might be more achievable at this point.

Thrush himself has a fair amount of experience. He was an engineer and I a consultant who worked for Westinghouse’s robotics division. (W) spun off as Automation Intelligence and a much smaller team led by Richard Fox specialized in neural networks, the foundation for modern artificial intelligence, also called machine intelligence.

To Understand the Future, Look to the Past

In the 1990s, AI approached the intelligence of a catatonic Labradoodle, but contrariwise, low IQ made it valuable for handling backbreaking and mind-deadening tasks.

An anecdote out of Australia told of a small parts inspection that was not only brain-numbingly dull, but subject to errors as workers’ attentions wandered. According to the story, workers trained a goose to detect bad assemblies, and an anserine solution proved somewhat more accurate without grousing. Supposedly the government stepped in and shut down the goose’s career, claiming forced labor was cruel to animals… not humans, but animals. (I would be interested if anyone can verify if this tale is true.)

Meanwhile, Fox and his colleagues, eventually acquired by Gould, had viable contracts, many from the automotive industry. These included banal tasks like Ford counting palleted sheets of window glass for export, GM identifying machine tooling heads too fine for the human eye to see, and determining if a transmission tab had been welded or not.

A particularly mundane task allowed Fox’s team to exercise its neural network: grading lumber. As plywood finishing a final trim and sanding, end-of-line workers noted knots and imperfections and categorized each sheet as Grade A, B, C, etc. This is where AI training kicked in.

For one last time, the grading workers sat with a training dongle, a keypad to rate the plywood. AI peered over their shoulders as workmen clicked through plywood sheets, teaching the neural network that a crack in the wood meant a rejection. Three small knots or one very large knot might drop a score to a grade C. After training with several sample sheets, the program was ready to tirelessly grade lumber all day long. Not brilliant, but it helped reduce industrial drudgery.

Pattern Recognition

Like all development, AI built on the shoulders of people and programs and techniques that came before, especially the Holy Grail of pattern recognition.

Humans can easily recognize faces, voices, songs, the distinctive beat of hawk wings, the scent of a lover’s neck, a fractional glimpse of an artifact our minds instantly extrapolate from a part to the whole in toto. Historically, digital computers have suffered at such simple human tasks. Before our current LLMs (large language models) and picture recognition could become useful, we needed pattern recognition, and pattern recognition required huge amounts of very fast storage and processors. These prerequisites have finally fallen into place and pattern solving has become a reality. Google and Alexa can not merely parse verbal questions, they can identify the voice of their inquisitor. Technology has finally arrived at the doorstep of machine intelligence.

The Stimulation of Simulation

Writers and researchers have speculated for a century about AI, and even as far back as a couple of millennia if one extrapolates early myths. AI was a topic at my university. I found myself assigned to a team working on economic simulations. Other universities pursued weather models, the effects of tides, and even earthquake simulations, so economics seemed relatively manageable. 

In an idle moment, I submitted a paper about simulating human intelligence, arguing that as simulations became more refined, they would eventually become indistinguishable from the real thing. I didn’t immediately realize I was backing into postulates and theorems by well-known theorists in the field, but I visualized simulation as an unexplored path to artificial intelligence.

Eliza

We’ve discussed prerequisites and pattern recognition, but in the mid-1960s, a fun experiment surfaced at MIT. Joseph Weizenbaum created a program, Eliza, that could communicate in a primitive way with humans. Although MIT disclaimed artificial intelligence, it nevertheless contained seeds of AI, the recognition of certain words resulting in a reaction. Beyond its small vocabulary, note the lack of specifics:

ELIZA: How do you do. Please tell me your problem.
Leigh: I'm concerned about the dark side of artificial intelligence.
ELIZA: Please go on.
Leigh: AI may not only be used, but also abused.
ELIZA: That is interesting. Please continue.

An anecdote told of an associate professor outside the computer room who sat down at an untended terminal, not knowing it was connected to Eliza. He attempted in vain to access his apps, and met with an implacable Eliza whispering soft platitudes in this teletype. Eventually the screaming professor drew the attention of staff, who soothed him with hot tea and an explanation.

Eliza lives on. You can try her out for yourself.

It all comes together.

Not long ago, our friend ABA had a government contracted business where she and her staff sorted through historical photographs to identify content, i.e, this is Nelson Mandela visiting Table Mountain on a mid-July afternoon.

AI has made her job obsolete. Computers can now recognize Madiba and distinctive geography with little to no human interaction other than feeding the machine.

Robots

As we speak, commercial robots are mating software with hardware, matching AI with mechanical precision. Applications are numerous. Think of elder care. Instead of slings and motorized hoists, a robot that may or may not look human softly scoops arms under a patient and gently lowers her on a toilet or into a bath, adjusting water temperature as desired. Another robot tenderly feeds a paralyzed patient and reads her an email from home.

I predict– yes, I’m willing to take such risk generally fraught with failure– I predict within a Christmas or two, we will see toys with built-in AI. Children can talk with them, ask questions, tell them their concerns, and let them know when they’re hungry or tired or need soothing. In the middle of the night, a toy might sing a child back to sleep. Advanced toys might resemble futuristic robots, whereas toys for young toddlers could look like Tribbles or teddy bears.

Jesus at the Wheel

We see one robot almost every day, a highly-intelligent ’bot on wheels. I’m referring to an electric vehicle (EV) with full self-driving (FSD)– the Tesla.

The average person may take FSD for granted, but those of us in the computer field are amazed at advances, especially in recent months. It is possible to enter the car, tell it where to go, arrive at its destination, and park itself without a person once turning the wheel or tapping the brake.

My friend Thrush, having traded in his Model 3 for a Model Y, cogently commented he doesn’t so much drive his Tesla, he supervises it. Close your eyes and you’ll never imagine a real person isn’t steering the car or– no disrespect– Jesus, as bumper stickers read.

Thrush no longer feels comfortable driving a traditional car. He has a point. Tesla accidents make the news simply because they are rare. Their accident and fatality rate is considerably lower than human-driven vehicles.

The console screen in a Tesla identifies traffic lights, stop signs, trucks, cars, and bicycles. It used to show traffic cones, but they’re no longer displayed. If a child darts into traffic, the car will brake and swerve to avoid him.

I’ll dare make another prediction, that the day will soon come when self-driving vehicles talk to one another. What? Why? Say you’re following a truck. An EV cannot see through a semi tractor-trailer any better than a person. But a smart vehicle in front of the semi sees a pending traffic accident and shouts out an alert to like-minded vehicles, giving them a chance to react without seeing what they’re reacting to. In a step beyond, intelligent vehicles could deliberately coordinate with one another to mitigate collisions.

The Dark Side

Those of us in the industry are well aware of abuses of computer intrusions and malware. At least one downtown bank here in Orlando won’t let you enter if you wear dark glasses or a hat. They want their cameras to pick you up and soon enough, identify you with AI.

London is one of the most monitored cities in the world. With AI, their computers could scan sidewalks and plazas snapping photos. Cameras sweep Trafalgar Square, its AI circuits identifying each person, innocent or not. AI can analyze faces at political rallies and protests, the wetdream of a police state. That is one creepy intrusion.

AI is already used to identify target marketing weaknesses and desires. In fact, AI was forced to cut back because it was targeting pregnant women before husbands and the women themselves were aware of their condition.

Finally, among other joys, AI can be used for warfare, electronic and traditional.

A Starting Point

We need AI legislation not only to protect us from corporations, but protect us from government. Decades ago, Isaac Asimov proposed three Laws of Robotics, later refined with an overriding fourth law. I can think of little better to form a foundation (there’s a joke here) for statutes to protect us against government and corporate excesses.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4. Superseding other laws, a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

What now?

Experiment with ChatGPT and other AIs. You’ll encounter flaws, many, many flaws, but what they get right can be impressive. But I suggest three works of fiction from the past to give an idea of the future, what’s possible and what terrifies. They are novels after all, not inevitable.

The Shockwave Rider (1975)

John Brunner may have been the greatest Sci-Fi writer of the latter 20^th century. He didn’t depend upon evil aliens or hungry monsters (except for an embarrassing awful early novel). Each of his books deals with a topic of concern such as pollution and over-population. His novels read like tomorrow’s newspaper and he had an astonishing prescient record of predicting the future. In Shockwave Rider, he foresaw computer viruses and hackers. Like Stand on Zanzibar, the story is an entertaining peek into the future– now our present.

The Adolescence of P-1 (1977)

Thomas Ryan also foresaw hackers and viruses and he provided the most realistic descriptions of computers and data centers in fiction, eschewing goofy tropes often seen on television and in bad movies. In its day, P-1 was little known, even in the computer community, but was adapted into a 1984 Canadian TV movie titled Hide and Seek. Like The Shockwave Rider, it ultimately foresees a promising, positive future.

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1966)

D.F. Jones turned this into a trilogy. It’s the best known of the novels here and was made into a 1970 film, The Forbin Project. A powerful supercomputer is turned over to the military, despite warnings to the contrary. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, a similar computer goes on-line. They meet. Warning: Unlike other stories here, this is one depressing novel. I mean unrelentingly depressing. It makes Dr Strangelove read like Pollyanna. The only good note is it serves as a warning of what could happen.

Wanted: Data Entry Clerks with No Knowledge of English

Colossus is so damn depressing, I couldn’t end with it. In early days, data storage was expensive and computer memory even more so. Scanners were huge, slow, and inaccurate, so how might large bodies of information such as law library Lexus/Nexus be imported into computers?

They were typed in. Twice. At least.

Building a digital, searchable law library was the goal of one enterprise. Despite being surrounded by emerging automation, the group depended upon manual data entry. They hired pairs of keypunchers to retype law books in tandem. In other words, two women would be assigned the same text in a section, each duplicating the work of the other. A pair of women would attack another section, and two more yet another. The result was two streams of text hypothetically identical.

At the end of a daily run, each pair’s output was compared. Differences indicated a problem and a third person would locate the error and correct it. A lack of knowledge of English was a key requirement on the theory their output wouldn’t be influenced by their language.

Verily, let us cautiously give thanks for artificial intelligence.

Submission Accomplished

  

About two weeks ago, a good friend who's also an editor contacted me and said he needed a story for a crime anthology he was editing and needed it really fast, because one of the contributors had backed out of the lineup and he had to send everything to the publisher in just a few days. (Red alert red alert!) The theme of the anthology was specific but interesting, and after some arm-twisting I agreed to come up with a story. I did it in my usual way, beginning with a plot (a crime) and then putting in the characters and settings that were necessary to tell the tale, and--bottom line--I finished the story, sent it to him, and got a thumbs-up, so all is well in the world.

But that's not why I'm posting this column. I'm posting it because it occurred to me, as I sat down to begin typing that new story, that every single story I've written in the past several years has started by my doing the same thing. I pull up a previous story manuscript, change the title, delete everything below my byline, and start typing the new manuscript--which is then "saved as" a new file bearing the title of the new story. What I'm saying here is that all my stories use the same template.

What does that template look like? It's almost identical to the example shown at the Shunn's Modern Manuscript Format site. I said "almost the same" because there are a few things I choose to do differently. 

In case you're interested (and if you're an established writer I'm sure you already have your own version of all this), here are some observations about the way I format a short-stort manuscript for submission:

- I like Shunn's advice on placing the name/address/contact information at the top left of the first page and and the approximate word count, rounded off to the nearest hundred, at the top right. I don't usually include my membership in professional writing organizations in all this, as he suggests, but you can do that if you want.

- I type my story title and byline in proper case between a third of the way and halfway down the page. I sometimes change this after I finish the story, depending on where my story ends on the final page. (More about that later.)

- I always indent the first line of the story and the first line of every new scene, just as I indent the first lines of all the other paragraphs, as Shunn suggests. Some authors don't indent those first lines of scenes in order to make it look more like a printed version, but I do.

- I double-space everything in the text of the story with nothing extra between paragraphs. When I taught writing classes, some students turned in their stories with a slightly bigger vertical space between paragraphs. Editors I've talked with don't like that, and neither would I.

- I center a pound-sign (#) between scenes. Some writers and editors prefer using other separators (three asterisks, etc.) and some prefer to use nothing except one extra vertical space to separate scenes. I do whatever the guidelines tell me to, but I like putting at least something there, because when I used only spacing between scenes, I once had an editor butt two scenes together in the printed version of one of my stories. Scene breaks are there for a reason, and inserting a separator of some kind lessens the possibility of that happening. 

- I make sure Widow/Orphan Suppression is turned OFF before starting. In other words, widows and orphans are fine with me (even in real life) and if you suppress them, it can cause way too much open space left at the bottom of some pages. If all this sounds ridiculous to you, Google widow/orphan control.

- I also make sure Grammar Check is turned off. That program is maddening to me. When writing fiction, I happily splice commas, split infinitives, fragment sentences, etc., when needed, and I don't want the computer telling me I can't. (This is one of those times when it's good to be da king.)

- I use the Tab key to indent the first lines of all paragraphs unless the submission guidelines tell me to do otherwise. I know some editors prefer an automatic half-inch setting, etc., to indent paragraphs.

- I space only once after a period. I'm old and it was hard to make myself change, on this, but I did. It's my theory that the two-spaces-after-a-period rule was there to go along with the each-letter-takes-up-the-same-amount-of-space Courier font. The two spaces made everything look better, back then.

- I italicize. I don't underline. Underlining to emphasize text goes back to the days of typewriters, when italics weren't a possibility. I have, however, submitted stories to publications whose guidelines said to underline and not italicize, and I followed their rules. Just saying.

- I center the word END three double-spaces (sometimes two) below the final line of my story. Shunn prefers THE END, and that's fine too. I think it's good to put something there, because if my text happens to go all the way to the bottom of the final page, I don't want an editor to wonder if another page should be coming. Maybe, as with scene separators, that's just me and my paranoia.

- I don't use anything except black TNR 12-point format throughout. No colors, no boldface type. If I need to include something like a newspaper article excerpt, etc., I sometimes indent the whole thing to set it off from the rest of the text but I leave the font size the same.

When I'm done typing the story, I go back and check several things:

- I make sure all curly apostrophes and quotation marks are "aimed" the right way. Example: to properly type 'em (instead of them), I type a character just before em, hit the apostrophe key after that character, and delete the character I inserted. I realize that's a bassackwards way of getting there, but it works. I do the same kind of thing with single quotation marks in funny places. There are of course other ways to do this, but I like that one.

- I do a spell-check of the whole finished manuscript to catch misspellings, duplicated words, etc. It also flags certain odd words that I want to leave as is. (I like made-up words, and my characters sometimes THUNK their heads on the sidewalk or WHACK their palms on desktops, so when those get flagged I just override the program and allow them.

- I check to make sure my headers look right. Since I use previous stories as templates, it's all too easy to accidentally leave the title to the previous story in my header.

- If my story ends too close to the bottom of the page for me to write END two or three double-spaces after the final line, I don't want to put END by itself at the top of the next page. Instead, I go back to the first page and adjust that one-third-to-halfway-down title and byline such that END can now fit at the bottom of the last page or such that I can put the final couple of lines of text at the top of the next page and type END below that. This adjustment isn't usually required, but it sometimes is.

NOTE: Some editors prefer different fonts, different separators between scenes, and other unusual things. Whatever they want, I do it. (One editor, I recall, wanted everything to be in Verdana font.) If I don't like it, I do it anyway, and then change it back later, when I submit the story someplace else as a reprint. 

Again, these are just things I do in preparing my own stories. I'm NOT saying you should do it that way. I would like to hear, though, about your preferences on this submission/style/formatting issue. Are you a Shunn follower or a Shunn shunner? What's the strangest requirement that you've seen in submission guidelines? Do you have some formatting tips that I or others might consider, to make manuscripts look or read better? In my view, all of us are still learning, on this and on everything.

Meanwhile, I wish you joy in your writing and luck with your submissions!

Back in two weeks.