Glaucoma

Recovering from a personal tribute to Hunter Thompson.

The beverage of choice: Glaucoma.

Ingredients: classified: need-to-know.

At left, the cure of ... wait for it ... more booze.

Picture from wikicommons of a lovely Bloody Mary set-up. Photograph from Evan Swigart of Chicago, Il. USA.

Wonderful snap. Even nicer that he's allowed us to use it here. Wonderful work.

I have work to do so will not prattle on much.

You wonder perhaps what Hunter Thompson has to do with crime writing?

A little bit I posted elsewhere explains:

When I'm not sure what to do in a story I'm writing, I think of having a man with a gun enter the room. [ Chandler] When I picture that man as Hunter, scares the hell out of all my other characters and they get right back into the action.

Works every time.

And now, it is back to recovery for me. Oh. Caught me.

Writer colloquialism for killing off more characters.

The are still fictional dumpsters that don't have bodies in them.

Let's stamp this out in our time.

It's a cause I can get behind.

Maybe we can get little bands or lapel pins.

Insensitive?

Of course. I put bodies in a dumpster for an avocational pursuit.

Don't look to a crime writer for moral guidance.  Mayhem is good for sales. So are bodies.

I'm off to make some of each.

The Bad Fruit

Rotten oranges at right provided copyright free from wikicommons via the gracious Downtowngal who posted the lovely picture for our use! Thanks. Perfect.

Little smells as sweet as rotting fruit. Rotting meat - well. That's the "bad" smell. fruit when it starts to rot gets that cloying aroma.

It's that smell that tells you something is amiss.

I like my characters as fruit in the orchard. You know they're hanging there with all the potential in the world. If I let them twist in the wind a little longer than ripe, they'll go bad.

And we so love the bad ones.

I love a dyed in the wool through and through killer. I like despots. I like angry villains with an eye towards mayhem.

I'm not big on the sneaky killers. For whatever reason, I like killers. Just killers. The killers' defense in my stories are that anyone who is going to try pursuing them for justice doesn't have the tools, capacity, experience, whatever to do the job.

That is, unless our murderer runs up against a real killer. 

You run up against someone who looks at you and smiles not because he thinks you're pretty, but because he knows you smell like pork when roasted: that's a guy we want on the case.


He - or she because one of the hardest edged individuals I ever knew wore a skirt every day and looked nice in it - expects the worst parts of people. Wears on 'em though. Makes 'em want to retire to where they see the mailman and the grocer and maybe Alan at the hardware store and that's it.

I'm not talking about cops. Police detectives follow the rules, pay attention, cover the ground, and do a fine job of an unpleasant task. They're not given enough credit. 

They're pretty hard-edged, too. They have to be. Sometimes they find mom killed her own child. That's a tough job.

I'm speaking of the sheriff who gets a call from the county supervisor because one of his mower guys was going along throwing crap on the dirt road from mowing the bar ditch when he sees a human hand lying in the clear back behind the mower.

He's out and looks and that's all there was: a hand. Doesn't look like his blunt blade cut it off anything and he walks the ditch for a couple hundred meters looking for a body. He finds none and calls it in.

Now the sheriff has a hand in a bag. He's pretty certain it didn't just fall off and when his officers walk the whole mower route that morning to make sure it wasn't just carried downstream somehow, well.

He's go a body out there that goes with the hand. That's not a casual "accidental" shooting.

He's got a killer. Good thing he's one too. Carries a shotgun. Wears a badge. Doesn't have a lot of call to do it; but, he likes it. Dreams of it.

Now we've got as story.

Ever read those spy v. spy bits in Mad Magazine?

Put a badge on one.

I love those sort of stories. I've no patience for the amateur but show me professionals at work: great drama.

Properly, great narrative tension.

Little Lips Down to the Water and ..

At left, a mule deer on the John Day River courtesy of Oregon Fish and Wildlife. Great snap, folks! The photographer is listed as Dave Budeau.

The first rule of write club: We don't talk about our writing with non-writers. 

A friend asked about my offhanded remark a couple days ago when I implied talking about your work socially is ill-advised.

She thought maybe I was a little sharp.

Let me clarify:

You don't talk about your writing with non-writers.

Nobody cares about your works that are unavailable. You can't socially tell the story of your WIP because nobody can buy it.  That is a kind of rudeness: to discuss that which is not available for others.

Did you not bring enough bubble gum for the entire class, Marie? 

You really want to be the person who shows pictures of their summer vacation at a villa in the south of France on their cell phone at a party? Really?

That is who you are when you talk about unpublished works in a social setting. Argue all you like. Won't change the nametag the hostess set out for you one bit.

Better reason? Oh, Reason. You want reason! Here it is:

You can't talk about your work because when you talk about it, you - YOU - talk about it.

When we read your work, there is an abstraction that happens automatically correcting all measure of social transgression.

Case in point. Let's say you wrote Bambi. Almost.

You're to the part where you're burning down the forest. Fine. Let's see how this goes.

You to small captive cluster of almost friends: So they're running across this wonderful snow covered woodland and blam! A hunter's bullet blows Bambi's mom's brains out but Bambi doesn't notice and keeps running. He's ultimately orphaned in the depths of winter without survival skills. There's no way to see how this little fawn can possibly survive. Looks like the end of him. Real tear-jerker.

Them: You heartless sadistic prick! You wrote this for children? 

They won't ask if you're some type of pervert. They don't need your denial.

Didn't go well, did it?


You had to kill Bambi's mom to evoke the emotional investment which could carry your audience through the story. It's what you knew to do. It's what you the writer knew to do.

Everyone in that room had Bambi read to them as a child. Many have seen the movie. Nobody thought anything about it because, after all, deer are prey. They get shot.

You tell the story at the party then it is YOU telling the story, you twisted person.

Write the book about little girls whose teeth are pulled out after death by a female teenage murderer for the most trivial of possible reason and you get a prize for "best first novel" from the national writer's organization in your genre. Your party comrades pour you drinks and ask to have their picture taken with you.

If you don't see the difference, then you are in some real danger.

I advise you to either put down the pen, write memoir about your days in third grade, or have a steaming mug of STFU when you think of talking writing to non-writers.

We write about things that are wrong.

Nobody wants a story about happy bunnies taking a nap in a field of clover. Won't sell.

Write about a vicious orphanage whose children are "adopted"  into gourmet pate, and you might have something. 

Write about murder, come stand by me at the party.

Write about a mother who doesn't love the protagonist, well. I think Flannery was in the kitchen when I last saw her.

If you've got a character who can't reconcile his love of the wrong woman with his twisted self-important sense of duty, Ernie's in the library showing off a new rifle for bear.

I'd watch out.

He hasn't written anything in a while so I bet the gun is loaded. I bet he's looking to talk about some dramatic writing he's been considering.

Why don't you go ask him about it? I'm sure something will come of it. 

Opening the Oyster and Dreaming of Pearls

At left, from wikicommons a photograph of oysters by David Monniaux.

My eyes are different than yours and so the shading of this photograph strikes me as a more profound pattern than it does you. Color doesn't work for me anymore. The tones in the picture are however wonderful to me. I hope you enjoy it, too.
I'm certainly enjoying the privilege of having the image grace this page. Thanks, David!

I made oyster stew tonight. I'm drinking a fine cup of tea now. It's been a good day.

I finished a draft late yesterday evening.

The last big draft I finished, I took a day at the end to write myself the first round of "cooling" notes: those things that I thought I could resolve quickly in a next draft. I'll let the work cool in a drawer for a while, take it out, read my starting notes, read the entire draft slowly - twice - and then start with the big picture changes.

I'll also transpose all of the next draft into Scrivener as chapters are completed.

I solve big problems freehand better than I solve them in whatever writing software I use.

My first novel years ago, I staple bound individual chapters of the second draft, revised, then composed the new draft back into Word. It was so long ago that "track changes" was actually a bastardization of "team edit" settings! The first version was composed on Wordstar and imported, disk by disk.

Memory lane.

So, tonight: notes. Tomorrow morning: fleshing out the outline of the "next" as well as a critique session on the first pages of a novel a friend is writing.

I didn't find pearls in this version. I had fun and told the story. I didn't execute on what I wanted to say; but, I didn't quite know what that was until the end of the draft. It was difficult to understand my protagonist's desires. I know him better now.

Next draft will be the better for it.

Onto rural noir.

My protagonist is a sheriff. He's got a few skinned rattlesnake nailed to the wall inside his shed. He's thinking of custom boots.

Seems the snakes just keep taking a nap inside his mailbox.

There are a lot of hard edges to life when it's lived in those empty spots on the map.

Watch yourself opening the oysters. Mind you don't cut yourself.

The Big Empty

This is a grain elevator from just outside the big empty. Where I grew up, this was the mark of industry. This, and shabby oil derricks.

On the map where you see no roads, no towns important enough for any but the smallest dots, that's the place: the big empty.

There's a story I heard when I was a kid that in one of these little bergs, two men were found dead on a gravel side street beside their car. No one happened to live anymore on the little block where they lay.

They stayed that way for three days until a sheriff's deputy happened by and had them collected.

It wasn't a serious matter for the law. They were from somewhere else. Order is taken more serious than law in some places.

You haul your own load, carry your own secrets, wave at the neighbor you haven't seen for three months. Everyone wears of a mask with more than a little distrust.

It's the sort of place where little changes in fortune made a big difference in the community. Someone got a new car - and I mean new car. Someone's kid went to college back east. Someone bought a new horse worth a cutting of hay.

For every up there's a down and when someone went up, the neighbors all watched waiting for the inevitable reversal of fortune.

I think of it as a balanced environment where all things were conserved locally: nothing untoward happened without offset. Secrets couldn't be kept long.

As writers, we like the other side of that eventuality. We like ups without offsets. We like downs without redemption. It's easier for the reader to put our stories in a large context if we tell part and let the reader fill in the rest.

Tolstoy tells you everything. You know it all from beginning to end.

Hemingway tells us little. We know sometimes the end. Sometimes we know a middle.

I increasingly like stories where we know the early elements of discord and change, their initial event chains, and we know the sharpest of the transformations. The rest?

I'm not in the happily ever after business. 

Neither are you. Tell us enough that we see the consequences of conflict and transformation. 

You don't have to put a bow on everything.

In crime, don't show me the trial, merely point to the criminal. In literary fiction, you don't have to make him chase after her in the final scene loading everything he owns in an old Chevrolet to drive to Salt Lake City.

Leave a couple of bodies on the ground. Let's see in our own mind if anyone notices.

I'm going to write and see if anyone notices. I think you should try the same. Maybe you can find a big empty in your house in which to do it. Maybe you've been a bit of a big empty on the map thus far, too.

Let's make that dot grow a little, shall we?

Why? Because We Love You

Mickey Mouse. M-I-C, K-E-Y ... you know the rest.

A young school teacher who is a pupil of a friend asked "Oh, what do you write?" I did not introduce myself as a writer but was "outed" by another well-meaning friend.

I answered crime as in murder and deceit and lies and betrayal. I like the aftermath of these things and how they change people.

She stared. "Why write about such horrible things?"

"It's in our nature to harm one another - part of the human condition. As a species, its what we're best at: harm."

Her response? "I believe in non-violence."

It was a social encounter. I let it go.

There is nothing a human cannot be made to do to another human. Now, to make them like it I have to start young.  Nevertheless, their actions to harm can be compelled with the proper motivation.

Sometimes, it takes no external motivation at all. Steak knife in the aorta killed a husband in Detroit just last weekend. Asked his wife where she had been, and she stabbed him. Probably didn't mean for him to bleed out on the kitchen floor - at least not so fast. Nobody put a gun to her head. Nobody held her baby over a boiling pot of water. She did it of her own accord. Married 19 years.

 WW I. It's my favorite war largely because of the terms on which it was fought. Alexander and Caesar and Charlemagne would have recognized the direct close combat for the ritual barbarity it was. They might have been better at it than Foch.


The bar for the justification of harm is very flexible. It moves.

Imagine what someone who actually understands how to motivate individuals to harm can do. Imagine. No Queen's Regulations here.

Write something. Lock the doors, and write something, little ones. We're out there in the dark with out yellow night eyes. Yes. We. Are.

Every one of us.

Epic

As in Epic Sneeze.

I have a cold. At left, Edison's record of a sneeze.

I'm working up some short bits from a writing group. One has merit for humor.

I'll work it up and post it here.

I'm watching Cowboys and Aliens tonight. There's no accounting for taste. No, I haven't seen it.

I did think Zombieland was robbed of the Best Picture Oscar nomination a couple years back so that tells you about my sense of humor. Oh, I was pulling for The World's End this year.

I don't see many movies. TWE was damn sure better than Gravity, though. Hell, This is the End was better than Gravity simply for trying to exorcise Jonah Hill. (see what I did there?)

I did laugh all the way through Inglorious Bastards and Django Unchained. Hilarious.

Shoot somebody. Oh, sorry. Wrong blog.

Write something.

Not Nice Enough for Tea

At left, my new tea kettle. I've fought with the stylish older kettle given to me as a present. I've had to move on. I love the two-tone of my old kettle but there is a seam between two plates of rolled steel two-thirds of the way up the side and so now it leaks when you pour.

Unacceptable.

So, onto a solid one-piece rolled model. Now, this one isn't perfect and takes a little modification to pour correctly (have to remove a silicone seal under the lid to prevent hot water "chugging" out irregularly.) Nevertheless, this works.

The whistle is functional but not is not a screecher. I probably need a screecher but we'll see how "field testing" goes.

Which brings me to tea. Civilized people offer tea in civil settings. "Could I make you a cup of tea?" is common enough between nice people.

I try not to be social enough to allow this event to pass. I know the consequences.

My humor is harder than most. I think that's why I like crime and murder. I can stand amidst slaughter and mayhem emotionally unmoved. Makes me just right for some things, not right for others.

It makes me not right for tea. It also makes me a little lonely sometimes for kindred spirits.

"I laugh at the wrong things" your mother would say.

 I wrote a paper in college on Greek sensibilities from the Aeneid and the Oddyssey.  I was drawn to the phrases such as "their heads dashed upon the rocks as extra puppies in an unwanted litter." Tells you a great deal about common animal control practices in enlightened Athens.

My underlying premise is that underneath the pale civilized exterior we create with the plaster of civility lies the common desire to harm, maim, murder, deceive, deprive, and oppress. You'll argue; but, I'm not really soliciting counter arguments. I've stood too deep in blood spilled by neighbors and relatives one against the other to believe any other assertions.

I think my perspective is of the man fully awake among those groggy from drink and addled by weariness.

How can I live with such a horrible worldview? Humor. The odd way the corpse rolls down the hill into the pool can strike me as funny. The two steps taken by a dead man and how he resembles Sheri Tewes on the dance floor in junior high is funny.

The head-back sprawl of an open-mouth corpse in a chair suggesting to me a monumental sneeze brings a smile.

The way I might find amusement in the unintentional release of a an engineered flu strain in Novosibirsk in 1977?  Really not for public consumption. ("it's just a cold" - actual last quote from a fellow in the aerosol disbursement program).

Macabre? Sure.

Not the fellow to sit in the cafe with over a pot of tea, however. My veneer is thin and worn.

I'm trying to put this little humour in the characters of my stories. It is harder to do than I thought while still making the character likable by the reader. A bit like my struggles to be likable. I'll have to try harder.

Off to write about the consequences of a corpse. Really changes that three-hour cruise.

Write something. Have some tea?

Given a Pen

Uncle Joe at left. Looks a lot like Barney Fife holding a gun to me.

"Giving Jack a pen is a lot like giving a kid with an ant farm a magnifying glass. He's going to kill a lot of 'em before he gets bored." - Ex-Best Man ( that's what you call the bastard that didn't stop you from making that mistake the time before).

I like my villains as dyed in the wool smiling murders. I'm comfortable with folks that smile and lie and kill. I've voted for several. It's the job and I want folks who can do it well.

Oh , sure. I'll take an air of disappointment over launching a tomahawk strike at an intelligence headquarters.

I want the killing done straight away though, regrets or no. 

I think that's why I like crime in fiction. There's the search for justice in prose - very popular. There's the evil as a sickness (in bad stuff) which is also very popular (he's just a bad man and does this because he's a bad man).

Then, there's the sport of it. There is a sense of finality. There's the knowledge that $.37 is the price of a life. Hell, use two. They're cheap enough to make sure. (Double Tap).

In fiction, we can adopt any perspective we desire. The killer in the closet? Been there. The victim scrawling the clue in blood (Rache). Done that. The surprised bystander - oh, this one is good. "He pulled out the pistol and fired three times. I was shocked."

I'd been told in fifth grade after a schoolyard fight that "violence never solved anything." I'm not sure Emma Causey ever recovered from me retorting that martyrs are dead people and that Hiroshima seems to solve a whole pile of problems.

She beat me soundly. Then my parents beat me soundly for making them have to talk to the principal - not for the schoolyard fight. That retribution made perfect sense. I didn't like her either.

I'm not so interested in the mystery. It isn't the element of justice which entices me (I read my Plato, thank you very much). It is the useful or wasteful employment of violence and destruction which interests me. It has such interesting effects on the bystanders.

A killing is a gravity well for the survivors. They're unable to escape the transformation that comes without the application of great force. That's the heart of it for me.

Sticks and stones ... but words ...

Unless the words about the weekend in Miami with the mistress, then those things will hurt you plenty. It's all a matter of the application of force. As writers, we get to control that application. Love that.

Where'd my magnifying glass get to?