Long Shots

© MGM and Kotaku

By happy happenstance, I found myself in conversation with our resident filmologist John Floyd discussing the single-camera, continuous tracking shot that opens Spectre. This phrase, ‘single-camera, continuous tracking shot’ or SCCS, refers to using one camera only to follow the action even as it moves uninterruptedly, sometimes over relatively great distances. (The 5½-minute tracking shot of the beach landing in Atonement stretched over a quarter of a mile.) Such a technique gives a sweeping sense of place and an immediacy of time.

Sure, your cousin Jenny shoots with a single camera all the time with her cell phone. Great Uncle Spassky did it before her with his compact video recorder. Of course he forgot he left the camera on during that inglorious argument during Louise’s wedding and Jennifer’s phone was confiscated by Old Mrs. Henpecker in English class after she documented Tonya Thurible really wasn’t wearing undies. But to be sure, they weren’t making epics to be shown at international film festivals, let alone your local Cineplex.

Plot Shots

You may have heard variations of single-camera, continuous tracking shot in connection with last year’s acclaimed Birdman. Virtually the entire movie appeared as one uninterrupted shot.

Except…
    Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu …
        cheated.

Iñárritu used a number of extremely clever cinematic tricks to fool the eye, visual sleight-of-hand, sneaky editing, and a smidgen of digital magic. He learned from a master.

I’d love to word-playfully tie Birdman in with The Birds, but my target is a different movie entirely, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). Candidly, I appreciate it more as a film study than a film story. Hitch innovated two things: For the first time, he filmed in color. And, for the first time in a major movie, he elevated to an art form single-camera shooting…

… including cheating.

At least five times, Hitchcock used a fade-to-black technique, standard in films with cut scenes, but here the lens loomed close to the back of an actor’s dark jacket and when it pulled back and swung right, the audience found itself viewing a newly set-up scene without realizing it.

As mentioned last week, the opening scene in Spectre uses a fast-moving, single shot technique, and like Rope and Birdman, they cheated as well when entering and leaving the hotel room, and again when the building collapses. The hotel suite was on a sound stage not in Mexico, but London. We can forgive them for that.

On the Move

Quentin Tarantino’s often flawed story-telling enchants me less than his film techniques. Kill Bill was no exception and here the show became fascinating. As continuous filming moved about the building, stagehands rushed to remove and replace walls and lay in a camera ramp on the fly. That is old-fashioned movie magic.

Tarantino’s efforts sometimes remind me of Japanese martial arts epics. Kung-fu cameras love long tracking sequences, the bigger the better. While the action may appear cartoonish, the cameraman– and the audience– get a workout. On at least one epic, filming stopped so they could replace an exhausted cameraman.

In The Shining, Stanley Kubrick employed the recently invented Steadicam. Kubrick and the camera’s inventor, Garrett Brown, continued developing and refining the Steadicam and its potential. The result was one of The Shining’s most famous scenes featuring the plastic tricycle. A camera, mounted mere centimetres above the floor, followed little Danny as he pedaled his Big Wheels trike through the hotel hallways.

My favorite example is Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, made in 1958, a decade after Hitchcock’s Rope. I rarely watch movies more than once, but I’ve studied that opening sequence many times.

Rope, like Rear Window, was largely shot within a single room, but Touch of Evil sweeps through a city, even from one country to another. Welles had a reputation for blowing budgets and schedules, not to mention cars. When studio execs heard Welles spent an entire day rehearsing the opening shot, they rocketed someone off to give him hell. But Welles had fooled the studio. That one amazing shot put him days ahead of his shooting schedule.

I rewatched it after seeing Spectre. Clearly, Touch of Evil majorly influenced Spectre’s director, Sam Mendes.

Lest you think this type of immersive camera work is reserved for the big screen, season one episode four of True Detective contains a heart-thumping scene where Rusty Cohle, embedded with white supremacist bikers in a black, gang-ridden, crack house neighborhood, tries to get himself and an uncooperative neo-nazi out alive, while protecting innocents, especially a black child. Look for a possible cut in a black screen when the camera swoops up to frame a helicopter and then drops to pick up Cohle again.

It seems directors of our crime genres love single-camera, continuous tracking shot. I’ve mentioned several examples, and you can find others documented here and here and here. But single-camera shooting is showing up another place without a crime in sight… music videos.

Droning On

Take, for example, the group OK Go, known for continuous single-camera shoots as well as loyal fans in North America and Japan who participate in their intricate videos.

They came to my attention through ‘This Too Shall Pass’, known as the Rube Goldberg vid. (A Rube Goldberg Machine is the equivalent of a Heath Robinson Contraption in the UK and eine Was-passiert-dann-Maschine or Nonsens-Maschine in Germany. Australia’s Bruce Petty inventions came much later.) Watch the video; you won’t be disappointed.

Most of OK Go’s videos feature single camera shots, but in this intriguing video, they use a drone. The result is … uplifting.

How Girls Do It or Saving the Best for Last

Not sure how I stumbled upon it, but I’ve watched ‘The Voice Within’ fifteen or twenty times. It’s fun studying the old theatre, trying to figure out how the crew accomplished the camera work while unwrapping power cables as they moved around. (And Christina Aguilera doesn’t look exactly awful either.)

And that’s it for now. Some movie examples like The Player I haven’t seen and I didn’t include Gravity in my list because so much CGI was involved. Other than Kill Bill, my examples have shortchanged martial arts movies, not because they’re terrible, but because I’m less familiar with the genre.

Feel free to chime in. What are your favorites? Let us hear from you.

---

Our friend ABA sent in a pair of articles relating to last week’s article about James Bond and Spectre. Thanks, ABA!

Notes specific to Spectre
For example, the movie-making wrecked some £24-million in cars, about $36-million dollars. The entire film cost £250-million or about $380-million.

Notes about Bond movies
For example, both Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino wanted to direct Bond films. Whew! 007 might just have dodged a bullet there.

In Pursuit of Movie Trivia

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Mystery In The Superstitions

As may be plainly seen by looking at the photo below, the Superstition Mountains are quite inviting, and do not appear at all sinister. (He said with a wink.)

Why then, is this small range of jagged peaks, near Apache Junction, Arizona, so swathed in superstition and murder?

And, though lots of those murders are apocryphal, all too many were quite real!

Well ...

This is, after all, the spot on the map marked with a big X, if you're one of those folks looking for the Lost Dutchman's fabled gold mine.  (In fact, I took this photo while standing beside a picnic table at Arizona's Lost Dutchman State Park.)

And, that Dutchman figures pretty prominently in Valley lore around here.

Here is a look at just a few of the Valley businesses trading on the Lost Dutchman for the sake of name recognition.

I'm not sure I'd like to park my R.V. in this place.
I might return to find it missing, and not be able to locate it ever again!

There have been numerous books written on the subject, of course.

Just as there are plenty of "Lost Dutchman's Mine" maps floating around.

Some with less detail than others.








This map (right) is based on some rocks supposedly found in the area.

Evidently, the idea here is that the
Lost Dutchman, adept at wielding pick and shovel, used them to etch his treasure map on a surface more durable than paper.





       





These are the rocks.









Now, I'm not saying there aren't any mines in the Superstitions.  In fact, there are a LOT of old mines
and defunct mine shafts in the Superstitions.  The place is, after all, a treasure trove of minerals.

HEY!  You can see something that might be the entrance to a mine, in this photo (right).  Of course, it might just be a cave.  But, is it the entrance to the Lost Dutchman's Mine?

I rather doubt it.

The problem is: The Lost Dutchman's Mine brings out tons of treasure hunters every year.

Some contemporary Lost Dutchman occurrences are funny.
But ... others aren't.

Most of the time, of course, they find nothing, and then go back home -- with a story of adventure, and maybe even a gold nugget they bought somewhere else.  (The Gold Field Ghost Town -- built while I was off in the army -- isn't far from the mountains.  And, they sell "gold" there, though the last time I saw it, what they were selling was iron pyrite, otherwise known as "fool's gold."  Perhaps that tells us what the owners think of their customers.)

Some contemporary additions to the tale are rather humorous, such as the one in this clip on the left.

Other would-be treasure hunters, however, wind up lost and out of water, in a desert terrain that does not suffer fools or the unprepared gladly.  Among these folks, the lucky ones get choppered out by the Sheriff's Posse.  The unlucky ones stick around, to add their ghosts, and stories of a good person gone missing, to the litany of the Miner's victims.


Around 2010, for instance, a Colorado man came out to hunt for the mine.  His remains were discovered three years later.  He had apparently become wedged in a vertical fissure while climbing one of the walls.  Thinking about his last days or hours on earth is not a pleasant past-time.

Occasionally, however, that old "Ghost Mine" causes REAL problems.

When I was in high school, folks in The Valley began to notice that a lot of people who had gone hiking or camping in the Superstitions were not coming back.  Search parties were sent out.  The Civil Air Patrol overflew the mountains for several days at a time.  But, no bodies were found.

Finally, one search patrol did find a body or two.  And, that body or two had been shot to death.

To make a long story short: A mother and her two grown sons thought they'd found the Lost Dutchman's Gold mine back up in these mountains.  And, perhaps they'd been back there all by themselves for a little too long.  Add in a strong dose of "gold fever" after they thought they'd found the mine -- which, unfortunately, sat not far from a rather popular trail -- and they found themselves having to fend off a formidable number of "claim jumpers."

The story might have been funny, if they hadn't killed so many hikers.

The fact is, however -- even though you can see a picture of that "Lost Dutchman's" tomb stone on the right -- there may have been no Lost Dutchman at all!  At least, not in the Superstitions.

In fact, according to some research, there are as many as 51 versions of the Lost Dutchman legend, many of them having nothing to do with the Superstitions, and some taking place in states other than Arizona.

So, why is this legend so prominent here in The Valley, that folks die over it?

Well, I'll write about that in my next installment.

Meanwhile, if you're coming out to The Valley, and you want to visit a nice picnic or camping area that has nice hiking trails, you might make the drive to the Lost Dutchman State Park.

Just watch out, if somebody starts shouting: "HEY!  HOLD IT, YOU CLAIM JUMPER!"

--Dixon

The War on Anarchism

Naturally I have been thinking about the Paris attacks, and my conclusions are that the terrorists' goals were:

(1) to inflict significant random casualties, causing as much terror and disruption as they can (terrorists always like to see people afraid).
(2) subvert the entire refugee process, hopefully ending it, so that all potential refugees will "know" that they can't escape, and will submit to them.
(3) make the name of Islam stink in the nostrils of the West (our own politicians and media are already helping spread the word that 'all Muslims are terrorists'), again to remove hope from all those in the Middle East who want them destroyed.
(4) to financially bankrupt the West as we attempt to destroy an idea militarily.
(5) to morally bankrupt the West as we subvert our own values in the name of freedom and the War On Terrorism.


First reaction: Damn them. Damn all anarchists /terrorists/ bombers/ fanatics, of every religion, of every creed, of every political persuasion, past, present and future, who always prefer to see frightened children, weeping families, and dead bodies than have anyone escape their cultish claws...

Second reaction:  Screw them.  Spit in their eye.  Get out and enjoy life.  "But terrorists may sneak into the United States!"  Sneak in?  We've got them, we've had them, and we can also grow them ourselves.  In 1901, anarchists killed United States President McKinley; there have been lynchings, murders, and church burnings perpetrated against blacks since before the Civil War, and sadly, it's still occurring; in 1995, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah building; of course 9/11; and just in 2015, here at home, there have been 290 deaths from mass shootings by our own fellow citizens. Seriously, if we weren't afraid a week ago, there's no reason to be afraid now.

The problem with a war on terrorism is, of course, that it's actually a war on an idea, and ideas never die. But, when they become overwhelmingly popular and attractive, they can easily, rapidly lead to mass violence and murder. Now, before you go off and say, "see, I told you!"  The other side of ideas is that people can change their minds, and an idea that seemed absolutely universally true can become relegated to something abhorrent, or quaint, or completely unimportant.

Examples:  the divine right of kings, infant damnation, the geocentric solar system, the subjection of women, the general inferiority of other races (common in Europe, China,
and Japan), the mercantilist theory of economics, and the hugely popular notion that war is the normal condition between any two countries.  

Anarchism was one of those ideas.  The idea really caught on in the late 1700s, during the Enlightenment, when Jean Jacques Rousseau, my least favorite philosopher, wrote a number of works that, among other things, claimed that private property was the root of all evil, and that uncorrupted morals prevailed in the state of nature that [supposedly] existed before government came along. In his work The Social Contract, he said "The larger the state, the less liberty".  (Yes, Thomas Jefferson read Rousseau - EVERYONE read Rousseau, from Robespierre to Bolivar to Ho Chi Minh, which, imho, is part of the problem.) Small, city-states were ideal, in which [only] men exercised their freedom on election day. Now here's where Rousseau put an edge on the blade: he believed that the majority would always be right; and therefore the minority must be "forced to be free", i.e., obey the majority. And if they continue to rebel, kill them.

John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937),
the richest man in America.  Ever.  

During the Gilded Age, and slightly after, (1870-early 1900s), anarchists in Europe and the United States took Rousseau and ran with it.  They believed that people were naturally good and virtuous; that government and property were all corrupt and corrupting, and that government and private property should be abolished, violently if necessary.  And there was a lot of private property and government around that certainly wasn't theirs.

The Gilded Age was Grover Nordquist's wet dream: no income tax, no unions, no minimum wage, no regulations on industry, and government's only role was to collect foreign tariffs and defend our borders.  It was a time of huge economic inequality. From 1860 to 1900, the wealthiest 2% of American households owned more than a third of the nation's wealth, and the top 10% owned 75% of it.  There wasn't much left for the rest.  And the most popular philosophies among the upper classes said that was the way it should be:  Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism applied survival of the fittest to people and nations, making the poor simply lazy and unfit, while William Graham Sumner's push for a totally laissez-faire economy (What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, 1884) assured everyone that assistance to the poor only weakens their ability to survive in society.

Jacob Riis,
Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street

Meanwhile, it was a bad time to be one of the 90%.  The urban tenements in the north were horrendous (Read Jacob Riis' 1890 How the Other Half Lives:  Studies Among the Tenements of New York) and the mines and sharecropping in the south barely kept the workers alive.  Blacks in the South were stripped of the political power and voting rights they'd [briefly] had during Reconstruction, and were barely able to get any job.  The attempts to form labor unions - which fought for 8 hour days, safety regulations (the United States had one of the highest accident rates in the world, with no compensation for the injured/dead), abolition of child labor, etc. - were fought savagely by the owners of railroads, mines, factories, who hired police and private protection to stop them by any means necessary.  At least twice, under Hayes and Cleveland, the President sent in the U. S. Army to break up strikes.

Now the anarchists weren't the only ones challenging the status quo, but they got the most press because they were the most violent.  They didn't just talk about destroying the state.  Thanks to the invention of dynamite, they worked at physically destroying it.  They bombed public places, killing innocent civilians.  They assassinated some very important figures.  Some of the more notorious examples are:

• November 8, 1893, the Barcelona Opera House was bombed during a performance of "William Tell", leaving 72 dead or seriously injured.
• December 9, 1893 - Anarchist Auguste Vaillant bombed the Paris Chamber of Deputies, injuring 20.
• Februrary 12, 1894 - Emile Henry bombed the Cafe Terminus in Paris, killing one and injurying 20.
• June 7, 1896 - an unknown anarchist dropped a bomb on the traditional procession of the Sacred Host (it was Corpus Christi) in Barcelona, killing 23 people.  
• May 31, 1906 - a bomb was set off at the wedding of Spanish King Alfonso XIII and his bride Victoria Eugenie “Ena” of Battenberg.  The royal couple survived, but 25 people were killed and 130 were injured. 
• April, 1919 - at least 36 booby-trapped, dynamite-filled bombs were mailed to a variety of politicians, appointees, and businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller.  
• June 2, 1919 - coordinated bombs were set off, almost simultaneously, in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Patterson, New Jersey, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia. The intended targets included a mayor, a state legislator, three judges, two businessmen, a cop, and a Catholic priest. No intended victim was hurt, but it terrorized the American public.
• September 16, 1920 - a wagon full of explosives and shrapnel was set off in front of the Wall Street offices of J.P. Morgan & Co., killing 39 and injuring hundreds more.

(There were many more.  Please note that all of these were done before cell phones, twitter, or any other form of social media.)

And then there were the assassinations:

• June 24, 1894 - French President Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death in Lyon, France.
• March 13, 1881 - Russian Tsar Alexander II was killed by one of three bombs that were set off, killing him and at least two others, as well as wounding a number of people in the crowd.



Assassination of Alexander II

• July 29, 1900 - King Umberto I of Italy was shot to death.
• September 6, 1901 - US President William McKinley was shot to death.
• February 1, 1908 - King Carlos I of Portugal, along with his heir Luis Filipe, were shot to death.
• September 10, 1908 - Austrian Empress Elizabeth (wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I) was stabbed to death.  
• And, of course, on June 28, 1914, the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were shot by Gavril Princip, sparking World War I.

So, what was the reaction to these 30 years of terror, bombings, and assassinations?  The following is patched together from Johann Hari's excellent article  "Blood Rage and History" in the September 22, 2011 Independent:   Terror, a crackdown on immigration, a "bonfire of civil liberties" - in 1920, after the Wall Street Bombing, Congress declared anarchism "un-American", and said anybody preaching it would be held responsible for "aiding" the attacks.  (This was the first time that an idea had ever been declared un-American.)  A wave of arrests and convictions of people who actually hadn't done anything but talk quickly followed.  (There were some protests, but not a lot.)  But Spain, Italy, and other countries were worse, "and the countries that had the harshest crackdowns ended up with the largest anarchist movements of all, while those that reacted calmly and kept their freedoms open saw the movements implode much faster."  

"From the 1920s on, the anarchist attacks began to dwindle, and by the late 1930s they were over. Why? What happened? Nobody is entirely sure – but most historians suggest a few factors. After the initial wave of state repression, civil liberties slowly advanced – undermining the anarchist claims. The indiscriminate attacks on ordinary civilians discredited anarchism in the eyes of the wider public: after a young man blew himself up in Greenwich Park in 1892, his coffin was stoned and attacked by working class people in the East End. The anarchists' own cruelty and excess slowly deprived them of recruits. 

"But, just as importantly, many of the anarchist grievances were addressed by steady reforms. Trade unions were finally legalised, and many of their demands were achieved one by one: an eight-hour working day, greater safety protections, compensation for the injured. Work was no longer so barbaric – so the violent rejection of it faded away. The changes were nowhere near as radical as those demanded by the anarchists, but it stripped them of followers step-by-step."  Ibid, Hari.  

Can this be applied today?  The simple answer is, yes.  Changes can be made that would address some of the Islamic extremist grievances - two suggestions Hari gives are to abolish torture (even if everyone else is doing it), get free of our oil addiction so we no longer have to be the hired guns for anyone with oil, starting with the house of Saud, which has been and is supporting, harboring, and financing Wahabism, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist groups for years.  (See Charles Pierce's Esquire piece, There Is Only One Way to Defeat Isis , in which he says "As long as people are dying in Paris, nobody important is dying in Doha or Riyadh.")  

Even more, though, we should address the fact that most jihadists are unemployed young men, both those who are home-grown Arabs and those who are recruited from Western cities around the world. Let's face facts: young men who are not employed and/or married and (for whatever reason) cannot become employed and/or married are dangerous.  They are restless, discontent, and prone to go off after anyone who will promise them what they want.

Two Notes:  (1) this holds true for our own home-grown malcontents, who are responsible for the majority of those 290 deaths in mass shootings and counting in the USA in 2015.  (2) The Middle East, China and India, have the highest levels of men to women sex ratios in the world, due to in utero sex selection, one-child policies, preference for boys, and (in the Middle East) guest workers.  Right now we're worried about Middle East men.  Some day, someone's going to have to deal with the 30 million [each] of Chinese and Indian men who will not only never be married, but never even be able to get a date.  [Yes, there's a reason for the horrific rise of gang-rapes in India.] Unless someone figures out a peaceful solution, we will be dealing with new terrorist groups, under new names, but will be as horrific as the others.  But more on that another time.

Sex ratio by country for total population. Blue represents more women,
red more men than the world average of 1.01 males/female.
DBachmann, Wikipedia

These young men have to be given hope, yes, but not just a vision of it (the extremists give them that), but actual practical things, like a job and a home and a family.  Seriously, this is the way terrorism has always been sparked and how it has always been quenched, from Roman times (read up on the Zealots some time) to the Anarchists.

"Instead of spending astronomical sums on arms, let us spend instead on roads, hospitals, schools, houses, businesses, to create jobs and so on. Instead of financing war, let us purchase peace." Girardian Jean Michel-Oughourlian, Psychopolitics, p. 23

Look it up.  And then go have a good dinner.

Bouchercon: Vision Revision

First things first: in my last piece in this space I complained about something I thought Sisters In Crime did at Bouchercon.  It turns out it was actually done by SmashWords.  I don't know where I got my misinformation and I apologize to Sisters In Crime and to anyone who read my piece before I corrected it.  Now onto today's fresh blunders…

As I mentioned last month, I am pleased as punch to have a story in Murder Under The Oaks, an anthology published in October to celebrate Bouchercon, the annual mystery convention, held this year in Raleigh, North Carolina.  I am also delighted that the profits go to Wake County, NC libraries.  How can I argue with a cause like that?

This photo shows me at the end of the assembly line, eighteen or so authors signing their stories.  I'm the last guy because my story ends the book.

When I heard about the proposed anthology I went through my old files, searching for an appropriate piece.  I was happy to give a story to charity, but only one that had already been rejected by the major markets.  This doesn't mean there is anything wrong with the tale; most of my stories that have  been nominated for awards were rejected at least once along the way.

I settled on "On The Ramblas,"  which is set in Barcelona.  (Well, I don't have any set in Raleigh... yet.)  I pulled up the file for an edit and decided the plot was fine and the writing was okay, but immediately the question of theme came up.

Eileen Gunn said that "'Theme' is what the critics use to describe what you did."  Someone else said theme is what the story is about other than the plot and the characters.  I prefer the latter definition.

Usually I don't know what the theme of a story is until I am in the final edits.  That's when a sentence in the text will pop up in front of me and I'll think: Oh, THAT'S what it's about.  But in the case of "On The Ramblas" I knew early on that the theme was: What does it take to make you happy?

Happy American tourists on the Ramblas,
with animals.

My story is about two American tourists in Spain. Frank is miserable because he would rather be back home making business deals. His wife, Helen, is unhappy because Frank is making sure she is. My third character, Josep, is a Catalonian pickpocket, and he is brokenhearted because his girlfriend left him, taking his team of thieves with her. He is not only lonely (say that three times fast) but he is trying to do his job without the proper co-workers. What will happen when these freight trains of unhappiness collide on the Ramblas, Barcelona's main tourist shopping street?

So I thought I was all set in the theme department. But as soon as I sat down to revise I realized that there was a second theme, begging to come out and play.  It was right there in the first sentence:  Tourists wandered through the Ramblas like sheep, waiting to be fleeced.  I loved the animal/people metaphor.  I realized I could punch up that connection.

(A little inside baseball here: technically  my metaphor is a motif which I am using to build a theme.  I say that strictly to show off to the English majors.  Back to business.)

Of course , there is a connection  between  happiness and the people/animal thingie.  Back in Philosophy 101  my professor quoted John Stuart Mill to explain the importance of her topic: It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

There was one more thing I needed to do before sending in the story. It was recommended that the submissions include a reference to oak trees.  (Remember the title of the book?)  So I searched the web to see if there was 

The other end of the line,
with editor Art obscuring Margaret Maron.

any interesting connection between oaks and Spain.  There was!  And here's the beauty part: the connection has to do with animals. This is the sort of thing that happens when a writer is "in the zone." Things fall into place with spooky precision. It is the sort of thing that makes one invoke the muse or other magical explanations. I only wish it happened more often.

So I sent the story in, editor Art Taylor accepted it, and as a reward for his good taste and erudition he was invited to join the ranks of the SleuthSayers.

That last part is a joke: his name was brought up by someone who knew nothing about the anthology.  But I am glad to be in the book and I hope, well, that it makes you happy.

Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone

I don't like having my picture taken. If you went solely by my family members' photo albums, you'd probably not even know I existed. Until recently, I hid from the camera. I often think I look okay in the mirror, but photos tell the truth--a truth I would prefer to ignore.

But since I've become an author who needs to promote, I've had to get my photo out there. So I've had some pictures taken (like the one above). And I've become more comfortable with having my picture out there, even those taken by other people who aren't trying to showcase me in the best possible light. (Perhaps now that I'm in my forties, I've achieved the mindset of just not caring anymore. I see photos of me. Sometimes I cringe. Sometimes I untag myself on Facebook. And then I try to let things go.)

Me at age 23 in a
photo I don't hate.

It was with this "Frozen" mindset that I approached an opportunity last summer. I was invited to interview to be a narrator of a docudrama on the TV One Network. The show is called "For Her Man." It runs every Monday night at ten p.m. (and again two hours later at midnight, and again two hours later at 2 a.m. for people with insomnia). Each episode is about a woman who has ruined her life for her man. The company that produces the show was looking for local authors who would narrate portions of the show, letting viewers understand what happened to the woman in question. I was invited to be one of the narrators because of my background writing crime stories.

Behind the scenes
at the taping

The idea at first sounded fun. Being on TV--it's the kind of thing you dream of as a kid. And then reality set it. I would be on TV. People would see me. It's like having your picture taken times a thousand. I would be so out of my comfort zone, I wouldn't be able to see the zone anymore. So I nearly let the opportunity pass me by. But thanks to the encouragement of my friend Sherry Harris, I decided to leave my comfort zone behind. I interviewed, was accepted, and the rest is history.

The taping was fun,as expected. The producer and her assistant were nice and funny and patient. The cameraman and the sound man were cool. The show even did my makeup as if I were a real star. Next comes the cringing part, watching the show. I hope I don't talk too quickly. I hope I look okay. And I hope I sound intelligent.

Free food for the stars

My episode airs tonight (well, tonight as I type this blog). Monday, November 16th, at 10 p.m Eastern Time. As I mentioned above, it's also running at 12 and 2 a.m. on Tuesday the 17th, so if you're an early reader of today's (Tuesday's) blog, maybe you can catch it. Not sure if you get the TV One Network? Chances are you do. Look for it in your channel options. It's on DirecTV (channel 328) and Fios and Comcast and others.

And in case you  miss the show, here's a link to the promo for it, so you can get a taste of me, way, way out of my comfort zone.

Have you stepped out of your comfort zone? What did you do and what finally pushed you to do it? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Thanksgiving

by Susan Rogers Cooper

As Thanksgiving rapidly approaches I thought I'd jot down a few things I'm thankful for: my beautiful daughter and her three wonderful children, the memories of a good marriage that lasted over thirty-four years, old friends and new friends, and, yes, books.

I'm thankful for Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and the Winslow Brothers who enriched my childhood, for Agatha Christie, John Steinbeck and J.D. Salinger who molded my teenage years, and for John D. MacDonald who brought me back to mystery in my early twenties. I'm thankful to Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sarah Peretsy who taught me that women can write just as hardboiled as any man. And I'll always be grateful to Jan Grape, my mentor, who did more for my career than any agent or editor has ever done. And I'm thankful for those agents and editors who helped mold my work – especially the undisputed queen of mystery editors, the late Ruth Cavin, who once told me – when I complained after she read my fifth book that I hadn't gotten the editing letter from her that I usually got – that I finally sent her one without any big boo-boos.

I'm thankful that I've been blessed with the career of my choice, and that I've had a job that makes me mostly happy – except on those days when all I can do is stare at a blank screen. I'm thankful for the friends I've met since I started this career – Joan Hess, Sharan Newman, the late Barbara Burnett Smith and the late Nancy Bell, Dean James, Charlaine Harris, and so many more who've made me laugh and cry and given me advice that I'll always remember.

This is a good time to remember these things, to count our blessings, and say thank you to those we love. And to stock up on extra books since we'll soon have a day off.