What Makes An Anthology The Best?

The SleuthSayers anthology, Murder, Neat, edited by our own Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman, has had the distinction of being named one of the finalists for the inaugural Derringer Award for Best Anthology in an impressive field of 2024 short crime fiction anthologies.

I've edited two anthologies and contributed stories to almost a dozen including my own. I've also had a story included as an "Other Distinguished Story" in a volume of Best American Mystery Stories—an honor that means the notoriously critical series editor picked it as one of fifty out of a field of several thousand, but that year's guest editor failed to select it as one of the twenty to include in the anthology.

So I feel qualified at what seems a good moment to talk about some of the elements of excellence in an anthology.

Any anthology needs focus. This may be provided by a theme, restriction of the setting or authorship to a certain region, or limitation of submissions to a particular group or organization. All the contributors to Murder, Neat are current or former SleuthSayers. The theme, some aspect of alcohol, bars, and drinking, was chosen after much lively discussion among the blogfellas.

 The highly regarded Noir anthology series from Akashic Books was fresh when it began with Brooklyn Noir. It now runs to more than a hundred books. I've heard that the publisher is deeply committed to publishing stories on a variety of aspects of the chosen location as well as a genuine noir flavor. On the other hand, the concept of the "anthology noir" has been a runaway success far beyond the original publisher's series. I wrote a story for Jewish Noir II (2022). The stories ranged from Biblical to paranormal to historical to modern, the genres from noir to comic to speculative, the settings spanned the globe. Submissions were by invitation only, but not all of the contributors were Jewish.

Some editors choose to engage potential readers through a mix of beloved authors and fresh voices. Those are the anthologies in which half the stories are by invitation, the other half by open call. I've never made it into one of those. I tried to seed my own anthology, Me Too Short Stories, with a few well-known authors along with open submissions in hopes of attracting a better publishing contract. As it happened, a political issue was raging at the time, and the more courted authors were the first to abandon ship. I persisted and ended up with a book of wonderful stories that failed to get the attention it deserved.

Apart from market considerations, the best anthology is one in which every story is a winner. I got that in the end with Me Too Short Stories. All the stories adhered to the theme, but each of them did it in a different way. None of the writers was famous, but all were terrific at working cooperatively and appreciated a strong editor. Even when fifteen or twenty or two dozen stories are all about bars or all about Jewishness or all about crimes against women, they can be as different as each writer's voice and way of building a unique structure on the three-cornered foundation of plot, character, and writing or storytelling.

Once the editor or editors have selected the stories, they must put them in the best possible order. This is a creative act, akin to putting together a single-author collection of short stories or poetry, and I assure you it produces endorphins. A well arranged anthology starts with a pie in the face—a first story that grabs the your attention (especially in the library or bookstore or in the Amazon sample) and makes you want to read on. The second and third stories must also make you want to read on, and they must be entirely different from the first and from each other—dark and light, tragedy and humor, horror and cozy, snappy dialogue and brooding narrative. And one of the very best must be saved for last, so you close the book with a smile or a sigh of satisfaction.

Rat Paradise

You’ve heard and read a lot of doom and gloom asserting the population is declining thus leading to social and economic collapse. This is a follow-up to Eve’s article earlier this month, ‘What Nature Does Best’.

Growth is good, proselytizes the Chamber of Commerce. Growth is great, sayeth city fathers. No such thing as too much, blabs Peter Thiel, who likes to think he’s scary smart and who advocates for a global population of 1 trillion, a staggering 12,077% jump from 8.212 billion.

A surprising number of people don’t realize population isn’t declining but rather its rate of growth is leveling off. In other words, we’re easing off the accelerator but the bus is still picking up speed (differential calculus to you readers who snack on maths before breakfast). Even Elon Musk got it wrong in possibly a careless slip of the tongue.

Sexology 101

That’s subject to change about fifty years from now when predicted growth trends whisper to a halt and theoretically may start to rewind. Blame men. Worldwide male fertility has declined for decades. Researchers are convinced chemical air and water pollution is affecting male hormones.

In a climate change world of microplastics where wildlife and plant varieties are disappearing, that is worrisome. For the past three-quarters of a century, America’s Breadbasket, its farms and fields and groves, have been replanted with condos and strip malls. Our oceans are slowly turning to waste. A series of aerial photographs over Caracas illustrate the great jungles drying and dying.

Observers muse the planet is fighting back. Is Earth exerting a form of human pest control?

Inevitably, a question arises of men shunning sex: self-described incels, male separatist MGTOW, and that ilk, a phenomenon observed in many developed countries. I had surmised they represent an insignificant (apologies for the unfortunate word choice) percentage of the population, but I was wrong. Researcher Miriam Lindner estimates 39% of men choose to be single or celibate. However, she claims a staggering 62% of women are eschewing relationships with men. Can we spell WGTOW?

Sociology 201

As mentioned above, city fathers and urban mothers have long and loudly claimed ‘Growth is Good’ when promoting pet projects, which have a peculiar way of enriching those urban mothers and fathers. A balance can be good too, a robust, inflation-free economy can be a very good thing, especially when linked to discovery, technology development, and innovation. Those economic ideals are rare because of population growth. As we hatch new people, we need resources to feed them and places to put them.

Sections of New York University’s ‘soft science’ courses dealt with over-population, and a significant portion of related sociology and psychology delved into ‘prisonization’, the socialization process that occurs when individuals mold to the culture of the prison environment. Prison is an extremely hazardous and unnatural environment, a world of fear, a population of discards, an environment without the opposite sex, a large population day after day, decade after decade jammed within cold concrete walls with little mental stimulation. Professionals draw parallels with population imbalances in our world, where too many people who crunch into tight quarters exhibit extreme behaviors– psychological disorders, rape, loneliness, death, fear, disproportionate homosexuality, hopelessness, and in some jails, vile, moldy food despite federal requirements for nutrition and prohibitions against using food or lack thereof as punishment.

I can report on this only through study and research. Our true first-line heroine and expert is Eve Fisher, who lives and observes firsthand what I can only write about. The main point is that prisons offer a peek into ‘Stand of Zanzibar’ effects of overpopulation.

Rat Paradise 25.0

Eve’s description of John Calhoun’s work slightly differs in details from my long-ago reading, likely because Calhoun’s lab ran numerous population experiments with rats and mice. Mostly I refer to Universe 25, forty to fifty-some rodents in a 4⅓×3m enclosure. The gist remains the same: a rodent utopia in which creatures are provided with every conceivable comfort and protection. They were given a predator-free, temperature controlled enclosures with nesting a cornucopia of materials, nourishing foods, optional treats, and willing, fecund sex partners.

In this abundant environment, the critters fornicated like bunnies, gorged on food, and relished their perpetual vacation. As the population grew, aberrant behaviors broke out– violence, rape (eventually including same-sex assault), lack of mothering, signs of mental instability. At some point, rat residents lost interest in sex, socializing, even eating. They isolated until the colony died out. Poof! Gone, incels in the end.

A number of conclusions might be drawn beyond overpopulation. One might consider human’s need adversity to survive, goals to strive for. Progressives and conservatives (not necessarily left and right) might both be right in different ways, we need to advance but we need roots. We require wholesome, challenging work for our own well-being.

Am I suggesting a link between male and female incels, and a wind-down of population growth? No. Yes. Perhaps. Maybe. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t rule it out.

Wall-E © Disney

Behavioral Sink

The opening minutes of Disney’s 2008 Wall-E suggest Earth was devastated by an environmental disaster. However, as the movie transitions, the rest of the story reveals the underlying crisis, a storybook depiction of Calhoun’s mouse utopia.

Seriously? A couple of friends believe adult animation is intellectually demeaning for grownups, but I love a good story in any form. Apparently viewers and critics agree with a 95% approval. I highly recommend Wall-E for thought-provoking exercise and entertainment, with or without nourishing popcorn.

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Inspired by Barry and Stephen

 

We've talked before about the fact that more short-story anthologies seem to be published these days than in the past. Especially short mystery/crime anthologies and--again especially--crime anthologies based on singers and songs.

Two of these music-themed anthologies were published since I last posted here, two weeks ago, and I was fortunate enough to have stories in them.

A Fanilow of Manilow

The first of those was A Killing at the Copa: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Barry Manilow. Published by White City Press and edited by old friend Jay Hartman, this anthology contains thirteen stories and was released on March 18. My story there is called "Lonely Together," which is also the title of the song that inspired it, from the 1980 Manilow album Barry. (I suspect the reason I'm a fanilow is that so many of his songs bring back good memories.)

My story involves a man and woman who meet by chance at the bar of a Moscow nightclub. One is American and one's Russian and both are single, a situation that seemed to me to fit both the title while offering lots of chances for mystery and deceit and a twisty plot--in fact, there are several complete reversals in the storyline during the course of the tale. The whole thing is written almost entirely in dialogue between these two people, and since I love writing dialogue, that made it even more fun for me. At 2000 words it's fairly short, and includes only two scenes.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Computer

The second music-themed anthology was Every Day a Little Death: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Stephen Sondheim, published by Level Short and edited by writer/editor/globetrotter Josh Pachter. (This is the fifth of Josh's music-based anthology projects that I've been involved with--each one has been great fun and interesting, and I think I'm more excited about this particular story of mine than I've been about any of the others.) Every Day a Little Death features twenty writers, many of whom (except me) were chosen because they're extremely familiar with, and active in, the world of the theatre. It was released on March 22.

My anthology story, "I Love to Travel," is once again based on a song with the same title, this one from the Sondheim musical Frogs. This wasn't my favorite of his songs (my faves are probably "Send in the Clowns" and some of the tunes from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), but this one was fun to spin a story around. My story, about 3800 words, includes two hicks from the South Louisiana swamps who decide to rob the eccentric CEO of a chain of Walmart-like retail stores. These idiots put together a gang of misfits who travel to Florida to pull the heist, which--surprise, surprise!--doesn't go as planned. Now that I think of it, this probably was a case of sending in the clowns . . .

Questions

How do you, as a writer and/or a reader, feel about these "inspired-by-the-music-of" anthologies? Do you find them enjoyable to write stories for? To read? How does that compare to other themes? Do you tend to play the song that's represented by a certain story while you're writing it?--I know some folks do. Does it have to be music by an artist you like, for you to enjoy the anthology? Does it make no difference, so long as the stories are good? Which one(s) of these projects--there have been many--have you most enjoyed? Which have you contributed a story to? Do you have any suggestions for music on which future themed-anthologies should be based? NOTE: I'll be traveling today and might not be able to reply right away, but your thoughts and comments are always appreciated.

In closing, I hope that, wherever you are, spring has sprung. (Begone from me, coats, gloves, and longjohns.) Dust off the pollen, keep reading those anthology stories, and keep writing!

How Do You Prepare to Write?

Last year, I had a difficult time writing. Even the stuck list I discussed in a previous guest post wasn’t working for me. With deadlines approaching and no creative gas in the tank, I started to worry and reached out to a friend. 

She asked me a simple question. “How do you prepare to write?”

I told her about my perfectly fine-tuned scheduled, how I juggled writing between other commitments and my lengthy to-do list. When I had a window of time, I sat behind my desktop, laptop, cellphone (whatever electronic device I had at my disposal), and that’s when I would write.

She laughed (in a kind way) and said, “Maybe that's your problem.” 

She suggested I try meditation. It was my turn to laugh. I had tried meditation and thoughts bounced around my head like Tigger in the Hundred Acre Wood. She suggested journaling. (I didn’t laugh this time because it would have been rude.) I never liked journaling. It felt like an excuse not to put “real words” on the page. I thanked her, filed her recommendations away, and returned to my Barnum and Bailey’s approach to life, determined to do “all the things,” without success. Until one blessed morning I had a mental break through. 

Maybe it happened because it was still early. Maybe it happened because I was in the shower, and it was quiet. I was standing under the water, going through my mental checklist for the day (maximizing my time, and winning, right?), when it hit me, the note behind my friend’s advice. My problem was mental clutter.

Mental Clutter

I love the way Amarie writes about this idea in her article on Medium: “Imagine the mind is like a web browser. Each thought, task, and worry is an open tab screaming for your attention. Some tabs may be for work, others for personal stuff, and others may be random anxieties. When too many tabs are open, everything slows down, and it’s hard to get anything done.” 

My friend was right. My perfectly optimized schedule wasn’t optimized at all. My life had turned into a game of whack-a-mole. The fifteen minute windows I had taken so much pride in leveraging were opening more tabs, draining my focus, and slowing me down. More than that, it was suffocating my creativity because I didn’t have space to think, imagine, or let my mind wander.

I talked to Michael Bracken about the challenges I’d been experiencing, and he pointed me to Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

Deep Work

Cal Newport defines deep work as “focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.” Context shifts (interruptions, checking email, social media) degrade your cognitive effectiveness. He explains that deep work is important because deep efforts are what move the needle, especially in knowledge work like creative writing. 

To perform at an optimal level, he recommends the following: engage in deep work, embrace boredom, abandon social media, and eliminate unnecessary tasks. (He talks about this more on his YouTube Channel.) Armed with Cal Newport’s insights and recommendations from my friend, I decided my approach to writing in 2025 would be different. 

Time Blocking

In the evenings I mapped out my schedule for the following day, rearranging tasks, creating longer blocks of time to write, taking a mindful approach to deep work tasks and measuring their outcome. I discovered this focused approach helped reduce the chaos I felt in the past and helped me focus during writing windows. 

Strategically Check Email, Social Media, & the News

I also blocked time in my schedule for checking email, social media, and reading the news—trying my best to do these activities after deep work sessions knowing they would trigger “open tab, open tab moments” and weigh me down. I also blocked email and social media during writing windows and left my phone on a table outside my office door, close enough to hear if the school called but far enough away so I couldn’t reach for it reflexively.

Know My Why

Roni Loren, an amazing performance coach, reminded me that when I say “yes” to something, I say “no” to my writing. It was sobering, and it has stayed with me. I have tried to look at new opportunities and consider them with this outcome in mind.

Prepare to Write

In order to take advantage of deep work blocks of time, I started journaling—morning pages to clear away the noise. I will start a bigger project soon. As an experiment, I have decided to try evening pages—brainstorming scenes I intend to write the following morning to prepare. I also made reading a priority again. It had fallen to the wayside when things were soul-crushingly busy, and I needed to read in order to write. I tried meditation again, two minutes each morning before I started writing. I focused on my breathing, and the difference it made was remarkable.

White Space

I started prioritizing white space on my calendar. I took the dog for a walk in the woods, no headphones, no recording device. I went for a run. Some of the best ideas I’ve had this year came during moments when I left my productivity expectations behind.

How do you prepare to write? Have you tried deep work? What productivity tips do you have for writers? 

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My story “Mary Poppins Didn’t Have Tattoos” is now featured on Rabia Chaudry's acclaimed podcast, The Mystery Hour. At the end of the reading, Rabia skillfully connects elements of the story to real-life true crime events. I'm delighted with the final result. I hope you feel the same. Check it out on your favorite podcast app.

Crime Scene Comix Case 2024-03-028, Control Top Cop

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

l'Art du Crime

The Art of Crime is another show I’ve discovered, streaming on MHz, and I like it, but…

It’s funny what pulls you in, and what waves you off.

Very often, you find a book series, or TV, to be an acquired taste. I wasn’t drawn in right away, for example, by Jackie Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books. I loved her memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, but it took me a couple of books to warm up to Maisie. (Once I was sold, I was sold.)

I’ve tried to read James Benn’s Billy Boyle series – I read two start to finish, and cracked the spine on a couple more, hoping my first impression was wrong – but I’m sorry, they leave me cold as a mackerel. (This is a private opinion, obviously; your math may differ.) 

A show it took me the entire first season to even tolerate was Brokenwood, and well you might ask why I bothered, but something kept pulling me back, and I’m glad it did: I think I had to get over my aggravation with DI Mike Shepherd, who just seemed like one of those guys you’d go out of your way to avoid in the workplace.

 A classic example of this is Death in Paradise, which is hands down the most annoying show on television. They had the inimitable Ben Miller for the first season, and he’s the reason I watched Primeval (along with Doug Henshall), but then they cast the utterly execrable Kris Marshall, and almost killed the show. Seriously, if not for the supporting characters and the Caribbean landscapes, I would have given up.

Speaking of, although I’m nuts about Deadly Tropics (which is a terrible and uninviting title), but like the cast more than the scripts, I’m crazy about the local scenery of Martinique. Here’s another one. I was on the fence about Signora Volpe, even if the hot ex-spy and her hot Italian love interest give it romantic appeal, what convinced me were the fabulous Umbrian backdrops. Which, circling back, is a big selling point of The Art of Crime.

It’s shot in Paris. Ça suffit. Some of the surrounding countryside ain’t too shabby, either. But mostly, it’s in the city itself, and often some unrecognizable alley, off the beaten path. It’s not always the Champs Elysées, although you get a lot of I.M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre. I think they shoot inside the Louvre, too, but staircases and hallways, not the galleries, apparently. I’m not actually sure. They obviously got permission to shoot interiors at the Musée d’Orsay, once famously a train station, serving the southwest of France. And certainly other locations I don’t recognize. This is a big plus for me,

I have to admit, and not just in this show. I love the genuinely terrible Armin Mueller-Stahl policier variously titled Midnight Cop, or Killing Blue, because they shot it in Berlin and never showed a single familiar landmark, like the Brandenburg Gate or the Memorial Church. The Art of Crime opened an episode at the Temple de la Sybille, an architectural folly on top of an artificial waterfall in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, sixty-one acres of manicured grounds in the Nineteenth that I’m embarrassed to say I never heard of, or visited. And it’s clearly as famous to Parisians as the Bois de Boulogne. That’s exactly my point. When somebody who knows a place intimately uses the landscape as character, you see it with a fresh eye.

I don’t mean to damn The Art of Crime with faint praise. It’s got a cool premise, not necessarily art theft, but art adjacent crime. This is the French OCBC, not a fictional crew, that investigates cultural property trafficking – smuggling, counterfeits, money laundering – and our entrée is to team a streetwise plainclothes cop with an artwise academic. They expend a little too much nervous energy at the beginning, rubbing each other the wrong way, but you let it go. (It’s like Jonathan Frakes; you don’t take Riker seriously until he grows his beard.)

 The obligatory exasperated senior officer, on the other hand, is a much better character in this show, not a wet blanket but a full narrative partner. There’s also the trope where the art expert explains herself to her psychiatrist, not to mention explaining herself to imaginary artists, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hieronymus Bosch, da Vinci. The only superfluous character is the art expert’s dad, an unnecessary aggravation.

I should be clear, that I in fact find it quite charming, in spite of the occasional too-cutesiness.

You realize they established certain dynamics, but after the shakedown cruise, they didn’t throw the excess cargo overboard. Somebody on the team was too proprietary. Be that as it may. I’ve finished Season Three (out of an existing eight, but only two episodes a season), and I’ll finish them.

I think, as I’ve said before, that there’s a different rhythm to European cop shows. It’s an enlivening change of pace.

Literary Relationships

When we first have enough confidence in our writing—whether justified or not—to begin submitting our short stories, our goal is to find one editor—any editor—who likes our work well enough to publish it. Some of us achieve our first publication early and some of us grind for years before we break through.

If we’re lucky, we find an editor who likes our work well enough that it leads to multiple acceptances, and it may even lead to additional opportunities when that editor puts together invitation-only anthologies. This is a good thing.

Sort of.

Initially, it is wonderful to realize you have developed a strong working relationship with an editor and are confident that you have, through that relationship, a reliable home for your work. It’s a form of literary monogamy.

Me? I try to avoid literary monogamy because it can lead to heartbreak.

FEAR OF MISSING OUT

First, there’s the fear of missing out. There’s the fear that, had I tried harder, I might have developed a better relationship.

For example, if you review your list of published stories and discover that most of them have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, with only the occasional dalliance with other publications, you probably aren’t missing out on much.

However, if most of your stories have appeared in Jim Bob’s Magazine of Mystery, you probably are missing out. It’s time to make a concerted effort to step up to the next level. Don’t abandon Jim Bob yet, but don’t make his publication the first place you submit a new story. Send that story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine or Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine first or to the publications that aren’t quite at their level but fall somewhere on the scale below them and above JBMoM.

Once you step up to the next level, and can do so consistently, it may be—to torture the metaphor a bit—time to practice literary serial monogamy. Leave Jim Bob behind. Devote your time and attention to your new, improved literary relationship.

I SPY A WANDERING EYE

Some of us—especially those who might be considered prolific—need to develop more than one literary relationship.

If you review your list of published stories and find that most have appeared in one or the other of two publications, you’re already on your way to literary polyamory. You have established that you can satisfy the needs of at least two editors, so it may be time to put some effort into developing a third relationship.

By diversifying your attention, you can alleviate the inevitable disappointments that come from investing too heavily in your relationship with a single editor. Editors, die, retire, and change jobs. Publications die or change focus. Publishers cut back or eliminate anthologies from their list.

If you don’t already have relationships with other editors, your writing career might come to a screeching halt.

I’ve experienced this several times during the many years I’ve been writing.

Magazine editors who liked my work were replaced by editors who didn’t. Editors who included my work in their anthologies stopped editing. Magazines and anthology lines ceased publication. All of which left me scrambling for new markets because I had not developed enough relationships.

Worst of all was when entire genres collapsed. Even though I developed multiple literary relationships within several genres, each time one of them imploded I lost every relationship in that genre at essentially the same time.

LITERARY MONOGAMY OR LITERARY POLYAMORY

As an editor, I enjoy relationships with several writers I count on to provide stories I want to publish, who deliver on time and on theme, and who are easy to work with through the editing process. I never ask if they think we have a monogamous relationship or polyamorous relationship.

Whether your goal is to be a literary serial monogamist, regularly stepping up to better and better markets, or your goal is to be a literary polyamorist, the path is essentially the same:

Keep your current editorial relationship(s) solid, but always, always, always, keep your eyes open for the next opportunity. Strive to improve your work. Diversify the genres (or subgenres) you write. Then submit, submit, submit.

And never take actual relationship advice from me.

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Reminder: Murder, Neat: A SleuthSayers Anthology (Level Short), which I coedited with Barb Goffman, is currently nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s inaugural Derringer Award for Best Anthology. There’s still time to order and read a copy before voting begins.

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“Writers are people who write.”

This quote is universally attributed to Ernest Hemingway, and there is no evidence that he actually said it.  But no one cares, because it’s exactly the kind of thing he would say, and we do know that’s what he believed. 

On this matter, he was correct.  If you spend an hour a day messing around on the guitar, you’re a guitar player.  If you go to the driving range every weekend, you’re a golfer.  If you write all the time, because you‘re compelled to do so, you’re a writer.  Before I was published, I didn’t feel this way, which I regret.  It wasn’t fair to my unpublished self, because I sure as hell worked like a son-of-a-bitch to remedy the situation. 

            I have a young friend, unpublished, who’s been working on a book for many years, putting in the hours of writing and rewriting, casting about for help and advice, cramming in writing time around a demanding job and busy toddler, feeling buoyed and desperate in equal measure, and generally going through the paces of apprenticeship.  To me, he’s a writer, because he’s always working at it, no matter what. 

            The thing is, writing is rarely easy.  There are moments when we all feel as if some supernatural power has taken hold of us, directing our hands to tap away effortlessly, composing as easily as breathing or strolling down the street.  We’ll also agree that this hardly ever happens.  Instead, it’s not unlike digging a ditch.  You have to put the shovel in, push down with your foot, and haul the stuff out of the ground.  This is hard work, and you know how hard it is with every word and shovelful. 

      Pausing with your hands over the keyboard while staring into the void is something our life partners have often witnessed.  They think we’ve slipped into a trance, but we know we’re only trying to come up with the next word, phrase, analogy, simile, descriptive sentence, or clever tie-up to the end of a chapter.  You feel like your mind is now trapped in concrete, and not another thought will ever occur to you.  But it always comes anyway, you just have to wait for it. 

            Some people don’t feel well unless they run a few miles a day.  Some of them are friends of mine, and in their 70s have sleek, toned bodies and the glow of clear heads and arteries.  I’m not one of them.  I think a car is a much better way to travel from point A to point B, and will never run unless being pursued by a wild animal, which is a distinct possibility where I live in New England.  But I understand their addiction.  I’m the same way about writing.  If I don’t write something, anything, at least once during the day, I feel like I’ve not slept or eaten.  I get jumpier than an addict, which I guess I am, sort of.  I know it’s a mental problem, but I’ve heard of worse. 

            Though as noted above, running for a few hours or crunching through a narrative is difficult, even if you can’t help yourself.  It usually starts smoothly, but there’s always that point when you start to fatigue and mild regret sets in.  Your breath shallows or your hands begin to get sore.  Your brain starts to wonder why you launched this effort in the first place, when you could be on the couch watching NFL Highlights or Antiques Roadshow. 

            But then, endurance kicks in, and you keep going, because why not. You’re already out on the road or at the keyboard and it seems better to just push through.  You start to think of new things to write, new connections and old ideas that can be pulled out of the dusty attic of your tired brain.  You tell yourself: this isn’t that hard. You just have to keep going, and if it sucks, you can always erase it all and start over again tomorrow.  There will aways be other ideas, other notions, other turns of phrase, something else you can put down on the page, because this is what writers do.

            They write. 

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

I've obviously dedicated most of my writing career to crime and mystery fiction, and as you might expect I read a great deal of work in that field growing up.  I also had a deep love for science fiction, though, and while I've read relatively little new work in the genre in the last few decades, as a kid I delighted in the classics by the giants of the field--Asimov, LeGuin, Silverberg, and so on.  Recently, going through a box of books from my childhood home, I came across an interesting artifact by another of those giants, Arthur C. Clarke, probably best remembered today as the author of 2001.  I thought it worth looking at, both as an example of the perils of writers imagining the future and as a lens on the world writers are working in today.

In 1986, Clarke published a book titled July 20, 2019.  The date, of course, is the 50^th anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and the book is a series of essays in which Clarke predicts what the world would look like in that then far-off year.  I bought and read the book when it came out.  I don't remember what I thought of it then, but reading it now, almost six years beyond the date Clarke chose for his prophecy, was certainly eye-opening.

So how did Clarke do with his predictions?

Well, there are a few hits.  He thought that the field I work in, distance education, would be huge, though he assumed it would operate via teleconferencing rather than being online (more on this later) and largely text-based.  He said that cars would still be much the same and still mostly gas-powered, though he thought they'd get 100 miles per gallon.  He thought entertainment would reflect an increasingly fragmented culture with more books, movies, music and so on aimed at specialized audiences, and he predicted the boom in self-publishing as part of that.  He was right about shortened hospital stays and the fact that medicine would still be largely controlled by corporations, though he didn't seem to give much thought to the social implications of the rich having care most people can't afford.

There are, however, far more misses, some amusing, some depressing.  Examples:

SPACE.  Clarke believed that by 2019 there would be a permanent manned outpost on the moon with perhaps as many as 1000 inhabitants.  There would be several manned orbiting space stations as well, and we would be routinely mining asteroids and preparing the first manned mission to Mars, with an eye to exploring the outer solar system.  He discussed in detail several conceptual engine ideas then being theorized which could cut the voyage to the red planet from months to a few weeks.  It's interesting to contemplate how much of this might have happened if NASA had gotten, say, a third of what the US has spent on the military since 1986.  Incidentally, earthbound transportation in Clarke's 2019 is similarly advanced, with magnetic trains and advanced hovercraft linking cities and jets that go from Shanghai to Los Angeles in two hours.

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies

SPORTS.  Clarke predicted that steroids, hormones and other chemical enhancements would be made so safe that there would no longer be any reason to ban them from competition.  In addition, many athletes would have cybernetic parts, or even nerves cloned from legendary competitors to improve reaction time.  Elite athletes would be identified through genetic testing by the age of five and spend much of the rest of their lives being rigorously trained, using computers designed to enforce the most efficient way to perform any motion.  In baseball, for example, batters using boron bats would routinely hit home runs, though the fences had been moved to 500 feet from home plate.  They would do this facing pitchers who could throw 125 mph and pitch every other day.  The NBA would have to raise its hoops to 12 feet and make them smaller, since the average player would be over eight feet tall.

Offered without comment

THE MIND.  Clarke had little patience for the idea of therapy.  He thought that, by 2019, genetic mapping and brain imaging would make it possible to produce a vaccine preventing schizophrenia, drugs to prevent highly specific phobias and complexes, and compounds that would induce any desired mood.  For example, there would be a drug whose only effect is to enhance music appreciation, which would be routinely taken before attending any concert.

OK, maybe there's something to that one

ROBOTS.  Clarke would have been stunned to know there are still people making their living as coal miners today.  One of his most confident predictions was that virtually every job involving elements of danger or drudgery would have been taken over by robots well before 2019.  He honestly didn't think there would any longer be people working in factories, aside from very occasional repairs and inspections.  He also thought that most homes would have robots to handle routine domestic chores, and he dedicates considerable thought to how home design would emphasize simplicity and reduce clutter to make it easier for the robots to get around.  Clarke is very clearly NOT thinking of computers, but of humanoid robots.  He honestly thought they would be everywhere.  On the other hand . . . 

Rest easy, humans

COMPUTERS.  Clarke vastly overestimated the importance of the individual computer, and vastly underestimated the importance of computer networks.  He correctly assumed computers would be everywhere, in every home and every workplace, by 2019.  But while he occasionally mentions computers communicating with each other to share information for specific purposes, he still thought of every computer as an essentially distinct unit that learns to master the skills and demands of its particular job and function.  The idea that the computer would be connected to others essentially all the time, and that it would be useful only to the extent this is true, simply never occurs to him.  Thus he could not predict anything resembling Facebook, or Google, or Twitter, or Wikipedia, or Amazon, or the internet itself as it has come to exist.  Nor does he ever imagine anything resembling a smartphone--which might seem odd, from the man who, shortly after WWII, correctly predicted the creation of communication satellites.  This one oversight is so fundamental that it touches nearly everything else in the book, making it much less accurate than it might have been.  There's simply no way to understand almost anything actually happening in 2019 (or 2025) without taking account of the web.

Clearly, he did know there were dangers

GEOPOLITICS.  Again, Clarke was oddly short-sighted here.  He assumed the fundamental structure of world politics in 2019 would still be based on a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact contending with a US/UK-led NATO, with the front lines in a still-divided Germany.  There is virtually no mention in the book of Asia, Africa, or South America, let alone any notion that nations like China and India would be emerging superpowers that would shape much of the 21st century.  Weirdly, despite his ambitious claims for robots elsewhere, he envisions war still being conducted by human operators in planes and tanks; drones are another invention he did not foresee.  Something else he didn't mention, though it will dominate our lives for the foreseeable future: climate change.  Scientists by 1986 were well aware of this coming crisis, but Clarke never mentions it.  Perhaps he assumed the problem would have been solved, given his surprising degree of faith in  …

Not pictured: ice

 HUMAN NATURE.  It's hard to fault Clarke for this: he assumed that humanity, as a whole, would make decisions which might be self-interested, but which would be basically rational and fact-based.  He'd be dismayed to know that, more than fifty years after the first moonwalk, there are a substantial number of people who simply refuse to believe it ever happened because our teaching of science, math and critical thinking has become woefully inadequate.  He didn't foresee the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, the rise in racism and xenophobia, the spread of terrorism, or the willful embrace of ignorance that defines so much of our politics.  I truly wish that as a species we had lived up to the potential he saw in us.

Arthur C. Clarke

Books Don't Float – More book humour

My 18^th book launches today.  The Silent Film Star Murders is close to my heart.  I'm pretty sure it's my best book yet.  So I'm anxious to see this baby birthed.  Except – wait minute – there's a hitch.  Which is what this post is all about.  

HOW BOOK BABIES GET BIRTHED  (mine tend to be breech)

I've had 18 books launch, and I still panic every time we get close to launch date.  This is because I'm pretty sure the Literary Gods have a sense of humour, and delight in adding new codicils to Murphy's Law.  

By profession, I'm a marketer and event planner.  We, by definition, are planners.  Over-planners, some would say.  I have lists for my lists.  But think about it.  Marketing plans are developed months before promotion campaigns launch.  In the case of event planning (think of large conferences) we try to plan for every possible contingency - every single thing that could go wrong.  Because for dang sure, something that nobody dreamed about will happen!

It's the same with books.  Want proof?  (If you're looking for a quick way to develop a drinking habit…)

1. WHERE ARE THE BOOKS? 

Launch date for the Silent Film Star Murders (book two in the Merry Widow series) is March 22.  In-warehouse date is Feb. 21.  Promo blogs and other ads have been created and are to go live in US and Can on this weekend.

Publisher has just been informed that Amazon and B&N won't have the books in time because of the frantic increase in shipping (read madhouse) across the border due to - you guessed it - trying to beat the threatened tariffs.  So there's a new launch date.  March 22 in Canada, April 12 in the US.  Which means ALL the promotion comes out in the US before the book is available! <hits head against desk> 

2.  BOOKS DON'T FLOAT

Who-da guessed, but Pandemics really screw with book launches.  One of my books was to launch the very week Ontario shut down due to the pandemic.  It, poor thing, never got the attention it deserved.  But that was small potatoes compared to what happened next.

The entire second printing of Crime Club, due to be here for the Christmas buying season, got dumped into the Pacific Ocean.

Yup, you heard that right.  A container off a monster container ship took a dive with 16 others, into the Pacific, during a storm.  That is one hell of a lot of royalty moolah washed away.

The irony of this post (and yes, I live for irony) is: my current series takes place on the high seas, on an ocean liner in the Roaring 20s!  You'd almost think there was a diabolical plan to my life, Literary Gods.

I hope the fishes like to read. 

The Silent Film Star Murders SHOULD be available April 12 in the US, and March 22 in Canada and elsewhere.  It's traveling by land, I think.  Hope.

What's it all about?

Lady Lucy Revelstoke reboards her 1920s ocean liner for another high society murder mystery on the high seas — with rival film stars, resentful ex-lovers, and renegade snakes!

Available at all the usual suspects.

Music When You Write

© Embassy Pictures

For years, especially on Short Mystery, I've found myself drawn into the whole Music While Writing vs. Complete Silence debate. I haven't for a while, but my latest take is interesting. I've gotten really good at ignoring the television if I work evenings in the living room. However, as I type this now, I'm playing ocean sounds on my streaming app. 

Years ago, the then-spousal unit and I had a roommate who demanded a lot of attention. I, of course, wanted ours to be a couple's home, maybe eventually with a kid. (Spoiler alert: I later became a serial stepdad, but that's a different story.) So I would blast Metallica and Led Zeppelin through headphones to shut her (and the nearby TV) out. The roomie wanted to know how I got anything done playing loud music through the headphones. "I can't hear the rest of the world."

And really, if you have ADHD, diagnosed or not, music gives your wandering brain a place to go to and come back from. As the years went on, however, I liked that wall of sound as I wrote. It was particularly fun when a friend from Ireland started sending me blues CDs and certain members of the crime community latched onto Tom Waits. More recently, I rediscovered Yes (I'd kind of soured on any prog rock not played by Pink Floyd for a few years) and King Crimson. Plus my jazz phase.

When this debate comes up, people tend to center on what their brain wants. Coffee, followed closely by tea, is a given. Some people need calm, but not necessarily quiet. The most common response has been classical or ambient music at low volume. Although one scifi writer I know live-streamed as he wrote the last chapter of a book and played jazz in the background. Not sure I could do the live-streaming part. I've had people who wanted to peer over my shoulder as I write or wanted to read everything before it's finished. That results in a firm "No," followed by something more assertive when they don't take the hint. (Similarly, I hate reading unfinished manuscripts and refuse to do it as an editor.)

Some people want silence. Complete silence. The door is shut, and unless you're the cat (or a well-behaved dog), keep out. I get it. Absolutely no distractions. Also, there's a need to keep anything outside that might influence a story from getting in. Hence writers from Tolstoy to Chuck Wendig have write shacks. (John Scalzi bought a church, but I suspect he still writes at home, based on his blog.)

I'm of the low-volume music school of thought these days. Mind you, I don't listen to loud music as much as I used to. I was once the proud owner of the entire Led Zeppelin catalog on cassette, a Camaro, and an impressive mullet. (1987 or 88. No photographic evidence exists of either the hair or the car. I'm kind of bummed about the car.) Jazz can be played at lower volume, and I got into the jazz habit driving Uber. I could tell whether I'd like a passenger or not based on how they reacted to jazz. (Nearly threw one guy out of the car when he wanted "good music," but couldn't specify what that meant.)

Silence sounds very appealing. No noise other than the ambient noise of a house or the outdoors, maybe, as right this moment for me, the furnace kicking in. Sounds almost like meditation.

I think most of us need a little noise to write. Creatives' minds wander as it is, and music or ambient noise is a benign way to fill up space where the mind might go, "But how will The Bachelor end tonight?"

What Nature Does Best!

I've been subscribing to The New Yorker for years for a variety of reasons, and my latest rant / wonkout is based on an article by Gideon Lewis-Krause in the February 24, 2025 issue called "The End of Children."  (LINK)

It's about the current seemingly universal worries about the current world-wide demographic decline, which is very real.  Basically, almost every country is in the minus growth for population: fewer babies are born than can replace the population as a whole, and a lot of people are freaking out about that. Especially male white conservatives in the Western Industrial Nations seem obssessed with "The Great Replacement Theory":  that this is a nefarious plot to get rid of white people and replace them with black / brown / Asian / Native people.  

But, even if there is such a thing going on, then why is South Korea and Japan's replacement rate worse than ours? And in almost every country, even with added incentives, there's a steady drop in childbearing. So why?  What is going on?  Who is doing this?  Is it sheer modern selfishness (we've all heard the latest gender war where "selfish childless cat ladies" refuse to procreate in a society that needs them to have more children), or is something else going on?  

Well, while I'm waiting for someone to reveal the eugenicist who is in charge of the GRT and how they've kept it secret for so long, I will tell you what shouldn't be a secret to anyone: the biggest eugenicist of all is Mother Nature.  One of the things Nature as always excelled at is Demographic Apocalypse, and she's got all the best tools for mass murder.  

First of all, some statistics: 

CLIMATE IN HISTORY 

Yes, Virginia, things change.  

100,000-18,000 BCE - Last Glacial Maximum (i.e, end of the major Ice Ages)

68,000 BCE - World population cut to around 12,000 people probably due to the Toba Catastrophe, a super-volcanic eruption in Sumatra, Indonesia. (Sumatran volcanoes are dangerous:  we'll run into them again in 1816, when Mt. Tambora exploded and caused a year without a summer.)

Caldera of Mount Tambora

12,700-10,800 BCE - Late Glacial Interstadial, which is a fancy term for a BIG warm up. 

10,800-9,600 BCE - The Younger Dryas; a sudden huge plunge in temperature, along with another major die-off of humans 

7000-3000 BCE - Holocene Climatic Optimum.  A time of wonderful weather, and the Neolithic / Agricultural Revolution and the rise of a few major civilizations. (We'll get into more of that later.)

535-537 CE - Major global climatic catastrophe. No one is sure whether it was a small asteroid / meteorite / volcanic explosion, but historians like the Byzantine Procopius noted that the sun's light was dimmed like the moon, and Chinese scholars described eerie, colorless skies, unseasonable snowfall and mass starvation. There were world-wide famines. It launched the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536-560 CE. The weakened populations were further ravaged by the Plague of Justinian (yersinia pestis, i.e., bubonic plague), a deadly pandemic that swept through the Byzantine Empire and beyond. 

950-1200 CE - Medieval Warm Period (Climatic Optimum).  Wonderful weather, that led to exceptional crops, Viking explorations, the colonization of Greenland, vineyards in England, and Cathedral building all over Europe, as well as the 1st-4th Crusades, the Mongol Invasions and other fun events.  NOTE:  Increased food production and increased wealth often leads to increased war.  We are a quarrelsome lot.  

1200-1300 CE -  Cool Down including another probable volcanic eruption(s) from 1257-58 with heavy rains and extreme famine.

1300-1470 - wildly unpredictable weather with wildly unpredictable crop production.  

1470-1560 - Warm Spell (The Renaissance and The Reformation in Europe) 

1590-1850 - the Little Ice Age (including 1816's Tambora explosion redux)

1850 to now -  continuing warm up, much of which was launched and is fueled by the Industrial Revolution.  And for quite a while, we have been in a period of wildly unpredictable weather with wildly unpredictable crop production that shows no signs of letting up.

***

One thing I found fascinating in Mr. Lewis-Kraus' article was where he said, with what to me is a faint whiff of distress, 

"In about 1805, we crossed the threshold of a billion people. That had taken the entirety of human history. Our next billion took just a hundred and twenty-three years."

Meanwhile, our population has climbed from 2 billion in 1925 to over 8 billion of us on this planet today. That's 6 billion people in100 years. I don't consider that demographic collapse in any way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, during that "entirety of human history," humans saw tremendous civilizations of great sophistication, urbanization, with great cuisines, irrigation, flush toilets, waterwheels and windmills, seafaring ships, barges, canoes, massive food production, art, music, dance, sculpture, ceremonies, religions, and fireworks. Also, wars, weapons, gunpowder, and genocide. From ancient empires like China, Egypt, the Mesopotamian and Indus civilizations, as well as ones we're only now discovering underneath the jungles of Amazonia, Indonesia, etc., and on to Classical and Late Antiquity, the Renaissance, the "Age of Enlightenment" - it's pretty amazing (and sometimes horrifying) what you can do with "only" a billion people on the planet.

And on a purely irrelevant, personal matter, I think most people looked better in clothing like this:

 

(Vermeer) or this:

 

(Rembrandt)

than today's casual culture:

So, what are we so afraid of with a demographic decline? Losing all our cheap goods, cell phones, entertainment, transportation, food, and instant gratification? Probably.

Well, as I said before, we struggle to build up civilizations, and Mother Nature slaps us down with regularity.  

Around 66,000,000 BCE, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event caused the mass extinction of three-fourths of all the plant and animal species on earth.  Scientists believe it was a massive asteroid - 6-9 miles wide which slammed into the earth in the Yucatan, creating the Chicxulub crater.  

Meanwhile, there's 2024 YR4, an asteroid about as big as a football field, which is lined up to swing by, visit, or crash into earth around 2032. There's a supervolcano in Yellowstone, and there's always Mount Tambora, Mount Vesuvius, and a whole lot of Iceland, which are all still smoking.  We still haven't figured out a way to undecline our demographic from something like that.  

***

But Mother Nature has another dirty secret up her sleeve:  and it's in our own biology.  Back in June of 1972, Dr. John Calhoun watched as a four year utopian experiment ended in total demographic collapse:  the Universe 25 Experiment.  

He had set up a world in which four mouse couples were given a "veritable rodent Garden of Eden - with numerous “apartments,” abundant nesting supplies, and unlimited food and water. The only scarce resource in this microcosm was physical space.

As population density began to peak, population growth abruptly and dramatically slowed. Animals became increasingly violent, developed abnormal sexual behaviors, and began neglecting or even attacking their own pups. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out.  (LINK)

BTW, Richard Adams, in Watership Down, pointed out that among rabbits, does can and do absorb embryos when hard times come, when there’s insufficient food, or in cases of overcrowding.  Mother Nature, culling the herd from within.  And we are mammals. 

Sounds to me like we're already in Universe 25...