Writer Unboxed - The "Connect Kitty" Approves
AAC can't help but deliver the best bloggish content that will inspire writers to new leaps of imagination. This one is mostly new releases, bestsellers, literary fiction historical fiction, mysteries, popular non-fiction, memoirs and biographies.
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The world is a marvelous and mysterious place. It’s also fairly un-understandable, at least to me. String theory in physics is well beyond my understanding. I am equally baffled by the internet, by NFTs, by the resurgence of mom jeans and mullets. Oh, and what about the artistry of arachnids? I don’t understand how that level of precision is possible, or, how those filaments can be so sticky for a fly but not for a spider. I also spend considerable time wondering about the human brain, how it works, how it thinks, how it makes so many millions of body-related things happen. Not that the gallbladder or ear bones aren’t marvelous. But those body parts specialize in, basica…
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Here’s something great about great fiction: a made-up story becomes our story. Whatever the main character is going through is what we’ve been through. The struggle is our struggle. The world of the story is our world. When you think about it, that’s weird. It’s illogical, too. The characters we’re reading about aren’t real. What happens in the story isn’t actually happening. The story world can be far removed from our own world, as well. Despite that, we connect to Elizabeth Bennet, working a tedious desk job in the Ministry of Truth, and Oz. Are we nuts? Hypnotized? Daydreaming? Imagining ourselves to be more brainy, capable, self-actualized, suffering or j…
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A short time ago, a minister I knew passed away. We had not been in contact for quite a long time, but it was still piercing. He went too young, and it was a surprise, and as we all know, those are the deaths that catch us off guard, and I found myself thinking about him, about legacies, and what I learned from him. His most compelling physical trait was a twinkle in his eye, like he knew something magical he was about to impart. And he did know magical things. The best thing I learned from him was something that keeps me company all the time: What is mine to do? What is MINE to do? It’s a great phrase to keep in your back pocket. It can help sort out big and small qu…
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Right now, I’m in one of my favorite stages of the writing process: the early first draft. I’ve chosen the subject, done the research, loosely outlined what needs to happen when, and picked my beginning and ending points. And now I’m just cranking, cranking, cranking out the words as fast as I can. I write out of order. Always have. So at this stage, as I craft a scene, if I get stuck or things just aren’t seeming right, guess what? I just stop writing that scene and jump to another one. It’ll get harder later, and that will slow me down substantially. But right now there’s a seemingly endless list of characters who need to be introduced, scenes that need to be set, loca…
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Photo by Hannah Van Houten. Used with permission. My brother is a counselor. A very good one who won’t tell any of his clients’ stories, even when our dad asks him to strip all identifying features. Dad knows better, but he’s a curious man who’s never been afraid of hearing no (which made him a great entrepreneur). One night, after refusing to answer, my brother kept thinking about how he could honor our dad’s desire to connect with him about his work. About an hour later, he told us about an image and a corresponding therapeutic technique he’s been using with clients who’ve experienced trauma and cannot directly address what happened to them. They’ve built up so much r…
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The past month, I’ve been in the throes of promoting my new novel, Strangers in the Night. The book is about Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, their wild and rocky relationship, the glamor and the underbelly of Old Hollywood, and the cost of celebrity. There’s so much more to it, too, but one aspect of writing this story really stood out to me as I waded deeply through my pile of research: the very real draw of toxic relationships. As things became more unwieldy between Frank and Ava, the more entranced I became. I simply couldn’t look away. Recently I devoured Rachel Hawkin’s The Villa, set in a gorgeous Italian villa that has a past. It’s a story about two friends that ar…
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I like writing about places almost as much as I like visiting them. For much of my career, I worked in the travel industry as a writer and editor. For almost fourteen years, I wrote articles, reviews, and marketing content for and about destinations around the world. Over time, using words to illustrate the characters of historic cities, seaside villages, and sweeping natural landscapes became almost second nature to me. When it comes to writing about places in fiction, there’s a lot of good advice out there. The majority of what you find online is both practical and useful, such as the importance of basing fictional places on actual ones to make them feel believable. No…
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Please welcome guest and author Jennifer De Leon to Writer Unboxed! WU contributor Desmond Hall made the introduction, and said we absolutely had to meet Jennifer. We’re so glad that he did, and we think you’ll feel the same once you’ve read today’s post. More about Jennifer from her bio: Jennifer De Leon is author of the YA novel Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From (Simon & Schuster, 2020), which was a Junior Library Guild selection, and the Juniper Award winning essay collection White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing (UMass Press). Her latest YA novel, Borderless, releases today! Borderless follows Maya, a talented teen fashion designer who is caught in the c…
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If you’re a fan of epic fantasy or of Fantasy BookTube, our guest today will need no introduction. For the rest of you, Philip Chase is medievalist with a PhD in English Literature. He has taught courses on writing, medieval literature, and fantasy literature, among other things. His special interests include Old English, Old Norse, Middle English, nineteenth-century medievalism, comparative mythology, and fantasy. Other inspirations include time spent in places like Germany, the United Kingdom, Nepal, and the Northeast and Northwest of the United States. Those of us who are fans of his eponymous YouTube channel, which is dedicated to exploring fantasy literature, have c…
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Recently, I have had more than one aspiring author talk to me about their frustrations with the query trenches. And for those who seek the traditional publishing route, I tell them the same thing I say to every hopeful author: Querying your book is simultaneously one of the hardest and yet most rewarding things you will ever go through. And while that may feel overwhelming, I do have some tips to make the query trenches a bit more bearable. Set Realistic Pitch Goals. Do not expect to get your first agent right away. Even if it is the world’s best query letter, the likelihood that the agent will pick you is rare. You will go through so many rejections that in the en…
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Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page. Here’s the question: Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents. So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 …
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As C.S. Lewis noted, reflecting on the idea that it’s useful to view something from multiple perspectives: “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.” In other words, two perspectives will inevitably diverge rather than corroborate. Complement—or contradict—rather than confirm. Lewis’s remark calls to mind the “Rashomon effect,” named after the 1950 film by Akira Kurosawa, in which a murder is described in vastly different (and incompatible) ways by independent witnesses. The Rashomon effect is “a storytelling and writing method in which an event is given contradictory interpretation…
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Years ago, I edited a book that centered around a condition called prosopagnosia – you learn the most amazing things as an editor. Apparently, we have a spot in the brain whose only function is to read other people’s faces – the right fusiform gyrus, for those of you keeping score at home. When that spot is damaged from physical trauma, a stroke, or a congenital defect, sufferers can no longer really see faces. They can see and recognize everything else just fine. But faces – of loved ones, longstanding friends, even their own face in the mirror — remain unidentifiable. I thought about this condition recently when reading a historical mystery by the late Anne Perry. …
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A writing goddess visited my city recently. Elizabeth Gilbert. Ever hear of her? She of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic fame? When given the chance to brush up against such a figure, I rarely refuse. So when an author friend expressed her willingness to drive several hours and accompany me to EG’s event, I was quick to agree. I hoped to leave with a few writing tidbits for myself but also thought to act as your eyes and ears. Since Covid, I have been a comparative hermit, so my impression of the evening was influenced by many post-pandemic milestones. First time seeing my companion in four years, for example. First dinner in a fancy restaurant. First glimpse of the new do…
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One of the more helpful remarks I’ve read recently in the ever-escalating rhetoric of the culture wars came from historian Thomas Zimmerman: There is indeed something going on in America, and it does make a lot of people…really uncomfortable. We are in the midst of a profound renegotiation of speech norms and of who gets to define them. And that can be a messy process at times. But it’s not “cancel culture.” From a democratic perspective, it is necessary, and it is progress. Professor Zimmerman made those remarks in a two-part substack series: Part I: On “Cancel Culture” and Part II: The “Free Speech Crisis” Is Not a Crisis. It Is Progress. In those essays, he argues t…
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan Seeking publication is often compared to the rigors of mountain climbing for good reason. The journey demands uncanny endurance, spiritual fortitude, and more rigor than you at first think. Kelly Simmons (The Shortest Years), author of eight published novels, has said she wrote eight other manuscripts before selling one. Jenny Milchman, author of five published novels, wrote eight before her debut, Cover of Snow, won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for best suspense novel. The first novel that earned author Kelli Estes the offer of representation and then publication, The Girl Who Wrote in Silk, was her sixth completed manuscript, and it wen…
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If you Google “How long does it take to write a novel?” you get more than 700,000 results, with answers ranging from three months to a vague “years.” I can tell you it took me four years to write my first novel, while also raising two young kids and working part-time. My second novel took another four years. I wrote shitty draft after shitty draft while my agent told me that every author has at least one novel that ends up in a drawer. Three years in, I rewrote it yet again and my agent said, “I thought I was going to tell you it’s time to let this one go, but I think we can sell it.” We did, to an editor who said, “I think the book needs a second point of view.” She was …
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In springtime, after a cold, dark winter, my teachers would fling open the windows to let fresh air flow into the schoolrooms. Unfortunately, my school was surrounded by farmland and the fresh spring air had usually warmed up enough to bring with it the unmistakable stench of silage, that pungent slurry of fermented grasses the local farmers spread on their fields to keep the cows fed before the summer crops came in. Amid the groans of pupils holding their sleeves to their noses, the drone of bumblebees, and the window-rattling supersonic roar of Concorde’s pilots being taught to land at the nearby airport, you could occasionally hear the frantic scratching of pens on e…
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When this article by Steve Piersanti of Berrett-Koehler Publishers landed in my inbox, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Warning It’s a positively frightening read that will make you want to hide underneath your covers… or it will make you want to hurl a glass across the room. If there is bourbon in that glass, down it quickly, read the article, and then throw the glass across the room. So why did I breathe a sigh of relief? Because someone else far more important than me said it – all the things I’ve been thinking, saying, changing the way I work for. A publisher said the things. The things about the many many books on the market; how they sell or don’t; and the consta…
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There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human Soul – EMILY DICKINSON Emily Dickinson compares a book’s power to carry us to a different place and time to a frigate. From the fathoms of memory, an image of myself as a child rises: me curled up in a remote corner, stowed away for hours in the cargo hold of a book, visiting places where there were neither bickering parents nor exile’s terrible loss. Books carried me away. They brought me back safely and just in time to set the table for dinner. As the y…
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Following a 4-year hiatus, the in-person Writer Unboxed UnConference is back! Go ALL IN on the craft of fiction with our intimate and immersive event. The 2023 UnConference, Unboxed Part symposium. Part interactive workshop. Part networking affair. Part retreat. Unlike other conferences, our hybrid event will not include sessions on the business of writing. Instead, we’ll spend that time advancing your craft, strengthening your resolve, and helping you make meaningful connections with other writers. In other words, we’ll lean on the qualities that have made Writer Unboxed a strong online community and website for novelists—one of the best for 17 years straight, accordi…
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At some point you may have received a decline from an editor or agent which went something like this: “While there’s much to admire here, I didn’t connect to the main character as strongly as I wanted to.” Sound familiar? I’m not surprised. It’s a common shorthand in rejections and one that is supremely frustrating. What does that phrase “I didn’t connect” really mean? It sounds personal, as if the editor or agent was looking for a protagonist who is a polished mirror of themselves, or perhaps a projection of the selves they would somehow like to be. Is that true? Is making a connection to a gatekeeping reader—or any reader—purely a matter of luck? I don’t think …
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This is not a post to share an Eventbrite link or session lineup for the next in-person UnConference in Salem, MA. That exciting roundup and public link will drop here on Thursday. This IS a post telling you why I structured this November’s UnConference the way that I did and why I gave it the name that I did: ALL IN. Theme Sometimes ideas land for me all at once, and this was that kind of idea. I grabbed my phone and dictated rapidly into it. These are my actual, unedited notes, so forgive the scribble-sense of it. Consider the effect of covid/existential crisis/loss/feeling mortal/how many minutes before midnight?/feeling that time is all we have—this moment, right n…
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When I said I was majoring in Creative Writing, it began. “Do you know how hard it is to make a living as a writer?” Then, when I said I was applying to graduate school programs, they said, “Do you know how hard it is to get into an MFA program?” When I said I was trying to publish short stories, they said, “Do you know how hard it is to get published?” When I said that I was working on a novel, they said, “Do you know how hard it is to write a novel?” When I was pregnant and starting to have kids, they said, “Do you know how hard it is to write and have kids?” This was all part of Phase I, though I didn’t yet know this beast even had phases. When I had two kids an…
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March was weighed down with news about book bans and AI, both of which are unsettling, albeit in very different ways. The final word isn’t yet in on either one, but the conflict and confusion surrounding both is fully present. There’s plenty of other news to share about publishing, audiobooks, libraries, and TikTok. So, dig in! Hopefully, this new look for Getting Down to Business makes it easier to decide which stories to click on and read. (Thank you Keith Cronin for your suggestion.) AI You can’t turn on a news channel or checkout a news site without something about AI. Well, here’s some more. AI Narration of Audiobooks Is Coming Is it Time to Hit the Pause Button …
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
WTF is Wrong With Stephen King?
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Algonkian Pre-event Narrative Enhancement Guide - Opening Hook
Part of the first chapter – After a quick introduction to the protagonist and a brief world building, this section includes an insight into the protagonists, interaction between characters, and background to support the antagonist’s motivation. Acalia knew it would be awhile before Charra was cleaned of Gaia’s clae. Bonded ones brought back the essence of Gaia as an offering to Mother Moon. The matched Etherwolves collect heavy essences from their bonded ones and their travels on Mother Moon’s larger sister Gaia. To the land walkers, Sister Gaia was called Mother Earth as they were made from her flesh. The sharing of the energies of the clae and moonbeams kept the Sisters connected. Charra leaped into the Vortex Siphon. The astral gusts whipped through her red, gossamer form. It gathered all of Gaia’s soils and offered it up to the Moon Goddess to feed the Sisters’ symbiotic relationship. Acalia sighed as she remember the sensation of release when the clae was blown through her floating fur. She glanced around. She noticed her fellow Etherwolves waiting for their loved ones to visit through the gate. A twinge of sympathy went through her as she noticed Arnou stood off to the side by himself. His light gray form hung low and lacked his normal luster. Its been over twelve full moons since Kiba had visited through the gate. Acalia went over to him. “Don’t worry Arnou. I’m sure Kiba will visit soon. You know how easy it is to get caught up in your match’s life and lose track of time down there.” “I know. I just didn’t expect her to forget her mate when she found a match.” ‘There are so many more of us then opportunities for a match. I’m sure she will come to her senses soon and visit.,” she said. “At first, I was mad at her. Now, I just miss her.” She rubbed her side against his for comfort allowing their aerial fur to mingle.“She’ll have to return with a clae offering soon. She can only hold so much before it gets painful. Then you can have a good long talk,” she replied. She leaned harder against him. Her alabaster fur intermixing with his light smokey colored fur. Just as he was relaxing into her care she felt his energy tense up. She looked up to see a large, dark slate colored Etherwolf heading for them. His dappled fur a swirl of gray colors often reflecting his churlish mood. His mood when it came to them anyways. She asked, “What does Diak want now?” “The same thing he always wants, trouble.,” he replied. Diak stopped a few inches from Arnou and looked down on him. Diak’s head was a good foot above his. “Why do you wast your time Arnou? Kiba has probably found a land bound mate. Your acting like an Earth dog waiting moon after moon for someone who doesn’t care anymore. Your whining offends me. Go from here and wait out of my sight.” Acalia heard a low growl start from Arnou. As much as she would like to see someone wipe the ground with Diak she knew Arnou was no match for him. At least undying obedience to a pack leader was only a land magic requirement. Etherwolves did have a hierarchy of dominance and Diak was pretty high. That made him dangerous, but not in charge. She step between them and said, “I’m surprise to see you without your little lackeys. Did they get tired of you bossing them around?” “I’m surprise to see you hanging around a loser. Did you want a lap dog?” “You keep referring to dogs as if you’ve seen one. You haven’t though have you. You haven’t had a Soul Match yet. Your clan brothers, but not you.,” she replied. Diak loomed even larger as he filled with anger. He stepped closer. “Your lucky your chieftain was shaman tonight and your clan is moon honored or I would show you where your place is.” She wasn’t sure her clans standing was going to be enough to dissuade Diak from beating Arnou down, but she was hoping as she stepped between them. “Your place is in a dog house.,” Arnou snarled back at Diak. She inwardly groaned as she had just defused the situation enough to send Diak on his way. He knocked her aside and leaped for Arnou. “I’m going to beat you like a ..” Before Diak could finish his threat a huge, dark form darted through the gate crashing directly into him, somersaulting him six feet past them. “Hey clan brother. Where you waiting up to greet me?” Durrak’s excited mass of shadow and fur easily pinned Diak’s. Every time he tried to respond Durrak would shake his fur hitting him in the mouth with a chunk of clae. “What’s the matter little brother, got dirt in your mouth? Aren’t you going to great me?” Durrak’s smoky tail thread waved with each shake of his fur. “Get off me you big, smelly goof. Quit breathing on me. You have dog breath.” “Is that anyway to great a clan brother?” Durrak allowed him to push him off. He sat on his haunches with a big toothy grin. Diak forgot all about Arnou’s comment as he and his clan brother pushed and nipped at each other on their way to the Vortex Siphon. “Good to remember there is always someone bigger than Diak.,” she said. Arnou replied, “How can we get him to fly out of nowhere to tackle Diak whenever we need him to?” -
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Historical Romance, a Thriller, & More
Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake RECOMMENDED: Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake by Alexis Hall is $1.99 and a Kindle Daily Deal! Carrie and I jointly reviewed this one and agreed on a B+. As a bisexual woman, I definitely felt seen by this book and I’m here for all the baking romance reads. Fans of Casey McQuiston, Christina Lauren, and Abby Jimenez will love this scrumptious and sweet romantic comedy from the “dizzyingly talented writer” of Boyfriend Material (Entertainment Weekly)! Following the recipe is the key to a successful bake. Rosaline Palmer has always lived by those rules—well, except for when she dropped out of college to raise her daughter, Amelie. Now, with a paycheck as useful as greaseproof paper and a house crumbling faster than biscuits in tea, she’s teetering on the edge of financial disaster. But where there’s a whisk there’s a way . . . and Rosaline has just landed a spot on the nation’s most beloved baking show. Winning the prize money would give her daughter the life she deserves—and Rosaline is determined to stick to the instructions. However, more than collapsing trifles stand between Rosaline and sweet, sweet victory. Suave, well-educated, and parent-approved Alain Pope knows all the right moves to sweep her off her feet, but it’s shy electrician Harry Dobson who makes Rosaline question her long-held beliefs—about herself, her family, and her desires. Rosaline fears falling for Harry is a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Yet as the competition—and the ovens—heat up, Rosaline starts to realize the most delicious bakes come from the heart. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Fated Blades Fated Blades by Ilona Andrews is $1.99! Lots of Andrews fans here! This is book three in the Kinsmen series, which I’m not familiar with. Previous sales posts mention these don’t have to be read in order. An uneasy alliance between warring families gets heated in this otherworldly novella from bestselling author Ilona Andrews. At first glance, the planet Rada seems like a lush paradise. But the ruling families, all boasting genetically enhanced abilities, are in constant competition for power―and none more so than the Adlers and the Baenas. For generations, the powerful families have pushed and pulled each other in a dance for dominance. Until a catastrophic betrayal from within changes everything. Now, deadly, disciplined, and solitary leaders Ramona Adler and Matias Baena must put aside their enmity and work together in secret to prevent sinister forces from exploiting universe-altering technology. Expecting to suffer through their uneasy alliance, Ramona and Matias instead discover that they understand each other as no one in their families can―and that their combined skills may eclipse the risks of their forbidden alliance. As the two warriors risk their lives to save their families, they must decide whether to resist or embrace the passion simmering between them. For now, the dance between their families continues―but just one misstep could spell the end of them both. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Scandalous Desires Scandalous Desires by Elizabeth Hoyt is $1.99! This was one of the best Maiden Lane books to listen to on audio and Charming Mickey starts off as a bit of a villain. You’d definitely have to read the previous two books to fully understand his relationship to the characters, but it still operates fine as a stand alone. Can a pirate learn that the only true treasure lies in a woman’s heart? Widowed Silence Hollingbrook is impoverished, lovely, and kind–and nine months ago she made a horrible mistake. She went to a river pirate for help in saving her husband and in the process made a bargain that cost her her marriage. That night wounded her so terribly that she hides in the foundling home she helps run with her brother. Except now that same river pirate is back…and he’s asking for her help. “Charming” Mickey O’Connor is the most ruthless river pirate in London. Devastatingly handsome and fearsomely intelligent, he clawed his way up through London’s criminal underworld. Mickey has no use for tender emotions like compassion and love, and he sees people as pawns to be manipulated. And yet he’s never been able to forget the naive captain’s wife who came to him for help and spent one memorable night in his bed…talking. When his bastard baby girl was dumped in his lap–her mother having died–Mickey couldn’t resist the Machiavellian urge to leave the baby on Silence’s doorstep. The baby would be hidden from his enemies and he’d also bind Silence to him by her love for his daughter. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Family Plot The Family Plot by Megan Collins is $1.99! I believe Elyse has mentioned this on previous posts, like Whatcha Reading. Definitely all sorts of her catnip! When a family obsessed with true crime gathers to bury their patriarch, horrifying secrets are exposed upon the discovery of another body in his grave in this chilling novel from the author of Behind the Red Door and The Winter Sister . At twenty-six, Dahlia Lighthouse has a lot to learn when it comes to the real world. Raised in a secluded island mansion deep in the woods and kept isolated by her true crime-obsessed parents, she has spent the last several years living on her own, but unable to move beyond her past—especially the disappearance of her twin brother Andy when they were sixteen. With her father’s death, Dahlia returns to the house she has avoided for years. But as the rest of the Lighthouse family arrives for the memorial, a gruesome discovery is made: buried in the reserved plot is another body—Andy’s, his skull split open with an ax. Each member of the family handles the revelation in unusual ways. Her brother Charlie pours his energy into creating a family memorial museum, highlighting their research into the lives of famous murder victims; her sister Tate forges ahead with her popular dioramas portraying crime scenes; and their mother affects a cheerfully domestic façade, becoming unrecognizable as the woman who performed murder reenactments for her children. As Dahlia grapples with her own grief and horror, she realizes that her eccentric family, and the mansion itself, may hold the answers to what happened to her twin. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article -
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A Letter from Henry Miller
Around the time he published some of his mostly famous works—Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn, to name a few—Henry Miller handwrote and illustrated six known “long intimate book letters” to his friends, including Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and Emil Schnellock. Three of these were published during his lifetime; two posthumously; and one, dedicated to a David Forrester Edgar (1907–1979), was unaccounted for, both unpublished and privately held—until recently, when it came into the possession of the New York Public Library. On March 17, 1937, Miller opened a printer’s dummy—a blank mock-up of a book used by printers to test how the final product will look and feel—and penned the first twenty-three pages of a text written expressly to and for a young American expatriate who had “haphazardly led him to explore entirely new avenues of thought,” including “the secrets of the Bhagavad Gita, the occult writings of Mme Blavatsky, the spirit of Zen, and the doctrines of Rudolf Steiner.” He called it The Book of Conversations with David Edgar. Over the next six and a half weeks, Miller added eight more dated entries, as well as two small watercolors and a pen-and-ink sketch. The result was something more than personal correspondence and less than an accomplished narrative work: a hybrid form of literary prose we might call the book-letter. As far as we know, Miller never sought to have the book published, and the only extant copy of the text is the original manuscript now held by the Berg Collection at the NYPL. Miller had come to Paris in 1930 or 1931, ostensibly to paint. Edgar probably met Miller sometime during the first half of 1936. At twenty-nine, he was fifteen years Miller’s junior. Edgar soon joined the coterie of writers and artists who congregated around Miller’s studio at 18 villa Seurat. His interest in Zen Buddhism, mysticism, Theosophy, and the occult apparently helped energize Miller to embark on his own spiritual pilgrimage, and to articulate what he discovered there in his writing. “I feel I have never lived on the same level I write from, except with you and now with Edgar,” Miller confided to Anaïs Nin. Miller left Paris in May 1939. Edgar eventually returned to the United States as well. Though the two men seem to have stayed in sporadic contact, they probably never met again. Except for a single letter from Miller to Edgar written in March 1937—a carbon copy of which Miller saved until the end of his life —no correspondence between them is known to have survived. —Michael Paduano March 17, 1937 Saint Patrick’s Day In the past I had many conversations, many discussions, with others—and they were very important events in my life, and perhaps too in the lives of these others. Nothing is left of them but the aroma, the fragrance, the aura. They are in my blood, these heated conversations, but they are impossible to recall in any substantial form. If I make herein some feeble attempt to preserve the flame of our conversations it is partly for your own benefit, mon cher Edgar. I write these notes in anticipation of the day when you will open this little volume and marvel at your own lucidity, your own wisdom. In talking to you I see always before me a man desperately seeking his own salvation. It is this primarily which has brought me back to you for renewed bouts. For in watching your struggle, in assisting at your salvation, I have taken strength and courage myself. In a way, then, all these conversations in the past, made so vivid now by our recent ones, had the same quality—that of vital exchange. As I listen to you, or even listening to myself, I hear again the themes which only under these auspicious circumstances are brought to light. The eternal themes because the problems are eternal. No, Edgar, make no mistake. We solve nothing. That is, no more than Socrates solved anything, or Goethe in talking with Eckermann. No more than Buddha in communing with himself under the “historic” banyan tree. We are solving the business of solving! Therein lies an illusion which is not only satisfying, but activating. I hear you saying often: “No, but freedom is not that at all—it is just the opposite, in fact!” And as you burst out with it I hear the cogs creaking and the chains slipping. I hear all my other friends in the past speaking with equal conviction, equal ecstasy, in the act of discovery. I believe that in these moments a very real movement, a forward push, is made. It is for these moments solely, whether as contributor or inspired listener, that I come back to the joys of conversation, which it seems to me is an art involving spontaneous creation, or else nothing. I see you often coming toward me out of the all-enveloping fog of the cloister, with the little notes you so frantically made in your room still clinging to the lapels of your coat. I see you coming toward me full of vital questions. “Look, I want to ask you something …” My dear Edgar, I know you want to ask me everything. I know that, for the time being, I am playing substitute for God. And if I am giving you back now a reflection of your enthusiasms it is nothing more than the little Bible which you have created in me through the act of revelation. So many times, in listening to you, I have had the feeling that the word neurosis is a very inadequate one to describe the struggle which you are waging with yourself. “With yourself”—there perhaps is the only link with the process which has been conveniently dubbed a malady. This same malady, looked at in another way, might also be considered a preparatory stage to a “higher” way of life. That is, as the very chemistry of the evolutionary process. In the course of this most interesting disease the conflict of “opposites” is played out to the last ditch. Everything presents itself to the mind in the form of dichotomy. This is not at all strange when one reflects that the awareness of “opposites” is but a means of bringing to consciousness the need for tension, polarity. “God is schizophrenic,” as you so aptly said, only because the mind, whetted to acute understanding by the continuous confrontation of oscillations, finally envisages a resolution of conflict in a necessitous freedom of action in which significance and expression are one. Which is madness, or, if you like, only schizophrenia. The word schizophrenia, to put it better, contains a minimum and a maximum of relation to the thing it defines. It is a counter to sound with … So where are we? Why at the “Bouquet d’Alesia,” at exactly that segment of the bar which you asked me to examine closely before answering definitively the question about “growth and decay.” In those eighty-five centimeters of the synthetic marble bar God took out his compass and drew a magic circle for us. “The bar is both alive and dead,” He said, in his usual jovial way. “Going toward death as functional concept; vitally alive as atomic compost. Alive-and-dead as bar to man and man to bar. Without extreme unction no birth, no death. Caught at 12:20 midnight in the stagnant flux of introspection … Pose another problem!” There was a button to be sewed on the sack coat, pockets to be mended, a fire to be made. The answer today before yesterday’s questions still caught in the typewriter roller. What to do? A lait chaud tout seule! [“Just a hot milk!” A more literal translation, which Miller plays on in the following two sentences, would be: “a hot milk all alone!”] Always, when cogitating and recogitating, a lait chaud. Always tout seule when answering the final question which is for tomorrow. What happened? I mean—today? Why tomorrow. A lait chaud! Being God imposes difficulties, godlike ones to be sure. For one thing there is neither Time nor Space. Then again there are no beds, no holes to be mended. Everything moves on casters on a waxed floor. There is no end to the floor—no wall, no exit. It seems to me we are now safely and snugly at home. No, not quite either. The missing blanket is a bit wrinkled at the foot of the missing bed. God is so snugly ensconced that he begins to have imaginary, and of course very very trifling but very very real aches and pains. He is like a sound and healthy man with an amputated leg just before the winter rains set in. He wants a real leg so that he will have an excuse for complaining. Now, as every scientist will tell you, the real leg, of course, is in the brain. That’s why it can hurt even when it’s missing. But God has no arms and legs, neither has he a brain, so the difficulty must lie elsewhere. It lies exactly, if my memory serves me right, a league and a half northeast of Neptune. The only real difficulty here, however, is in distinguishing north from south, and east from west. God knows that Himself, even though he is without a brain, and that, that alone, is the reason why He is troubled. “Donnez-moi de la monnaie, s’il vous plaît.” [Give me some change, please.] PLEH—not PLAY. Home with Expression and Significance … The lucidity of Keyserling is amazing. (The fire could be a little brighter, even if not warmer.) So is it with Krishnamurti. What was that again about Memory—the unlived residue? Or some such thing. (Wonder if that bugger Henry Miller is starting another volume of work.) No, often Henry Miller is already in bed planning the next day’s adventure. Henry has the faculty of knowing when to call it a day. He says ofttimes, just before falling off to sleep, “if I croak during the night it will be perfectly all right.” Dying peacefully with his boots on. That’s the way Henry takes it. You can do more than just so much each day, but on condition that you lose no time thinking about it. Just so I make a sort of mental and spiritual progression each time I meet you and we have it out. I learn by your mistakes and am fortified by your discouragement. You profit then by your friend’s misfortune? Oui, c’est ça! Je ne me blame pas. Content, très content, moi. Tout s’arrange dans la vie pour quiconque sait d’en profiter. Je ne me trompe jamais. Toujours droit et en avant. Avant et après—il n’y a que ça. Bien sure, il y a aussi des hypothèques—c’est à dire, des ennuis. Comme c’est beau, les ennuis! Comme la pluie septentrionale! La terre tourne. Et nous aussi. L’on tourne en place. Chaque minute compte. Chaque minute fait quelque chose irremédiable. C’est bon, ça. Tout juste. La vie se présente à nous en mille aspects. Chaque aspect a son valeur, son moment, pour ainsi dire. Faut en profiter. Il n’y a pas à plaindre. Faut jouir. Faut faire l’amour avec les sacrés moments qui sont vraiment sacrés. C’est tout, mon ami. Absolument tout. Pourtant, il y a quelque chose à ajouter … C’est pourquoi je ne m’arrète pas. Je continue … Je laisse la parole à Dieu. Il sait beau parler. Son métier, quoi! [You profit then by your friend’s misfortune? Yes, that’s right! I don’t hold it against myself. I’m content, very content. Everything in life works out for whoever knows how to enjoy it. I never make a mistake. Always straight and onward. Before and after—that’s all there is. Of course, there are also debts—that is, hassles. But what beautiful hassles! Like septentrional rain. The earth rotates. And so do we. We rotate in place. Each minute counts. Each minute is something irrevocable. It’s good that way. Just right. Life presents itself to us under a thousand aspects. Each aspect has its own value, its moment, so to speak. You have to enjoy it. There’s nothing to complain about. You need to have some bliss. You have to make love with sacred moments which are truly sacred. That’s all there is to it, my friend. That’s absolutely everything. And yet, there is something more to add … That’s why I don’t stop. I keep going … I give the floor to God. He knows how to speak beautifully. It’s his job!] “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The word was not a noun, or an adjective, or a preposition, or a conjunction (quel horreur!), but it was a Verb. You can see how God must be in the Verb—it’s so perfectly natural, so spontaneous and autochthonous. God does not come home each evening, after a hard day at the factory, and knock out words. Ah no! Pas lui! Il sait mieux faire que ça. [Ah no! Not him! He knows better than to do that.] You see, God doesn’t permit himself to get fatigued. He is awake twenty-four hours of the day, and each day he is becoming more and more wide awake. It’s his nature to be that way. Homer nods now and then—God never! Voila une petite différence très impressionante. Faut pas ignorer cela. [This little difference is very striking. Don’t overlook it.] Et comment ça se fait que le bon Dieu ne s’endort jamais? [And how is it that the good Lord never falls asleep?] Parce-qu’il se mefie de tous les mots qui ne sont pas des verbes. De preférence il se sert du “present participle,” comme on dit en anglais. Oui, il n’aime pas beaucoup le passé parfait, ni le subjonctif. Il se dit toujours = en anglais naturellement = “I am doing this … I am doing that … I am having a good time.” Oui, il rigole tout le temps. Il ne sait jamais ce que se sera demain, ni ce que s’est hier. Oui, un drole de type, lui. Il s’en fout toujours. [Because he is suspicious of all words that are not verbs. He prefers to use the present participle, as we say in English. Yes, he doesn’t really like the past perfect, nor the subjunctive. He’s always telling himself = in English, naturally = “I am doing this … I am doing that … I am having a good time.” Yes, he’s always joking. He never knows what it will be tomorrow, nor what it was yesterday. Yes, he’s a funny guy. He never gives a damn.] Et pourtant, il fait du progrès. Oui, c’est merveilleux ce qu’il a fait dans le temps—sans vouloir rien faire. L’on se demande parfois s’il l’a bien fait pour lui-même, ou pour nous. Moi je crois qu’il a fait tout pour lui-même. Je crois, moi, qu’il est tout à fait narciste. “L’univers, c’est moi!” il se dit toujours. Et il a raison. Parfaitement raison. Il s’y connait, ce type là. [And yet, he makes progress. Yes, it’s marvelous what he’s accomplished in time—without wanting to do anything. One sometimes wonders whether he has done it for himself, or for us. Personally, I think he’s done it all for himself. I think he’s a complete narcissist. “I am the universe!” he’s constantly telling himself. And he’s right. Perfectly right. The guy knows what he’s talking about.] Mon cher Edgar, tu te connais, toi aussi. Mais, permettez que je vous pose une toute petite question: est-ce que tu t’y connais aussi? C’est une constatation qu’on fait rarement. L’on ne se pose pas des questions pareilles. Mais on a tort. La santé morale n’est rien d’autre que les réponses automatiques à ces question intimes. Donc, pour mettre fin à cette partition francaise je me pose une question intime. “A quoi ça sert, toutes ces ruminations vagues et elliptiques?” [My dear Edgar, you, too, know yourself. But allow me to ask you one little question: do you also know what you’re talking about? It’s an observation that is rarely made. One doesn’t ask oneself such questions. But that’s a mistake. Moral health is nothing other than the automatic responses to these intimate questions. And so, to bring this French partition to a close, I ask myself an intimate question. “What’s the point of all these vague and elliptical ruminations?”] Je suppose que cela m’amuse. Voila! [I suppose it amuses me. Voilà!] Edited and translated by Michael Paduano. From The Book of Conversations with David Edgar, out from Sublunary Editions in May. Henry Miller (1891–1980) grew up in Brooklyn before eventually moving to Paris. It was there that he made the acquaintances that would bring about the publication of a remarkable run of books, including Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring. Those early books, Tropic of Cancer in particular, drew intense criticism for its sexual candor and explicitness, leading to a landmark obscenity trial when it was finally published in the United States by Grove in 1961. He eventually settled in Big Sur, California, where he continued to write and paint until his death in 1980. Michael Paduano is a Canadian scholar and archivist. He has contributed prefaces to new French-language editions of Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Éditions Bartillat, 2022) and Quiet Days in Clichy (Éditions Bartillat, forthcoming), and is editor of the volume Imperfect Itineraries: Literature and Literary Research in the Archives (Éditions de l’Université de Lorraine, forthcoming). He is currently working on an extensive archival-based study of Miller’s creative process. He lives in Paris. View the full article -
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GODS OF THE WYRDWOOD by RJ Barker (BOOK REVIEW)
You are running but you are not running fast enough. You are running. Running. RJ Barker is back with a new trilogy, The Forsaken Trilogy, and Gods of the Wyrdwood is our first foray into his brand new world. Some books are plot driven, some are character driven. Gods of the Wyrdwood is one of the few, if only books I’ve read, that I’d describe as being world driven. And what a world this is. Barker’s previous Tide Child trilogy imagined a world where ships had to be built from dragon bones as they couldn’t be built from wood. Here, we have a world with no metal, where instead wood is the main commodity. Weapons, armour, currency, is all derived from wood. It’s a world of imbalance, of many different sorts, but primarily it’s believed the world is tilted so that the north endures an eternal winter whereas the south enjoys the warmth and therefore prospers. It’s prophecised that one will rise who will tilt the world the other way, through the power of their god. Cahan du Nahere was taken as a child to be trained to fulfil this prophecy. However, many gods rise and fall in Crua. Cahan’s path is violently disrupted when the followers of a new god mercilessly begin to crush any who oppose them. We join Cahan’s story as he attempts to hide from his past. But a power as strong as his cannot stay hidden for long. There is only so much running you can do. To return to Barker’s worldbuilding then, Crua is dominated by hostile forest, and it is this which shapes and drives the fears and beliefs of the people. This is a richly imagined world, wonderfully unique. Water is derived from vines in the forest; a different type of vine enables you make things float. Creatures are tentacled with many eyes, or can fly propelled by sacks of air. Rootlings, small creatures of twigs and leaves who leave shrines dotted throughout the forest. It’s a thought experiment brought wholly to life, made utterly immersive by Barker’s signature prose. The further north you travel, the more dense and wild the wood becomes; people do not venture into the woods, for they do not return. Few indeed make it as far in as the Wyrdwood and see the cloudtrees – trees unfathomably large, mountainous in their scope. Barker is not one to stop and explain this new world to you, instead leaving you to experience it entirely through his characters; which is why, I believe, his stories are so successfully immersive. I feel like I’ve lived this world alongside Cahan, like I’ve travelled through these woods with him and the monk Udinny (my favourite character!). There is a story in here, despite my focus on the imaginative world. Barker’s protagonist is a complex creature living in a constant stasis of fighting against his inner nature and running from the person he was created to be. As Barker discusses in his acknowledgements, this is very much a story exploring the nature of what happens when you can’t run anymore. When you accept who and what you are. In Udinny, we have someone who has spent her time running from her past, and has now accepted the path her god steers her down. She accepts the obstacles before her knowing it is her fate to do so. In Venn, we have someone firm in their knowledge of what they are not, despite the demands of their family and society. Between these two influences, Cahan finds a way back into society, and a way in which he can take his life forward without having to run. Gods of the Wyrdwood is a lot darker than I was anticipating. There is violence, battle, murder. There are elements of Venn and Cahan’s that are bleak. Barker does not shy away from demonstrating the cruelty of this world. And yet there is love and support here, the importance of acceptance and inclusion. What I particularly loved was the absence of romantic love from this story; these characters are important to each other for reasons other than romance and I found that refreshing to read. Friendships and found family are just as motivating and driving, just as strong a bond. Barker has taken me on a dark and fractious journey. Gods of the Wyrdwood is an arresting story with deep undercurrents weaving through a world you will not have experienced before. There’s is still so much more left to explore in this world, and I cannot wait to return. Gods of the Wyrdwood is due for release 29th June 2023 from Orbit Books. You can pre-order your copy HERE ARC provided by Nazia at Orbit in exchange for an honest review. All quotes taken from advance proof copy and may be subject to change. Thank you so much for the copy! The post GODS OF THE WYRDWOOD by RJ Barker (BOOK REVIEW) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article -
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WATCHMEN by Alan Moore and David Gibbons (BOOK REVIEW)
This Hugo Award-winning graphic novel chronicles the fall from grace of a group of super-heroes plagued by all-too-human failings. Along the way, the concept of the super-hero is dissected as the heroes are stalked by an unknown assassin. One of the most influential graphic novels of all time and a perennial best-seller, Watchmen has been studied on college campuses across the nation and is considered a gateway title, leading readers to other graphic novels such as V for Vendetta, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and The Sandman series. I’m still fairly new to the graphic novel format but Watchmen was a recommendation by my son in law who kindly loaned me his copy. The book is a 1987 omnibus edition of 12 DC comic books that came out monthly in 1986-7 (in a similar way to Dickens novels all having been first published as serialisations). So I am coming somewhat late to the party of enjoying this remarkable example of the graphic novel genre. The graphic story telling form is a different reading experience. With conventional text I am used to seeing (often fragmentary) images in my head as I self-illustrate the narrative. It is one example of the way that we immerse ourselves and actively respond to the text. However, while the printed word may have been the medium through which individuals could consume stories for centuries, there has been something of a sensory explosion in the last hundred years. Films, audio books, multimedia delivery and even epistolary detective mysteries, are all giving us new ways to experience stories. I do wonder how those different modes of access affect our responses to the stories. For example, film watching is a more passive experience than book reading, with the director entirely controlling what we see and hear. In a similar way the images in a graphic novel take some of the proactive independence away from the reader and that might explain why it took me a little while to settle into the story of Watchmen. However, once past the first couple of chapters I found the intriguing characters and imaginative setting had quite captured my imagination and I was becoming more comfortable around the mix of tangled storylines in panelled images with epistolary or archival interludes separating the chapters. The narrative built to a very pleasing twisting conclusion. The main thread of the story focuses on a few months in the fall (Autumn!) of 1985 in an alternative version of contemporary America. However, through flashbacks and more text-based interludes we delve into the past of all the characters and the book gives a convincing sense of a coherent whole. It can be a little confusing, as we meet characters before we get their backstories – particularly when the blue guy turns up – but the immersive approach works well and I was happy to be swept along by it. There is even a bonus zombie pirate tale that gets interleaved with the main narrative, as though the writers had a story searching for a home, or perhaps just wanted to amuse us and themselves in a meta-fictional way by inserting a graphic story within a graphic story. The eponymous Watchmen (and watchwomen) are a group of mostly retired “costumed heroes” who, by 1985, are past their physical and legal prime. Most fall into what you might think of as the Batman category. By that I mean ordinary mortal humans enhanced – through various permutations of physical training, technological gadgetry, martial prowess, and superior intellect – to facilitate their masked crime fighting spree. One – the blue skinned Jon, or Dr Manhattan – is more in the Superman league, or even supraman, in that his powers do appear pretty boundless. The various backstories chart the arc of this cluster of heroes from pre-war depression era vigilantes through two generations as various newcomers join their ranks, up until their legal disbanding with a 1977 act outlawing their encroachment on the proper authority and jurisdiction of the police. So, by the present time of the story, the Watchmen are largely marginalised and forgotten until one of them is murdered – and in essence the story is a murder mystery as we follow one defiantly unretired Watchman, Rorschah as he investigates the death. The story takes place against a backdrop of rising tension between East and West, reflecting what was then the pre-Glasnost era with nuclear war being the most feared and relevant form of planetary Armageddon. The backdrop and the foreground narratives merge pleasingly in the final denouement. The world is a sort of a parallel universe, the conceit that allows the writers to plant world defining events in the familiarity of an utterly contemporary setting. The story is not confined to a fictional Gotham City but sprawls across the real world from Antarctica to New York with a brief sojourn on Mars. In this distorted version of the real world an aged white-haired Nixon is still President and it appears that Dennis Healey has become the UK prime-minister. The Watchman are a varied bunch, one has to warm to Rorschah, the underdog and street warrior with a stubborn conscience, while Dan the heir to NiteOwl’s mantle is an endearing technocrat in something of a mid-life crisis. The Comedian is wonderfully ironic since he is the least funny and most arrogantly repugnant of the Watchmen. Jon the blue skinned supraman is wonderfully confined by the unlimited nature of his own powers, foresight becomes a curse when it only means seeing the inevitable without the possibility of avoiding it. Possibly showing its era, the main female lead – Laurie who inherited the silk spectre title from her mother and has become the lover of Jon – appears to be a sounding board for the plots and struggles of the male characters, rather than having much agency in her own right. Both the writing and the artistry are full of flashes of humour – such as when one character is effortlessly depicted in successive panels holding off the assault of another, while simultaneously having a conversation with a third – a nice separation of action and dialogue that the form lends itself too. The dialogue too has its laugh out loud moments and the combination of image and text tempts one into a re-read with the sense that there are more secrets and Easter eggs to be unearthed than in a conventional novel. As with many beloved books and series of the past, there are aspects of the story – like the superannuated heroic watchmen themselves – which show their age. The handling of issues like rape and homosexuality feel authentic to the era but perhaps a little dated to modern eyes. That discrepancy highlights the constant evolution of social attitudes. Each era can fall so easily into the fallacy of thinking that how it is now is how it has always been – that contemporary standards and expectations are somehow eternal and immutable. The truth is that society, like the individuals within it, is a constantly growing and developing organism. While we feel we are somehow the same person we were as a young adult we are (thankfully) in many ways very much different and – no matter how old we might be – will go on learning, growing and changing. The personal and collective trajectory of the Watchmen nicely illustrate this point – they have been aged and changed by their experiences. There are themes that Watchmen still speaks to – around the tribal nature of nationalism where we seek always to divide a people into us and them (or as they say here in Belfast Us’uns and them’uns). The plot pivots around the fact that ultimately it might need an external threat (like the Alien invasion of Independence Day) to recognise our common humanity and appreciate that we are all really us’uns. There is then the question of how far achieving that epiphanaic end might justify the means. What sacrifices are necessary and appropriate to end all sacrifice. Watchmen’s version manages to be a far darker one than Aslan on the stone table. Those politics of division have a certain resonance today, though the lines appear to be being drawn within rather than between nations, with political polarisation and demonisation of the woke left. It’s telling how far that era of communist-capitalist division continues to haunt our world. As Oreskes and Conway highlight in Merchants of Doubt (2010), there has been a migration of people behind the political, economic and scientific consensus that opposed communism into one that demonises and opposes climate change action. Capitalism in the absence of old external enemies that helped forge a collective sense of unity is finding internal enemies and helping to polarise our societies. They smear attempts to address the climate crisis with the old messages that action will impoverish, enslave and destroy western civilisation. There was a dreadful headline I saw recently – Net Zero is a Trojan Horse for the destruction of Western Society (Heath, 2023). The fear and hate that form the backdrop to Watchmen have been repurposed in our times. One wonders what externally driven catastrophe might be needed to knock sense into the movers and shakers of this world. Where Watchmen envisages one terrible individual visionary, Jon Raymond in Denial (2022) foresaw a more ground level raising of awareness into collection action in the Upheavals of 2030. Either way we need to do something soon, for while the fall of Berlin Wall might mean we have substantially dodged the nuclear bullet that haunts the pages of Watchmen, Climate change is a juggernaut less easily evaded. References Heath, A. (2023, March 29). Net Zero is a Trojan Horse for the total destruction of western society. Retrieved from www.telegraph.co.uk: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/29/net-zero-trojan-horse-total-destruction-western-society/ Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. London: Bloomsbury Press. Raymond, J. (2022). Denial. New York: Simon & Schuster. The post WATCHMEN by Alan Moore and David Gibbons (BOOK REVIEW) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article -
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The Birth (and the Evolution) of Ideas
The world is a marvelous and mysterious place. It’s also fairly un-understandable, at least to me. String theory in physics is well beyond my understanding. I am equally baffled by the internet, by NFTs, by the resurgence of mom jeans and mullets. Oh, and what about the artistry of arachnids? I don’t understand how that level of precision is possible, or, how those filaments can be so sticky for a fly but not for a spider. I also spend considerable time wondering about the human brain, how it works, how it thinks, how it makes so many millions of body-related things happen. Not that the gallbladder or ear bones aren’t marvelous. But those body parts specialize in, basically, a single job. The brain is the renaissance man of the organ world: our brain tells our legs how to walk and our eyelids to blink. It tells us when to laugh because something’s funny or sleep when we are sleepy. It creates, sorts, and stores memories–some but not all. It makes us fall in love (or not). It allows someone (not me) to pole vault. It thinks. It dreams. It wonders. And for us writers, our brains allow us to create stories, our own carefully-constructed filaments of silky sticky stuff. My brain and I also spend a lot of time thinking about creativity, especially when it comes to storytelling. How does a brain generate an idea? And specifically how do we writers come up with an idea for a story? A few weeks back, an email landed in my inbox advertising a webinar called “Where do ideas come from?” and as I was on spring break and as I needed some help with the ideas in my pesky, crazy-making WIP, I hopped on the Zoom call and was delighted by what Joyce Hesselberth, writer and illustrator and all-around creative soul, had to say about ideas. The seminar didn’t help me understand the neuroscience of ideas or why I wonder about arachnid architecture, but it most certainly got me thinking about how I can lubricate the idea-making portion of my brain squiggles, about how I can put myself in situations where, somehow, my cerebral soil will yield the most ideas. Here’s what I came up with (you’ll get to share too): Notice. When I take my dog on a walk, I bring my phone along so I can listen to a book or call a pal, or at the very least, track my steps. But the other day, I forgot my phone, and while I considered going back (why do I care about tracking steps?) I proceeded to walk, phoneless. And boy, did I notice! The fragrance of some species of some springtime flowering bush. The symmetry of leaves. A bee’s bumbling tenacity: Do bees see all colors and smell all fragrances? Is it the stinger that gives bees such a bad rap, or is it their classification of “insect”? Do female worker bees feel any bitterness toward or envy of the queen? I noticed a school bus parked in someone’s driveway: Where does one buy a school bus? And why? Would I like to own a school bus? I think I would like to live in a school bus … but why? Why on earth did I just think it would be fun to live in a school bus? I noticed a snail, gooeying up the sidewalk with stoic, silent, steadfast, slowness: Where was she going? What was her goal? Do snails feel stress? Does she like her whorled shell or does she wish she had her cousin’s sleeker, more aerodynamic whorls? Questions bubble up when we notice. Eavesdrop. I bet you already do this. My husband has learned to understand that, when we are working at a coffee shop or dining out, it’s impossible for me to ignore the conversations of others. “What did you figure out?” he will ask. He knows I have fabricated an entire story based on the snippets of conversation I have extracted. “I don’t know exactly,” I say, “but when is she going to learn to stand up for herself? How can she be so unaware of how she’s being treated? Has she always been such a doormat?” Questions bubble up when we eavesdrop. Consort. If ever I am feeling creatively constipated, I switch genres and pick up a book of poetry, usually Pablo Neruda or Wislawa Szymborska. This gives me a break from my long-winded narrative so I can instead look at how, in a poem, ideas and questions are distilled and condensed into stanzas where no word or bit of punctuation is frivolous. Or I look at maps … or books of maps. My favorite: You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. a collection of maps and “charts of places you are not expected to find, taking you on a voyage of the mind … a breathtaking view of worlds, both real and imaginary.” Maps remind me to notice what others notice about the geography of, yes, land masses, but also how others map fictional worlds of, for example, The Wizard of Oz. Or the lines on our palms. Or the journey (including both intentional and unintentional detours) of a marriage. Does the landscape of our palm really reveal something about our personality or our future? Can matrimony be mapped, and what is the map of my own marriage? Does the Wicked Witch of the West live in a distant, imaginary realm, or does she reside, clad in striped stockings, just down the street? Questions bubble up when we explore different genres. Follow. Ideas happen when we follow the question. When we pay attention to an itch. When we put ourselves in unfamiliar places. When we steal and reconfigure. When we read other writers’ literature, listen to others’ music, study others’ art. Once we start paying attention to the bubbling questions, we can follow those unanswered (or unanswerable) questions, and occasionally, those questions will dump us right into a story. Do all stories start with an idea-seed that comes in the form of a question? Probably not all stories. But so far, mine sure do. If you’re curious about creativity, this is a beautiful article from The Smithsonian that I stumbled upon and loved, partly because it validates the idea that all ideas “have a genealogy” and that “prior art propels the creative process.” It also taught me just a little bit about sea squirts, creatures that, for most of their life, live a remarkably uncurious, uncreative existence … yet are incredibly beautiful, unique works of art. Your turn: What don’t you understand about the world? Where and when is your brain’s idea factory most productive? What is the idea, in the form of a question, that has blossomed into a story? Would you like to own a school bus? Thank you, as always, for reading and for sharing! [url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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Peter Robinson, Remembered
On October 4, 2022, legendary author Peter Robinson, creator of the long-running Inspector Banks series, passed away after a brief illness. Beginning with Gallows View in 1987, Robinson delivered a novel in the series, or short story collection, almost every year until his death. He also managed to find the time to write three stand-alones. All told, he completed 34 books, 31 of them either Inspector Banks novels or related short story collections. His new, posthumously published Banks novel, Standing in the Shadows is now available. And while all of Robinson’s Banks stories can be read out of order, this book also completes the “Zelda” trilogy, and represents some of Robinson’s darkest work. Sheila Halladay, Peter’s wife, to whom he dedicated almost every novel, graciously agreed to an interview and gives his readers wonderful insight into his approach to his craft, his love of all kinds of music and literature and an overall picture of an exceedingly talented and warm human being. * “Peter had a very literary mind,” says Halladay, “after all he did have a PhD in English literature, so I think that he read not only for pleasure but would be analytical and try to learn from the styles of other authors. Once he started writing his own manuscript, he would stop reading crime fiction, because he was wary of getting into the unconscious habit of imitating other writers…He was constantly casting about for ideas for a book. Because he had such a wide range of interests, the basis of the plot could come from anything that piqued his interests. Peter always carried a notebook and was constantly making notes. I would often find scratching on bits of paper of ideas, a phrase of a description, or a thought for a character, strewn around the house.” With Standing in the Shadows, Robinson returned to one of his favorite stylistic techniques, the use of a first-person narrative and Banks written in the third. “He liked experimenting with the concept of two stories, in different time periods with different characters, that over the course converges into one narrative.” In Standing in the Shadows, the historical aspect of the plot is set in 1980 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, a time and place of both radical students and the terror of the Yorkshire Ripper. The plot is complex although never convoluted as it moves back and forth through the decades. Beginning in 1980, a student named Nick has been dumped by his strident activist girlfriend Alice for a flashier sophisticated man, Mark. When Alice turns up dead in a local park, Nick is suspected – is he maybe even the Ripper? Meanwhile, Mark vanishes at the same time. Fast forward to 2019. Banks and his team are called to investigate a skeleton – a very deteriorated one — found by a group of archeologists excavating a lonesome plot of land attached to a nearby field where a shopping center is to be built. How Robinson adroitly and convincingly ties these two deaths together is yet another example of his gifts for plotting amid diverse time periods and a disparate set of suspects and supporting cast. Halladay on how he put it all together: “While Peter was not a “plotter” in the sense of working out every scene in advance on cue cards or post-it notes, he did a lot of thinking about the book and wouldn’t start writing until he had a general idea of the overarching plot of the book. Because he didn’t write detailed outlines before he started writing and never knew exactly where the plot was going. As he was writing, he continuously researched details that were specifically needed to advance the plot. For, example he might need to know the differences in dental practice between the UK and North America, or research of different types of guns, or perhaps blood spray patterns or buttons on uniforms from World War II. “He used to say that the details of police procedure should not get in the way of a good plot,” notes Halladay. “So latterly he would write a scene first and then check with the experts to see if it could have happened that way. For example, one time he was told that a person of Banks’ rank would probably not head up a national investigation. Not a problem, Banks’ supervisor became incapacitated, and Banks got a promotion. “Peter was a very disciplined and committed writer and he always met his deadlines. Once Peter started on a manuscript, he was pretty steady. While he was flexible and didn’t commit to a strict schedule, he would generally concentrate on writing for three to four hours in the morning. I was very lucky that he did not wake up in the middle of the night to frantically write. He would tease that if the writing was going well in the morning, he would go back to it in the afternoon and if it was not going well, he would go to the pub. “As Peter was heading towards writing the conclusion of the book, his pace of writing would pick up. Because he did not plot out the books in advance, he had to keep all of the strands of the main plot, secondary stories etc. in his head. It was a like giant puzzle that he had to put together. The actual murderer was not particularly important to Peter and he would usually be over half way through the manuscript when he would announce that he knew ‘who did it’. He always found it amusing when people would tell him the page when they knew who the murderer was, and he would tell them that he didn’t know until much later.” A sense of place pervades all of Robinson’s Inspector Banks novels, and the primary setting is Yorkshire. In Standing in the Shadows, Banks goes for the first time to the landscape where the skeletal corpse is discovered, and is struck by the trees on the property. “They were odd-looking trees, not majestic and wide spreading, but squat, black, knotty and gnarled, with thick trunks and branches twisted into strange shape, like headless torsos or Prometheus trying to break free from his chains. Most still had a few leaves clinging to their branches and twigs. Banks thought they seemed creepy in the louring twilight and half expected one of them to start moving like the Ents in Lord of the Rings.” Halladay and Robinson traveled extensively over their marriage. “While Eastvale (the village setting of the stories) and the surrounding areas were clearly fictional, they were in fact based on actual places. When he first showed me around the Dales he would point out the spot where the body was discovered in a Dedicated Man or The Hanging Valley. We went to Thrushcross to see a dried-up reservoir and that became the basis for In a Dry Season. Or a walk around the abandoned racecourse north Richmond, led us into a remote dale that formed the setting for Before the Poison.” In terms of the violence in the stories, for the most part, Halladay says. it “…usually involved finding the body in a specific place. Most of the violence in Peter’s books was offstage, and while he would rarely actively describe violent acts he would often start books by vividly describing the gruesome effects of violent acts on the victim. He often said that one of the most interesting characters in his crime fiction was the one who wasn’t actively there – the dead victim. What was it in their past that led to someone wanting to kill them?” But in the previous two, Many Rivers to Cross and Not Dark Yet, the other key protagonist, Zelda, a previously sex-trafficked woman who lived with a friend of Banks’, seeks revenge on the abusers from her youth. In Not Dark Yet she does not mess around during an oral rape attempt by a man armed with a knife: “She closed her eyes, felt the cold steel on her skin, felt his hand press against the back of her neck, pulling her forward. ‘Open your mouth’. Zelda opened her mouth and felt him enter her. She almost gagged but managed to stop herself. Instead, she offered a prayer to the God she didn’t believe in and bit down as hard as she could.” Zelda mixes it up brutally as well in Many Rivers to Cross, when she drugs a captor and finishes him off with a knife. It’s as grim and grisly as Robinson gets. Halladay suggests that perhaps this almost unyielding somberness in the final three books may have come from coping with the pandemic. “While he started the trilogy prior to the pandemic, he continued writing throughout the time of social isolation. As you pointed out, the Zelda books were quite “dark”. While some writers commented that they got a lot of writing done during this time, Peter personally had difficulty concentrating on writing. He wasn’t by any means clinically depressed, but he often felt down, particularly when he thought of the state of world politics. But he got over it and I think that you will find when you read his last book, Standing in the Shadows, that Peter and his character Banks (although he was always quick to point out that they were not the same people), reached some sort of state of contentment.” A particular joy of the series for many readers is Robinson’s use of a very wide range of music that Banks listens to. From obscure folksingers to punk bands to classical composers, opera—Robinson demonstrates a depth of knowledge encompassing decades, all effortlessly incorporated into the novels. On Robinson’s website, readers can access “playlists” from several of the novels. Additionally, several of the titles in the series are from well-known songs: Piece of My Heart, Many Rivers to Cross, Bad Boy, Friend of the Devil. “Music was always a big part of Peter’s life,” acknowledges Halladay. “He was lucky to have been a student at the University of Leeds during the heady 70s and saw popular groups like The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and Wings, as well as more traditional music like Lindisfarne and Fairport Convention. He would brag about actually being at the original Who, Live at Leeds concert at the Refectory of the University in 1970. “He always felt that the music was an integral part of his books and enhanced the atmosphere. Many people told him that his playlists were remarkable, and they were often introduced to new artist merely by reading his books. Even though he included a lot of musical references in the books he was very casual about it. A few days before Peter died, I heard music playing when I went into his into his room in the ICU. When I asked him what it was he said ‘Chopin. My nurse is Polish and I want to get on her good side.’ He always kept his sense of humour.” His greatest love was probably The Grateful Dead. During the pandemic he discovered a number of their concerts were available on YouTube and I would often find him listening in awe to Jerry Garcia riffs. What a long strange trip it’s been…” View the full article -
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Flea Market Cons and Other Slippery Shenanigans
It’s summer in New England. The sun is just peeking over the mountains, but cars and trucks are already rolling into the parking lot of the local flea market. The vendors rush to unpack and setup. The first customers hurry down rows of tables and tents, hoping to spot a rare collectable or antique at a low price before other buyers arrive. Many of these customers are antique dealers, others are collectors, some are local homeowners or tourists. Before the morning is done, any or all of them may purchase something they’ll later regret. My name is Trish Esden. I’m the author of the Scandal Mountain Antiques Mystery series and a full-time antique dealer, a profession I’ve been involved with since my teens. I also spend a great deal of time at country flea markets. And, though I should know better, I have and still occasionally fall for flea market ploys. What sort of tricks am I talking about? The most common is what I call the ‘good story’. Like mystery authors, flea market vendors know the power of backstory. Sometimes the origin story they provide about a collectable or antique is total fiction. Sometimes it might be an embellished version of the truth. A rusty cast iron skillet becomes a lot more appealing when it was discovered in the summer kitchen of a great-grandmother’s Adirondack camp that was built in the 1890s. Notice, the seller didn’t say the skillet was made in the 1890s. It came out of a camp that was built around that time. The pan might well only be five years old and have become rusty from spending the winter outdoors, but those things aren’t mentioned. In this case, a manufacturer’s mark on the bottom of the pan, or its weight and construction might solve the age question. “How old is it?” a potential customer might ask. “I don’t know much about cast iron,” the flea market vendor could respond. Perhaps the vendor truly doesn’t know the answer or maybe they’re withholding the truth. Either way, the customer has essentially been told ‘buyer beware’. Of course, if the buyer doesn’t care about the skillet’s age or antique value, then there is no reason not to buy it as long as the price is the same or less than what it’s available for elsewhere—such as at Walmart or on Amazon. There is a vendor at one of my favorite flea markets who deals in unusual pieces. However, every time I express an interest in something he tells the same origin story. The story involves his world-traveling son and a host of other specific details. It’s not a bad tale to add appeal to an object, except it becomes unbelievable when I hear the same story about every item in his booth, week after week. The moral is: don’t base a purchase or an item’s value on the story a vendor tells. Base it on your own experience, research, and personal examination of the piece. The next category of flea market shenanigans is the ‘sneaky tricks and alterations’. There are lots of ways to make something appear older than it is, like in the case of the rusted skillet. Another simple trick is to remove a mass produced item from its original packaging and present it as if it is used, or better yet antique. Bejeweled hair clips purchased on Amazon can be mistaken for Victorian hair pins when tossed into an old box or beat-up jewelry chest. Unscrupulous vendors are known to make glassware look old by scuffing the bottom of a piece against gravel to create scratches that resemble natural wear. “This piece is very old,” the vendor says. “Look at how worn and scratched the bottom is.” Similarly, modern ‘made in China’ stickers are easily removed. Paint can also be artificially worn and crackled. It’s one thing to buy a distressed piece of furniture knowing that’s what you’re getting. It’s quite another to pay antique value only to discover you’ve been misled. Flea markets are by nature home to used items. Pieces that are honestly old, may also be damaged. Nicks, chips, cracks, repairs…damage of all sorts won’t necessarily be pointed out or mentioned by the vendor and can be easily overlooked if a buyer rushes instead of thoroughly examining a piece. Don’t feel pressured into instantly buying something. Look it over carefully and in good light. Chips can be disguised by coloring them with paint or markers. Foul smells—yes, don’t forget smell—can make a piece valueless. That pretty antique quilt or seemingly clean stack of linens, once put into your car may reveal themselves to be disgustingly stinky. And I’ll guarantee you, a majority of vendors will be glad to get them off their hands and not as willing to mention the stench ahead of time—or they’ll lie and say something like, “A quick squirt of Febreze or airing out will easily get rid of that smell.” The last category I’m going to bring up is ‘preconceived ideas’. Flea market vendors come in all shapes, sizes, age groups, and educational backgrounds. They are also generally very astute. They’re more than happy to let you believe you’re outsmarting them while they’re busy pulling the wool over your eyes. Don’t act like a know-it-all. It’s only asking for trouble. I read an article recently that said older flea market vendors are less likely to be active on the internet. Therefore, they are less likely to be aware of current antique and collectable values, and easier for buyers to outsmart. This is total malarky. Yes, there are flea market dealers who prefer to sell in person and for cash and don’t pay any attention to online values. But age isn’t a way to judge this. It also doesn’t mean the vendor isn’t well informed. In conclusion, there are tons of wonderful deals and items to be discovered at flea markets. Just don’t rush, don’t believe what you’re being told, and if that little voice inside you is whispering a deal is too good to be true, it probably is. If you enjoy novels featuring small time cons and shenanigans like the ones you can run across at flea markets, there are many books to choose from, classics and recent releases. In my Scandal Mountain Antiques Mystery series, the main character not only buys at flea markets, she’s also been a flea market vendor and is very familiar with tricks of the trade. The Lovejoy Mystery series by Jonathan Gash and the associated TV show are in some ways outdated and may make some modern readers cringe. However, they are ripe with tricks and devious small time antique related swindles. Jane K. Cleland’s Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries touch on a variety of things buyers need to watch out for. Priceless by Robert K. Wittman is nonfiction about the FBI Art Crime Team. It also includes tidbits which might open a person’s eyes to lesser swindles. TV shows such as Flea Market Flip, Antiques Roadshow, and Pawn Stars on occasion show ways people can be conned. *** View the full article -
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What Makes Seattle Such a Good Setting for Thrillers?
I’m writing my seventh thriller, and six of them have been set in Seattle. What is it about Seattle, and the Seattle area, that makes it such a compelling place, such an attractive place to write thrillers? Why do I always come back to Seattle when I could write about New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago or Paris, other places where I have lived? For me, Seattle is a hidden jewel, an original, never-ending cache of unexpected surprises. I love writing about Seattle’s eccentricities, its quirks, its unique culture, its vibrant street life, the kids who are trying to create a place for themselves, the high school children in the young Shakespeare workshop producing his plays outside in public places, like a market, all summer long, the fresh fish vendors throwing fish for sale in the Pike Place Market, the gum wall – the long brick wall covered in used chewing gum, the outrageous wondrous things that so many people do, without calling attention to it. It’s a place where people come to reinvent themselves, and if you watch carefully, they actually do it. * There’s a wonderful 1989 movie, THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS, made in Seattle, that makes my point. In this movie The Baker brothers, Jeff and Beau Bridges, work together playing piano duets at middle level Seattle hotels, bars and so on. They’re quintessential Seattle characters, drifting, never talking too much about where they are or where they want to go. They’re having trouble getting work, and they decide to bring on a singer. They rent a small cluttered, nondescript space, a piano and place an ad. People start to come and none of them are right. When they’ve finished, unsuccessful, the brothers start to pack up. A woman comes in, unrecognizable, unfashionably dressed, no representative, no introduction, no description of her, her experience and so on. When they ask if she’s ever performed, the answer is no. Her occupation, she’s a call girl for an escort service. She’s chewing a large piece of bubble gum. Reluctantly, the brothers say they’ll hear her sing. She asks them to play More than you know, puts down the bubble gum, starts, then stops, asks the pianist, Jeff Bridges, to start again, slower. He begins again, then slowly, in small increments—it’s magical. This woman, Michelle Pfeiffer, is simply a marvelous singer, and the adventure begins. This is a very Seattle, unexpected surprise. This woman is reinventing herself, by herself, with no help, no agent, no group of admirers, fans, or friends, and in that instance, she becomes someone else. This Seattle characteristic, people reinventing themselves – and others leaving them alone, accepting their new identities – has played an important role in how I develop my characters, especially the villains, the antagonists, in all of my books. In Inside Passage, the first book in the Corey Logan Trilogy, Nick Season, the frontrunner for state Attorney General is the same man who framed Corey and sent her to prison by threatening her young son’s life. Nick is a monster, a pathological liar, a killer, a gigolo, and a razor smart, ruthless psychopath. This complicated, frightening thriller was more plausible in Seattle. Primarily, because Nick Season was able to reinvent himself, present himself convincingly as an exciting, even inspiring, candidate for State Attorney General and no one, except Corey, ever suspected, who he really was. In Danger in Plain Sight, the monstrous couple, the devil incarnate, our villians, Avi and Christy Ben Meyer, are masquerading as part of Seattle’s elite. These people are so confident in their elite status, that they regularly dine at The Bronze Pig, our heroine’s restaurant. Again, people are accepting their new identities, and they’re not even suspected of the first crime in the book – when Callie’s ex-husband is struck by a truck in front of her restaurant and blown through the front window of the The Bronze Pig. The ability to create plausible unsuspected criminals is only a piece of the pleasure of writing in Seattle. Writing in Seattle, one of the great delights is simply using the many varied landscapes in and around the city, as well as capturing the unique appearance of Seattlites. It’s a place where the wilderness is close by, and people know how to use it, where there are wonderful, unexpected restaurants, where you can fly fish all day floating the Yakima after driving over the mountains, then be at a fine splendidly run restaurant for a late dinner at Bell Town. People also look varied, unpredictable, and unique. They don’t dress like LA or NYC or anyplace else, and it’s not uncommon for people to ignore contemporary fashion and create their own. The unique Seattle culture makes it possible, easier, to write, to invent unexpected relationships. In the Corey Logan trilogy, Corey falls in love with Abe Stein, the psychiatrist who’s evaluating her to get her son back. Two more different people would be hard to imagine. Something happens between them, effortlessly. It’s as if they are able to connect, to understand each other, straightaway, without talking about it. When it happens, it’s just done, it’s never doubted or second guessed. They see it, they reach for it, and they evolve right into it. It was a treat to write. In Danger in Plain Sight, Callie discovers that her bartender, Cash Logan, is smuggling erotic ivory carvings, netsuke, into her restaurant. Callie pitches a fit, has him arrested, then famously says, “When you get out of jail, don’t ever come back here.” The challenge in this entire book is to make these absolutely incompatible people fall in love. What helps make this happen is that in their different ways, they’re both Seattleites. They’re not afraid of unconventional feelings, of doing something totally unexpected, out of character, outside of their supposed comfort zone. As they change, they’re each comfortable with who they are, as unconventional as that might be. Again, this is a very Seattle type of relationship. Unexpected, no one chasing after it, neither of them aware of what’s happening until after it happens. And when it happens, it’s done, unshakeable, forever. Seattle’s unique people and culture have, without me always being aware of it, helped me evolve as a writer. When I first began writing my book, Inside passage, I spent time with a young Seattle woman, who’d spent summers in Alaska, fishing commercially for salmon. She taught me about the long summer days, the potentially harsh weather conditions, the demanding life on a boat and so on. In doing so, she helped me understand, create, and finally write Corey Logan, an archetypal Seattle woman. * Two of my novels brought me to the inner-connected worlds of private school kids and the runaways who roam Seattle streets. I talked with Youth Care and spent time at their Orion Center learning about homeless teenagers. This is an ongoing issue in Seattle, and the growing numbers of homeless people make it a very real problem. It’s not a good situation, but it’s possible to learn about it, to think about its complexity as it evolves. In Seattle, it’s all there to see, good and bad, and there are lots of concerned people who will talk with you about it. The city is not so big and not so politically set up that all you get is a dogmatic point of view. For me, it’s been a good place to explore things that aren’t working and small enough that you have a chance to talk with influencers. In my experience, Seattleites genuinely care about their city, what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to change. They often disagree and certainly they can be opinionated. At the end of the day though, it’s a great place to think about, to examine and finally to write about things I care about. *** View the full article -
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Something to Sing About: Why Cop Rock Fails
“The height of the Bush era was a weird, giddy time.” -Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Milli Vanilli’s Girl You Know It’s True (1989) Cop Rock (ABC, 1990) was a real television show that existed. It was a police procedural with musical numbers. The plot of the show chugged progressively from episode to episode like any police procedural. The songs in the show occurred with clockwork regularity, as in any musical. The characters—police officers, suspects, lawyers, bureaucrats—resembled characters in fraternally related shows like Law & Order, except that they sometimes burst into song. I promise this is true. I first learned of Cop Rock from a video posted almost as an afterthought by a friend on Facebook. When I watched the video—it was “Let’s Be Careful Out There” from episode seven—I went through a series of reactions. Is this a fan parody of Hill Street Blues? Is this an elaborate SNL sketch? I denied and disbelieved, and only gradually, with the help of Wikipedia, came to accept that the show existed. I am explaining this because you may be feeling something similar. Before you read any analysis of Cop Rock, you must believe that it aired, which is a process, not a light switch. Even when watching the show, its ridiculousness does not wane, but simply rolls over itself, like waves on the shore. By the end of the final episode, a viewer may have succumbed to a new reality in which Cop Rock is normal, but it’s a little like accepting cult conditions: it only occurs with immersion and a fatally open mind. Here are some other things to know about Cop Rock before we truly begin: The show ran for eleven episodes before cancellation. Its creator, Steven Bochco, had previously created Hill Street Blues (1981), A. Law (1986), and Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989). All of these shows were memorable and successful, although very differently so. Blues is easily one of the most influential television shows ever made. Another hour-long musical TV show, Hull High, also debuted in 1990. It ran for nine episodes. Across the eleven episodes, the cast sings 54 songs. All of the songs were recorded live, not dubbed and lip-synced. Twin Peaks also debuted in 1990. So did Beverly Hills, 90210. So, in fact, did Law & Order, which certainly would not exist, in any of its permutations, without Hill Street Blues. Genre Although Cop Rock is bad for apparent reasons—its musical numbers are exceptionally undistinguished, its dramatic tension is consistently undermined, its plotlines are slow and generic, its characters are either paper-flat or totally bizarre, and its tone never coheres for longer than half a scene—it’s also bad for fundamental, genre-based reasons. Any lesson from Cop Rock is a lesson about genre, and how genres work, together and apart. Police procedurals are a specific genre of television, one largely codified by Bochco’s own Hill Street Blues.[1] The police procedural (cop show) has a teeny-tiny wheelhouse with infinite items inside. Although networks can make a ton of different shows from the formula, the formula itself is quite restricted, limited to what can fit inside its doorway. Bochco’s success and expertise with this genre must have convinced him that he could combine it with another fairly regimented genre: the musical. He was wrong. I am certain that he did not know enough about how musicals work, and for all I know, he may have been mistaken about cop shows, too. The 1,100 hours of television comprising Law & Order had not yet passed through CRT tubes at the time Cop Rock ran, and that means all of us knew a lot less about how modern cop shows work. Musicals, in their mechanisms, haven’t changed much in a long time. For several years I went to as many operas as I could, attending live broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera of New York in movie theaters, and it dawned on me somewhere in the middle of this obsession that Broadway musicals descend directly from opera. The latter used to be popular entertainment, after all; that it’s become an esoteric art form mainly enjoyed by rich people is a quirk of time and evolution, not an inevitable outcome. (Broadway musicals may be headed for the same outcome if ticket prices don’t even out.) The point is, songs in musicals accomplish many of the same purposes arias in operas do. They expand upon character, capture a ceremony, gather a crowd under a particular purpose, or explain a circumstance. Most importantly, songs and arias illustrate transitional emotional moments. Something is changing inside a character’s heart, or a character is revealing something inside her heart to others. It can be love, or joy, or heartbreak, or determination, or fury, or jealousy. It can be any number of emotions. But there is always a change in emotion that the song encapsulates, a move from one mood to another, both for the characters and within the show. The audience is prodded by the song to feel something, and likely it’s something different than we felt a little while earlier. The show transitions from mood to mood until the final bow, and then the experience is over. I’m sure there are exceptions to this general rule, but nearly every song I can think of from a musical follows it. Songs from Disney movies fall into limited categories, as Justin McElroy memorably pointed out, but even those categories are largely about transitional emotional moments, too. Songs from The Sound of Music, Repo! The Genetic Opera, Hamilton, Bye Bye Birdie, The Phantom of the Opera, Frozen, Cannibal! The Musical, Singin’ in the Rain, and many more conform. Not all songs featured in all musicals follow this rule, but I’d wager that most do, even if the emotion they express is satisfaction or stable joie de vivre. After all, what is music without emotion? Why say it with a song if not to infuse it with extra feeling? In Cop Rock, this rule does not apply. Some of the songs do indeed express an emotion that the audience would not access as deeply without the song, such as “She Chose Me” and “If That Isn’t Love.” But in other cases, a minor character (or even a character we never see again) sings an emotional song—“Beautiful Eyes,” and “Nobody’s Fault”—rendering a dead end of emotional exposure. In most cases, the song isn’t about an emotion of any kind—“Black Is Black,” “He’s Guilty,” “Let’s Be Careful Out There,” “For the Record,” “Clean It Up,” etc., etc. The majority of the songs on Cop Rock are situational, reiterating or embellishing a moment that could just as easily exist in dialogue. The songs, although often performed well, are needless, which makes them awkward to sit through. This is an essential, insurmountable problem with the show. The songs, although often performed well, are needless, which makes them awkward to sit through. A moment that would take a few lines of dialogue on another police procedural is stretched into a three-minute song (“Baby Merchant,” “LaRusso’s Back,” and perhaps most regrettably, “Bumpty Bumpty”). There are also flashy fantasy numbers that don’t fit at all, like “Perfection,” and pointless songs that remind us upsettingly what 1990 was like in music, such as “Lineup,” and “In These Streets.” None of this arises from emotional urgency or genuine feeling, but instead functions as gimmick. Or as requirement: sing five songs per episode, no matter how crappy or shoehorned they may be. Since they don’t happen naturally, the songs fail, on the whole. There are exceptions. “Good Life” is sung by partners who have been coping with unwelcome sexual tension. Although the fantasy elements of the song (the partners magically change outfits and a phantom wind blows at their clothes) are out of place, the song showcases and heightens the tension, it’s sung well, and considering the rest of the show’s catalog, it’s not badly written. “Garbage In Garbage Out,” a song about bureaucracy and recidivism, has strong energy and a palpable emotion: frustration. Some of the songs, if stupidly written, are extremely well-performed, like “Reasonable Doubt” and “You Lied.” Still. The reason for the song is rarely organic, which leads to an audience wondering why we’re sitting here listening, when the point of the song has already been made. Steven Bochco, in an interview, proudly noted that all the songs advanced the plot. This is not true, but even if it was, it’s not what songs are for. This basic misunderstanding of why musicals work the way they do is a columnar problem with Cop Rock, but it’s not the only genre-based problem. Plenty of genres can blend into musicals surprisingly well, but police procedurals are uniquely poorly suited for this task. Membrane In any fiction, a membrane exists between the audience’s real world and the fiction’s false one. The thickness of this barrier depends upon a slew of factors, genre not least among them. Rupture the membrane, and the audience remembers or realizes they are absorbing a fiction, and their relationship to the art changes. Sometimes this is a deliberate action (Deadpool, Funny Games), and sometimes the art is so unconvincing that the audience is thrown, disappointed, out of hypnosis. Musicals have a funky relationship with the membrane.[2] The very idea that one would break into choreographed song due to unfettered emotion might be enough to shatter the spell, but if not, only in certain stories is it unsuspicious that all the characters within the fiction can sing and/or dance professionally enough to entertain outside the fiction. Lots of musicals write in professional singers and dancers as characters (Swing Time, Chicago), or are backstage musicals, written to capitalize on this dynamic instead of succumbing to it. You have to think about it, when you’re writing a musical. You have to make the musical so captivating, cast such a spell, that an audience will fall in love with what you’re doing enough to forgive you for the farce of your premise. And the audience has to walk into the musical willing to forgive. Any cynicism (theirs) or shoddiness (yours), and the whole framework of the thing will collapse. Police procedurals, on the whole, intend to display realism. To a fault, perhaps. Writers of cop shows try to tackle current issues, consult with real police officers, be gritty. Nothing about a police procedural communicates that you’re watching a fantasy.[3] It asks of its audience only minimal suspension of disbelief: the ordinary kind of “get metaphysically absorbed in these small moving pictures that are plainly simulacra.” What we’re asked to believe once we’re in there is not different from what could conceivably happen if we were living in the circumstances depicted by the show. Compare this to the audience investment required in a musical, with its proliferation of fantasy. Everything about a musical is fake—not simulated, as with many fictions, but falsely conceived. In the course of their ordinary lives, people do not ever behave as they commonly do in musicals. In short, a cop show asks its audience to believe we’re watching something real, while a musical contracts with its audience to watch something artificial. Blending these two genres was just never going to work. Or, at least, it wasn’t going to work under these circumstances—in 1990, on television, with the demands of a major network in play. This isn’t to say that drama has no place in musicals. Terrific dramatic musicals exist, like Les Misérables (in its time, a novel that realistically showcased wretched poverty). But dramatic material has to be poured carefully to move from one genre jar to another without spilling the whole lot. A dramatic musical has to offer extremely compelling context for the characters to sing. Les Mis is an all-sing for a reason; it’s less jarring that these starving revolutionaries sing everything they say to each other than it is to imagine them having dialogue-driven scenes together and occasionally deciding to sing. Mood Mood and tone also require careful management in a musical, and these elements are often simple or even monolithic in a cop show. Occasional flares of dry comedy barely disturb the undulating dramatic mood of the average cop show. Meanwhile, in a musical, the mood of a song will dominate the scenes around it, and ordering the songs manages the audience’s emotions across the course of the piece. The creators of Cop Rock did not understand this at all. The songs that do have emotional resonance (few and far between) are placed without regard for the episode’s story-based momentum, and the songs that have some other purpose disrupt the episode’s emotional momentum. A song like “Baby Merchant” is profoundly jarring not just by its own lights (its lyrics are impossible to take seriously, its melody poor), but because the smug, surreal tone of the song contrasts with the dramatic situation. Two undercover cops are pretending to be a couple desperate for a child in order to arrest a…well, a baby merchant, and the cops’ preexisting sexual tension plus the dual performance aspect are plenty to manage. The song overloads the scene until it collapses into comedy, which puts the surrounding dramatic scenes in jeopardy. Besides, it’s a particularly pointless song. The singer is a bit player at best in a wider dramatic arc. The song’s purpose is theoretically to convince the play-acting couple that the singer can get them a baby, which they already believed before the scene even began. It’s not the only song that completely halts an episode for a baffling tone change. In “Choose Me,” a passel of female officers are disguised as prostitutes for undercover work, and they sing and dance suggestively to convince the male officers they’re realistically prostitute-y. This song is a waste of time in every possible way. Before it starts up, the tone is a bunch of cops at a briefing, and then suddenly we’re watching a PG-13 stripper number (amazingly, the second one in the episode). It’s sexist and gratuitous, and the situation isn’t even an important part of the overall plot. The number, meanwhile, is almost a leap into fantasy. The audience should be able to understand a fantasy song as a jump away from the ordinary, but should also be prepared to accept it as part of the fabric of the work. Neither of these requirements exists in “Choose Me.” In Grease, “Beauty School Dropout” works because nearly everything about it is visually distinct from the rest of the film—the sets, the costumes, the lighting, Frankie Avalon—thus marking it as a fantasy, but also, the tone of the film is generally light, and a goofy number like it is not conceptually off the table. In Cop Rock, occasional fantasy numbers (“Perfection,” “Your Number’s Up”) don’t work at all, because they only exaggerate the regular surroundings, and because the tone of the show is mostly dramatic—and, again, realistic, as a police procedural, not fantastic, as a musical. Indeed, the songs vary much more widely in mood than the rest of the show does. Generously, the songs attempt to vary the overall mood of the show. But they are so poorly integrated into the plot and character development that they just amplify the shoehorned feeling most of the songs already convey. 1990 The sheer mediocrity of Cop Rock’s music represents one of the larger problems of the show. It doesn’t grab an audience well or immediately. And even if the audience believes the characters are genuinely motivated to sing their feelings (which we almost never do), it’s even harder to imagine that the characters’ feelings could or should be expressed as feebly as this. Again, the crunch of a weekly 45-minute show, answering to network producers nervous about the rise of cable channels, is probably the worst imaginable context to write and deliver 54 musical numbers. Given that, and the contemporaneous music (Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, Michael Bolton), it’s no wonder that Cop Rock’s songs are mostly crap. But it remains astonishing that such crap was aired. The songs are largely synth junk, strings of idiom and cliché, and shallow, repetitive melodies, along with a surprising amount of vamping from certain singers (Carl Anderson, of Jesus Christ Superstar fame, plays a judge twice; Loretta Devine, of the original Broadway cast of Dreamgirls, kills it as a singing juror). However, the show’s musical talent includes Randy Newman, who composed the theme song as well as songs for the pilot. My opinion of Newman is not high, and I realize this opinion is not commonly shared, so I’ll say only that his work on this show is fairly typical for, and recognizable as, his. The sheer mediocrity of Cop Rock’s music represents one of the larger problems of the show. That opening credits sequence, though. It depicts Newman performing “Under the Gun” in a soundstage rigged as a studio. There are other musicians in the semidarkness, including a second pianist and three woo-woo girls, and Newman is in headphones. Cuts show the main cast of Cop Rock sitting around in directors’ chairs or standing nearby, watching and enjoying the song. Some are bopping along. Some are smiling in a manner that does not seem voluntary. All are dressed in clothes that don’t resemble the characters’ costumes on the show, and they are eye-catching, even for 1990—ugly sweaters, huge jackets, hideous patterns. I watched these credits many times, and they only got weirder on each repeat. No realism in sight: the lighting is such that musicians can’t see to read their music, and the acoustics in the space seem unacceptable for recording. So it’s clearly a setup for the sake of filming the credits sequence, yet it continually tries to convince us that it’s a spontaneous thing. Ronny Cox, shouldering a tote bag, walks up to stand next to Barbara Bosson’s chair, as if he’s just arriving on the set for a day’s work. The actors continually look at each other and grin: “Hey, wow, this is really cool, huh?” They move to the music as if it’s awesome, as if they’re feeling it, but that is simply impossible, given what we are hearing. Anne Bobby has an openmouthed smile that suggests she can’t believe what she’s seeing and has chosen amusement as her reaction. This sequence oozes artificiality, but it purports to be showing something real. That’s really a key assessment for all of Cop Rock. It crashes the fakery of choreographed musical numbers into the (purported) realism of a police procedural. With better music, more time, and more complex plots and characterization, this collision might have resulted in a pleasurable, paradoxical tension. But 1990 was the wrong moment in pop culture to try it, cop shows being early in their evolution and music being what it was at the time. Sometime around the year 2000, Stephen Thomas Erlewine retrospectively reviewed Milli Vanilli’s 1989 hit record, Girl You Know It’s True, for Allmusic.com. I have remembered this review for twenty years, as its assessment of the pop gestalt in the early 1990s is so sharp and so intriguing. Ironically, at the end of the ’80s, MTV changed the rules for mainstream pop, putting the emphasis on image and overall package, to the extent that major artists lip-synched in concert so they could deliver better dance routines. So, it really wasn’t that extreme to have a group with two faces—one to make the music, one to market it. And, face it, the fluffy dance-pop and slick ballads on Girl You Know It’s True were of their time…The fact is, with dance-pop (especially Euro-dance!), just like Playboy, artificiality is the name of the game, and that’s what is good about it. It’s the distinguishing characteristic, its identity, the core of its being. On that level, it’s hard not to listen to Girl You Know It’s True and marvel at the level of [producer Frank] Farian’s studiocraft, since it doesn’t even sound like he programmed a computer to make this music; it sounds like something the machine wrote on its own accord. There are no natural sounds or human emotions on this record, just a bunch of shiny hooks and big beats, all processed and precisely assembled to be totally irresistible to a mass audience. […] The height of the Bush era was a weird, giddy time, when the mainstream was filled with effervescent, transient pop, and nothing sums up that era as well as Girl You Know It’s True. This isn’t just music that’s all surface, this is music that gives the impression of having a surface, then not delivering on that. He’s talking about the texture of the record, and I’ve been talking all this time about the way fakery manifests more broadly, in genre. But the way these ideas conjoin in Cop Rock continues to fascinate me. At a time when pop music was especially dumb and powerless, Cop Rock tried to alchemize two naturally opposed genres with pop music. The experiment could only fail. The credits sequence epitomizes a lot about the show: how enthusiastically everyone involved threw their lot in with Bochco’s terrible idea; how very much a product of 1990 the show is, a quality which becomes more noticeable with every passing year; how thoroughly the genuine is papered over with badly made fakery, and how that seems like it’d be cool and fun and instead is obvious and awkward. Showing the actors out of costume and character (although, no doubt, they are acting) also hints at metatextual concerns, which pop up again unexpectedly, and perhaps transcendently, in the finale. Finale In all these words, I haven’t offered a summary of the story arc across the eleven episodes of Cop Rock, nor have I said much about the characters. When I considered what I wanted to say about this show, these elements kept slipping to the back of my mind. I found them irrelevant to an assessment of Cop Rock, because they are inconspicuous compared to everything that makes it fail so spectacularly, everything that makes it a rare artifact. Still, they do require a mention before we tackle the finale. The major plot threads have to do with a wrongful police shooting and its consequences, a drug addict who sells her baby daughter, uneasy partnerships between different genders and races of cops, the mayor considering a Senate run despite her unfortunate looks, the batshit insane chief of police, and various marriages. There are shorter plotlines about a movie star and her stalker, a rookie losing his innocence, and the mayor’s gay assistant. These are all pretty undistinguished. Only one of the show’s threads interested me enough to feel faint regret that there was no more to the story, and that largely because the characters and their actors were likeable, not because the story was especially original. For the most part, the characters only pop out of cliché in order to be really odd (the police chief is obsessed with cowboys, a female cop goes full Pepé Le Pew on her partner after breaking up a fight). Elaborating on them would be to point out how indistinguishable they are from characters on other cop shows. The actors in this experiment are generally game, and they acquit themselves well enough, although some of them haven’t learned the trick of singing and/or listening to singing with stillness that belies the song’s length. The songs mostly seem long and out of place, and although the most meaningful reasons for that are laid out in detail above, the actors are also inexperienced at staging them properly. Aside from this, they’re appealing, particularly Anne Bobby and David Gianopoulos. Even some of the weirder scenes have undeniable chemistry, with Ronny Cox and Vondie Curtis-Hall presaging the greatness of Aidan Gillen and Reg E. Cathey in The Wire. The show does not indicate that it might be ending until the final scene of the final episode. Prior to that, the plot churns on, slowly, dully. But then, after a song that concludes in meaningful looks from two decent cops about the reinstatement of a corrupt cop, Curtis-Hall walks into an office set and sits across from Cox, who says, “I can’t believe they cancelled us.” The two actors have a conversation about the songs they sang in the show, and how much they enjoyed the experience of working on it. Cox presses a button, a door off the set opens, the cast (not in costume) spills in, and the music begins. The cast starts singing, all together, and the handheld camera captures them as well as the musicians playing just off the set. The number grows more elaborate, showing a zaftig woman on a swing that rises up into the air (“it ain’t over till the fat lady sings”) as the cast vamps shamelessly. The song’s lyrics refer to the show and its folly—name-checking famed disaster Heaven’s Gate and Cop Rock’s network, ABC—but has a generic positive message of overcoming obstacles and fond farewell. The final shot is a crane angle of the set, cast, crew, lighting, etc. on the soundstage. This blindsides the audience completely. We had no indication at all that the episode, much less the series, was properly over, and all at once we are deep in metatext, watching actors rally in song about the cancellation of their dreadful show. Although there’s plenty of precedent for metatext in musicals, there’s very little in police procedurals, which adds incongruity. I must credit this move for being clever, but this was not a particularly clever show, which makes the number yet stranger. Perhaps it’s fitting that the opening credits and the finale song both traffic, to different degrees, in metatext. Cop Rock is so weird, top to tail, that it’s almost impossible to become absorbed in it as art, even if the art had been original and exceptional enough to warrant that absorption. We might be able to set aside our shock and surprise about the existence of the show for the length of a scene, but back it rushes once a song begins. Both the opening and finale sequences ultimately leave me at a loss, gaping at them, all my intellectualizing about their function and context fading to a murmur. I can use everything I’ve read and seen to interpret what they’re doing and how and why, to illustrate similarities and conclusions, but I cannot tamp down my amazement that they really went on film and then on the air. Even in 1990. Feeling If you’d like a look at how a genre-restricted television show can do musical numbers successfully, watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sixth season episode “Once More with Feeling.” Even the title acknowledges what the writers of Cop Rock did not understand about musical numbers: their basic purpose is to convey a transitional emotional moment. Every major song in the episode reveals a character’s emotional struggle or situation, and even the miniature filler songs about parking tickets and removed mustard stains have actual moods behind them (pleading and joy, respectively). These songs reveal character in ways that have been building all season long, and in ways that will drive the plot in following episodes. “Once More with Feeling” accomplished something great: it blended two kinds of art that shouldn’t go together—or, at least, that usually don’t—and it made of them a unique harmony. In my kinder moments, I wonder if Bochco was trying to do something similarly great. “Once More with Feeling” was a tremendous risk, and so was Cop Rock. But Bochco didn’t do the work to understand the trickier of his two ingredients. In the spirit of the early 90s, I believe, he wanted it all to happen quickly and synthetically. To dazzle with a light show instead of creating authentic illumination. _________________ From JUNK FILM: WHY BAD MOVIES MATTER. Originally published on Bright Lights Film Journal. Copyright © 2023 by Katharine Coldiron. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Castle Bridge Media. [1] Dragnet started the engine, and structurally, cop shows still do more or less what Dragnet did. But the shakycam, the production design, the typical characters, the blending of private and public life, the “realism” are all modeled on Blues. [2] To me, all genres have at least an interesting relationship with this barrier, but if I enumerated them all, I’d be writing a totally different essay. [3] Although of course it bears saying that these shows always offer a fantasy version of police officers and departments, whether they intend to or not. View the full article -
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The Non-Traveling Travel Writer
By Barbara Noe Kennedy If you want to break into travel writing, you don’t need to travel far and wide for that amazing story. Think about what place you know best—where you live! You have the inside scoop on what happens in your location, including museum, hotel, and restaurant openings, under-the-radar things to see and do, what plants bloom and birds arrive when, fun angles that only locals know. Whether it’s a metropolis or tiny village in the middle of the countryside, you’ll find plenty of stories to tell (and sell). Probably half of the travel stories I write are about Washington, D.C. Why? Because I live and breathe it, I’m an expert. For example, I’ve written about kayaking on the Potomac River, where to find cherry blossoms beyond the Tidal Basin, and the amazing story of the boundary stones, which are the first federal monuments. I’ve written about the tulip library (right near the famous cherry blossoms), the children’s museum, and the partial reopening of the National Air and Space Museum. These are all story ideas that I stumbled across just chatting with friends, walking around town, reading local magazines and newspapers, and keeping attuned to tourism board updates. And some were assigned to me because some editors know I live here and write about it. What can you write about? Here are some tips to brainstorm your own travel story ideas about where you live: Tourism Boards. Get friendly with your local tourism board, whether it covers your city or region or state. Their websites have journalist resources, including story ideas and local trends, and they oftentimes organize annual meetings to provide journalists with trend updates. Get on their newsletter list for updates. Your Out-of-Town Guests. When friends or family visit from out of town, what do you do with them? Where do you take them? What do you want to show off? Are there any story ideas there? Time Off. Where do you go on your time off? What cool things do you do on the weekends? Are there any new wineries nearby? Are there gorgeous horse trails? Does the historical society offer fun events that you could turn into an article? The Reputation. What is your homeplace known for? Is it famous for hot chili peppers? If so, are there tours? Are there restaurants using it in special recipes? Or maybe it’s known for spring wildflower blooms—which trails are the best? How do you plan a visit? Are there non-hiking ways to see them? People love small towns and scenic drives. Can you play up one of those angles? Stay alert to what’s going on, keep asking the questions, and try to find the not-so-obvious ways to showcase your homeplace. You can become a travel writer in no time, without ever leaving home! *** Barbara Noe Kennedy is a former longtime editor with National Geographic Travel Publishing. She currently works as a fulltime freelance travel writer, with credits including Fodor’s Travel, Lonely Planet, London Telegraph, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, National Geographic, BBC Travel, The Points Guy, and more. She received a Lowell Thomas travel journalism award for her story “Taking Stock of General MacArthur’s Legacy in Norfolk, Virginia” in 2022. Barbara is also a WOW! Women on Writing instructor. Check out her upcoming live webinar on May 17th, Travel Writing 101. (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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Dr. Perfect by Louise Bay
A- Dr. Perfect by Louise Bay April 20, 2023 · Louise Bay Contemporary Romance Dr. Perfect is a low stakes, low angst contemporary romance that’s as much about loving what you do as it is about finding the love of your life. Ellie Frost set aside her passion for cooking to work as a manager for her motorbike racer ex. When he breaks up with her, she’s left with a huge gap in her CV, no severance and few options (he, of course, kept her off the books). Ellie is determined to restart her life and scrape together the money she needs to study at the Cordon Bleu. Finding a job isn’t easy given her official lack of work experience, but when she’s hired to be Dr. Zachary Cove’s assistant, she’s committed to making herself a success so she can save her tuition as quickly as possible. There’s just one problem: Zach seems largely disinterested in his fledgling private practice. He doesn’t have a website or business cards or even a single patient. The more Ellie presses him on how they can move the business forward, the more he hides in his office. What the highly-motivated Ellie doesn’t know is that Zach actually doesn’t want to practice medicine. He comes from a family of doctors and has always done what’s expected of him. What Zach really wants to do is write. The two days a week he’s not at the hospital he uses as office time to write a cozy mystery. Zach, of course, doesn’t tell Ellie this so there’s a lot of tension along the lines of Ellie trying to get the practice off the ground on her own and Zach resisting her every effort. As I described it to the SBTB team, “He secretly really wants his practice to stay dead so he can write cozy mysteries in his office and she’s determined to make him a gastroenterologist to the stars. “So he’s like “why do I have a website?” and she’s like “why can’t you appreciate me?” When Zach gets the opportunity to have his manuscript shopped out he decides to go to his family’s remote Scottish cottage to write–and of course forgets his manuscript with the agent’s notes on it. Ellie, going above and beyond, decides to hand deliver it to him (he forbids her from opening it) to ensure he gets it on time. Once at the cottage, though, a bad storm snows the couple in, forcing them to actually talk to each other and address their mutual attraction. There isn’t a lot standing between Zach and Ellie getting together once he’s honest with her about what he’s been doing locked in his office all this time. When he learns of Ellie’s culinary ambitions, he’s supportive. The biggest obstacles in this book are what Zach and Ellie overcome in order to find happiness in their professions. Zach is worried about disappointing his family by giving up medicine, since his parents and four siblings all work in the medical field. He’s also unsure of he’s giving up a lucrative career as a doctor for a far less reliable one as a writer. Ellie is still smarting from her breakup. She’s the type of person who gives her all to the person she’s working for–she’s absolutely a fixer–but that leaves little time and energy for her own pursuits. She has to break that cycle and put herself first if she’s going to achieve her goals. The obstacles these two face are, honestly, largely logistical as they’re both embarking on new careers. As a result there wasn’t a lot of tension or drama in this book, which, depending on what my brain wants at the time, is perfectly fine for me. The situation Zach and Ellie have to navigate is entirely realistic, and does require some growth on each of their parts, so I had no issue with the conflict being light. This is also a delightfully tropey book. Zach and Ellie are snowed in when they first act on their physical attraction to each other. This book is marketed as “sunshine/ grumpy” although I think a more fair assessment would be “sunshine/ oblivious.” Zach never struck me as grumpy, just so focused on his own issues he appeared indifferent to Ellie. A word of warning, though; there are so many descriptions of Ellie’s cooking and baking that this book will absolutely make you hungry. If you’re looking for a contemporary that’s conflict-light, has food p0rn, and is a little tropey, then Dr. Perfect should work nicely for you. View the full article -
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The Rec League: Lockdown Romances
Ed. note: This is clearly a current, ongoing, and difficult topic, and your feelings on reading books that include the COVID pandemic may be different. We want to remind folks that it’s ok to like very different things. This Rec League was sent in by Anna: I recently read Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, which made me realize that reading a romance set during Covid, especially one that doesn’t sugarcoat lockdowns, could really help me cope with grief over everything that happened (privately and globally) during the pandemic. Could you recommend some? Sarah: For something light and a little goofy, there’s always Chuck Tingle, who has two releases: My Handsome Sentient Face Mask Protects Me Despite the Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories That He Won’t Also He Pounds my Butt ( A ) and Not Pounded by Anything While I Practice Responsible Social Distancing. ( A ) Love Under Quarantine by Kylie Scott and Audrey Carlan ( A | BN ) Love in Lockdown by Chloe James ( A | BN | K ) Amanda: I’d also recommend the movie Locked Down, which combines a marriage in trouble, layoffs, and a heist. Which books would you recommend? Let us know below! View the full article -
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Links: Kickstarters, Adaptation News, & More
Welcome back to Wednesday Links! How are you all doing? We’ve reached May and it’s been a rainy start to spring in New England. I may have mentioned this before, but my partner and I are looking for a friend for Linus. Linus is my grumpy senior cat, who was diagnosed with a thyroid condition back in August. It’s really brought out some anxious behaviors and we think a little lady would be able to give him the company he needs when we can’t. We’re very nervous about the process, so whatever tips and tricks you may have would be much appreciated. The ideal is that they get along fine right off the bat, but that’s wishful thinking. … Let’s tap into some nostalgia with this profile on the painter of The Baby-Sitters Club covers! … Bonkers Romance is back with another Kickstarter, this one has a seafaring theme! It’s already well-exceed their goal, as is typical for Bonkers Romance projects. Congrats to the team! … The Perfect Find by Tia Williams is getting a Netflix adaptation! It releases in late June and stars Gabrielle Union. … If you need another Instagram account to follow, I want to recommend The Islamic Society of Baltimore. I loved this video of Muslim fashion for Eid and what countries the designs came from! The blue babariga from Nigeria, for me, was a show stopper. There is also a part two. … Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way! View the full article -
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Romantic Suspense, a Contemporary Romance, & More
The Recovery Agent The Recovery Agent by Janet Evanovich is $2.99! I’m a sucker for things that make comparisons for Romancing the Stone. However, I worry this will be another Stephanie Plum, where the romance is dragged out forever. Lost something? Gabriela Rose knows how to get it back. As a recovery agent, she’s hired by individuals and companies seeking lost treasures, stolen heirlooms, or missing assets of any kind. She’s reliable, cool under pressure, and well trained in weapons of all types. But Gabriela’s latest job isn’t for some bamboozled billionaire, it’s for her own family, whose home is going to be wiped off the map if they can’t come up with a lot of money fast. Inspired by an old family legend, Gabriela sets off for the jungles of Peru in pursuit of the Ring of Solomon and the lost treasure of Cortez. But this particular job comes with a huge problem attached to it—Gabriela’s ex-husband, Rafer. It’s Rafer who has the map that possibly points the way to the treasure, and he’s not about to let Gabriela find it without him. Rafer is as relaxed as Gabriela is driven, and he has a lifetime’s experience getting under his ex-wife’s skin. But when they aren’t bickering about old times the two make a formidable team, and it’s going to take a team to defeat the vicious drug lord who has also been searching for the fabled ring. A drug lord who doesn’t mind leaving a large body count behind him to get it. The Recovery Agent marks the start of an irresistible new series that will have you clamoring for more and cheering for the unstoppable Gabriela Rose on every page. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Wrong Number, Right Guy Wrong Number, Right Guy by Elle Casey is $1.99! This is the first book in The Bourbon Street Boys series and a couple other books in the series are discounted as well. Readers recommended this for fans of romantic comedy contemporaries. However, others felt the amount of comedy bordered on immature. When a mysterious text message summons May Wexler to a biker bar in downtown New Orleans, she knows something is very wrong. Her sister has sent out an SOS, but when May gets there, she’s nowhere to be found and May is the one in trouble—she’s wearing pink espadrilles, she’s got a Chihuahua in her purse, and she’s in the middle of a shootout. After tall, muscular Ozzie comes to her rescue, May has no choice but to follow him to safety. At the headquarters of his private security firm, the Bourbon Street Boys, she finds a refuge for the night—and the offer of a job. But it’s not long before a gun-toting stalker isn’t the only complication in May’s life: the more time she spends with Ozzie, the less she can deny that they’ve got some serious chemistry. A wrong number got her into this mess…Will it also get her the right guy? Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Tiffany Blues Tiffany Blues by M.J. Rose is $1.99! This is historical fiction set during New York’s Jazz Age. I just need to say that M.J. Rose always has the most beautiful, ethereal covers, though I haven’t read any of her stuff. Do you have experience with Rose’s books? What do you think? Everything looked more beautiful through the stained glass… except her past. NYT bestselling author, M. J. Rose crafts a dazzling Jazz Age jewel–a novel of ambition, betrayal, and passion. New York, 1924. Twenty‑four‑year‑old Jenny Bell has escaped her past… her hard-hearted stepfather, murder, and the dank hallways of Canada’s notorious Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women where she spent 2 years. Now as one of a dozen burgeoning artists invited to Louis Comfort Tiffany’s prestigious artists’ colony. Gifted and determined, Jenny vows to avoid distractions and romantic entanglements and take full advantage of the many wonders to be found at Laurelton Hall. But Jenny’s can’t help but be inextricably drawn to Oliver, Tiffany’s charismatic grandson. As the summer shimmers on, and the competition between the artists grows fierce as they vie for a spot at Tiffany’s New York gallery, a series of suspicious and disturbing occurrences suggest someone knows enough about Jenny’s childhood trauma to expose her. Supported by her closest friend Minx Deering, a seemingly carefree socialite yet dedicated sculptor, and Oliver, Jenny pushes her demons aside. Between stolen kisses and stolen jewels, the champagne flows and the jazz plays on until one moonless night when Jenny’s past and present are thrown together in a desperate moment, that will threaten her promising future, her love, her friendships, and her very life. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Extreme Honor Extreme Honor by Piper J. Drake is $1.99! This is the first book in the True Heroes series and features a dog in need of some TLC. Readers really seemed to enjoy the animal aspect to the plot, but some found they wanted more romance to balance out the suspense. HONOR, LOYALTY, LOVE David Cruz is good at two things: war and training dogs. The ex-soldier’s toughest case is Atlas, a Belgian Malinois whose handler died in combat. Nobody at Hope’s Crossing kennel can break through the animal’s grief. That is, until dog whisperer Evelyn Jones walks into the facility . . . and into Atlas’s heart. David hates to admit that the curvy blonde’s mesmerizing effect isn’t limited to canines. But when Lyn’s work with Atlas puts her in danger, David will do anything to protect her. Lyn realizes that David’s own battle scars make him uniquely qualified for his job as a trainer. Tough as nails yet gentle when it counts, he’s gotten closer to Atlas than anyone else-and he’s willing to put his hard-wired suspicion aside to let her do the same. But someone desperate enough to kill doesn’t want Lyn working with Atlas. Now only teamwork, trust, and courage can save two troubled hearts and the dog who loves them both… Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article -
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On Butterflies
Jakob Hübner. Mancipium Fugacia argante, 1806. Everything we see is expression, all of nature an image, a language and vibrant hieroglyphic script. Despite our advanced natural sciences, we are neither prepared nor trained to really look at things, being rather at loggerheads with nature. Other eras, indeed, perhaps all other eras, all earlier periods before the earth fell to technology and industry, were attuned to nature’s symbolic sorcery, reading its signs with greater simplicity, greater innocence than is our wont. This was by no means sentimental; the sentimental relationship people have with the natural world is a more recent development that may well arise from our troubled conscience with regard to that world. A sense of nature’s language, a sense of joy in the diversity displayed at every turn by life that begets life, and the drive to divine this varied language—or, rather, the drive to find answers—are as old as humankind itself. The wonderful instinct drawing us back to the dawn of time and the secret of our beginnings, instinct born of a sense of a concealed, sacred unity behind this extraordinary diversity, of a primeval mother behind all births, a creator behind all creatures, is the root of art, and always has been. Today it would seem we balk at revering nature in the pious sense of seeking oneness in manyness; we are reluctant to acknowledge this childlike drive and make jokes whenever reminded of it, yet we are likely wrong to think ourselves and contemporary humankind irreverent and incapable of piety in experiencing nature. It is just so difficult these days—really, it’s become impossible—to do what was done in the past, innocently recasting nature as some mythical force or personifying and worshipping the Creator as a father. We may also be right in occasionally deeming old forms of piety somewhat silly or shallow, believing instead that the formidable, fateful drift toward philosophy we see happening in modern physics is ultimately a pious process. So, whether we are pious and humble in our approach or pert and haughty, whether we mock or admire earlier expressions of belief in nature as animate: our actual relationship with nature, even when regarding it as a thing to be exploited, nevertheless remains that of a child with his mother, and the few age-old paths leading humans toward beatitude or wisdom have not grown in number. The simplest and most childlike of these paths is that of marveling at nature and warily heeding its language. “I am here, that I may wonder!” reads a line by Goethe. Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors—whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity, where one thing or creature says to the other: Tat tvam asi (“That thou art”). We look at the simpler relationship earlier generations had with nature and feel nostalgic now and then, or even envious, yet we prove unwilling to take our own times more seriously than warranted; nor do we wish to complain that our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom and that, rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach—the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment—and keep mum about it, while their greatest minds recognize no nobler goal than to constitute a step toward such figures as Goethe and other true sages once more. Butterflies, our intended focus here, are a beloved bit of creation, like flowers, favored by many as a prized and powerful object of astonishment, an especially lovely means of experience, of intuiting the great miracle, of honoring life. Like flowers, they seem specifically intended as adornment, jewelry or gems, little sparkling artworks and paeans invented by the friendliest, most charming and amusing of geniuses, dreamed up with tender creative delight. One must be blind or terribly callous not to delight at the sight of a butterfly, not to sense a remnant of childhood rapture or glimmer of Goethean wonder. And with good reason. After all, a butterfly is something special, an insect not like any other, and not really an insect at all, but the final, greatest, most festive and vitally important stage of its existence. As driven to procreate as it is prepared to die, it is the exuberant nuptial form of a creature that was until recently a slumbering pupa and, before that, a voracious caterpillar. A butterfly does not live to eat and grow old; its sole purpose is to make love and multiply. To that end, it is clad in magnificent finery. Its wings, several times larger than the body, divulge the secret of its existence in contours and color, scales and fuzz, a language both refined and varied, all in order that it may live out this existence with greater intensity, put on a more magical and tempting display for the opposite sex and glory in the celebration of procreation. People across the ages have known the significance of butterflies and their splendor; the butterfly is simply a revelation. Furthermore, because the butterfly is a festive lover and stunning shape-shifter, it has come to symbolize both impermanence and eternal persistence; from time immemorial, humans have embraced the butterfly as an allegorical and heraldic figure of the soul. As it happens, the German term for butterfly, Schmetterling, is not very old; nor did all dialects use it. This peculiar word, while energetic in character, also feels quite raw, unsuitable even. Known and used only in Saxony and perhaps Thuringia, it did not enter the written language or general usage until the eighteenth century. Schmetterling was previously unknown in southern Germany and Switzerland, where the oldest and most beautiful word for butterflies was Fifalter (or Zwiespalter*), but because human language, like the language and script found on butterfly wings, is a matter not of reason and calculation, but of creative and poetic potential, a single name did not suffice and, as is the case with everything we love, language instead produced several names—many, in fact. In Switzerland today, butterflies and moths are usually referred to as Fifalter or Vogel (“bird”), with such variations as Tagvogel (“day bird”), Nachtvogel (“night bird”), and Sommervogel (“summer bird”). Given the multitude of names for these creatures as a whole (including Butterfliegen, or “butter flies,” Molkendiebe, or “whey thieves,” and a range of others), which also change according to a region’s landscape and dialect, one can imagine how many names must exist for individual butterfly species—though this will soon read “must have existed,” for they are slowly dying out, like the names of local flowers, and if not for the children who discover a love of butterflies and collecting, these monikers, many of them marvelous, would gradually vanish as well, just as many areas have seen the wealth of butterfly species die out and disappear since industrialization and the rationalization of agriculture. And on behalf of butterfly collectors, young and elderly alike, a further point bears mentioning. The fact that collectors kill butterflies and moths, stick them on pins, and preserve them, that they may endure and retain as much of their beauty as possible, for as long as possible, has been deemed—often with an air of sentimentality—an act of rank barbarism since the age of J.-J. Rousseau, and literature written between 1750 and 1850 features the comical figure of the pedant unable to enjoy or admire butterflies unless they are dead and skewered on pins. What was mostly nonsense, even then, is almost total nonsense today. There are, of course, collectors of all ages who will never content themselves with letting the creatures live and observing them in the wild, but even the roughest of this lot help ensure that butterflies aren’t forgotten, that certain wonderful old names endure, and, at times, they contribute to our dear butterflies’ very survival. Just as a love of hunting teaches nothing less than to tend one’s prey, butterfly hunters were the first to recognize how the eradication of certain plants (e.g., stinging nettles) and other acts of violence in an ecosystem can lead to the rapid dwindling of butterfly populations. Not that the cabbage white or a similar foe of the farmer and gardener would suffer any losses; instead, it’s the finer, rarer, and prettier species losing the battle and disappearing whenever humans get too involved in a landscape. A true butterfly lover does more than treat the caterpillar, pupa, and eggs with care; he also does what he can to allow for as many types of butterflies as possible to flourish in his area. I myself, though many years have passed since my days as a collector, have been known to sow nettles. Every child with a butterfly collection has heard of the much bigger, much brighter, much more brilliant butterflies found in hotter climes, in India, Brazil, or Madagascar. Some have even laid eyes on them, in museums or personal collections, because these days one can purchase exotic butterflies, preserved (often beautifully so) and mounted on cotton under glass; even those who haven’t glimpsed them have seen reproductions. When I was younger, I remember, I very badly wanted to see one particular butterfly that my books told me could be found in Andalusia in the month of May. And whenever I encountered some magnificent specimen of the tropics in a museum or a friend’s collection, I felt that indescribable delight of childhood tugging at me, something akin to the thrill I had, for instance, experienced as a boy the first time I spotted an Apollo. Accompanying this delight, which contains its share of melancholy, at the sight of such wondrous creatures I would often take that step out of my not-always-so-poetic life and into Goethean wonder, experiencing a moment of enchantment, devotion, and piety. And later, what I never thought possible happened to me, as I myself sailed the seas to disembark on sultry foreign coasts. I traveled by crocodile-infested waters through tropical forests to see tropical butterflies in their natural habitat. With that, many of my boyhood dreams came true, and in coming true, some also tarnished. The fascination with butterflies, however, never flagged; this little door to the ineffable, this lovely and effortless pathway to awe, has rarely quit me. *Translator’s note: The use of the word Zwiespalter for butterflies is in reference to the bipartite quality of their bodies. From Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse by Herman Hesse — selected by Volker Michel, translated by Elisabeth Lauffer, and illustrated by Jakob Hübner — to be published by Kales Press later this month. View the full article
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