Weather or not.

Elmore Leonard was indeed a great writer.  That doesn’t mean his 10 Rules For Good Writing should be followed.  Some of them make sense, but, “Never open a book with weather?”

     What if your book is set in the Amazon, might your characters take note of a little humidity?  What if your lead guy is a leatherneck working on an oil rig in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska? Can he say, "Gee, it's nippy." How about Monsoon season in Bangkok?  "Before I left the house I had to choose between an umbrella and diving gear."

      I wrote a book set in the Hamptons that starts in the middle of a raging snowstorm, a phenomenon not often observed out there, at least not in fiction.  Not a single reviewer mentioned my flagrant violation of Leonard’s rules.  So there.

            I find the cliché of “setting as character” a little annoying since it’s not.  Setting is the setting.  But there is some truth that a special setting, like Raymond Chandler’s LA, Parker’s Boston or Grafton’s Santa Terresa, California, does have a personality that infects the story, like a member of a series ensemble, familiar and prominent in the narrative.

            You English majors will recognize the term “pathetic fallacy”, a conceit used by Homer, Shakespeare and 18^th century Romantics where the mood and behaviors of the characters both reflect and influence natural forces.  In modern literature, this can be pretty silly, unless it’s deftly metaphorical.  Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is often found trudging through a howling blizzard somewhere in the Upper Great Plains (even in Chapter 1), establishing the promise of savage and frozen-hearted villainy about to ensue. 

             (My wife played on a softball team in graduate school composed mostly of PhD candidates who called themselves The Pathetic Fallacies.  Still my favorite use of the term.)

            I’ve written two other books that featured giant storms, which might betray more of a meteorological than literary obsession.  In both, hurricanes capped off the action, a deployment of weather as a plot device Leonard is silent on.  In Black Swan, I was credited with a clever use of the “locked-room mystery” motif (trope?), though my actual intent was to crib somewhat blatantly from the plot of Key Largo.  The concept of being trapped in a claustrophobic space as an uncontrollable fury smashes into the building is pretty compelling.  Especially when you’re trapped there with a bunch of murderous, drunken bad guys.  Weather in this case really deserves to be front and center, open to any metaphorical, theological, existential interpretation you wish to infer. 

            My other book featuring a wild tempest took place on the Jersey Shore, where I actually rode out a hurricane.  I was a lifeguard, and since the town was paying us to protect lives, we had to stay on while the protected fled to the mainland.  After clearing out a few knuckleheads trying to surf in the wrathful Atlantic Ocean, we retreated to our bungalow for the night, when the worst of the storm hit.   So, I too was confined to tight quarters that were being bashed and jostled by the wind with a bunch of people who were not murderous, but decidedly drunk.

            This was an experience that I had to use at some point.  In Homer, to say nothing of the Old Testament, these sorts of events are an act of divine cleansing of the hubris and corruption inherent in ever-fallible humanity.  I didn’t want to go that far, though as we all know, few things impose a greater sense of humility on real people and fictional characters alike than a rip-roaring natural disaster.    

          After that storm in New Jersey, with only the Beach Patrol and other first responders wandering around looking at the damage, the world was strangely quiet, even serene.   For some reason, it evoked the feelings I had reading the last paragraph of Joyce’s The Dead, which I believe is the finest bit of literary language ever composed in English.  So I adapted that for the ending of my lifeguard book, Elysiana. 

            I waited for charges of appropriation but never heard a word. 

The Horror! The Horror?

For the past few years, I've been maintaining a list of markets for short crime/mystery fiction for the members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (obligatory plug: membership is free, and the group is open to writers, readers, editors, and anyone else interested in the form). Several times a month I go hunting for new market opportunities: magazines, websites and anthologies that might be of interest to the writers in our group. This means checking sites like Duotrope and the Submission Grinder, scrolling through social media, doing general Google searches, and so on. New magazines are relatively rare these days, but new anthologies pop up fairly often.

I'm Stephen King, and you're not.

And I've noticed something odd– or at least, something I don't quite understand.

Mystery readers can be a fairly rabid bunch, and there are a lot of them. Walk into any bookstore, and the mystery section is likely to be among the largest. So why is it that there seem to be a lot more markets for short fiction in other genres than there are in mystery?

This isn't new; it's something I was aware of even before I started keeping the markets list. I should also say that it's possible I'm just wrong about this. Maybe my perceptions are skewed somehow, or maybe I'm just not good at this kind of searching.

But, man, it certainly seems as though, for every new anthology seeking mystery stories, there are ten seeking fantasy or science fiction and fifteen or so seeking horror. It's the preponderance of horror that I always find especially confusing. Go back to that generic bookstore, and compare the size of the mystery section to the size of the horror section (you can find it by looking for Stephen King and Joe Hill). In pretty much every bookstore I've ever frequented, the mystery section is larger.

So what explains the seemingly much larger number of markets for horror? Logically, it would seems to suggest a similarly larger number of readers, but I don't see much other evidence that this is the case. Maybe it's just the case that there are a lot of horror readers who don't read anything else? Maybe horror readers are more open to short stories, while most mystery readers prefer novels?

One of the places I dabbled in horror

I should make it clear that I have nothing against horror fiction. I've dabbled in it myself, and I certainly recognize there's a lot of wonderful writing being produced in the field. My first love will always be crime, though, and I guess the bottom line is that I wish mystery writers had more opportunities to strut our stuff.

So: short column this month. It's February, after all. The main reason it's short is because I don't have an answer to this question, and I'm hoping someone will. What do you think? Are my perceptions of the current market just wrong? If they're not, what explains this?

Or maybe everyone just wants to be Stephen King?

The irony, of course, is that horror fiction has its roots in texts like Dracula and Frankenstein. Mystery fiction, by contrast, looks back to the short stories of writers like Poe and Doyle (yes, this is reductive, and yes, Doyle wrote novels about Holmes, but I think there's pretty general agreement that the stories are better).

That First Book You Loved...

What's the first book you remember loving?

When I was a kid, say just learning to read, my favourite book was Mr. Hazelnut. It was about a young girl who meets a tailor who sews magical clothes. He knows just what Alice longs for, makes the clothes for her, then poof! Disappears. But the clothes grow with her over time, so it's a kind-of happy ending.  I still have that book (it was written by a Scandinavian woman) and plan to read it to my three year old granddaughter this winter.

I grew older and devoured Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  By eleven, I was into Agatha Christie and had read most of her books by the age of thirteen.  In high school, I fell in love with Ivanhoe. Then and now, I zoom to my friends' bookshelves in every house I go into.

Were there books in your house?  We had several low-bookshelves lining our living room and dining room.  I was raised by an ardent book-lover. My dad lost his father when he was six, and there was no money for books in his young years. He vowed that - when he grew up - he would buy every book he ever wanted. I grew up in a house full of books and they are still my treasures.

My own home has books in every room.  Filling walnut bookshelves, piled on side tables, bedside tables.  My office is a shrine to books.  And while I applaud the development of Kindle, a shelf-full of Kindles doesn't fill my heart the way book spines do.

Yes, there was magic in the first book I loved.  Sorcery magic, plus the kind that fills your soul.  

Because books create magic, I have found.  They provide a magical escape into a zillion adventures.  

I count myself lucky to have made a career in writing books.  If in my lifetime, I can create that wonderful escape for some readers, then my heart will be full.

What about you?  Was there 'one' book that made a difference to your childhood and stoked your love for reading?  

Dimes, Mules, and Starvation: An Inspirational Guide to Short Story Success!

I’ve been obsessed lately with sticking to a decent writing schedule, and still having some semblance of family life. How do you pull it off? To find out, I’ve been collecting anecdotes about writers who came before us. Alas, their stories tend not to be terribly helpful because the times in which they worked and their personal circumstances are so varied. But they are nevertheless inspirational.

Back in the 1930s, when radio was still in its infancy and print was king, a writer we all know adhered to a solid schedule for producing and selling short stories. His writing regimen is a matter of record, enshrined in a collection called Selected Letters of William Faulkner.

At the time, writing “good” stories for magazines earned Faulkner between $300 to $400 per story, so if he could stick to this schedule, he could support himself and his widowed mother on $1,200 to $1,600 a month.

That money was decent for Depression-era Mississippi, but it was still tight. When his father died, he tells a correspondent in 1932, Faulkner’s mother had just enough money to live on for a year. After that, her support fell entirely on Faulkner’s shoulders. And he could never rule out the possibility that his brothers and wider circle of kin would hit him up for money.

He experimented with ways to earn more. By 1934, he was working on two novels and still maintaining his weekly short story output. He tried upping his short story output to two stories a week, but found that exhausting. If a check from a magazine editor ran late, he mortgaged one of his late father’s mules, mares, or colts to tide him over. (Note to self: Joe, what is your horseflesh back-up plan?)

Then he hit upon a genius plan: He would crank out six—count ’em, six!—short stories aimed at the Mac Daddy of American magazines, The Saturday Evening Post. If they bought all six of these “pot boilers,” he would raise $6,000, enough money to live on for six months while he wrote another book. But the plan failed. The Post bought only one of those stories, and Faulkner—who would win the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and a Nobel in his lifetime—despaired because in his mind the remaining five stories were fit only for the trash. He seemed to believe that The Post bought lesser stories that other magazines wouldn’t touch.

Another time, agent Harold Ober told him—either by mail or by phone, I forget which—that he would try to sell a story to The Post if Faulkner made some changes. Faulkner agreed, then told Ober to air-mail him back the damn story because he didn’t make a carbon copy.

Well, crap, we know that it would not do to wait, right? Our man needed cash and he needed it now. So what did he do? He rewrote the story from memory, incorporating Ober’s requested edits, and mailed it off so it could get in the pipeline and he could get his check that much quicker.

The story was “The Bear,” a hunting novella that is found in every high school and college anthology. The Post published that “pot boiler” in 1942.

That is the real point: The story that teachers and professors celebrate as a work of genius, fit for days of analysis, was written to stave off hunger, bills, and the loss of another mule.

In his lifetime, Faulkner wrote 125 short stories, possibly more. Fitzgerald wrote 181. Hemingway wrote 70, the slacker.

Another writer returned stateside after World War II and cranked out 800,000 words in his first four months out of the Army. He worked 80-hour weeks, amassing 1,000 rejections. He never had fewer than 20 to 30 short stories in the mail. Eventually, John D. MacDonald sold 600 stories, and launched a career writing mystery novels. If his early output figure is correct, he wrote just under 7,000 words a day during those critical four months.

Like I say, that’s an amazing story of one’s dedication to craft but not terribly helpful to a guy who is looking for lessons in the realm of life/work balance. MacDonald lost 20 pounds sticking to this regimen. If the purpose of writing is to earn one’s bread, he was doing it wrong.

Let’s see…who else have I got here? Nathaniel Hawthorne, another darling of school anthologies, calculated that he could only write about 10 to 12 short stories a year–about one a month. If he could manage to sell them for $25 each, he could support his family. Getting $25 a story was feasible but difficult in pre-Civil War America. It forced him to be exceedingly choosy about which publications he submitted to. Philip K. Dick wrote 121 short stories, and I’m sure every single one of them will eventually be made into a movie. The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant sold 116 short stories to The New Yorker. Our genre’s Ed D. Hoch wrote 950 short stories.

One of my favorite true stories concerns an American writer whose eyesight was so bad the military would not enlist him to fight in World War II. Hence, his creative adolescence, during which he sold his first few stories, extended well into his adulthood. He lived with his parents in Los Angeles until he married at 27.

Every week, he adhered to the following schedule.

“On Monday morning I wrote the first draft of a new story. On Tuesday I did a second draft. On Wednesday a third. On Thursday a fourth. On Friday a fifth. And on Saturday at noon I mailed out the sixth and final draft to New York. Sunday? I thought about all the wild ideas scrambling for my attention…”

Even at that young age, the writer, Ray Bradbury, had begun to trust his imagination. The more he wrote, the more ideas came. Even though he lived at home, he was driven by an intense work ethic.

“There was another reason to write so much: I was being paid twenty to forty dollars a story, by the pulp magazines. High on the hog was hardly my way of life. I had to sell at least one story, or better two, each month in order to survive my hot-dog, hamburger, trolley-car-fare life.

“In 1944 I sold some forty stories, but my total income for the year was only $800.”

One technique that served him well was to draw up long lists of story ideas. He’d write down the word “the” followed by a noun, usually something from childhood that scared or fascinated him. One list might have looked like this, he tells us:

THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.

From there, he picked one of those ideas and let his subconscious take over. By the time he ran those personal memories through his process, he had a fresh story that bore no resemblance to its real-life counterpart.

In essays he later wrote about his process, he attributed his success to his early consumption of poetry and short stories. Those twin loves trained him to sharpen his prose, to bake economy into every sentence.

Short stories were his early bread-and-butter. It’s believed he wrote 400 of them, but at first glance they were useless in helping him land his first book deal.

In June 1949, he took a Greyhound Bus to New York, where he made the rounds of book editors, all of whom inquired if he’d written a novel. He hadn’t, and they could not care less about his stories. Even then, the world of New York publishing greeted a collection of shorts by a single writer the way one would welcome a shoebox filled with a three-day-old catfish.

He finally met with an editor at Doubleday, the friend of a friend, who cheerfully announced, “I think you’ve already written a novel.” The editor explained what he meant: Wasn’t there a common thread in the series of stories Bradbury had written for several years on the topic of Mars?

Why, yes, Ray said. He wrote them like that because he was so moved by Sherwood Anderson’s novel in stories, Winesburg, Ohio. Ray had never confided that inspiration to anyone and he certainly never thought of collecting his Mars stories in a book.

The editor requested an outline. Bradbury hurried back to the YMCA where was staying, stripped to his underwear, and pounded on his typewriter in the sweltering heat until 3 AM.

The next morning, the delighted editor offered him a contract and a check. “Now that we’re publishing your first ‘novel,’ we can take a chance on your stories, even though such collections rarely sell. Can you think of a title that would sort of put a skin around two dozen different tales—?”

The “skin,” or framing device, of that 18-story collection was the story of a carnival refugee whose extensive tattoos spring to life, thus engendering each of the tales in the book.

So the first two books Bradbury ever published were fashioned entirely of short stories. The “novel” was The Martian Chronicles, the collection was The Illustrated Man. He triumphantly returned to his wife in Venice, California, with two checks totaling $1,500 (about $20,000 today). The sale of those two books gave the Bradburys enough money to pay their rent for a year, finance the arrival of their first daughter, and help with a down payment on their first house.

The following spring, Ray needed to find a quiet place to write and couldn’t afford an office. He escaped to the basement of the UCLA library, where he rented a desk-mounted typewriter for 10 cents per half hour. You put your money in, a clock ticked away, and you typed furiously to get as much of your money’s worth as possible in those 30 minutes before the machine bricked.

In nine days Ray had the first draft of a manuscript. He thought it might become a novel, but it was still too short, only 25,000 words. He would eventually expand the story to a whopping 45,000 words. It only cost him $8.90—about 44.5 hours—to bring Fahrenheit 451 to life. Considering it has sold 10 million copies, I think we can all agree that the dimes were well spent.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Selected Resources:

Recent article on Mavis Gallant.

The material on Bradbury comes from his 1990 book, Zen in the Art of Writing, a collection of about 11 essays on writing.

The material on John D. MacDonald is drawn from two articles, here and a 2019 SleuthSayers post by Lawrence Maddox here.

The material on Faulkner is drawn from Eudora Welty’s review of the Faulkner text, found in her book The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (Vintage Books, 1979).

More Notes for Horatio

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
— Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5.

First, some BSP - Back in 2017, I wrote a SleuthSayers post on Fort Mountain, Georgia, and the Cherokee legend of the Moon Eyed People with whom they lived and fought and eventually… drove out. Maybe. (LINK) Anyway, Neal Burnette, a writer and director of documentaries, read it and found it interesting and interviewed me for a documentary on the Moon Eyed People. (The video is at the bottom of this post.)

So, I had a few more thoughts on the whole thing (as if I don't always have a few more thoughts on everything...).

First of all, my general approach to history is and has always been to look for the patterns. Because they're there; they're always there. History may not repeat itself, not identically, but it sure does rhyme. I would always try to get that across to my students - there are patterns to revolution, to war, to missionaries, to education, to just about everything.

And the same with legends. Every legend has a germ of truth in it. Often more than a germ. Often it's blaring at us, except that we know it has to be a myth. thanks to the common fallacy that time is an arrow of progress, and we, we who are living here and now, are the purpose and pinnacle of it all, and we are the most brilliant, educated humans who have ever lived. All our ancestors were inferior to us, and they lived in darkness. (This was the whole point of the collective Renaissance strut during their stage of time.) Now that's complete and utter bull hockey, and we can prove it by looking at, if nothing else, the Pantheon in Rome, the bronze vessels of the Shang Dynasty, and the Pyramids. Geniuses and artists have always been with us, along with dictators and monsters, since... well, since the earliest records we have (back to say, 3,000 BC). And before. Check out Gobekli Tepe some time.

But back to legends and myths.

There is an amazing similarity among stories world-wide of "the little people". The canotila in Lakota a/k/a wiwila in Dakota who live in the Black Hills and Badlands, the sidhe in Ireland (commonly called fairies in the British Isles, and very commonly called the Good People in Ireland) and others who appear in every indigenous culture around the planet. All are humanoid, but most are much smaller than most humans. Some live in the forest, some in caves in the woods, but the stories told make it clear that they live in another dimension that intersects with ours. They have their own roads, places, habits, work, hobbies. Some little people have been said to reside in the Pryor Mountains of Montana and Wyoming. The Pryors are famous for their "fairy rings" and strange happenings. Some members of the Crow tribe consider the little people to be sacred ancestors and require leaving an offering for them upon entry to the area.

And the legends of the sidhe are endless. I highly recommend a book called "Meeting the Other Crowd: the Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland" by Eddie Lenihan and Caroline Eve Green for just a few of them.

BTW, by and large, they're not that interested in us. Sometimes they will take children to their world, sometimes for pity (especially an abused child - very common among the Native American legends) or a replacement for a sickly child of their own (most of these stories are European in origin), or for who knows what reason? Some adults have been invited to the sidhe's world, where they find hallways and royalty and a warning (from other humans who have been taken there) that if they eat or drink anything there, they'll never be able to go back. And it's always hard for a human to return to our dimension. Thomas the Rhymer was supposedly carried off by the Queen of Elfland and returned to earth with the gift of prophecy, but then had to return to Elfland when he was summoned back by a milk-white hart and hind. Washington Irving's fictional Rip Van Winkle slept and woke up after almost everyone he knew had died. But there were earlier stories from the German Peter Klaus to ones that are at least a thousand years older, Ranka from China (Link), and Muchukunda from India. Basically, if you eat or drink with the fairies / elves / sidhe / immortals, and go to sleep, if you ever wake up, it will be whole lifetimes later.  

Now to me, this is very interesting. The leap from Klaus to Rip Van Winkle is fairly obvious. But how did the ancient Chinese legend of a woodcutter who runs across a pair of immortals playing a game of Go, eats some of their food, and who falls asleep for so many years that his axe handle turns to dust make it all the way to Peter Klaus in Germany? But then, there are stories of Cinderella, Blind Kings, and deals with the devil in every culture...

There be giants in every culture, and dragons…
But that's another blog post.

Another note, all the stories about them say that if you treat them well or do them a good turn, they will reward you, sometimes very richly. But if you do them a bad turn, they will do you harm, perhaps life-long... In fact, you would do well to appease them or move away, quickly.

Meanwhile, all of this made me do a rethink of the legend of The Pied Piper of Hamelin Town. Now it's pretty obvious that it's tied to the bubonic plague, because Hamelin is swarming with rats and the Pied Piper gets rid of them. But then the Hamelin leaders refused to pay him, and he gathers up all the children (except for one that was blind, one that was deaf, and one that was lame) with his music, and leads them out of town... and into a cave in a mountain, which promptly closes behind them. BUT... the oldest version of the legend is as follows:

On the back of the last tattered page of a dusty chronicle called The Golden Chain, written in Latin in 1370 by the monk Heinrich of Herford, there is written in a different handwriting the following account:

Here follows a marvellous wonder, which transpired in the town of Hamelin in the diocese of Minden, in this Year of Our Lord, 1284, on the Feast of Saints John and Paul. A certain young man thirty years of age, handsome and well-dressed, so that all who saw him admired him because of his appearance, crossed the bridges and entered the town by the West Gate. He then began to play all through the town a silver pipe of the most magnificent sort. All the children who heard his pipe, in the number of 130, followed him to the East Gate and out of the town to the so-called execution place or Calvary. There they proceeded to vanish, so that no trace of them could be found. The mothers of the children ran from town to town, but they found nothing. It is written: A voice was heard from on high, and a mother was bewailing her son. And as one counts the years according to the Year of Our Lord or according to the first, second or third year of an anniversary, so do the people in Hamelin reckon the years after the departure and disappearance of their children. This report I found in an old book. And the mother of the Dean Johann von Lüde saw the children depart.

The sidhe are known for being handsome and well-dressed and excellent musicians...

And now for the documentary! Enjoy!

Boob Tubery

The Belgian Original

Let's talk TV.  Not long ago I finished watching a  series. Then I watched it again, but different.

(Old philosophical question: Can you step into the same TV series twice?)  But Professor T is sort of a set of  non-identical twins.

The first iteration of Professor T was a Belgian series (2015-2018) starring Koen De Bouw as a highly eccentric but brilliant professor of criminolgy at the  University of Antwerp.  He assists the police there while struggling with his considerable assortment of neuroses, especially a germ phobia.  He also has an unfortunate addiction to telling the truth, no matter who it hurts.

Professor Teerlinck is an example of the Holmes school of annoying genius detectives.  Fun to watch but hell on the people who work with them.   One of the entertaining aspects of the show is that we see the Professor's active fantasy life acted out before our eyes. So the police officers will suddenly start dancing, or a rival professor might explode...

The British Version

I have been watching the show on PBS and now you can also go there to see  its relative, the BBC version. In this one Professor T is Jasper Tempest, a Cambridge scholar played by Ben Miller (the original star of Murder in Paradise.)  All of the plots are borrowed from Belgian episodes, with significant differences, of course, and those changes are what fascinates me. For example, in an episode called "The Perfect Picture" the plot is mostly the same but the motive and murderer change.  It feels very much like the authors of the British episode had a grudge against a certain profession and modified the plot accordingly.

The biggest change, though, is the story that ends Season Two in both series.  It feels like the English team wimped out on this one, although to be fair, this may relate to a difference in the laws in the two countries.

On the whole I liked the Belgian version better, largely because of the main actors. Miller plays the professor with only two expressions: Man With Toothache, and Man Pretending Not To Have Toothache.  De Boew on the other hand, has mostly one expression: supercilious superiority, which  fits the character better.  (To be fair, he has one more facial tic: terror when he is around his mother.)

British Fantasy Scene

And that brings up one area where the British version wins: Frances de la Tour plays Mom and if you don't love Frances, fie on you. Another place where the Brits prove superior is the surreal scenes from Prof T's imagination, although they seem to have forgotten to include them in the last few episodes.

You might want to compare our own Janice Law's take on the Belgian version.   Oh, apparently there are German and French versions too, but they haven't shown up on my screen so far.

Now I would like to talk about  the new reboot of Matlock. There are spoilers ahead so if you plan to watch the show please stop reading now or jump down below the picture of my cat.

Okay?  Everybody gone?

The new Matlock is a Trojan horse.  It cheerfully promotes itself as a reboot of the old show but it is nothing of the kind.  All the two series have in common is a senior citizen lawyer with a Southern accent (very occasionally in the latter version).

Kathy Bates plays a lawyer pretending to bear the name of the old TV show (which is fictional in her universe) but she is carrying out a convoluted scheme and a lot of what she says turns out to be lies.

The series this reboot resembles more closely is Mission: Impossible.   At the beginning of each episode of that old spy show we learned a little about the team's cunning plan.  But at some point (usually just before a commercial break) something would appear to go disastrously wrong.  Only after the ad for corn flakes or whatever would we learn whether the disaster was 1) part of the plan, 2) not part of it  but a contingency that had been prepared for, or 3) uh oh, we're in deep doodoo.

The same thing happens frequently in the reboot.  For example, Matlock gets caught in someone's office.  Is she in big trouble, or was this part of her scheme all along?  Cool stuff.

As other viewers have said this plot feels like it can't run for years.  I hope it is intended for a limited run.  Also the underlying story lacks the grim realism of, say, a Scooby-Doo cartoon.

But I keep watching it, largely because of  Kathy Bates, who each week offers a master class in physical acting.  When she is silent her face reveals more than the other actors do when they are speaking.

Okay, as promised, here are  my cats.

Quickies on two more crime shows I have been enjoying:

A Man on the Inside (Netflix). Ted Danson plays a widowed professor who is hired by a private eye to move into a senior complex and find a jewelry thief.  He isn't very good at it but the show is warm and funny and the elder actors (including Sally Struthers) are having a great time.

Where's Wanda? (Apple+) is in German with subtitles.  When the Klatt family's teenage daughter disappears the parents decide to plant spy cameras in every house in their lovely suburban neighborhood. They soon find that almost everyone has secrets, including members of the family.  The show is funny and sad and intriguing. But I have to say: I was almost at the end of the series when characters began behaving in such offensively stupid ways to keep the plot going that I gave up on the show.

Wishing you better luck. 

  

 

Type-ology

 

As I’ve reported numerous times, I’ve returned to work as a part-time criminal magistrate.

            Mostly, I do it for the money. Although the exorbitant sums paid to short story writers meet most of my daily needs, the extra paycheck helps when the servants need bonuses, or the Ferrari's oil requires changing. I also like to splurge on locally sourced pate and not limit myself to the bulk container at Costco. Although I'm told that the blue vests issued to Walmart greeters make my eyes pop, I've reclaimed the magistrate gig instead. The occasional court session keeps my bar card from getting dusty.

            The work also allows me to build my collection of typos and misunderstoods that crop up occasionally in police reports. Often, these mistakes happen when a patrol officer in the field calls in their report using the department’s voice-to-text system. Other errors appear when line personnel use a word and, perhaps, aren't entirely clear on the definition. In either case, the results can be entertaining.

            What follows are a few of the recent examples of reporting errors. Besides a bit of fun, I hope they remind writers and citizens that police officers are human. They make mistakes just like the rest of us. Rarely are the errors cataclysmic breaches or deliberate violations of constitutional norms. More commonly, they are the mistakes we all make--failing to proofread carefully or assuming that what they said was what they meant to say. Anyone who has ever dictated a text message will understand. We have all seen auto-correct go crazy. The typos are a harmless way to remember that police officers are flesh and blood people. We want cops who can empathize with the individuals they encounter. That humanity makes for better police/community relations and more effective law enforcement.

That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it when that humanity is displayed.

“I activated my lights to imitate a traffic stop.”

That's something trainees do at the police academy. They imitate traffic stops, arrests, and searches. In the field, they usually initiate the real thing. Maybe this officer had just graduated.

“Julia starched the victim.”

If you could read the remainder of the police report, you’d see that the victim had four long red lines running along his left cheek. It's safe to assume that Julia scratched him. Starch, however, may have antiseptic properties of which I’m unaware. Or perhaps she didn’t want the red lines to wrinkle.

“Oscar collaborated part of the story.”

This one is likely both a typo and unintentionally correct. The evidence rules in Texas require that an accomplice’s statements be corroborated. Independent evidence must support the truthfulness of a co-defendant. But conspirators might also get together and agree in advance on their excuse. Oscar may have only worked to craft part of the alibi. Next time, stay for the whole meeting, Oscar. The parts you missed will land you in jail.

“I saw her restraining his waste.”

My inner eight-year-old laughs every time at this bathroom humor. I reported a similar typo several months ago if you're keeping score. This mistake seems to be trending upward. But again, it may also be a typo and unintentionally accurate. If the woman squeezed his waist hard enough, she might restrain his waste. Don’t form this mental picture around mealtimes.

"Juan was able to interrupt at times for his mother."

This is the last of my unintentionally accurate misquotes. Juan is bilingual, and his mother speaks Spanish. Although the officer intended to say that Juan helped interpret for his mother, the officer could truthfully write this sentence. At most family violence scenes, a whole lot of interruption occurs. 

“A pre-summit field test.”

Officers in the field typically perform a presumptive field test on possible narcotics they’ve seized to confirm that they are genuine. This officer performed his test before reaching the top of the mountain.

“Due to his eradicate behavior.”

Benefiting from the entire police report, I can tell you that his erratic action aroused the attention of the local constabulary. They intervened and got the situation under control before any eradication occurred.

He drove with wonton disregard.

This one only applies to Uber Eats drivers who wantonly ignore the local traffic regulations and still deliver the wrong order.

As you imitate your day, may you do more than starch the surface of your potential.

Until necks time.

A Prince of Detection

I made the acquaintance of a Prince last week. This was somewhat belated, as Florizel, Prince of Bohemia, had made his London Magazine debut in 1878. Later, seeing his stories plagiarized, Robert Louis Stevenson collected the four stories comprising "The Suicide Club" in the hardback New Arabian Nights.

His Highness is a lively character who forms an interesting comparison to his near contemporary Sherlock Holmes, who appears in 1887. Both inhabit similar, mostly masculine, worlds, have a good-hearted companion, and confront a criminal mastermind.

The Prince lives in London. Despite his marked affection for his homeland, Florizel prefers to reside in the British capitol where he collects interesting experiences and usual characters alongside his Master of Horse, Colonel Geraldine.

In this set up, the Colonel, though younger than the prince and very much the faithful subordinate, is easily the more prudent and sensible of the pair. Indeed, Florizel's adventures would have ended with his initial outing, "Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts", if Geraldine had not, for once, taken matters into his own hand.

Do not, by the way, be deceived by the cozy suggestions of this title. As in the later adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the whimsical and trivial is often reveals some deep and sinister matter. In this case, 'cream tarts' lead direct to the Suicide Club, which, starting with film rights in 1909, has showed up on film, on stage, on TV, and as recently as 2017 in a Caliber Comic.

The Colonel plays a big role in this story, not so in most of the others. Unlike Watson, that most famous of detective companions, Geraldine does not narrate the stories. Rather, his function is to offer good advice and reminders of the political responsibilities of a prince. These Florizel usually ignores, pulling rank and so precipitating the complications that inspire a good story.

Although an intelligent, socially astute, generous, and gentlemanly character, Florizel is young and very far from the coolly analytical Holmes, who was destined not only for monstrous popularity but for a long life post-Doyle, acquiring not only new authors but a wife and child as well.

By contrast Florizel inspired seven stories in New Arabian Nights, all good. In them he is perhaps as much fixer, if that term is not insulting to a royal personage, as investigator. And unlike Holmes, he is not onstage the majority of the time. Indeed, he sometimes appears only toward the end of the narrative to sort matters out.

Florizel is less a sleuth than a collector of interesting people. If they prove to be in difficult straits, he tries to tip the scales toward the good. He is generous with his help but very much the entitled royal when facing the criminal element.

Throughout, Florizel is brave and capable, a man of the world with an admirable sense of humor, a bit of a philosopher, and fond, like Sherlock, of disguises. Since Stevenson was a fine writer, a master of atmosphere, characterization, and plot, and always very much in need of money, the Prince would seem to have been a good candidate for many more stories. Might he also have become a great detective?

Stevenson did bring him back in More New Arabian Nights, written with his wife, Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson, but by this time, Florizel has lost his kingdom after too much time away from Bohemia. He is now running the finest tobacconist shop in London and clearly does not have the resources and agency he enjoyed as prince.

Perhaps the seriously ill Stevenson ran out of energy for Florizel; perhaps the prince's station and character proved limitations, or perhaps Stevenson simply decided to keep him part of an ensemble rather than the star of the show. In any case, Florizel's fame, if lasting, if modest, and, having settled him comfortably as a merchant in his beloved London, Stevenson spared himself the artistic conflicts that so bedeviled his fellow writer, Conan Doyle, who eventually could not rid himself of his greatest creation.

And here, a Stevenson type of story suggests itself: an astute author who spies Conan Doyle's error in sending Holmes over the falls but failing to produce a body. A character can return from the dead, it seems, but not from becoming a tobacconist in London.

---

Coffin Dancer

When James Lincoln Warren launched CriminalBrief.com , he assigned nicknames to our fellow bloggers. Mine was ADD Detective, a riff on Monk’s OCD Detective. During a workday or when wanting to sleep, I imbibed litres of caffeine, self-medicating without realizing it.

A common trait of ADD/ADHD is inventiveness thinking outside cubicle enclosures. Gradually I came to view ADD as a superpower, a garden of creative seeds, yet this isn’t about me, but a stranger than fiction experience. Literally.

Dr Ronald Malavé © CBS 48 Hours

Until then, I found most doctors almost as clueless as I was and occasionally dangerous. During a discussion among colleagues at Disney, a few friends suggested I visit their doctor, a Dr Ronald Malavé, who numbered some of Disney management among his patients. He wasn’t known for useless blathering, but for digging into chemical problems in the brain.

He resembled David Suchet, not a handsome man, definitely more Hercule Poirot than Richard Castle. Fastidious, conservatively dressed, short with thinning hair, he was no one’s idea of a love icon.

His main office differed from others in his field. It was awkwardly placed next to a busy corridor in a business building where conversations and footsteps echoed up and down the hall. His secretary chatted up patients more than he did. When she stepped away, lost people opened the door interrupting discussions.

No soothing hues and bland prints covered the walls. No artsy rugs, no couch, no pot of tea. File cabinets and a laptop dominated the décor. Fine with me. I wanted a diagnostician, not a fuzzy wuzzy chatty chemist.

But things turned weird.

Barely did I get two visits under my belt when I arrived and found the office in chaos. Dr Malavé had been arrested.

I listened as the staff gathered at the secretary’s desk. Hereafter, I’ll refer to the complainant as CD. She was a highly intelligent, highly troubled patient diagnosed with multiple personalities, referred to Malavé because of his talent and track record of success with hard cases, and this was a very difficult case.

“How could someone accuse him?” the receptionist said. “He’s such a good man.”

His secretary burst into tears. “He cared so much. Never would he do that with a patient. Plus she’s… I’m not supposed to say it, but she’s off the deep end.”

As they commiserated, I listened quietly. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I couldn't turn away from this train wreck. As if the situation wasn't peculiar enough, the story grew even stranger. I don’t recall exactly when, but a little nugget dropped into my ear.

"So weird. She keeps using that nasty email ID.”

“What's that?”

“Coffin Dancer.”

What?

Now they really had my attention. Eventually someone realized I wasn’t supposed to be there. The staff headed for a bar and I headed home.

During the next several weeks, I chatted with the secretary. She was loquacious, unprofessionally voluble, but she was deeply wounded.

The accuser had provided a calendar when she claimed to have had sex with the doctor in that severe but servicable office, and the secretary had been the one to comb their records, discovering some dates didn’t match. Investigators attributed this to confusion of a mentally disturbed person.

The secretary confided the accuser had stalked Dr Malavé for months. CD had trailed him home, learning where he lived. She began a habit of going through trash set out on the curb, learning what she could about the residents.

At least three major investigations ensued. The secretary had to wind down both offices, effecting layoffs, and idling operations until the State of Florida permitted him to see patients again. She warned clients police would interview us. In my case, they did not, but good news arrived. The criminal investigation and jury trial ended with Dr Malavé declared not guilty.

In the Sunshine State, licensing of physicians and critical healthcare workers is controlled by two entities, the Florida Department of Health and the Florida Board of Medicine. They stalled, refusing to return his licence to practice as they reinvestigated. Some physicians published open letters asking Board and Department to restore his licence. The secretary suggested the obstinate Board was caught up in ‘Believe the Woman’ fever.

I wasn’t so sure, but my interviewer could not have been more disinterested. I felt someone wanted to bury Dr Malavé. My impatient interviewer gave me the feeling they didn’t want evidence vindicating him but sought evidence to kill his career. I had something to say.

“I’m told the accuser used the handle Coffin Dancer.”

“I don’t know anything about that and it doesn’t matter.”

“I disagree. Author Jeffrey Deaver writes a series featuring Lincoln Rhyme. He’s a forensics and crime scene expert.”

“That sounds like a made-up name.”

“It is a made up name. One of the novels is titled The Coffin Dancer.”

“So…?”

I grow tense and frustrated when I’m not heard.

“Don’t you agree using a title about DNA harvesting and violent murder is a bit odd?”

“Dancing on someone’s grave is a common expression. People can use any handle they want.”

I realized I was making no headway at all. It turned out another major inquiry was under way, the season premier of CBS News 48 Hours Investigates. It’s still featured on the CBS web site.

They focused on DNA. CD provided police with a number of panties containing secretions from both parties. However, local news reported at least some (plural) had not been available for retail sale until after the date in question. An unsatisfactory suggestion of a mixup surfaced. At least one reporter indicated CD had taken condoms from Malavé’s garbage bins, but if true, that report passed into obscurity.

CD was described as having a brilliant mind, but suffered from borderline personality dissociative identity disorder (DID), once referred to as multiple personalities and Sybil’s Syndrome. CBS experts dismissed multiple personalities out of hand, but Malavé’s attorneys believed at least three of CD’s internal characters conspired to accuse Malavé of having sex with CD.

Following professional medical training, she worked for a urologist, harvesting and working with semen. She had the knowledge, she had the experience of working with and manipulating seminal and vaginal DNA.

☛ Curiously suggestive, a central plot point in the novel The Coffin Dancer is collecting DNA from semen by going through trash bins.

Nonetheless, 48 Hours hired their own expert who concluded the ratio of male secretions indicated intercourse, not transfer. 48 Hours Investigates season premiere ended with a gleeful assertion the show had vindicated Coffin Dancer.

The Florida Board of Medicine leaped upon the 48 Hours conclusion rather than police reports and a jury’s conclusion, and denied reinstatement of his licence to practice.

Maybe CBS got it right, but I wonder if Board members read Deavers novels. They might have reached a different conclusion. I wonder if Coffin Dancer, the accuser, outsmarted them all.

---

References

• Open Letter by a Fellow Physician

Links in the CBS News articles are broken. Use the following to navigate the three segments.

1. A Crime of the Mind, Part I
2. A Crime of the Mind, Part II
3. A Crime of the Mind, Part III

Hey, Watch THIS . . .

 

My topic today is something I don't often talk about, or even think much about: experimental fiction.

You know what I mean. Stories or novels that are unusual in some way, most often in format, technique, or structure.

When I think experimental, I'm reminded of Faulkner writing a short story in first-person plural POV ("A Rose for Emily"), or Cormac McCarthy leaving quotation marks out of his novels, or Ernest Vincent Wright writing an entire novel (Gadsby) without using the letter e. Truth be told, I'm not fond of that kind of thing. 

But . . . what if it's not something too weird or too difficult? What if it's just writing a story in a new and different way, maybe venturing beyond your comfort zone, just to see if you can do it? (And maybe to keep from getting bored.) I doubt any of my stories will ever be written without paragraphs or quotation marks or upper-case letters--but there are some kinds of literary experimentation that are almost too tempting not to try.

So, here are a few of those. This is a list of my own attempts at experimental fiction, none of them too drastic and each one followed by an example:

- An entire story told backward, scene by scene, with the ending first and the beginning at the end. "The Midnight Child," Denim, Diamonds, and Death (Bouchercon 2019 anthology).

- A story that takes place within the span of one hour, using three different points of view: the first third is seen through the eyes of the antagonist, the second third the protagonist, the last third an onlooker. "An Hour at Finley's," Amazon Shorts.

- A story with three completely different cases and solutions within the same story. "The POD Squad" and "Scavenger Hunt," both at AHMM. 

- A story written with no dialogue at all. "Bennigan's Key," Strand Magazine.

- A story written using nothing but dialog--not even an attribute, like he said or she asked. "George on My Mind," completed (last week) but not yet submitted.

- A story with three equal parts, each from a different POV, each part beginning and ending with the same sentence. "Life Is Good," Passport to Murder (Bouchercon 2017 anthology).

- A story set entirely in one small, cramped location. "The Donovan Gang," AHMM (stagecoach), "The Red-Eye to Boston," Horror Library Vol. 6 (airplane), "The Winslow Tunnel" Amazon Shorts (passenger train), "Teamwork," AHMM (car), "Silent Partner," Crimestalker Casebook (rowboat), "Christmas Gifts," Reader's Break (elevator), "Merrill's Run," Mystery Weekly (car trunk). 

- A long, rhyming poem (256 lines) in story form. "Over the Mountains," Dreamland collection.

- A story whose title is the same as its length. "A Thousand Words," Pleiades.

- A story in letter form (epistolary). "The Home Front," Pebbles.

- A story told entirely in flashback: "Cargo," Black Cat Weekly.

- A story featuring only one character. "Windows," Land of 1000 Thrills (Bouchercon 2022 anthology).

- A story about a countdown, using a time (8:10, 8:14, 8:26, 8:27, etc.) as a title for every scene. "Twenty Minutes in Riverdale," Pulp Modern.

- A story about a historic event that's revealed only at the end (spoiler alert!): "Premonition," Pegasus Review (Lincoln's assassination); Stopover," T-Zero (Mount St. Helens); "Custom Design," Lines in the Sand (Noah's ark); "Partners," The Oak (the Alamo siege); "A Message for Private Kirby," Green's Magazine (Battle of the Little Bighorn); "A Place in History" Scifantastic (Pearl Harbor); "Tourist Trap," Pulp Modern Flash (Pompeii); "The Barlow Boys," Mystery Weekly (deaths of Bonnie and Clyde).

- A 26-word story in which each word begins with a different letter of the alphabet, in order. "Mission Ambushable," online contest. (I won!)

 

 - A story that references more than a dozen MacGuffins from other stories/movies. "Mayhem at the Mini-Mart," AHMM.

 

Have you tried any so-called experimental writing? Anything more challenging than my stellar efforts? (I would hope so.) How often have you done something like this? Did you find those stories/novels fun, or at least interesting, to write? Were any of them published? What are some types of experimental fiction that you've enjoyed reading?

And that's that. I'll be back in two weeks. Meanwhile, experimental or not--keep writing!

The Power of Reviews

I am delighted to be the newest member of the SleuthSayers community! Over the years, I have learned so much from posts written by this esteemed group. It is an honor to be a contributor and share what I have learned during my writing journey.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and I’m going to talk about love, LITERARY LOVE, the kind we can spread by writing thoughtful reviews while, at the same time, giving a little literary love to ourselves.

Here’s more on my experience with the power of reviews.

Writing Reviews

When I began writing, I wanted to understand what made a story great. I’m an avid reader, but I realized learning craft through reading wasn’t enough. I needed a deliverable with a deadline. When I was offered an opportunity to review books for Publisher’s Weekly, it was exactly what I needed, and I accepted. This set the stage for my writing career.

Publisher’s Weekly has specific style guidelines for their reviews, and I learned how to analyze books and convey my overall impression in a tight and succinct way. Page citations were required for proper names, major plot points, and other details that substantiated my conclusions. 

This deep dive taught me about structure, how to develop character, the importance of stakes, and how to use conflict to keep readers engaged. I learned why some stories held together and reasons why others fell apart. The experience not only taught me to read with purpose, but writing the review helped me internalize lessons that I later applied to my own stories.

It has been years since I contributed to the magazine, but I still write reviews, both novels and short fiction. They aren’t public. I keep a reading journal with lists of interesting twists, setups and payoffs, character motivations, and unique approaches to story structure. There are also notes about stories that didn’t resonate with me. Both provide learning opportunities that are helpful.

Reading Reviews

Reading reviews has taught me a lot, too. We are fortunate to have wonderful contributors in our community who write reviews and essays that are mini masterclasses in storytelling.

Art Taylor’s, “The First Two Pages,” is a great resource. The blog series, originally created by B.K. Stevens, hosts craft essays by short story writers and novelists who analyze the opening of their own work. In “Little Big Crimes,” Rob Lopresti reviews his favorite short stories each week. He is a talented writer and editor, an avid reader, and former librarian. If a story makes his blog, you know it’s something special. 

Lifting up the Community

Anne van Doorn and Ed Ridgley review short stories on Facebook. I look for their posts each week and discover new writers this way.

Kevin Tipple is also dedicated to shining a light on short fiction. Through his blog, "Kevin's Corner," and social media posts, he is always promoting authors from the short fiction community.

Recently, I was working on a story that was crushing my soul. We’ve all had them, right? A friend forwarded a review of one of my stories that I hadn’t seen. It was an unexpected gift from the universe and reminded me that I could still do this thing called writing.

I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on the dark side of reviews. Of course they are out there. However, I believe when we review stories by fellow writers, we have a responsibility to highlight the positive, to lift up each other, and should share our perspectives with this in mind.

Have you written reviews? Do you keep a reading journal? Have reviews influenced your writing? 

                                                                           ***

Speaking of reviews, if you want to learn about my latest short story, “A Rose for a Rose,” from Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir Vol. 5, edited by Michael Bracken, check out Ed Ridgley’s recent review on Short Mystery Fiction Society.

In Defense of Kindness (Or: This Time I Only WISH I Were in Hawai'i!)

 Way back in the Before Times (we're talking the tail end of 2019 here!) My wife, our son, and I took a long overdue vacation in Maui. While there I penned the blog post below, accompanied by vacation pics that had nothing whatever to do with my subject: the notion that it is absolutely fair that customer service get to rate their interactions with customers in much the same manner that customers have been empowered by the internet to do. Bear in mind this is pre-Covid and I'm pretty sure right around the time of the Dawn of the "Karen."

This post seems timely in light of so many goings-on in this country-and by extension, the world-right now. Where phrases such as "the cruelty is the point" get bandied about non-stop. Me, I'm for kindness. And this year I'm MISSING Maui, instead of visiting it-a pre-fire Maui, no less, with an intact Lahaina, and an unscorched Banyan tree. I say if you're gonna go nostalgic, why not go all in?

So please enjoy the repost below. I've got a longer, craft-related piece in the works for my next turn in the rotation! - Brian

Aloha from Maui!

Every time I've driven past the signs for Kihei in the past week, I've thought of old pal and fellow Sleuthsayer R.T. Lawton, and his better half, Kiti. (And they know why!).

As I sail toward the end of the first real vacation my family has taken in years, my thoughts have been on an amazing and amusing thing that happened to me during the final week of the school year a couple of weeks back.

One of my students (hard-working, charismatic, a real leader, just a fine young lady) informed me that her mother works for the credit union where I and my family do most of our banking. "Oh," I think to myself, "Small world."

Turns out there was more.

"My mom finally remembered where she recognized your name from," this amazing kid went on.

"From the credit union?" I said, still not quite getting it.

"Yep. She sees your name quite a bit there."

These are vacation pics and have zero to do with this post: that's the island of Kaho'olawe across the bay.

Casting back in my memory to try to recall whether I had any recent NSF fees (Hey–no judgement. Most of us have been there at one time or another, after all.), I asked, "What does your mom do at XXXX Credit Union (Not its real name)?"

"She's Quality Control for Customer Service."

This information sends my thoughts in a new direction. Have I complained about the service I've received lately? Nope. Does that mean someone's complained about me? Is that even a thing customer service folks even do?

I asked myself this last question because a few decades back, I was one of those people working in a variety of entry-level customer service jobs. It was some of the hardest and least rewarding work I've ever done. I worked in food, in hospitality, in transportation, all while working my way through college so that I could embark on a different–yet–not–all–that–different type of customer service: teaching.

Back in those days (and we're talking the early '90s here) one customer complaint could mean the end of your employment (I didn't have a union job until I started teaching, everywhere I worked was a one-counseling session and you're fired kind of place.). I know this because at least once I got fired because of a customer complaint.

Well, that and the fact that the guy who fired me (someone who really put the "ass" in "assistant manager.") was a real piece of work.

But that's another story.

These and other memories were washing over me during my conversation with that awesome student of mine. So I said: "Quality Control, huh? She fields complaints, things like that?"

"Yep," Awesome Kid (not her real name, but it might as well be) said.

"Does she like her job?"

"She does. And she likes you."

I cudgel my brain trying to recall whether I've ever met Awesome Kid's mom. Nope. I'm pretty sure I'd remember. She didn't come to conferences, and I didn't see her at Open House. So that surprises me.

"She likes me?" I ask, all intelligence and awareness, now.

"Yes. You're one of the highest-rated customers they have."

I blink at her, not comprehending. "They rate customers?"

She nods. "And the customer service reps all really love you. You get high marks all the time and you're near the top of their list."

And just like that, with this small kindness, Awesome Kid made my year.

The island of Lana'i (left) and the West Maui Mountains (right) framing a spectacular sunset

My early experiences with the downside of customer service (being the one to catch the irate call, or get someone's order wrong, or commit one of thousand small errors) have informed my interactions with the people who work in those positions ever since my own days in customer service, lo those many moons ago.

In the years since I've striven to be patient, to be polite. To be courteous and respectful, even when I'm pretty pissed off about something.

Because, nine times out of ten, it's not the fault of the person I'm talking to. They're there because they picked up the phone, took the chat request, what-have- you.

I've never forgotten what it's like to be on the other end of that call, and I hope I never do.

So it did my heart good to know that customer service reps are getting a chance to rate their interactions with clients: getting a voice in how that back-and-forth went. Because, hey, it's a hard job. And it usually doesn't pay all that well.

Plus, I gotta admit, I like that someone on the other end of that phone call notices how I try to treat them well.

After all, Couldn't we, each and every one of us, use a little more humanity in our daily interactions?

This is why I've been tipping people left, right and center (something I do religiously anyway) over the last week, and will until we head for home.

Like I said before, it's a tough job, and people don't get paid a whole lot to do it.

And that's all I've got for this go-round. I hope you're all having a wonderful and productive July.

Mahalo, and see you in two weeks!