Steve & Melanie Tem: HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED TO START?
Steve:
So how much do you need to have in place before you start a piece of fiction? I’m mostly talking about short stories here, since I presume that before you begin a novel you’re going to want to have a pretty clear idea of what it’s about, who the characters are, and in general where it’s going. Maybe you’ll even want to have some, or all, of your research done before you put that first word down on paper.
Melanie:
True in most cases, I think, but I’ve been known to start what I know will be a novel without knowing much about it, on the basis of only a single scene (”this would be a great ending for a novel!”) or maybe just a feeling profound sorrow I can’t quite name and so I have to write its story, or a
certain kind of restlessness, or a moment of excited curiosity about nothing in particular). So I’d say that even long projects can start with a small thing. Then you find the actual story and the means to tell it.
Steve:
Now I admit that sometimes I start with a subject, and some research, before I start writing a short story, especially if it’s something I want to place in a theme anthology. If it’s a theme I don’t know that much about, I’m hoping that the research will spark an idea. It’s a gamble that sometimes pays off, sometimes not. I don’t have that much to lose–after all, the worse that could happen is that I’ll have learned some things I didn’t know before. Never a bad thing. And maybe I’ll find a way to use that research later. It’s not that unusual for me to read a book, a handful of articles, watch a few movies, visit a location or two, all as research for something I decide not to write. I suppose that’s wasteful, but I don’t worry too much about it. I assume (perhaps too optimistically) that it will all be useful in the end.
Melanie:
Theme anthologies often work like writing prompts for me. Sometimes I find I just have nothing to say about a theme. Usually I know that right away. Not infrequently, though, an announced theme–or an overheard phrase, or a word that all of a sudden strikes me as laughable–will turn out to be exactly the impetus for a story I already had in mind to write, or to inspire me to write one I hadn’t thought about yet.
Steve:
So what’s the minimum that you need to begin a story? I’m sure the answers vary widely. On my disks, in my notebooks, tugged away in my funky little flashdrives, I have lists of titles, and underneath these titles are oftentimes the beginnings of stories, sometimes even one or more scenes. These titles simply came to me, floated out of the air, and I recognized (perhaps too optimistically) that they were the titles of stories I would one day write, or had written, in some alternate universe. Titles like: Chasing Sleep, Coldwater Hospital, On the Eno Estate, Disappointment, Rock Scissors Paper, Return to Earth. I wrote them down because I knew immediately they were the titles of my stories.
The peculiar thing is, when I wrote these titles down, I was already feeling what I knew would be the central emotional thrust of these stories. And I was hearing some of the characters’ voices. These last two bits of data are even more important, I think, than the titles themselves, which are most likely to change. So I wrote down as much of these conversations as I could capture, even though I didn’t know who these characters were. It was like overhearing conversations that haven’t yet occurred.
Melanie:
The danger in beginning a story with something small, without having thought it through, is that you’ll come to a screeching halt somewhere about page 10 or, worse, page 32), and you won’t be able to finish. That first flash-in-the-pan turns out to be nothing more than that. That’s frustrating
and discouraging, unless you can remember that it’s not wasted, you might use that material in another project, or you might have just worked out something necessary before you can actually write a different story.
Steve:
Yeah—that would be a killer. For me, my process seems to work in a way that failure never happens that way. Page 8 seems to be the litmus test for me—if I reach page 8 in a short story I can be pretty sure I’m going to finish it, no matter the eventual length (and of course some of my pieces are much shorter than 8 pages). I stop novels for different reasons, which often simply have to do with the energy required by the enterprise.
As for the stories that don’t make it to page 8–some of these stories I’ll get back to, some of these I won’t. I try not to worry too much about it. But some days I wake up, and these unspoken conversations start up again, and the unseen participants gradually reveal themselves and tell me their story.
Melanie:
And the potential benefit of starting a story without much thought out is that you go in places you had no idea you were going. That’s really fun, if you can stay with it and hang on for the ride.
Steve:
It’s a kind of fishing expedition. If you’re really serious about storytelling, all your life you’ve been collecting people and conversations and situations, and all that collects in this great unconscious pool. You go fishing with one of these little pieces—this color or this phrase—and you snag a complex of things which, when landed, grow into this dynamic story-making machine.
So how much do you need to start? For you maybe it isn’t even a word, but a smell, a taste, a barely articulated sound.
Melanie:
Or a word you’ve heard all your life–chair, alabaster, swimming, albeit–that suddenly pulls a little loose from its moorings and invites you to go somewhere else.
Collecting Characters on the Road
My son and I are in Baltimore as I write this. I set up a new office for my company here a while back, and since we just managed to get it connected to the corporate network, I’m here to iron out the kinks and get things running smoothly. Bill is in training to do this sort of work, and he’s a great helper.
On the drive up, I caught myself in an old habit that I thought I’d share. I call it character collecting. I think we all do this to a degree, writers, artists, anyone with creative tendencies. You see a guy with greasy hair and five kids in a beat up pickup truck, or five teenage girls dancing and whooping it up in a Mercedes with the sunroof open, and you take a mental snapshot.
I was doing this yesterday, particularly in traffic. We pulled up to a stoplight in DC on the way through, and across the concrete median from us, a semi trailer got pulled over by a pair of police SUV’s, lights flashing and sirens blaring, and I couldn’t help checking out the oddly balanced cargo, which was some sort of white bales. I was already writing stories about it in my head before the light turned green.
At food stops along the way I gathered more people. A young mother with several children went crashing through McDonald’s, and I tried to picture why they were there. Were they local? Did they come in from the road like we did? There was a truck there with a flat-bed trailer behind it and what appeared to be a very ornate gold-leafed coffin as the only cargo. Behind the trailer, another trailer (a small green one that might have been tools, or a generator?) was dragging, and the guy was having a hell of a time backing it up to get out of the parking lot.
In the bushes, with kids and workers all around, a snake slid along out in plain sight. The only one who seemed to notice was Bill, and by the time I turned, it was gone - as if it had never been there.
I remember a trip I took long ago to a convention. I drove there with Storytellers’ own John Rosenman, and we stopped at one of the most bizarre hotels ever. The toilet made space sounds, and when we went out to get take-out we determined that the Chinese restaurant was actually staffed by aliens. What they gave me as “soup” was hot water with vegetables in it. No broth, not soup at all. The vegetable chunks, broccoli and Cauliflower along with a few other things, were HUGE. There wasn’t a bite-sized bit in the entire meal. Combined with the oddness of the hotel room, stories were born. Later that trip we ate at a diner that prompted John to write his story “Nighthawks at the Diner,” for an issue of the now defunct magazine AFTER HOURS. In that issue, every story was titled “Nighthawks at the Diner,” which was interesting. I wrote a story too, but didn’t make it into the issue. I still have it.
I keep it in my people collection. Today we’re going to the new office, then out into Glen Burnie, an outlying part of Baltimore, where will undoubtedly add a few more unique faces to the coffers.
It’s what I do. Then I sift them, re-arrange them, build them into something new and bring them back to life in my stories, screenplays, and novels.
Wish me good hunting.
—On the Road — David Niall Wilson
I AM NOT LOOKING FOR ME
Why do people treat books as mirrors?
I recently came across a post by Elizabeth Bluemle at the Publisher’s Weekly site entitled “The New Literal Mind” (link to the full post, and comments that follow, given at the foot of this essay). Elizabeth writes, amongst other things:
“I’ve noticed a strange trend among grandparents these days, and sometimes among parents: the tendency to reject a book for not being specifically, literally, representative of their child’s world.”
Parents or grandparents apparently look at a book – its cover, to be more precise – and come up with reasons why their child or grandchild won’t want to read it. The kid’s a country kid, and the book is set in the city – or vice versa. The kid has a brother, and not a sister (like the character in the book) – or vice versa. Most damningly at all, the “Oh, I don’t think he’ll really be interested in THAT” comment when the skin colour of the child depicted on the book cover doesn’t happen to match the precise hue of the potential reader of said book.
That neatly connects with another trend that has seen a lot of Internet exposure recently – the blog posts of a whole bunch of people, particularly people of colour, about how they could never “find themselves” in the books that they were given to read as children..
And that brings me to the brink of something that I do comprehend as a concept but which I completely fail to understand on a visceral level.
Why are all these people so bent on treating books as mirrors? Why is the value of a book measured by how much of oneself – in an absolutely literal sense – one can “find” in it? I have never picked up a single book with the purpose of looking for multiple incarnations of me – but, instead, I’ve sought new things, new experiences, new ideas, landscapes I might never see in real life, people I might never meet, and people I might be fascinated with but would not remotely want to actually BE. I have never picked up a fantasy book with a dragon on the cover and expected to find a clone of me riding the dragon by page five.
When I read a book, I’m not looking for me.
Look at (a random selection of) books which have touched my life.
“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott: at the time I first read that, I was still a young kid living in Europe. American history was not remotely familiar as such, not in detail, and the context of the March family’s lives might as well have been on a different planet. But with the one possible exception of going “Oh! She writes too!” when I met Jo March, I have never identified with any of the sisters. Meg is entirely too holier-than-thou (which I never was), Amy annoyed the snot out of me, Beth made me cry but I am not sure that she would not have been too precious to live with if I ever had to do it in real life, and even fellow-writer Jo often went off the rails and did things I did not approve of. I did not wade into the book desperately seeking a reflection of myself, and I was not put out when I did not find one. Did that stop me from enjoying the book and from loving my early copy of it literally to pieces? No, it did not. And if the cover on it had been anything to do with choosing it I would never have had it at all – because oh, these were AMERICAN characters who ran around wearing long dresses and white gloves none of which was remotely familiar to me so in other words these were the equivalent of “city” characters being thrown at a “country” child.
Any book of China, by Pearl Buck: my mother had a set of these and I read them, in translation, when I was pretty young. The books were old-fashioned hardcovers with slipcovers on them – the slipcovers are long since gone but as I recall a lot of collected-edition type books of that era basically had the title and the author’s name on the cover and very little else so relying on the cover art to determine whether I would “find myself” in these books never arose – but even if there was a Chinese girl on every cover that would not have prevented me from picking up such a book because, well, it had a Chinese character on the cover and I was not Chinese. I was not seeking myself in those books – I was getting thoroughly and enchantingly lost in a world not my own, where characters did not think or behave as I would have thought or behaved, where the rules were different and everything was rich and strange.
“Through Desert and Jungle”, by Henryk Sienkiewicz: Yes, I am a European child and I read European authors. Sienkiewicz was a Polish writer – of adult historical novels – who happens to be a Nobel Prize winner; he wrote a book for what would these days be considered a YA audience, which was a cornerstone of my mother’s growing up, and then mine, and then I gave the book as a present to my young nieces when THAT generation came up to the point of demanding things to read. I loved that book. I love it today, still. It concerns the adventures of a young English girl and a young Polish boy, children of Suez engineers in Egypt, who are snatched as hostages to be exchanged for persons being held by the colonial government during the Mahdi rising. The kids ride on camels across the desert in the moonlight; they are thrown into the chaos of conquered Khartoum; they are tossed out again in search of someone who would know what to do with them; they escape, and in their travels they cross from the Sahara into the near-equatorial jungles and savannahs, meeting lions, and elephants, and warring black tribespeople into whose path they blunder, and dying explorers, and malaria, and they live in hollowed out baobab trees, and oh GOD it is wonderful stuff. I first read this book years before I, too, stepped onto African soil – and even after I had done this my own experience of Africa was far, far different than those of the two protags of this book (thank Heaven…) To this day I have never been in Northern Africa, the Arabian part of Africa, Egypt or Algeria or Libya or Morocco; I have never seen the pyramids, the dunes of the Sahara, the Nile, or the Suez canal. I may or may not get to do this in the future. There was NOTHING of me in that book when I read it – I was not English, I was not Polish, I had never been to Cairo or seen the desert or experienced the humidity of equatorial jungle or set eyes on a living elephant. But I plunged into the story which has now held three generations of my family’s girls, and I had one hell of a ride.
But all of those are more or less “real” contexts, in the sense that although they were unfamiliar at least they were possible, they existed somewhere out there on this planet which turned with me upon it. What of true fantasy? If it is true that you need to find yourself in a book of fiction in order to enjoy it or even accept it, how did true fantasy ever even get a toe in the water?
The Hobbit, by J R R Tolkien: There are no such things as dragons. Or trolls. Or dwarven kings under the mountain. Or hobbits, for that matter. And there are no characters in that list which I could identify with, even remotely. Oh, I have always aspired to be an Elf, but I can no more be Tolkien’s Luthien than I can be Cinderella – both are creatures of the imagination.
Yes, before people point out the obvious, I am aware of archetypes, and people possibly identifying with an ARCHETYPE of a character rather than the character themselves. But I ask, again – where does Imagination come into this? Curiosity? An itch to discover things that are outside one’s own purview, things that one might never see or smell or touch in reality but which become all the more real because they take such firm and potent root inside the potent imaginary scenery of our own minds and hearts? Isn’t this what books are FOR – the chance to imagine something that had been unimaginable, to look out onto the world through a pair of eyes which might perceive it differently from our own?
Do people seeking to find themselves and only themselves in a story – people who dismiss the story as inadequate, for whatever reason, if they cannot – really believe that a child is incapable of imagining the things that are not spelled out for it? If that is the case I despair for the human race because it is wonder and imagination, the kind nurtured in very young children, which has taken us this far – and which may still be the only thing that will carry us forward.
Elizabeth Bluemle writes:
“As a child growing up in the sand-colored deserts of Arizona, I loved reading about kids in New York City, or the swamps of the south. I did enjoy the odd book about my own landscape, in part because there were so few of them, but if I’d limited myself to books about kids like me in a setting like mine, I’d have likely been bored, for one thing, and grown up with a very narrow world view, for another. I was living my life; the magic of books lay in getting to live someone else’s.”
A commenter by the name of Gail Gauthier then comes in from a completely different direction:
“I think one of our reasons for reading is to connect with someone–the author or characters we believe to be like ourselves. Even when we’re reading to try out different lives, I think there’s usually something about the book that we connect to. We think a character is like ourselves or like someone we’d like to be. Or something is happening in the book that has some significance for us.”
As a reader – then (as a child) and now (as an adult) – I am not sure that Gail Gauthier’s comment speaks for me. I did NOT enter a book seeking a character I believed to be like myself, or even particularly want one. The “something about the book that [we] connect to” that Gail speaks of has always, for me, been the STORY. A story lived by characters whom I could believe were living it. It did not matter in the least whether or not the character was “like me” or not – and preferably it would be someone not like me at all, someone whose own take on life and their own particular worldview would be sufficiently UNLIKE me to teach me something which I had until that moment not known or been capable of knowing.
Elizabeth Bluemle continues:
“We have many missions as booksellers, but it’s a strange world when one of them is the need to defend children’s curiosity and imagination against the instincts of some of their most loving and well-intentioned guardians. “
To which I can only give a resounding AMEN. Let’s keep the books as portals, as gateways into the unknown, as a magic carpet which can take us to lands unknown and perils unnumbered, where we can go wearing someone else’s skin – learning what it means to be HUMAN, as opposed to just being ourselves. There are enough mirrors surrounding us all our lives in which we can peer short-sightedly and see only our own faces – there are more and more every day, and often life does seem, in an eerie and tragic way, to be lived inside a carnival fun-house where there’s nothing BUT mirrors to surround us. A book, a good story, is a doorway out into the green meadows of summer, into the dunes of a yellow desert, out into the stars. Leave the mirrors behind. Let’s stop trying to find ourselves in other people. Let us, instead, try to find other people in ourselves.
Full text of the Bluemle blog post, complete with commentary:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/660000266/post/770045677.html
Yearn For A Dream
Yearn For A Dream
Wayne Allen Sallee
June 28th 2009
We finally got our mid-90s here, so I’m listening to Cannonball Adderley and Charlie Parker. In the
stinking summer subways of Chicago, the best thing you can hear is someone playing a saxophone with a pile of coins inside the case on the floor. One summer I heard a guy playing “I Can See Clearly Now,” and I can still see the moment, maybe fifteen years later, stopped in time. This temperature is great for me, health-wise, though I’m still one fingered, I can type for longer stretches, and this late at night I feel less tormented, as I sweat on the keyboard. Never at peace, just less tormented. Maybe that’s why men play the sax in the bowels of the city.
I am almost finished with a novel I’ve been ghostwriting, 91K out of 94K. I am actually excited, the original manuscript was turned on its head, but the author and I have worked closely so that the book is still his own. I’m sure with all of you novelists on board here, you know that feeling, being able to sit down and immediately be in the moment, know who does what next as the last five or ten minutes of the book’s life ticks down. I could say that I know that feeling from my short fiction, but not in the same way, as I always have the last line and title written before I start something.
I write my best in the evenings, and so I’ve taken advantage of summer, not wanting it to slip away so fast. I hurt from typing, but not everything is fine motor motion. This past week, I went kayaking for eight miles on the Chicago River, with the rains causing the river to be three feet higher and loaded with dead rats. As a kid, I saw a syndicated b&w cliffhanger-type thing on Garfield Goose, “Journey To The Beginning of Time,” which ran about 60 chapters. These guys go canoeing in Lincoln Park after being at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago, go under a bridge and end up in prehistoric time and there’s some really cool stop action filming. I can only remember two guys’ names, Tony and JoJo, and it was kind of a rip to find out at the end that all 60 chapters turned out to be a dream of JoJo’s after falling asleep on a bench by the T. Rex exhibit. Well, a gyp, as we said back in the day. Also went to Taste of Chicago and had lunch with a few people in the Loop, came up with street talk and story titles as I rode the el. This last mostly comes from people being on their cell phones. I always wonder why the hell people are on the phone all the time, what did they do before cell phones?
What is the deal with the current trends in publishing? Some dude got a five figure advance from HarperCollins for a book that consists of, well, funny “tweets” on Twitter. Thing is, he has an email set up for people to send him these examples, which then leads me to believe that people will just make up funny entries. Now, there are some odd things I come across, the few times I’m on Twitter nowadays, my favorite being my writer friend Maurice Broaddus writing “I can’t believe I’m up this late trying to buy a pool for my son’s frog.” Mind you, no one would get this unless they have nieces who have Webkins. But I contacted my agent about this Twitter event, and suggested he market @joymotel, the Twitter novel I wrote with John Kewley (our hook being the review in the Boston Phoenix and the fact that John and I have never met or spoken on the phone.) You look at, say, Project Gutenberg, and you have bookshelf to ubernet. The new trend seems to be the reverse. Its no longer “What happens on Twitter stays on Twitter.” Another example is HARRY POTTER SHOULD HAVE DIED, which is entirely filled with speculations that had been posted on message boards on said ubernet. So I again contacted my agent, and working with a fellow in Los Angeles, have started writing LOST’S LONG CON, which intersperses a blog about the television show LOST that has been five years running with new material consisting of the two of us doing a Siskel & Ebert routine. The pitches can’t hurt, and for once in my life I’m looking at what’s on the shelves and knowing I have the time to write something that might slip through the window before the next trend hits, presumably “anecdotes involving iPhones,” and yes, you heard it here first, folks.
I suppose that if there is a topic to be discussed here beyond my usual ramblings, it is the net-to-shelf thing going on. I suppose it is a good thing, encouraging people to go out and buy a damn book, yet there is something vaguely insidious about it. If PK Dick were alive today, he’d find a way to write a great novel about it, likely involving corporate mind-control. He would certainly have invented the word UbikNet.
I’ve been taking a mess of photos, I always used to as references, and I have a Flickr account. Always use a disposable camera. Sometimes a multiple shot, but usually I want it to be a karma-like thing. In the last issue of WIRED, Hideki Ohmori talks about disposable cameras. A lot of what he says is right on target with my general feelings towards social networking, and I do have my toes in the water, but don’t really plan on dog-paddling daily on Twitter and Typepad and LinkedIn and Plaxo. Also, though no one asked, Facebook might as well be the Chicago River, in my opinion. I get more emails from FB than I do regular mail, and when I politely reply on FB, I then find myself replying to five or six other friends who have replied to my original reply, even though no one asked. Do I sound like Andy Rooney now, or what? I’m glad I don’t have his eyebrows. Imagine Rooney’s eyebrows on Larry King’s face. Yeah, good luck getting that image out of your head now.
Anyhow, Ohmori closes his interview by saying this. “We do not always want a faithful representation of reality. Sometimes we yearn for a dream.” Hopefully my photo will post; I took the picture while the bus I was on passed 91st and Cicero.
Enjoy July, my unseen friends. Call or hug a veteran next weekend, after you watch YouTubes of what’s going on in the streets of Tehran.
The Secret To Good Writing. Seriously.
If you are reading this, you are most likely someone who reads extensively about writing. You have no doubt read or heard a great many bits of advice, suggestions and recommendations as to how to make your writing better. You have almost certainly been told multiple times what the secret/key/Maguffin to good writing is, often in ways that contradict each other with jagged and relentless ferocity. You have been told to do everything except dip yourself in lemon herb butter and conjure the spirits of the ancient lobster gods of Lemuria before sitting down at the writing desk and taking quill in hand.
And I am here today to tell you that the secret is none of the above.
At this point, having spent the better part of twenty years writing novels, roleplaying games, book reviews, nonfiction, video games, academic papers, blog posts, book reviews, and internet humor columns under the pen name “Elfpants”, I can say that I have found precisely one factor that correlates 100% with writing well. Everything else has its ups and downs, its pluses and minuses, but there’s one element that, time and again, matches up with when I’ve done my best, my fastest, my cleanest work.
Get enough sleep.
That’s it.
Look, I know some of you were hoping for something earthshattering. Sacrifice a spotless purple goat on the new moon, maybe, and get the magical power of adverbs. Do a specific exercise and in just 3 sessions per week of 30 minutes each, your writing abs will be rock-hard and cut like a Belgian diamond. Keep yourself on a strict diet of no prepositions. Whatever. The gimmicks don’t have it. The gimmicks are often precisely that: gimmicks. What matters is putting yourself in the best position to do your best work, and that starts with getting enough sleep.
Get enough sleep, and your brain functions better. Your brain functions better, and you think more clearly. You think more clearly, and your ability to do silly little things - like utilize language constructively - is improved. In short, you write better. If, on the other hand, you don’t get enough sleep, pretty soon your brain starts running like Atlanta public transportation during a snowstorm. Surprise, buttercup: If you’re not thinking well in general, the parts of your brain that are thinking about writing well aren’t going to be magically exempt, even if you have a deadline.
This is not to say that getting up an hour early to get some writing in before work is a bad thing. On the contrary, a scheduled, structured approach that includes a solid sleep schedule is a great thing for writing. It means forgoing sleep excessively, for whatever reason, will ultimately negatively impact your writing.
Don’t believe me? Consider this possibility: You stay up late writing because you’re on a really good roll and don’t get to bed until the wee hours. In the morning, you get up at your usual time, still exhausted, and don’t get a lot done at work. Because you’re not getting stuff done and you have a deadline, you stay at work a little later, just to make sure everything gets done. That, in turn, means you get home a little later. Which means by the time you sit down to write in the evening, it’s already getting late. Plus, you’re still tired, which means it takes longer for you to get the amount of work you want in, which keeps you up even later to make your word count, and…
You get the idea. As romantic as the idea of the magically inspired writer pounding heedlessly away into the wee hours, fueled by the sheer glistening fires of artistic creation might be, it’s not a sustainable model. Sleep debt is the sort of thing that racks up interest in a hurry, and it takes payments right out of the middle of your brain. I know for a fact that on days when I’ve gotten enough sleep, I write better. I have more ideas, and better ones. I work faster, and cleaner, and just plain better. And on days when I’ve pushed too hard or too far the night before, I lose the good ideas before I can write them down. I work slower. I get distracted more easily. I need more breaks, and I’m a helluva lot worse at Facebook Scrabble.
Anecdotal evidence? Sure. But ask a lot of writers, and I’ll bet you get a lot of similar anecdotes.
So read all the other stuff. Pay attention to it. Learn it. Try it. Do it, if it makes sense to you. Find what works for you – exercises or word counts or schedules or writing groups or whatever – and go for it. But if you want it to have the best shot at succeeding, if you want to give yourself the best chance to do good work, do this one thing.
Get enough sleep.
Whistle While You Work
I’m still finishing up the novel I mentioned last month—almost there!—so I’m going to keep this short and sweet.
I love to listen to music. Back when I was a kid, I’d pull out my parents LP albums and 45s (that’s a single-song vinyl record, kid, not a pistol) and listen to them over and over again. I’d learn the lyrics, sing along, and then sing them to myself when I wasn’t anywhere near a record player or radio. (This was back before MP3s and things that play them.)
Today, I still love listening to music, and fortunately I work at a computer that gives me access to countless tunes of all stripes. The trouble is that when I’m working I don’t want to listen to most of them. Writing uses the verbal centers of your brain, the ones they always check to see if they’re shutting off accidentally when they do brain surgery, which is why they keep you awake through it and treat you as if you’re drilling words for the national spelling bee.
Songs with lyrics, of course, also worm their way into that part of the brain—unless I’m familiar enough with them to ignore them and treat them like background chatter. Unfortunately, I need every bit of that center that I can draw on when I’m writing a novel. There’s just not enough of it to spare, and if my brain starts latching on to lyrics and singing along—even just in my head—it’s not letting me use what I need to write. In other words, there’s only so much mindwidth getting pumped out of my verbal centers, and I need to give my writing full access to it.
Because of this, I like listening to wordless music when I write: soundtracks, techno, trance, house, things with a beat but nothing to say—at least literally. In fact, I’ll often pick up or adopt a certain album for a new book and then listen to it over and over while I write. When I’m done with the book, I’m often done (at least for a while) with that piece of music too.
The music also helps drown out the other strange noises in my house—I have lots of kids—and lets me focus on the writing instead. Things like screams still manage to poke through, which is likely good for my family’s long-term survival though.
When I’m not writing, though, I really go for great music with solid lyrics that mean something to me. For instance, the ringtone on my cell phone is the opening bars to “Taking Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. As the song says, “If you ever get annoyed, look at me. I’m self-employed. I love to work at nothing all day.”
FORENSICS 118: FAMILY TIES
Many things develop over time, each creating its unique history as it proceeds. Sometimes the lines they trace intersect and their histories merge. One interesting development is that of the city of Cardiff, Wales. Its history stretches all the way back to the first century AD when Romans, who happened to be visiting the area, built a fort there. Being located at the center of three river systems and along a network of roads enabled the Romans to control traffic and trade. About three centuries later, the Romans, apparently no longer enjoying their visit, decided to head back home.
Near the end of the eleventh century, the Normans visited and built a wooden castle (later rebuilt using stone and embellished many times since) within the walls of the remaining Roman fort. During the following decades, a village, which ultimately became the town of Cardiff, grew beside the Norman fort. Over the years, the town was burned, flooded and subjected to other indignities; but it survived to become the capital of Wales with a population of more than 300,000. Cardiff Castle, of course, still rises majestically from its midtown site of the original Roman fort.
DNA also has an interesting history, one that dates back to a time before the first Roman took breath. Our focus here, though, is not just on DNA but the much more recent development of DNA analysis (also known as DNA typing, DNA profiling and DNA fingerprinting). This was discovered by an English geneticist named Alec Jeffreys. While examining an X-ray of DNA during an experiment in 1984, Dr. Jeffreys (now Sir Alec John Jeffreys) noticed that the DNA of individuals in a family included both similarities and differences. He quickly realized that this phenomenon could be useful in identifying individuals.
The discovery and subsequent developments led to there now being hundreds of thousands of DNA tests done every year in the United States alone. The tests can be used to establish or confirm presence, paternity, guilt, innocence, etc; and the number of tests done is continually increasing. Shortly after its discovery, DNA analysis got off to a grand start by being used to convict a rapist killer and to exonerate a suspect who would likely have been convicted and given a life sentence in the killer’s place.
The history lines of Cardiff and of DNA analysis intersect at a point shared by a third history line, namely, that of a 20-year-old prostitute named Lynette White, who was brutally murdered before sunrise on Valentine’s Day in 1988. The murder took place in a Cardiff flat above a betting shop south-southeast of Cardiff Castle. Actually, the words “brutally murdered” do not even suggest what occurred. I will leave it to each reader’s imagination to envisage the scene where the young woman had suffered more then 50 knife-inflicted wounds, not the worst of which indicate that an attempt had been made to remove her head.
Since, at the time, this had been the most brutal murder in Welsh history, one can imagine the public interest in the case and the amount of pressure exerted on the police to find the murderer. Unfortunately, this might have been a factor that contributed to an appalling pattern of injustice. Thousands of statements were taken during the next months; but only one person, a pedophile, was initially considered to be a prime suspect; and he was eventually cleared.
As would be expected at the scene of such a vicious attack, there was an abundance of forensic evidence. It included blood stains left by an unknown male who was ultimately determined to be the murderer. In cases involving multiple stabbings, it is common for knives to become bloody and therefore quite slippery. Consequently, attackers often cut themselves. Evidence indicated that Lynette’s watch had been stopped during the violent attack between 1:45 and 1:50 a.m. Lynette’s boyfriend and ponce (pimp) became a suspect. He was of low intelligence and high suggestibility. In spite of there being witnesses who saw him elsewhere within minutes of the estimated time of the murder, the fact that he could not have erased all traces of his being in the flat and the fact that he could not have cleaned or changed his clothing in time to have been in the flat at the time of the murder, police bullied him into confessing.
An agitated white man in bloodstained clothing had been seen by several witnesses outside Lynette’s flat shortly after her murder, but five nonwhite suspects, including Lynette’s boyfriend, were finally tried for her murder. None of the five had blood that matched that found at the murder scene. Two of the five were acquitted, but the boyfriend and the other two were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in 1990. By this time, the convicted men had become popularly referred to as the “Cardiff Three.”
The case was appealed, and in 1992, the Court of Appeals determined that there had been a gross miscarriage of justice. The police were criticized at some length for their method of “interviewing” Lynette’s boyfriend. The convictions were quashed and the three men were released. That left citizens and police wondering who and where the real killer was.
In 2000, the South Wales Police initiated an investigation of the conduct of the first case. By then, DNA analysis had been markedly improved. By 2002, the police had established a genetic profile of the murderer. The DNA of all five of the originally charged suspects was tested, and none matched that of the murderer. The investigation resulted in more than a dozen police officers and civilians being charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice or perjury. This resulted in the case being known as Wales’ most notorious miscarriage of justice. Several witnesses in the original trial alleged that they had been forced by police to make statements implicating the original defendants.
Meanwhile, in 1999, the case had been re-opened. While originally trying to establish the genetic profile of the killer, most of the original blood thought to be that of the killer had been used. The flat was examined once again to obtain more samples of the killer’s blood, and not just that near the body. Bloody hand marks on the walls indicated that someone had stumbled while leaving. This evidence could not be used for DNA analysis, however, because it had been damaged by a chemical spray applied by police while attempting to obtain fingerprints. Further attempts to obtain more blood samples was not exactly aided by the fact that the flat had been cleaned and repainted.
A piece of cellophane had been found with a fair amount of blood on it. The blood included a tiny spot that could have reached the cellophane via an airborne route. The DNA of this alien blood did not match that of Lynette’s blood. This evidence was the source of the popular name, “Cellophane Man,” used to refer to the killer. Still more of the alien blood from different locations was needed to link it to the killer.
In desperation, police examined a skirting board (baseboard) near which Lynette’s body had been found. They had no idea where, or even if, blood might be on the board. Experts painstakingly removed paint bit by bit and, amazingly, found a small blood stain. A similar search was conducted on the front door, and a sample was found that was a mixture of Lynette’s blood and that of the Cellophane Man. The collective evidence, including the fact that Lynette had lived in the flat for only a week, results of testing blood originally tested or stored during the original investigation, and the analysis of the DNA samples found in the new investigation, tightly linked the Cellophane Man to the murder. But the police still needed to discover who the killer was.
A search of the National DNA Database found no matches Some, however, were relatively close. Limiting the search parameters to men living in the Cardiff area and to certain profile elements cut the list to hundreds and then to 70. A mathematical model was then applied that assessed the rarity of each profile section. That didn’t result in a match, but it isolated one person, barely a teenager, whose DNA profile was significantly closer than that of others on file.
Armed with the knowledge that close family members have similar DNA, police took a few CSI-style swabs of the inner cheeks of the teenager’s family members. This resulted in the discovery of an uncle whose DNA matched that of the Cellophane Man. Thanks to a crime committed by his nephew, the killer had been found at last,
An ironic twist to this story is that the nephew had not even been born until a year after his uncle had killed Lynette.
Extra facts:
According to a 1999 survey by the Justice Department, 46 percent of prison inmates had at least one close relative who had also been jailed at some time.
According to British law, a DNA profile of everyone arrested (whether they are convicted or not) is stored in a database.
All states in the US take DNA samples from all convicted felons. Some take samples from many others.
The charges brought against the police and citizens in the forgoing piece were not trivial. The maximum sentence for perjury in Wales is seven years; that for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice is life imprisonment.
Although A, B, AB and O and Rh genetically determined blood group systems are the most familiar and the most important systems used in connection with blood transfusions, there are actually more than 20 such systems.
In a separate case, police followed a suspect who refused to volunteer a sample of his DNA and retrieved a discarded cigarette butt. DNA obtained from the butt ultimately led to his conviction.
DNA analysis is now being used to identify various animals during wildlife population studies.
Simply the Best
Last weekend’s Stoker event was, in the words of the infamous Tina Turner, “Simply the Best!” The lineup of special guests was to die for, the food at the banquet was spectacular, and the panels, workshops, and the awards ceremony were second to none. Oh, and the parties, folks, the parties! Huge thanks go to Heather Graham and Medallion Press for sponsoring the Gory Ghoul Ball and to Dark Scribe Press for sponsoring the Unspeakable 80s Pre-Stoker banquet party!
Congratulations to all of our Stoker winners, as well as our Lifetime Achievement Award winners, F. Paul Wilson and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. I can’t think of two more deserving writers for that prestigious award.
Throughout the weekend, I heard nothing but positive comments from people, all claiming this was the best Stoker event ever. And they were absolutely right. Everywhere you went, there was a buzz of excitement in the air. Something was different. The feeling was tangible–and wonderful.
There were so many people who helped make our Stoker weekend special that naming them all would cause this note to go on forever. Even more importantly, I fear I might forget to name someone, then I’d be guilt-ridden for a millennium.
I would, however, like to offer a special thanks to Heather Graham, HWA’s Vice President. Heather not only took on the expense of the Gory Ghoul Party, which included food, music and entertainment from her wonderful band, giveaways, and contests, so our attendees were assured a good time, she also brought an editor from a large publishing house so our members would have the opportunity to pitch in the major leagues. Thank you, Heather, for your abundant generosity!
And what words can possibly express the gratitude we have for Lisa Morton and John Little, our Stoker coordinators. Without them, this spectacular event would not have been possible. Both worked endless hours, determined to make this the best Stokers ever, and they succeeded in spades! I offer my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to John and Lisa for all of their hard work and commitment to HWA. Our organization is fortunate to have them because, without question, John and Lisa are indeed SIMPLY THE BEST!
deborah
Adventures in Reading
– by Bev Vincent
Most of what I’ve written about here at Storytellers Unplugged has been about writing. However, writers are also voracious readers. It’s hard to imagine a writer who doesn’t consume books at an impressive pace.
I started young, a preschooler reading road signs on family vacations, much to my parents’ chagrin. A few years later, I picked up copies of The Jungle Book and Tales of Mystery and Imagination in a discount bin on one of those trips. The former I must have read, but the latter had a profound impact. Poe’s short stories loom large in my memory—they seem almost as long as novellas in my recollection, and I’m always astonished when I go back to reread one and discover again how brief they were.
I moved on to the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie, went through my science fiction and fantasy stage when I started university, switched to horror in my early twenties, but always went back to my first love, which is crime fiction. Anyone who follows my book reviews on Onyx Reviews will probably know that the majority of what I read falls into that genre.
As an adolescent, I was the guy who always had a paperback in his back pocket, even at school dances. During a two-year period when I lived abroad, I read nearly 200 books. The walls of our house are lined with bookshelves, and my to-be-read pile has evolved into to-be-read shelves and is now almost a to-be-read wall. I can read anywhere, and can easily put a book down in the middle of a chapter, paragraph or even a sentence if the situation demands.
As writers, we spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen. We usually read and revise our own drafts that way. Our colleagues and friends send us electronic copies of their works, which we often read from the screen as well. As a group, we’re probably more likely to read at length on a computer than a general audience. We may gripe and complain about it, but we do it as a matter of course.
Two weeks ago, I received a Kindle 2 as a gift. It was my idea, however, having seen someone using one in the airport on a recent trip. I never travel without at least two or three books, since I can often read an entire novel on one leg of a journey. Books weigh a lot, and they take up space. The Kindle is light and even smaller than I imagined. Less than 1 cm thick, it can hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500-2000 books. If you run out of things to read, you can go online with it and buy a new book and have it in your hands within a minute (so long as you’re in the US—the wireless network doesn’t work anywhere else, at present).
My main trepidation was the reading experience. I’m not a big fan of reading from the computer screen, despite what I wrote above. I often print out documents longer than a dozen or so pages so I can read them in comfort away from my desk. However, the Kindle affords me that possibility. I can read from it in bed, on the couch, in the car, in the back yard—hell, even in the hot tub if I’m careful.
The screen is a bit smaller than a standard paperback page, but the text is very legible and you can increase the text size if you need to. If you encounter an unfamiliar word, you can just move the cursor over it and the definition pops up at the bottom of the page, because there’s a built-in dictionary. If you’re really curious, you can enable the free wireless and look something up on Google or Wikipedia. It’s not blazingly fast as a browser, and you have to do a fair amount of paging around, but it satisfies my innate curiosity. I’m always looking stuff up, and now I can do it right from my book. You can create bookmarks, search for specific text, and add notes to any document. The clunkiest thing about the Kindle is the process of scanning back a few pages to pick up a detail you think you might have missed—you have to go one page at a time, one click at a time. Not a big deal, but not as easy as flipping a few “real” pages.
I’ve become a rapid convert. I suspect I’ll do the bulk of my reading from the Kindle in the future. Amazon has a mechanism where you shoot them an e-mail with an attached html file or Word doc (PDF is also supported, but it is still experimental owing to the rigid formatting of PDF files) and they return a file in the right format for the Kindle, which you can then transfer over by USB (for free) or they will send it to the Kindle by wireless (for 15 cents). I transferred the manuscript of my most recent novel to it so I’ll have it on hand when I talk to my agent. I also had a friend send me an electronic ARC of her upcoming book. If I could convince publishers to send me review copies this way, I’d be a happy camper.
There was a time when I thought I’d reread books but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that such a privilege will be reserved for only a special subset of books. There are simply too many new books to read to spend precious time with ones I’ve already read. My recent trend has been to buy a book, read it and sell it while it still has some resale value. With NY Times bestsellers costing less than $10 for the Kindle, the net cost is about the same. I may also be inspired to tackle some of the classic novels I’ve always wanted to read—many of which are free for Kindle.
I still love physical books, the smell of the paper, the whisper of the pages turning, the texture of the rough edges and the embossed covers. But in the end it’s more about the words than the package and I’m perfectly willing to give up the pleasure of holding many books in physical form. The environment will thank me for it, I suppose, since I have probably clear cut a small forest over the course of my life due to the vast number of books I’ve purchased.
Besides, I don’t want to have to build an extension to the house just to house the next decade’s worth of books.
Thomas Sullivan: ALICE’S RESTAURANT, THE BATAAN DEATH MARCH, AND FALLING ASLEEP IN AN MRI
Shhh. Don’t want to disturb the Spirit layers. Okay, let’s hold hands in a circle across the miles. Now dim the lights or just close your baby blues. See the floating trumpet? Make that a floating T-sax (after all this is a séance to get in touch with Sully’s ghost), and let’s hope he doesn’t actually play the damn thing — rock ‘n roll RIP! Brace yourselves… He’s baaa-ack!
Seriously, good folks, I am not a zombie. Go ahead, one pinch. OUCH! See? And I really was grateful and touched by all the expressions of concern as I went through some physical trauma and the sawbones fired up the buzzsaw a time or two. But now I have escaped stitches, gauze, tape, ace bandages, plaster cast, surgical wear, meds, a deflatible rubber boot that allowed me to work out in the pool, and a pitching wedge that did for a cane. My gloriously naked body is better than new (it could only be better) and my odometer is rolled back to — oh, say – 19 or 20…decades.
So now I must apologize profusely if you are one of the many people I kinda blew off with glibness when you were so gracious as to ask after my status. The thing of it is I hate to be a whiner and I’m a pretty stereotypical male in that when I’m injured I just want to be alone. Maybe it’s an evolutionary echo, like a fear that if you expose your vulnerabilities, the sabertooth tiger will get you while you are lying injured under a bush. But it was rude and immature of me. So now in a shameless bid for your sympathy AFTER THE FACT, and hopefully to get an amusing column out of it, I’m whining and coming clean with all the answers and details. Call it another of my Cannibal Essays, geared as an object lesson in converting mundane life into stylized prose. There are no bad experiences for a writer, as they say, just material.
So there I was last January skiing in the dark and pissing off my muse who thought I was altogether too far removed from suffering for my art. This explains the vindictive irony that I simply wiped out on a nothing sweep of snow, falling softly and I thought in a controlled way but somehow tearing my rotator nearly clean off. Don’t you love it when the surgeon calls in his colleagues to look at the MRI all excited about the extent of the injury? Yes, I lied to my friends a little when it happened — lied to myself — actually tried to ski a couple of times sans poles before the sawbones cut.
It is probably not an exaggeration to call me an orthopod junkie. In order to simplify life, I regularly visit the offices of a coven of terrific trauma surgeons who collectively account for my various injured limbs. It is only a slight exaggeration to mention that, due to some overlap, I am able to send broken body parts in separately and on occasion keep simultaneous appointments. When I come to the reception desk the nurses immediately begin laughing, and if I announce my intention to see a veterinarian or a gynecologist, I am pitied but scarcely doubted. Thus, I have a reputation among the “sturgeons” for not taking treatment seriously. “It would be you…” said the state’s leading carpal tunnel doc when just before he retired I became the first patient whose wrist surgeries he had to repeat. But see, this is good, because he said I heal so fast that the nerves didn’t have time to abate. In the postmortem after the rotator cuff repair, that surgeon said the same thing, that my range of motion was better after three days than he had expected in two weeks. True, one of them also told his nurse, “Don’t bother telling him what to do, he’ll just do what he wants anyway,” but let it be known, I was a very good patient this time.
The sawbones made sure of that by scaring me to death with his enthusiastic account of how he had to chase my rotator somewhere south of my derrière and haul it into place with a special technique that sounded like a tractor pull and crucify it with twice the number of pins, stitches, and surgery time as usual. Oh, I was awed and contrite after that. Didn’t protest when he strapped my arm to my chest or insisted I stay in the hospital overnight or wanted to give me fentanyl for pain (the drug that is 80 times more powerful than morphine and that the Russians used to kill terrorists in that opera house a few years back). Hate the stuff on account of I think it shuts down my bladder and I never met a catheter I liked. They always warn you to stay with someone the first 24 hours, but if I feel like I’m in trouble I usually drive over to Wal-Mart and hang out in the pharmacy near the meds. Not this time. When my boy-child drove me home I even asked him to stay a while. Went by the book. Straight arrow. I r a good patient – yessir…mm-hmm.
And things went swimmingly at first — learning how to change a light bulb by letting it drop into a clothes basket and shaving my head with one hand and pouring water from a jug spigot into a glass sitting in an open drawer below, etc. Admittedly boredom drove me to press my luck a little, e.g. snowshoeing or dragging a canoe into the lake while the ice was breaking up (a spring thaw event not to be missed!) and poling one-arm along the zigzag lightning channels. But no harm done.
What’s really dangerous is following the doctor’s orders, and being too cautious, and rehab, and sleeping! Sleeping — totally dangerous! You can crawl into a knot and strangle while sleeping. Last year my bicep ruptured in the middle of the night! It was strained while bailing out a boat with a 5-gallon bucket, but I was just lying in bed and suddenly it felt like warm wax dripping down my arm as it peeled off. That was the right bicep, and after the injury to the left rotator cuff, the doc mentioned that I ruptured that bicep too. I asked him if he reattached it, and he said “nah, you’ll probably never notice the difference,” so now I’ve got matching ruptured biceps.
It got more complicated at rehab. Lisa, who is gifted with the touch, manipulates my arm for half an hour once a week. I was not trying to be macho, but since I didn’t think stretching could cause any damage, I kept telling her to ignore my reflexes as she torqued my arm, and she did, and that was how my elbow suddenly swelled up like a grapefruit. One of the standby sawbones aspirated it and compressed it, but when the Ace bandage came off, it just ballooned up again. X-rays showed zero arthritis, so it had to be a ruptured bursa sac. When the doc drew off fluid this time, he got nothing but a cup full of black blood, and thus I was sentenced to 10 days in an elbow cast.
Are you getting the picture here? The Incredible Mummified Man. I slept in micro bursts swaddled in bloody rags and felt like I was in a Japanese game show where every time I figured out how to wash an armpit, they slapped another cast or ridiculous Velcro wrap on me. Plus, after making fantastic progress in rehab — months ahead of schedule — I now had to stop all exercises. Except that I did a lot of hiking. A LOT.
So why did I opt for toe surgery– don’t ask. Yet another sawbones saber-dancing around a surgical gurney. BTW, I recommend not joking with the nurses as you are about to be anesthetized on the slab. It was, to say the least, impolitic to quote CrackBarbie: “The last nurse I had was four chest hairs short of being a dude!” (har, har). Too late the realization dawned on me that the nurse behind the surgical table was, in fact, a dude. Lights out before I could apologize, and I woke up fearing I would hear people in white discussing my sex change operation (har, har). But they stuck to the script and so far no funny urges.
Now welded into a surgical boot with a pin stuck through the end of my toe to hold it together and using a pitching wedge for a cane, I barely missed not sleeping for the next 30 days, and it dootaleebop didn’t cha-cha-cha affect my sanity at all! Headline: MAN HANGS HIMSELF WITH ACE BANDAGE WHILE LYING IN BED. Shades of David Carradine in a Bangkok closet. Absolutely normal, I suppose, for a wretched writer wearing an elbow cast, shoulder sling, 33 miles of Ace bandage, a surgical slipper and bloody stuffing coming out of all seven orifices.
Did I mention the bath? I am so clever. Figured out how to sit in the freaking tub with a surgical boot braced on the wall and an elbow cast looped over the soap dish while shaving my head with one hand. You probably think my skull looks like hamburger, but nay, the problem was that I never got through a single bath without dipping the cast in the soup. When the itching kept me awake, I tried holding the cast arm over a burner on the stove to dry it out, and that’s how I set an Ace bandage on fire.
This drove me to try the blue rubber deflatable boot. With DryPro not only were showers possible, but as the cast was removed and wrappings rotted off, working out in the pool became socially acceptable. And if a defective squeeze bulb had not messed up the deflating of the rubber boot, I probably would not have hung up like an obscene blue buoy when the thing bobbed out of the water on flip turns.
Out of pity, the surgeon said I could walk all I wanted. “Like all day?” I asked. “I don’t think you’ll feel like doing that, but as much as you want,” he repeated. This led to a reprise of the Bataan death march, during which the bleeding toe became infected. Thank God for my Maple Grove WalMart pharmacy. Just two parking lots and a corner of a lake away, I can walk there…or take the elevator. Like Alice’s Restaurant, you can find anything you want over-the-counter, and it has saved my soul more than once.
Antibiotics were not enough, so the sawbones pulled the pin on me after 20 days instead of 30. You’d think that a pin holding a toe together would match its length, but I was shocked to see 4 inches of it come out as if my foot were shish kebab. “I did some nasty things to your toe,” said the surgeon, “it was basically hanging in three pieces.” Which is why, I suppose, he only used one stitch that ran through the toe like a clothesline. More information than I needed to know.
So there you have it, the unexpurgated skinny. There is more — the Achilles tendinitis, and how I sprained a knee trying to sleep with my foot hanging off the bed, and falling asleep in the middle of an MRI (clunk, clank — zzzzz) — but in the end laughter is the best medicine, and I’m taking the last dose of that now. What’s the old saying? “He who laughs laugh, laughs laughs laughs laughs.” Yeah. Whatever.
May I invite you to follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan )? It’s fun and unintrusive. I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for my free newsletter, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net. Past newsletters are archived at the website below. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, my new short story, “Case White,” is out in the latest issue of Cemetery Dance http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060 , and the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website. Have a terrific launch into summer.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/
http://twitter.com/thomassullivan