Valentine Post: Love and Free Book

Zestful Blog Post #146

As I haven’t yet figured out how to package and deliver pure love to you, my friends and family, I thought I’d do the next best thing by giving away a story that has love in it. Well, love and violence, of course, being that it’s a Lillian Byrd crime novel. Easy Street is free on Amazon Kindle through Tuesday. (And ya don't need a kindle device to get it--just the free Amazon app.) Love to you and yours!

 [Cover by my talented buddy Ann McMan.]

"You'll be happy to know that Lillian has returned in all her dry, witty splendor to pull us all into yet another totally enjoyable and satisfying mystery."

—The L Word Literature Review

Lillian Byrd's battered Caprice is convulsing through the last of its death throes; her pet rabbit, Todd, ails; and as usual she's single—and flat broke. For a few extra bucks she signs on to help an old friend, retired police detective Erma Porrocks, renovate her house, but of course nothing ever goes smoothly in the life of Lillian Byrd. The end of her first day on the job yields a partially demolished wall, a mysterious stash of cash, and a fresh corpse. And Lillian's attentions are diverted by the appearance of a drop-dead gorgeous neighbor.

Nonetheless, Lillian throws herself into chasing down every complex thread, especially after Porrocks is injured in a suspicious accident. The action ranges from Porrocks's Detroit riverfront neighborhood to a nursing home in Cleveland, where Lillian and Todd pose as animal therapy workers to shamelessly coax information from an elderly resident. From there Lillian goes undercover to Boise, Ft. Lauderdale, and points beyond, facing deception and danger the whole way—as well as the bewildering emergence of her own dark side.

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Lying is Good for You

Zestful Blog Post #145

Writers need to keep their brains sharp and guts alive, and one way to do it is be on the lookout for opportunities to lie. I’m not talking about the lying we do in our fiction, which is, of course, the whole point. Neither am I talking about malicious lying; my subject here is recreational lying. Recreational lying pumps your adrenaline and challenges your wit. I discussed this a little in Zestful Post #54 (“5 Good Reasons to Make Stuff Up), but want to expand a bit on it here.

Life is just too damn boring sometimes. Enough bloggers rant about our hyper-risk-averse culture and our increasingly ensafened public spaces (rubber cushions beneath the monkey bars; helmet laws). But I feel one’s comfort zone is one’s own business, and it’s up to us to stay in it or step out of it. Lying is such an easy way to walk on the wild side.

One of my favorite recreational lies happened at a summer polo match in the Detroit area back in the 90s. (Someplace like Farmington Hills, as I remember.) The Borders Book Shop I managed in Birmingham was an advertiser on the local classical radio station, so I regularly got invited to thank-you parties, which was a nice perk. For one such party, the station (WQRS, anybody fondly and sadly remember it?) set up a lavish hospitality tent at a polo match. Though I’d never been to a polo match, I guessed correctly that one should dress nicely and be on good behavior.

I wore a crisp chambray skirt and a sleeveless top, which just happened to expose the fresh blackwork tattoo I’d received on my right upper arm a month before. It was a grasshopper, or locust, designed by me and inked by a well-known artist in Ann Arbor. (Anybody remember Suzanne of Creative Tattoo? Another bygone entity.) I’d wanted a symbol of strength and lightness, and thought the hopper a good choice. Being so new, the tattoo was profoundly black and stark against my white-girl skin.

[As seen in Skin Art magazine, vol. 1, no. 7. For real.]

It’s safe to say mine was the only visible tattoo on the whole polo grounds. I might characterize the other guests as upper crust; most were prosperous business owners and their spouses. I was experienced enough to know, however, that most of them would be somewhat nervous coming to such a hoity-toity event—this was Detroit, after all—and therefore vulnerable and credulous.

As the horses thundered to and fro, I snagged a mimosa and headed for the buffet of first-class delicacies. Three society gals of a certain age assembled behind me in line. I heard a brief whisper, and turned. Decked out in pastels and their afternoon pearls, they were staring at my tattoo. One found her nerve and said, “Where did you—what’s—?”

“Oh,” I said with a smile and a shrug, “I used to live in Los Angeles, and I was in a girl gang for a while. This was the initiation tattoo we all had to get.”

Their faces were just so fabulous. Just writing about it, I feel the rush all over again.

Most recently, I recreationally lied at a restaurant in Mount Dora, Florida. Marcia and I were getting up to leave, and the couple at the table behind us were interested in the pork chop special. “What’s it stuffed with?” asked the guy. The server took off to check for sure.

Without thinking at all, I leaned in and said, “Ze pork shop, eet ees fabulous. Ees ver’good—ver’ good. You try eet, OK?” Somehow I sensed zey deed not speak Frainch. They gazed at me with respect, and when the server returned, the guy ordered the chop. I nodded my approval, though I had eaten the steak salad. The couple’s eyes followed Marcia and me to the door, and I just felt that much more alive.

There’s nothing wrong with taking vitamins and obeying the speed limit in school zones. But recreational lying is downright good for you, your brains, and your guts.

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Story Writing Demo II

Zestful Blog Post #144

One of my favorite myths, since I could read, is the story of Baucis and Philemon, first written down by Ovid. (Baucis is properly pronounced Baw-kis, and with Philemon you place your emphasis on the first syllable.) They were an old, poor but hardworking couple who lived in a hut. I believe a thin cow lurked outside. Cows in these tales are always thin.

One day Mercury decided to have some fun on Earth. He took off slumming, disguised as a hiker, and around noontime approached the humble hut. He wondered if he might have some refreshment. Baucis and Philemon welcomed him in, and set the table with all the food they had: a loaf of bread, some cheese, some grapes, and a pitcher of milk (remember thin cow). Mercury ate some food, and they all shared the milk. When Mercury asked for more, Baucis sadly upended the pitcher to show it was empty—but what do you think?

Milk spilled all over, and the pitcher never went dry again; it always brimmed with fresh, delicious milk. They would never starve. What’s more, Mercury asked the couple what their dearest wish was. They answered that they’d like never to be apart. Mercury went away quietly, and saw to it that their wish was granted. When they died, they became an oak and a linden tree, which grew intertwined forever. I’ve seen other versions of the story in which the magic pitcher contained wine instead of milk, which, hey, cool. (Picture of Baucis and Mercury from my Wonder Book by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1935 edition. Illustration by Milo Winter. Note friendly snakes from the god's caduceus ready to lap up the spill.)

The moral, of course, is that one should be good to everyone, because one never knows who that stranger really is. This is part of many spiritual teachings: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me.” Do good for the sake of doing good, and reward will come in the form of good karma, or possibly eternal life, or maybe even a new Corvette. You never know.

How to translate this to a modern story? First let’s unpack it. We have: the poverty and kindliness of Baucis and Philemon; the powerful god who can confer reward as well as, we assume, punishment; the enduring love of the old couple; and finally, the god’s kind heart, which matches the mortals’. There’s a lot of material here, and storytellers have used it over and over. Plus wasn’t there some reality show about a kindly angel who grants wishes to good people?

To make the story fresh for today, how about creating a sort of anti-god who runs around doing stuff? Yeah, how bout a garbage collector who snags broken toys from the rich neighborhood, fixes them up, and gives them to the kids in the poor neighborhood? One day he’s got a cold, but he’s on the job, and it’s extra miserable because the boss is being a bastard. Some little poor kid sees the garbage guy’s runny nose and dashes inside to bring him some orange juice. He might secretly reward that little kid for years, just because.

The power differential is key here. What is true power? There’s material power: I can confer gifts to you. And there’s spiritual power: I can love you. Couldn’t we keep riffing on this for hours? Yeah. Take it away. I love you.

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Story Writing Demo I

Zestful Blog Post #143

Aspiring fiction writers often are told by literary gurus to ‘make use of’ fables, myths, and folklore. Why? Because, of course, the power of those stories has stood the test of time. But as with so many other admonitions in writing instruction books, we’re left to our own devices as to how, exactly, the hell to do it.

In this case, I think a couple of examples—demonstrations, really—will be more helpful than some kind of theory with multiple steps and check marks. In You’ve Got a Book in You, I demo the ‘hero’s adventure’ plot template, but there are many other useful myths and fables out there. Just for the heck of it, here are some ways to harness their dynamism.

...speaking of power...

Do you remember the Dog in the Manger? Aesop told of the dog who lay in the manger filled with hay he couldn’t eat, and snapped at the cattle who tried to eat it, keeping them from their food. The moral is pretty simple: Some folks are spiteful and there’s nothing you can do about it.

This one gets acted out in real life all the time. A modern-day vandal, filled with envy at, say, someone else’s beautiful sports car, takes a crowbar to it for the same sick satisfaction. I can’t have this, so to make myself feel better, I’ll ruin it for you. There’s a short-story beginning right there, or a subplot in a longer work.

In a more serious version, some guy, spurned by a woman, murders her so no one else can have her. Elvis and John Lennon sang hits based on it: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.” (From the song “Baby, Let’s Play House” by Arthur Gunter, 1954. Elvis covered it, and Lennon used the line in “Run For Your Life.”) Think it through. This is supposed to be love? It’s not love for another, it’s narcissism. The myth of Narcissus can take over at this point. That myth, however, is pretty short. Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool, and couldn’t tear himself away from it even to eat or sleep. There he died, watching himself grow, one presumes, increasingly gaunt. But back to the Dog in the Manger. The key motivating force for an author here is: What kind of person does these things? Is change possible? Revenge certainly is. But then things can escalate. You can see where this can go, all the way up to world war.

Here’s a romance: Beauty and the Beast. How to transfer this one? A cocktail waitress falls for some shallow rich guy, while all along the busboy quietly loves her and stands up for her against jackass customers and the lecherous boss, etc. She takes him for granted, because he’s clumsy and unpolished. The turning point comes when the chips are down—she and the shallow rich guy (who’s cheating on his wife, naturally) get in a car wreck. He walks away from it, while she’s in surgery for 15 hours and barely survives. He tells the police and his wife she was a hitchhiker, he’d never seen her before, that’s it. And the waitress never sees him again.

It’s the humble busboy who visits her as she’s getting well, and tries to look after her. Her eyes pop open at some point, she perceives his true worth and potential, and she falls in love with him. They get married, happy ending. For an extra-happy ending, it turns out they’re both secret inventors with little projects they’ve been working on. They put their two ideas together and voila, they have an important new thing, and overnight they become billionaires. Yay. Satisfaction.

You could do this one with children on a playground. With amoebae in a dish. With prisoners in a camp. With Winston Churchill and Marlene Dietrich. Look at a myth. Look at real life. Then look at your characters, or make up some new ones. Write it. Off the top of your head. This stuff seems simple, but it’s powerful.

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Poor Fred

Zestful Blog Post #142

This post is about choices and their ramifications.

Yesterday Marcia read to me a snippet from last Sunday’s New York Times (which sits around the house in increasing stages of decomposition through the week) about the editing process. Basically, the photo editors were talking about how hard it is to select images to publish, from the thousands they have access to via their own photographers and the wire services. (I cling to the cool term ‘wire services,’ even though we all know the truth.) I was like, yeah, tell me about it. I’d been there, even as a lowly reporter and photographer for a local weekly paper. Which image tells the story best? What really is the story in the first place? Moreover, which image tells the story from the angle we want to tell it? Because there’s an angle to most every story.

Then there’s the public and its appetites. Sensational always sells better. But when the public itself is being represented, their standards are quite different. Inclusion is what matters. I learned this quickly, just out of college, at the paper.

One day the community theater troupe sent me tickets to its upcoming production, some closed-room mystery play. I went to the dress rehearsal, took some pictures and interviewed the director, then attended opening night. I wrote an enthusiastic article about the play and the players, and made it into a big feature spread with two or three pictures.

I heard nothing from the troupe after that, though. I wondered if something was wrong; usually you get a note or a phone call of thanks for such nice publicity. By happenstance, I bumped into one of the actresses at the drugstore and asked her what the troupe thought of the article.

“Oh, yes,” she said sadly. “Poor Fred.”

Turns out I had mentioned every single cast member in the article except the guy who played the cop who comes in and arrests everybody at the end. He was in none of the pictures I ran. I think he had one or two lines. Fred was crushed that he’d been excluded from my coverage, AND THAT WAS ALL THAT MATTERED.

Then there was the children’s ice show. Having, believe it or not, taken a term of figure skating in college for physical education, I laced up my skates and got out on the ice with the kids during a practice. I took some closeups and zooming action shots. A cluster of parents were watching, however, with increasing displeasure.

 They cornered me and demanded that I take off my damn skates and climb up to the top of the bleachers while they got ALL the kids onto the ice at one time. They wanted one group shot of all two hundred kids, so that every kid could “have their picture in the paper.”

I obliged, thinking I might just run the good shots anyway. But I didn’t; for some perverse reason I ran the group picture. The photo, reproduced on newsprint at about four by five inches, looked like a bunch of poppy seeds clustered on a white cake. I think I wanted to say to the parents, “There’s your group shot, and none of your kids are recognizable except as poppy seeds.” But I got no complaints. Had I been the New York Times, I would have run one or two of the good shots and to hell with what the parents want.

The moral of the story is that scale matters. When readers outweigh your subjects, you make one choice. When your subjects practically outweigh your readers, you just might want to make a different choice. The public is bloodthirsty when it comes to news about other people, but as sensitive as a bouquet of orchids when it comes to themselves. You don’t have to cater to that, and sometimes you can’t. But it is a choice.

As writers, closeness to our subjects can be a blessing and a curse. One must harden oneself.

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Defending Precise Language

Zestful Blog Post #141

When I make a mistake with language, I welcome being corrected. For instance, some time ago a reader of one of my Writer’s Digest articles let me know that I’d misused the word ‘devolve.’ I’d used it as the opposite of ‘evolve,’ as in ‘things deteriorating / falling apart / going to hell,’ basically. It really means the transfer of something to a lower or further level. When the commander got shot, control of the vessel devolved to the lieutenant commander. The house devolved to the widow. I appreciated knowing my mistake, and have not made it since.

But because many people make the same mistake I did, the wrong definition will probably become an accepted definition. Ref. my rant on descriptive-vs.-prescriptive dictionary entries in Zestful Post #103.

Not everyone appreciates being corrected, however, and this has always surprised me. I used to have a boss who asked me to proofread his weekly staff memos. One time I pointed out that he’d misspelled ‘supersede.’ He’d made the common error of spelling it ‘supercede.’ He argued with me, then finally grabbed the dictionary (pre-desktop PCs) to check. He was so angry. I’d been respectful; it isn’t as if I’d called him an idiot. This same boss also used the word prone to mean supine, and employed the phrase ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ when he meant ‘put all your eggs in one basket.’ I stopped correcting him after supersede, though.

Word meanings fade and morph as cultures change, of course. I’ve noticed the phrase ‘marking time’ is increasingly used to mean keeping track of time, as in checking off the days on a calendar. Did you know it’s actually a military term that means to march in place? As such, it’s also correctly used as a metaphor for wasting time or not making progress. I think more Americans knew the meaning during and after WWII, when so many people were more familiar with military culture, either being in the service themselves or being close to a service member.

‘Penultimate’ is another good one. Many folks use it to mean like, man, super-ultimate, the livin’ end, you know? Actually it means second-to-last. Ultimate, of course, means last or final. Ultimately, we decided to go to the movies. The penultimate letter of the alphabet is Y.

Then there’s pronunciation, which is essentially hopeless. I remember pronouncing the word ‘flaccid’ correctly (flak-sid) in conversation with a friend, who began finding ways to use the same word but pronouncing it ‘flassid’ as most people do, thinking she was subtly giving me the hint that I’d been saying it wrong.

Think about it. We don’t say someone had a car assident, or has a French assent, or is essentric because he wears a derby. It’s flak-sid, goddam it.

Defenders of precise language, unite!

And finally, happy birthday to my friend Special K.

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Clearing Decks Fast

Zestful Blog Post #140

As many of us do, I find the onset of winter a good time to take stock, clean up stuff I’ve procrastinated on, and clear decks for new work and life. This time I’m trying to be fast and ruthless, because there’s so much on my wanna-do list.

I quit my part-time lifeguard job. I’d wanted to keep it up for a year, but decided six months is good enough. (Gave proper notice, of course.) I figured it thusly: I went through the training as a challenge, then decided I might as well actually use that training and see what it feels like to be in charge of a public pool. So now I know. Didn’t have to jump in and save anyone during that time, thank God, but I gathered new experience, gained skills, and made new friends. The aquatics director would love to have me back. I think I’ll keep up my certifications just in case. The hours I would have spent guarding, I’ll spend writing and perhaps learning new things. This falls under the category of “declare victory and move on.” I’ll definitely keep up my swimming and will see the gang around the Y.

A nice clear deck.

Am following up on obligations and planning, and getting rid of stuff I haven’t used. Sold my beautiful old Deagan marimba. It’s a wonderful instrument, but I hadn’t played it much for years, and it was taking up practically a third of my office space. So now it’s in another musician’s home, and I bet he’s enjoying it. And the clear space in my office feels good.

Moreover, I’m looking forward more than back. That’s the key to speed and peace of mind, I think. And of course, being right here in the present is best for productivity.

Onward. With coffee.

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