Switch Hitters

 by Janice Law

I recently read Red Comet, Heather Clark's fascinating biography of poet Sylvia Plath. Aside from thinking that the prevention of so complete and probing a book might make an excellent motive for a literary mystery, I was interested that Plath sold some illustrations to The New Yorker before the editors bought her poetry.

That made me think of other notable artists who moonlighted in another discipline: Michelangelo wrote sonnets, Van Gogh, wonderful letters; novelist Gunther Grass did handsome etchings, while both Bob Dylan and Tony Bennett paint, not to mention several present and former Sleuthsayers who compose songs and perform music.

I am a minor member of this interesting fraternity, being a semi-serious painter of long standing. Although I have done the occasional illustration for my own pleasure and, years ago, did cover drawings for a number of Anna Peters novels when I participated in the Back in Print opportunity, I have rarely combined the two arts or even treated the same subjects.

But about a year ago, writing a short story focused on the Tour de France gave me a little insight into the differences, at least for me, between writing and painting. 

I have long been a fan of grand tour cycling and had done quite a number of paintings inspired by the grand tours. For non-cycling fans, these events, even on TV, are a visual feast. They traverse spectacular scenery in France, Italy, and Spain, with, increasingly, well-chosen visits to other cycling mad countries.

 

The colorful array of team uniforms proves a real challenge to the fans, who themselves favor wild costumes–dinosaurs and inflated fat suits are popular this year– along with Borat style tiny bathing suits, big fluffy wigs in team colors, and, of course, at Le Tour, the giveaway shirts and caps from the sponsors' Caravan, in white with red polkadots (the King of the Mountains jersey) or bright yellow (the maillot jaune– the famous Yellow Jersey of Tour leader). You can imagine how promising all this is to a painter!

 

A short mystery story was a different matter, and though I had often thought of writing something set in the cycling world, there were always technical difficulties. A body can be dropped anywhere in a story, so can forbidden drugs or an act of violence. But timing is difficult around a cycling race. People consuming the equivalent of 4 or 5 bananas an hour just to keep pedaling are unlikely to get into much trouble, while riding along at up to 70 kilometers an hour just inches away from other bikes does not lend itself to anything but the tightest focus.

 

Commentators, professional observers that they are, are trapped in their booth watching multiple screens, while understanding the duties and techniques of the professional security people would have required serious research. It was not until I thought of a favorite former rider, himself a terrific writer, who does color commentary for Le Tour and blogs on  random topics during the race, that I found a plausible protagonist.

I decided that someone along his lines would do. Only the crime remained, and that was easy. A mystery about the Tour had to involve the Devil. Not, you understand the genuine Hadean item, but the fan who for years has danced and capered along the sidelines in horns, red top and tights, a pitchfork, and in recent editions, a black cape, which, one commentator remarked last month, he wears to breakfast.

With these ideas in hand, I struggled as usual to construct a plot, as I like mysteries to be plausible and am more at ease with interesting characters than unforeseen twists and turns. As usual the beginning went swimmingly, the end was at least vaguely visible, the middle, a struggle. It was finished, revised, fussed over, sent out and sold. Thank you, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

About a year later, I got an idea for a painting on the same subject: the Devil at Le Tour, which is actually the name of the short story. I had been taken with the dinosaur costumes and the sea of yellow and polkadot t-shirts and thought the brilliant red of the devil costume would serve to pull it all together. One day as the TV camera panned along a group of fans, devil gave a hop and there was the picture. 

I made some drawings, pinned a satisfactory one up next to my easel, picked up a small brush and, using burnt umber, sketched out the design. At this point, I really should wait a day or so to be able to spot the inevitable little errors. But no, although I can wait for a literary idea to develop, an image, once arrived, must be gotten down fast. I use inch wide brushes and rough the whole thing in as fast as possible.

For better or worse, I usually have a good sized (20 x24 or 24 x 28 inch) board covered in an hour. Then I spend probably 50% more time looking at the picture than I do physically painting, and, I must admit, a fair bit of time making corrections that could maybe have been avoided with a less impulsive and more professional and craft wise approach. 

However, I am not sure one can change one's working style too much. Little modifications, yes, complete change, no. Too much of creative work is beyond conscious control, and while I have sometimes thought that I would have done better with a more careful approach to painting and a more colorful approach to writing, change of that magnitude is not possible.

"The Devil at Le Tour" may or may not have appeared in AHMM by the time this emergency piece runs, but the painted version appears below.

Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

Grim Reaper: An Ode to Editors.

 

I just came back from a funeral I never wanted to attend. Courtney Tower was a family friend who was the last of the Greatest Generation. Yes, he was old but, damn, I’m going to miss him. 

People shape us. Some sow seeds in our growing up and then continue to water them. That was him. There are many things I could tell you but this isn’t that article. This is an ode to editors because it’s time they were celebrated. 

While growing up, I admired Courtney. He had worked with Pierre Trudeau, was an editor and, ultimately a newspaper man as he stated poignantly, "I work 60 years in the same Press Gallery where I started. However tenuous it was, I liked to be at the fringe at least of the political action. That was the main reason. The extra money was fine, and I loved walking through the buildings.

There’s something about this place. There truly is."

As a young woman I often butted heads with Courtney on many issues. He was one of the few adults who I enjoyed arguing with because he had a sense of humour to match his stubbornness, had an unshakeable commitment to democracy and always doing the honourable thing. 

When I wrote my first article for a national newspaper, I excitedly told Courtney and he asked to see the article before I submitted it. I sent it to him with high hopes that he would like it. He returned it full of corrections, explained that I had a lot of facts first, summarized the story at the end and the facts presented like that bored him greatly. He told me to tell the story first and then the reader will be hungry for the facts when they're presented. He also told me to write to the reader in that way always: make them curious enough that they want to read what comes next. There were other corrections and he signed it all "Grim Reaper". 

The edits were presented in his usual gruff manner but, oddly, I was not offended but, rather, enchanted by the fact that he took such an interest in the article and in improving it. They say that all politics is local and Courtney's deep commitment to democracy politically started with his relationships. He took a completely novice writer of articles like me as seriously as he would a proper journalist. 

We went back and forth with my corrections and his critiques until he was satisfied. I sat down and compared the first article with the last edit and there was no question about how much better the final version was and how much I had learned along the way. 

In the last few years, Courtney asked me to write an article to publish in his community newspaper. I was too busy to write it so, of course, I put everything aside and wrote it immediately. As I structured the article and edited it, I heard Courtney's voice because he honed many of my skills. Courtney critiqued the article, of course. I was grateful for more wisdom generously coming my way. Then, when we were done, he published it. 

I've heard many writers bemoan working with editors, claiming they feel insulted by the changes suggested. Quite apart from what skills Courtney taught me, he taught me to be grateful for editors. They are someone who, unlike most people on the planet, are actually reading your work and taking it seriously. The critiques that appear to come out of left field are actually the best ones of them all, because they teach you a new way of looking at writing. 

With his tough, newspaper guy approach to editing, Courtney was the best editor of all. There was such empathy in his signing his edits "The Grim Reaper" because he knew I would be taken aback by the extent of the changes, the many criticisms and humour was the best way through that. 

I will deeply miss my "Grim Reaper" and will continue to write with his voice in my ear. 

        Thank you for the edits, Courtney. 

It was Random Joe, on Your Porch, With His Teeth

Imagine the scene: A famed detective gathers everyone in the drawing room and lays out the evidence. "Ah, but it is clear," she says. "Someone among us even now got drunk last evening and punched a dude in the face." Or, in a darkened interrogation room, the hardboiled cop leans over the table and says, "Listen, we know you swiped that lawn mower." No, not as dramatic as what lands in crime novels, but sucker punches and swiped Cub Cadets are the crimes most people commit.

The FBI's Crime Data Explorer statistics for the last five years (select categories):

For data nerds, how I pulled the FBI reported crime numbers is post-scripted below. 

Here, I'll stipulate a couple of things: 1) Any murder is one too many and 2) Crime stats are full of unreported incidents and societal biases. My point is that we porch-pirate or pick-pocket each other a lot. A whole lot. Or gnawing on each other--literally. The top weapon involved in aggravated assault is "personal," which is Fed-speak for fists, feet, teeth, any body part. And then there are those seven million simple assaults.

Murder has the inherent stakes and drama to pump up fiction, but that level of malice is proportionately rare. A bloody business, too. I'm of the Raymond Chandler school. People don't take malice as far as murder without a damn deadly sin involved. The FBI data say that some type of gun was used in 75% of reported murders. Knives, vehicles, and blunt objects account for most of the rest. Nowhere near topping the list is overly elaborate murders or killings for the sake of a puzzle. Even comic mysteries--which I love--need a non-trivial motive. Without it, the whole thing can feel hollow. Somebody got killed, y'all. 

If these stats are a guide, the data say Americans are running 13 times more con games than murder plots and 25 times more burglary rings. The petty stuff also makes for excellent studies of human flaws and motivations. Urgencies and justifications, delusions and miscalculations. What can be more human? I think this is why I gravitate toward small-change bumblers. 

The FBI stats say that about three times as many homicides are of family or acquaintances than strangers. Aggravated assault is closer to two-to-one acquainted. Burglary is about fifty-fifty, and vehicle theft swipes a stranger's car twice as much as a friend's ride. Things get more random as they get more small-time. This leaves more room to explore an idea, or it does for me. Plus, I'm talking fiction. Bumbler fiction. Things must inevitably get out of hand, and in sneaks the stakes and danger. 

Write enough stories, though, and you get around to most everything. A few years ago, I wrote a spin on a manor mystery, even down to the dead guy as story device. I like to think that one subverts manor mysteries as much as it upholds tradition. A quick scan of my story tracker shows I've bumped off six characters by murder (however justified), or one every four crime stories. As side mayhem, I also have a manslaughter, a suicide, and two characters left to their likely death. But there are still the other three-fourths where nobody got killed. The story didn't need the murder. Why force one? 

The FBI numbers bear me out. It's a big, criminal world out there, and most people have a little crook in them given the right or wrong moment. 

But hang on. Golden Age Mystery fans, there is something in the FBI data for you. 727 homicides in the five-year period were by narcotics/sleeping pills. Fifty-one were by poisoning. 1,092 were attributed to a cryptically categorized "other." That's right. No category exists to capture the deed. 

Summon the famous detective. Unexplained methods are mystery story inspiration if I've ever seen it.

Postscript: About those FBI Crime Data Explorer stats...

The crime counts aren't static across all reported elements. It must depend on completeness of reporting, multiple elements per report, etc. So. For as consistent a count as possible:

• The data was as of November 2, 2024.
• I used crimes reported, not arrest counts. It's notionally more inclusive and maybe avoids some inequities seen in arrest rates. 
• Within the "Crime" tab, I used the "Offender Age" section as my official incidents count. I used percentages for all other stats.

Fascists in the Family

Every summer my father climbed to the top of a rickety ladder and hacked away at the tall arborvitae shrubs surrounding our house in the New Jersey suburbs. My brothers and I dutifully collected the dropped branches, and dragged them to our Mom, who stood ready to bundle them with twine so they could more easily be dragged to the curb for our town’s weekly trash pickup.

Mom was absurdly proud of her branch-bundling skills. If we tried to bundle them ourselves, she’d watch for a while before chiding us that we were doing it the wrong way. “Hmph,” she’d say. “You don’t know how. I learned the right way. From my grandfather!”

To this day, I am not sure I can’t even describe her method, but I could probably duplicate it if you watched me. The point was that when she was done tying, you could shake that bundle as hard as you could, and none of those branches would come loose. Yay, Mom.

I reminded one of my brothers of this annual ritual some years ago, and he chuckled, “Well, sure she knew how to bundle sticks. She was a good little Fascist.”

And we had a chuckle at our late Mom’s expense.

Joe's Mom:
Top row, second from left.

He was referring, of course, to Mom’s upbringing in Italy during the rise of Mussolini. And the freakish images (which I’m sharing here) of those days. They are a reminder to me how easy it is to mold young minds to believe that This Is The Way. The Only Way. The Way of Our Leader.

Like it or not, a war intervened and erased the world of her childhood.

The word fascist and fascism gets lot of play these days, especially this week. The word is derived, of course, from the fasces, a bundle of wooden rods (not sticks or brush) enclosing an ax, that has been a symbol of government going back to the days of the Etruscans.

I rooted around the web some time ago, trying to learn more about those wooden-rod bundles, and how fascism differs, say, from totalitarianism or authoritarianism.

The Romans meant the ax to refer to the right of the state to use violence to keep order, when necessary. When the legions returned to Rome from war, the ax was removed from the symbol carried aloft by soldiers, indicating that military power yielded to civilian authority. Minus the ax, the wooden rods alone symbolize governmental authority.

The fasces motif is still used today in that context. You’ll find them on the Great Seal of the United States, the Lincoln Memorial, on the walls of the Oval Office, and so on.

The "Doll Dance":

Mom, second from left.

I had heard growing up that the fasces were a symbol of unity. Together, went the notion, the rods were stronger than each was alone. But it turns out that that concept came later, thanks to a fable by Aesop. The earliest users of the symbol would not have ascribed that meaning to the rods and axe.

My brothers and I were surprised later in life to discover these photos of Mom in various school pageants with a giant portraits of Il Duce in the background. She had described these events to us, but seeing the photos was another thing entirely. In the context of her time, she would have been called a “Piccola Fascista,” or a “little (female) fascist”.

She was under the age of ten when these pics were taken. She hailed from a family of four siblings. Near the end of their lives, I interviewed her and her older brother, Mike, whose story was slightly more troubling. As a teen he was sent to a fascist youth camp on the Adriatic coast, where young boys trained in calisthenics, marched around in green knickers and Tyroleon hats. Later that year, they performed for Il Duce himself in their regional capital.

I don’t have a pic of Mike handy, but at the time he was a husky boy, what Italians then and now would describe as ciccione—chubby. Laughing, he described to me the trouble he had performing the most basic feats of strength required by the program. He could not, for example, climb a rope, and watched with envy as one of his camp mates performed the act handily, twirling in the air like an aerialist. When he descended, the expert rope climber strode over to my uncle, sneered at him, and slapped his face in a gesture of derision. You can’t do what I do.

Mike was rescued from further involvement in Mussolini’s program when his father returned from the U.S., where he’d gone to seek employment, and brought his oldest son back to Brooklyn, New York.

From that point forward, each half of the family had vastly different wartime experiences. Mike enlisted in the U.S. Army, fought all across Europe, and served as an engineer at Normandy. His most soul-crushing experience, he said, was carrying emaciated survivors out of Buchenwald in his arms.

My mother, her two other siblings, and their mother remained behind. Nazis camped in her grandfather’s fields, threatening the old man with a gun to get access to his barn. When the Americans started bombing, the Nazis dumped their gunpowder in her grandfather’s fields and fled. Mom, her family, and her neighbors hid in (yet another) barn to wait out the air strikes. When the smoke cleared, their village was filled with a new crop of soldiers: Americans, Brits, and their Indian allies. The family was reunited after the war, when all but one sibling moved to the U.S. with their mother.

In the immediate occupation after the war, Mike was stationed in Germany, where he was assigned to question and repatriate Italian soldiers—a portion of about 30,000 POWs at one site who had been captured by the allies. Every day for weeks, he sat at a desk in a local gymnasium, asking one soldier after another—in their native tongue—their name, rank, home province, and one question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Fascist Party?”

To a man, every single soldier said no, they weren’t, and never had been.

One day, as he was working in the gym, Mike looked up and saw a POW climbing a rope and twirling in the air like an acrobat.

Seething, Mike waited for this Italian soldier to descend.

Mike asked him the question.

“No,” Expert Rope Climber said. “I am not a Fascist.”

Mike slapped him in the face. Sweet justice. “Liar,” he said, proceeding to spell out the athletic games where they had together performed for Mussolini: “Campo Dux. Campobasso. 1935!”

Mike estimated that he had interrogated 5,000 of his countrymen. Every single one denied involvement in the ideology that had sent a nation to war and so many to their graves.

Sick to his stomach, one day he leaned over to his captain and said, “Hey, you know what? Looks like I’m the only Fascist here!”

Angels and Devils.

Mom, first, top row left.

---

Thanks for reading. See you in three weeks!

— Joe josephdagnese.com

Don’t Have the Words

 So, lucky me, today of all days is my turn in the rotation, and gotta be honest, folks. I’m having trouble finding the words.

Any words.

Lots going on in BrianWorld, and to top it off I’m one of the folks none too thrilled about the outcome of the Big Event yesterday.

Not gonna talk about it. I’m not mad at anyone about the outcome. You win some, you lose some. Besides, someone a whole lot wiser than me famously said, “the failure is not in the fall, but in the not getting up.”

Today, I got up. 

No more anxiety with the potential outcome hanging over our collective heads like the proverbial sword of Damocles. No more dread. No more uncertainty.

Instead I feel blessed with a clearer vision of what lies ahead for myself, my family, and my friends. And I immediately began to take steps to realize the new goals-both short and long-term-I’d already set for myself, and which had been buried and shunted aside by the creeping dread of the feared potential outcome.

So that’s “What next?”

Huh. Whadaya know?

I guess maybe I do have the words after all.

And now if you’ll pardon me, I’ve got stuff to do.

See you in two weeks!

HVI2, or Heads, You Lose

 

I subscribe to BritBox and I have worked my way through most of the mystery series I enjoyed (Jonathan Creek, No Offense, MacDonald and Dodds, Cadfael, New Tricks, mostly) so I have been giving lit-er-a-choor a try.

Britbox offers the entire canon of Shakespeare as interpreted by the BBC. I am working my way through the plays I have never seen or read (an embarassingly large number) and watching each one until I get bored or too puzzled by the language. (They make the subtitles too damn small.)

The Trout

For example, I tried watching Henry VI, Part 1, and gave it up quickly. Not even a guest appearance by  Joan of Arc could keep me tuned in.

But I made it through Henry VI, Part 2, no trouble.  I noticed that Wikipedia says Part 2 is usually considered the best of the trilogy.  We will see how I feel about Part 3.

Some random thoughts.  There are few Shakespearean characters I have wanted to give a good punch in the kisser as much as Henry VI.  What a boring, pious, pompous little trout.  No wonder his wife wants nothing to do with him.

But speaking of Queen Margaret, I had a really writerly moment during one of her speeches.  She watches hubby walking away with another fella she dislikes, Warwick, and says: "There's two of you; the devil make a third!"  First I thought: Billy the Bard sure knew his way around a curse, didn't he? Then I thought: What a great title! The Devil Make a Third.

privateproertynotrespassblogspot.com

A quick search taught me that one author had already figured it out.  Douglas Fields Bailey wrote a novel by that name in 1948.  As I understand it, the book is about a rural man who makes it to wealth by any means necessary - a not uncommon theme of the time.   The book was reprinted for the Library of Alabama Classics series in 1989.  There is an entire website dedicated to the book, run, as near as I can tell, by Robert Register.  

There are also many novels called Devil Makes Three and some of the authors might have been thinking of Queen Margaret (as I'm sure we all do from time to time).  

The most interesting part of the play for me was the Jack Cade section, based on the largest rebellion in England in the 15th century.  Shakespeare sees it as a highly anti-intellectual event, with simple literacy being a capital offense.  It is here that Dick the Butcher gives us what I think is the play's most famous, much quoted, line:  "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers."

Jack Cade, against Woke Education

The play also made me wonder whether the Globe Theatre had a propmaster whose specialty was severed heads.  There are four, count 'em, four, hacked-off noggins in  HVI2.  There are others in Macbeth and Titus Andronicus, among other of Billy's little skits.. I found an interesting article by Michael J. Hirrel discussing the chop-chops in Elizabethan plays and he pointed out something that never occurred to me. Shakespeare's audience would have been quite used to seeing severed heads in real life.  So it is reasonable to assume that someone went to a lot of trouble to make the props realistic and each one unique.

Personally, I'd rather be a writer.  So far, no severed heads adorn my work.

World Builders

The November/December issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine proves good to SleuthSayers. Rob Lopresti graces the cover while Stephen Ross, Michael Bracken, and I help to fill the pages behind him. Simple math tells me we have a third of the titles in this edition. 

My story, "From Above," is the latest in a series about the 16th-century French attorney Bernard de Vallenchin. His challenge in "From Above" is to defend, in an ecclesiastical court, birds charged with disrupting a Catholic mass.

And yes, that was a thing. Animals could be accused of violating laws and punished in both church and secular courts. They could be imprisoned or executed. As I've mentioned in an earlier blog, while researching a different topic, I stumbled into a 1906 book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E.P. Evans. He documents the work of Bartholome Chassenee, a 16th-century French jurist who described his own work in defense of accused animals. The Evans' book explores this forgotten world. 

I think of writing the de Vallenchin stories as akin to creating science fiction. The world of animal prosecution in 16th-century France is an alien place to which readers must be introduced. The age had a top-down cosmology that began with God and continued through the great chain of being to the lowest slugs. There was a patchwork of courts--royal, manorial, and ecclesiastical--that may have been involved, depending on the offense. To tell an understandable tale, a good chunk of information had to be delivered in order for the reader to know why a bird might be on trial. I needed to quickly build a different world from the one the readers inhabit. There stands the challenge. How do writers create an distant environment while avoiding a dreaded information dump. Or, in the alternative, how do writers camouflage an information dump so that it doesn't take the reader out of the story?

The standard advice is to feather the facts into the tale. With the limited word count of a short story, however, the slow accretion of details is often impossible. What then might the writer do? 

A few suggestions follow: 

Pare down the information.

In researching Europe's animal prosecutions, I acquired many fascinating pieces of trivia, odd bits that seemed really cool to me. Social historians have used GIS programs to map out the variety and overlapping jurisdictions of courts across France. But I'm not writing a dissertation. My goal was to craft an entertaining tale about fictional characters. To do so, I wanted to keep the information at the minimum level to make the story understandable. I remembered the lesson Barb repeatedly tries to teach me, in a short story, every word matters. I tested my accumulated facts and separated them into what was necessary and what proved merely interesting. The unused facts might one day become central to a future story, but they remained in the nest for this avian tale. 

Consider where to begin.

"From Above" starts in media res. From the first words, the readers find themselves in an ongoing conversation between the lawyer and a barmaid. I trusted that the readers would catch up quickly. By beginning in the middle and then going back, a writer can draw the reader into the conversation and engage their interest in the topic. The goal is to have a shared experience. If the characters were attracted to the subject, hopefully, the readers will also become interested. 

Incorporate the information into the action.

Action doesn't have to be car chases or gunfights. It may be a more subtle personal contest between two people. Bernard de Vallenchin is a libidinous drunkard and a cheap braggart. (I hope you like him in spite of his faults.) His high opinion of himself is sometimes challenged. To accomplish some earthly aim, de Vallenchin boasts about his courtroom mastery and the complexities of the subject matter. He uses his exploits to achieve an end, perhaps bedding a barmaid. In an earlier story, the scheme was to extract free food from the hotelier. The lawyer used an elaborate discussion on courts to serve as a distraction. The information became part of the action. The current story works the necessary details into the process of two characters learning about one another. 

Incorporate the information into character development.

Fans of the Harry Potter books know that Hermione Granger is the brightest witch of her age. She constantly dispenses obscure facts. These nuggets of information often prove necessary later in the story. She is an expository character. She'll tell you the things you need to know. The information dump becomes incorporated into her character development. Similarly, Bernard de Vallenchin's description of the complexities of his legal challenges helps to show readers that he is a self-absorbed trumpeter but perhaps posseses courtroom skills. The technique aids in establishing his character. 

Consider making the expository character a drinker. Who hasn't met an intoxicated person who didn't over-explain, or tell you something you already knew? Adding alcohol can allow a character to state what should be obvious to the people in the room. The writer can educate the reader not only about the necessary details but also demonstrate that the character is a sloppy drunk. 

Conversely, a writer may say something about the recipient's character, the person in the story tasked with receiving the information dump. This character acts as the portal. She is the doorway into this world. If, for instance, the listening character is drunk, she may not object to the bloviating protagonist reciting what should be commonly known information. 

As a circuit-rider, Bernard de Vallenchin travels to new cities and villages in each story. He knows little to nothing about the area's details. He is a fish out of water. Listening as another describes the local jurisdiction or corrects one of his assumptions is a necessary part of his effective advocacy. He needs to learn these details in order to succeed. The fish out of water offers another opportunity to world build and give information to the character and, also to the reader. 

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine published the second story of the de Vallenchin series in November 2022. I can't assume that anyone will remember the details of the world from that story. Every reader, therefore, needs fresh facts to  imagine a place far outside their own experience. Pouring the essential details into a brief short story required a strategy. As I consider future de Vallenchin stories, I face the same question. How might I deliver the necessary information quickly and in a way that will hold the reader's attention? 

As a writer, your issue may not be 16th-century cosmology. Every storyteller, however, needs to craft a setting. That world-building requires dropping information eggs. The challenge is to find new and different ways to open up that fictional realm. 

What strategies do you like to use? 

It's Election Day in the USA. Go vote. 

Until next time. 

True to type.

             I only write in Palatino Linotype, which is a more attractive cousin of Times Roman.  Most people can’t tell the difference, which is good, since publications often require their superannuated relative, which I find cramped, fussy and inelegant, compared to my first love. 

                I prefer to indent my paragraphs, and dislike putting spaces between them (even though I’ve occasionally done it here, when laziness trumped principle, or the blog app forces it upon me).  Nearly every book you’ve ever read throughout history follows this practice. I don’t think there’s any reason to change it now, despite the insistence of word processors and trendy digital formats. 

           Serifs are like little brush strokes at the end of straight or slightly tapered lines, flourishes that suggest a certain panache, elan, a bit of dash to the characters.  I was once told that medieval scribes saw them as tiny angels.  I’ve found no evidence of this, but the notion is enchanting.

            Times Roman can also look dated, like your grandmother’s Victorian furniture.  If disturbed by this you might select Bodoni, or Century, or my favorite Palatino Linotype, efforts to freshen up the form.  I’m fine with this as well.  All are preferrable to the execrable sans serif.     

I have no affection for any version of san serif, particularly Helvetica, which has no social charm, only narcissistic, declarative impudence.  It doesn’t care what you think, it only wants you to follow its commands.  Bold san serif is even worse:  a lout with a megaphone yelling over polite discourse. 

Or simply boring and commercial. All those straight up and down, and horizontal, lines have no personality.  It’s just a flat, soulless delivery of the words.  Serif faces have lots of smiles, frowns, intelligent observations and witty asides.  These are the Cary Grant and Noel Coward of typefaces.  The Shirley McClain and Katherine Hepburn.   Sans serifs are just pronouncements.  Demands.  Directives.  Humorless and colorless.  Bureaucratic. 
            

        You might note that sans serif faces are defined by what they lack.  Serifs.  It reminds me of Baus Haus or Brutalist architecture, which boldly erases all decorative or artistic detail, stripping everything down to right angles and plain boxes, like the ones that deliver goods to you from Amazon.  I don’t see this as an achievement.  Anyone can build a box.  Few can shape crown moldings, cornices, curvilinear arches and hip roofs. 

Digital content is often in Calibri, the slightly less school-marmish version of Helvetica.  Another cousin is Aptos, which is even worse than the other two.  Helvetica’s sadistic, stunted little sister. 

 Most of the typeface choices in Microsoft Word are novelties and nothing more.  Fun, silly and usually inappropriate comedians only useful to children and unserious designers.  Cheap invitations to the gala event, or hyperventilating car ads given to starbursts and excessive exclamation points.  The typographical equivalent of a drunken huckster screaming over the crowd noise.   

You might think that a type face shouldn’t affect your understanding of the words on the page, but that’s not true.  I spent a long career in partnership with art directors and graphic designers who brilliantly captured the essence of a headline with a deft choice of type face.  They knew the emotion the writer was trying to convey, presenting it in the precisely appropriate visual style.  (Most of the art directors I worked with were also quite capable writers.)

Art at its best conveys feelings.  Typefaces are the rare art form that bring intrinsic emotional interpretation to the meaning of the words they’re representing.  A true integration of purpose.  Digital media has the capacity for delivering an endless assortment of faces, with no sense of the mission these shapes and miniature diagrams are charged with achieving, but we can intercede and pick the face that suits our mood. 

What you are saying, of course, matters the most.  Though how you are saying it can make all the difference in the rendering. 

Día de los Muertos

Día de los Muertos

Friday and Saturday followed Halloween with Día de los Muertos, the popular Mexican version of All Souls Day. Celebrations are colorful and exciting. Like unpretty gargoyles on a church, Halloween and Día de los Muertos may confuse casual observers as to their religious bona fides.

All Souls remembers those who have come before, ephemeral passages our modern world neglects. But on this holiday of remembrance, I stumbled upon a passing you’re unlikely to forget.

Shock and Aww

For those who believe the world fosters no more eternal love stories, meet Carolyn Hamilton. She has such a gift for description, we barely resist falling into the gravitational pull of her words.

The title demonstrates truth-in-publishing still exists. Tik Tok has inured us to sensational headlines where ‘shock’ and ‘disturb’ may mean an influencer is showing off her too-transparent fashion haul so that, oopsie, nobody misses the show, yawn. Audience, please restrain your intense emotions.

Hamilton, if anything, understates shock. The White Queen told Alice she could imagine six impossible things before breakfast. Contrariwise, I found myself believing two antipodal understandings before dinner. I could comprehend a reader shocked and disturbed, and I grasped precisely how and why Carolyn… well…

I couldn’t have done it… I doubt most could. But Like Water for Chocolate, I get it. I get it. Unlike Tita’s story, Carolyn celebrates happiness.

Carolyn and Jeff Hamilton family

Here is Carolyn Hamilton’s article. Let us know what you think.

When My Husband Died, I Did Something That May Shock and Disturb…

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For You and Me and I

  

I should probably apologize ahead of time, because this post is a complaint, and I learned long ago that nobody likes complaints. My mom's usual reply to grumbles like "Are we having peas again?" was "There are children starving in India," and when I was stupid enough to say something like "I'm bored," Dad always replied, "Oh, I can find you something to do." Having now grown old, I still complain, but my wife has become so used to it she pays no attention.

My complaint here, though, isn't about aches or pains or the weather. This one involves grammar, and language. Here it is: 

I'm tired of people saying "for you and I" or "of you and I" or "to you and I" or "from you and I," etc. To phrase it as my high-school English teacher would've, you shouldn't use a subject pronoun when it's an object, and specifically a subject pronoun after a preposition. And it happens a lot.

I think I know why. Throughout childhood, we're taught not to say "Susie and me met at the park" or "Bob and me are going fishing" or "Dad and me like movies." It's supposed to be Susie and I, Bob and I, Dad and I. So when we have the need to say or write things like "They were shouting at Jane and me," we're tempted to substitute I for me, and say "They were shouting at Jane and I." Which is wrong.

What really bothers me is when this grammatical crime is committed by people who should know better. If the farmer being interviewed on TV after his barn's blown away says "And a dern tree almost landed on Stella and I," I don't mind that a bit. Not only has the man had a hard day, he's just a regular guy. But if the reporter who's interviewing him makes that kind of mistake, that's another matter. And believe me, I've heard this kind of screwup by politicians, news anchors, teachers, talk-show hosts, pastors, and salesmen, all of whom supposedly received an education and are now paid to get up in front of others and speak. That's their job.

NOTE: As most of you already know, the handy test for which pronoun is correct ("I'm rooting for you and me" or "I'm rooting for you and I") is to change the sentence a bit and say "I'm rooting for you and for ____." The answer's obviously for me, not for I, and if you say it aloud you immediately see that.

It especially irks me to see this mistake--a subject pronoun used instead of an object pronoun--in writing. The most common crime scenes, I think, are Facebook posts and Amazon product reviews. As a fiction writer, I don't mind (mis)using it in dialog because that's my character talking, but I wouldn't want to goof up that way in the rest of my story. Thankfully, we don't see it often in published works.

But it has happened. I can remember the me/I error occurring in both a song and a play. The song was "Hungry Eyes," by Eric Carmen, who at one point feels "the magic between you and I." (I like the song, but I guess me didn't fill the bill, in terms of rhyming.) And the play was The Merchant of Venice, in which one of the characters says something like "All debts are cleared between you and I." Even when the author is Shakespeare his ownself, between is still a preposition and the sentence is still wrong.

I saw a "don't" list long ago, when I first started writing for publication, of the seven worst grammatical mistakes. I can't recall all of them, but it included things like its/it's, lay/lie, less/fewer, etc. And high on the list was for you and I. This was almost thirty years ago, and I suspect that mistake would still be a top contender.

Question: Is this particular misuse irritating to anyone else? Do you tend to shrug it off, instead? As a writer, I make plenty of grammatical errors myself, so I'm not sure why this one bothers me so. (I wasn't even an English major--I graduated in electrical engineering.) But it does.

In closing, and in recognition of the fact that we should all complain less and be more tolerant of things we don't like, here's a piece of particularly elegant poetry:

If you must say "Between you and I,"

I won't stop you--I won't even try.

So just say it; feel free,

But don't say it to me

Or I'll shoot you and leave you to die.

Okay, I'm kidding--I wouldn't do that. But, like the hungry-eyed songwriter, I needed something that rhymed.

See you in two weeks.

Teach What's Hard

 by Steve Liskow

In grad school, I had a humanities professor from Germany. His English had only slightly heavier consonants to give away his roots. The reading list was brutal, from The Confessions of St. Augustine to selected essays of Montagne, with Rabelais, Shakespeare, Chaucer (in the original Middle English) and several others along the way. It was a six-week summer course, and we turned in three papers of five, five, and ten pages. There were only ten of us in the seminar, so there was nowhere to hide.

After he returned the first set of essays, the professor scolded us for our "pedestrian" writing styles. "For you, it is your native language, so you do not think about it. It is my fifth language, so I do have to think about it."

After my career as a teacher and another fifteen years or so of conducting writing workshops, I still remember that comment. I grew up in a family of voracious readers and entered kindergarten reading at the fifth-grade level. I also had a solid feel for the rhythm and sound of Midwest American English.

My fourth-grade teacher assigned us to write a poem, and then we read each other's work aloud. I read someone else's poem and changed it as I read it because I could tell that one line had the wrong rhythm. The classmate came up to me after we all read and said, "You changed my poem."

"Yeah," I said. "I made it better."

Hubris at nine years old. Even though I couldn't explain to him why it was better, I knew I was right.

I used to play golf pretty well (nine handicap before I broke my wrist), and I often helped other players fix a flaw in their game so they ended up beating me. I was an adequate actor but a better director because it was like teaching: you prepare the lesson (production) and help the cast convey the play's ideas. I was always a better teacher than a doer, and I think it's because I was basically a kinesthetic learner. I got the feel of the activity into my body and could explain what it felt like to other people. I still do.

How does that relate to the professor's comment above? Well, if you don't have to think about something you can do well, it's difficult to explain how you do it because you've never really observed the "process." I know some very good musicians who can't read music, and they have a hard time explaining how they play something. I'll bet Aaron Judge would have trouble explaining how he hits home runs. He's 6' 7", well-proportioned and athletic, so after all the practice, it's muscle memory rather than consicous thought. The ptch comes in...right...THERE, and he swings.

When I taught composition, I used the textbooks, but occasionally disagreed with some advice because it didn't work for me. I seldom mentioned it unless many students had trouble with the concept, too, and then we'd work it out together. I'll bet those kids know that concept especially well now because they had to work harder at it. One of my warnings in fiction workshops is DON'T rely on Strunk and White's The Elements of Style too much because it's geared specifically to expository writing (essays for college). It's a good start, but it makes everyone's voice/style the same. It won't help with plotting, dialogue, pacing, irony or humor. That means that when I retired from teaching and turned to writing fiction, I knew how to write a sentence and a paragraph, but I knew NOTHING about how to plot a story or control the pace and rhythm. 

I had to learn those techniques, and I attended workshops and read dozens of books to master them.

Because I had to work so hard, I can explain them clearly and still be flexible for people whose rhythm and strengths are different from mine. I can write humor, but it's difficult to plan in advance because my sense of humor is built around the rhythms my family instilled when they read to me decades ago. It's instinctual and hard for me to explain. I've only found a couple of books on writing humor, and neither of them helped me.

Dialogue, which also relies on rhythm and a host of other factors, has never been hard for me, either. But it was hard to explain how I did it until I found two books that showed me what I was actually doing and broke it into a process. I rely on those books now, and people have told me my dialogue workshop is one of the best craft workshops they've attended.

I've wanted to play piano most of my life. A few years ago, after trying and failing with several different books, I found a set of DVDs with a booklet that uses graphics to show fingerings and techniques. It speaks to my kinesthetic learning style and I get everything more clearly. I will never be a good, or even adequate keyboard player because I'm starting 65 years too late and I have small hands and minor arthritis. But this approach makes me play the music because the recorded rhythm section carries me along. Rhythm again.

It's the same way I learned to walk and to tie my shoes. Now I do both of those fairly well.

How about you? How do YOU learn?