Thanks to all who showed up in support of MWA NorCal Mystery Week events.
I owe a huge apology to anyone I missed or gave a non-working Zoom link to — it happened, and I have no excuse other than residual Luddite-ness.
First: if you will identify yourself, you will receive a prize!
Second: here’s a screenshot of my panel on Tuesday evening, 10/27, on writing characters, with Claire Johnson, Eileen Rendahl, Ann Parker, David Corbett. I chose a Zoom background of a wedding. (I’m middle left.) But whose wedding? Name the bride and groom (or one of the guests!) for another prize!
(If you need a better image, let me know, but really that woman in orange?)
Next time we meet, we’ll have been through a critical moment in our country. VOTE NOW if you don’t already have your sticker.
Pardon me if I lapse into Gothic, but I just came across my
notes from a class in Gothic Literature.
If you haven’t visited my bookshelves, you might be surprised
that I like dark, noir, heavy reading, like the Nordic authors—all those unpronounceable
names like Indridason and Lagercrantz, or it turns out, like Gothic Literature.
(Then why have you written almost 30 cozy, light novels? you might ask.
That’s for another blog.)
These selections in italics are from The Italian, by Matthew Lewis (1775-1818).
• I loved seeing words used as different parts of speech
from what we’re used to: . . . a gentle
slope that margined the water.
• And what about a word with a different meaning: From this moment I make you independent and
promise . . . to give you a thousand sequins.
In the past I’ve had a sequin or two on a jacket. But these
thousand sequins are Venetian gold coins.
• One of my favorites: Young
man! You are an enthusiast, and I pardon you.
The explanatory note: Enthusiasm was a dismissive 18th
century term for the belief in private revelation or personal communion with
the divine.
I hope you are an enthusiast in the 21st century meaning, for my next (cozy) novel “Fishing for Trouble,” which will be released on November 24!
One weekend morning, pre-pandemic, I showed up to teach a
writing class that was to be held on the property of a county park. The class
was scheduled for ten o’clock. I showed up about 15 minutes early and found a
couple of students waiting outside a tall chain link fence held closed with a
serious padlock, and a No Trespassing sign.
No problem; we were early. We chatted on; more students
came. We hardly noticed that a half hour had passed. No one had showed up to
let us in. A couple of delivery people came by in trucks and left when they
realized there was no entry. We made a few calls with our cells—first to my
contact at the school, who suggested I call the park police, who suggested I
call the city police, and so on.
The boring part of the story is that eventually someone came
to let us in.
The interesting part happened while we were waiting.
A young woman pulled up in a low red sports car. She got out
and addressed us.
“I have to get in there,” she said. “I was at
a wedding in the park last night and left my purse.”
We shrugged and explained that there was nothing we could do
until someone came with a key to the padlock, and we hoped someone was on the
way.
She grunted. The next thing we knew, she was scaling the
fence. She plopped down on the other side and walked into the park. About ten
minutes later, she approached the fence again, from the inside, and climbed
out.
In her hands were a purse, a pair of shoes, and a bra.
She gave us a wink, got in her car and drove off.
My writing students and I got a lot of mileage of the
incident, creating many colorful back stories.
One thing that impressed me was the young woman’s
willingness to disregard the No Trespassing sign and its warning of a heavy
fine.
I thought about how I am such a rule-keeper (well, most of
the time). For me, the physical difficulty of scaling a fence pales in
comparison to the mental and psychological difficulty of breaking the law.
Maybe that’s why I write fiction—to break laws vicariously!
Laurie King moderating: Cara Black, Robin Burcell, Rae James, Saul Lelchuk, Camille Minichino, Jason Ridler, Faye Snowden, and Jacqueline Winspear.
If you’d like to attend, let me know and I’ll send you the invitation/link as soon as it becomes available. Email me at camille (at) minichino (dot) com. I’m not sure how many “seats” (places along the rail?) we’ll be allowed, so the sooner the better!
You may have attended Noir at the Bar in the past, at a real bar. This time you’ll have to supply your own bubbly and tiny pretzels. So sorry about that, but at least we’ll “see” each other and hopefully enjoy some good stories.
Post Card issued 1911. From The New York Public Library Collection.
Finally the checkout clerk won’t look at me funny when I unload large bags of candy.
I can’t say enough about a month that starts out National
Dollhouse Month, and ends with Halloween.
Throw in all that fun-size candy, those glittery costumes,
and the anniversary of Sputnick
(October 4, 1957), and you have 31 party-filled days every year. Well, except
for October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles read a script derived from “The
War of the Worlds” and scared millions in the radio audience more than any
ghosts, evil witches, or giant spiders’ webs could have.
In October, all the
white skirts and shoes are safely put away and the orange comes out: pumpkin
scones, pumpkin lattes, and pumpkin ice cream. No wonder I love this season.
I always wanted to live on a street that treated Halloween
with respect, taking orange and black decorations seriously. It didn’t happen,
so I created one of my own in my fifth miniature mystery, “Monster in
Miniature.”
FYI, “Monster in Miniature” will be re-released soon, maybe even in time for this Halloween. Watch this spot!
It’s not a coincidence that National Dollhouse Month is the same month as Halloween. Dollhouses and Halloween go together just as Mysteries and Halloween are a natural combination. Every miniaturist has built at least one haunted house.
This year will be different, of course. It’s hard to trick-or-treat on zoom, as wonderful as that software is. We’ll have to get more creative. There’s no reason we can’t have a costume party — and it will be easier than ever: waist up only!
All ideas welcome!
I wish there were Halloween carols to sing. But failing
that, I’ve programmed my smart phone with a new ring tone: He did the mash. He did the monster mash.
At one point as we
waited to cross a busy street, she cupped her ears. It turned out she’d been
bothered all week by the noise.
“What noise?” I asked.
She meant the soothing sounds of taxis; cars honking; buses; industrial motors, generators, and fans; crowds of people; alarms; jackhammers. All music to my ears. As opposed to the quiet suburbs where silence is broken only by the occasional ear-splitting lawn sprinkler.
What’s noise and what’s soothing background?
It goes back to childhood, I believe. My bedroom window growing up was about 3 feet from a bar/pizza parlor. I fell asleep to the sounds of the jukebox. Later, I had a nearly 2-hour commute to college in Boston. For 4 years, I did my calculus homework on the famous MTA, often with one arm slung around a pole, always with chatter all around me.
For me, noise provides
stimulus to write and a reassuring background to sleep. If it’s too quiet, I
can’t relax, neither to write nor to rest. Where is everyone? I wonder. Maybe I
should get up and look around.
How many decibels does it take for you to feel comfortable?
It’s September and time for a story from academia.What do you think of when you hear, “It’s all academic”?
That it doesn’t matter? That it’s not practical? No use arguing?
Here’s an incident that might enhance your definition.
Q: What’s the difference between a physicist and a historian?
No, it’s not a joke, it’s actually a true story of an interaction between me and a friend who is a history professor at a university in the east. By which I mean Pennsylvania, not Mongolia.
~*
He’s a PhD history professor, a good friend, and found
himself on the review panel for a doctoral thesis on a problem in the history
of quantum mechanics.
He called me in a panic. He was the only nonscientist on
the committee. He needed to look as smart as the rest of the members. Would I
help him?
Of course.
He emailed me and attached the student’s ten-page summary
and asked if I could come up with two or three intelligent questions for him to
pose to the student who was defending his thesis.
“I can do that,” I said, always thrilled when
someone wants to learn science, for whatever reason. I read the summary, wrote
out three questions, and called him the next morning
“I can’t thank you enough,” he said. “These are great.”
“I’m glad. I’m ready to discuss them with you.”
He laughed. “Oh, no, I don’t need to discuss
anything,” he said. “All I need are these questions. The answers
aren’t important.”
It took a while for his message to sink in: as long as he
posed an intelligent question, he’d sound smart. He could then sit back and let
the others, especially the student, come up with the discussion and possible
answers.
For me, it was a
different take on “It’s all academic.”
What ever happened to Leave well enough alone? Or the elegant, If it ain’t broke don’t fix it?
I work with 2 different academic websites, one worse than the other for updates and (*&^ icons (oops, slip of the links).
There are six ways to do everything on these sites—like post an email, and ten places to put it after you’ve written it. I’ve forgotten how to do the math that calculates how many combinations and permutations that amounts to.
In a strange twist of web designer/user interface, in one class where the opening website to click on your course is new, and the course navigation scheme is new, someone had the decency (guilt feelings?) to include a sentence in tiny font, almost grayed out: Click to see original layout.
Then there are ICONS chosen by ? Please introduce me; I’d like to tell ’em what I think.
What do you think this is?
Here’s an example.
In one class, after I’ve written the text of a post, I get to choose from broad range of things. bold, italic, or Heading, for example. Or bold italic, or bold italic heading, and so on. Today I wanted to choose a color for a line of text so it would stand out. Red, I thought, that should be easy.
But nowhere could I find the icon that said, in any words I could understand, “red” or “color” or color red.
I’ve learned to hack around, however, and so I began clicking on every single icon. Fascinating choices popped up. I had the feeling I could have switched to the language of Croatia more easily than I could find RED. Finally, because I ran out of logical ones, I clicked on the stack of waffles in the image above.
Voila! It opened up a rainbow of further choices including colors, plus many other tools.
OK, raise your hand, you who thought this was the way to indicate “colors”? Or anything other than waffles or dominoes?
I’m leaving before I accidentally hit the COLLAPSE button on the sidebar
Actually in the ether. But the point is that I wrote THE END and sent off another manuscript to my publisher. This is Book 3 of the Alaska Diner series.
Granted it’s not really the end because it has to go through
the entire structure of the publishing house—editor, editor’s boss, copy
editor, galley editor, production editor. And who knows what other “team” members.
But at least there’s a core 84,000 words that make up the story, and most of
that will survive the blue pencils, or these days “track changes.”
My first 4 mystery series were inspired by me; that is, careers or hobbies I’ve had—physicist, miniaturist, math teacher, postal worker. Even most of my standalones and short stories have been connected in some way to my past—a nun, a concession worker on a boardwalk, inspecting commercial nuclear plants.
But for this new series, my 26th through 28th novel, I broke from that pattern, and actually wrote fiction! Yes, it was my publisher’s idea. Oh, and so was a new name: Elizabeth Logan.
“How about a cat in a diner in Alaska?” my editor said. (As
most of you may know, editors don’t ask, even when there’s a question mark at
the end of their sentences. They tell.)
I’ve never owned a cat, but apparently every one of my
friends has and they were only too eager to help me out with stories. Thus, an orange
tabby, Eggs Benedict, Benny for short, was born. (He has his own Pinterest
page, by the way. You can check out “Benny” there.)
It’s funny to have my critique partners argue over whether
Benny can or can not do a certain thing, eat a certain thing, sound a certain
way. So it’s not much different from other research, such as when you ask a
question of experts in police procedure, for example, and you get “yes” from
three or four, and “no” from three or four others. The good news is you’re then
free to do what you want!
A funny example: one friend insists her cat eats corn on the cob, while it’s still on the cob. She demonstrates with her own hands and mouth, teeth running along a “row.” Another friend insists no cat would or can do that. I went with “can” because it was more fun, but my editor scratched it!
Moral here, in case you missed it: you never know whom to credit or blame for settings, pets, character names, pen names, cover design, story decisions. It takes a village!
I’m in the mode of repurposing these days. So if I “have to” read an essay for my MFA class, I might as well post it here for you to read, right?
The essay is “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid. I heard her lecture in SF many years ago. This is not what she read, but I found Girl on YouTube. There it is for your listening pleasure.
PS, this is not cheating because I’ve already submitted my homework, so I won’t be getting credit for any comments you make.
I've been a factory worker, a translator, a teacher, an experimental physicist, a nuclear safeguards engineer, a writer, a waitress, a miniaturist, a paralegal, a nun, a minister, a short order cook, a ticket taker, an editor, a crafter, and a cotton candy twirler.
I am still some of these, plus a wife.
No wonder I still have a spectrum of stories to write.
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Oct.29,2020
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