Sneaking Up On Outrageous

What’s the most outrageous thing you’ve ever considered doing?

I realize this is all relative to your own lifestyle. For my neighbor—let’s call him Gene—it might be putting a forbidden article in his garbage before rolling it down to the curb. For Lady Gaga it’s . . . it’s . . . Hmmmmmm. How can you possibly top wearing raw meat lingerie?

In the late eighties, I considered getting my ear pierced and sporting a gold ring hanging from one lobe. Several things stopped me. First of all, I’m a pain wuss. The idea of somebody shoving something pointy through any part of my face turns me into a quivering puddle of cowardice. Secondly my round face, chin and a half, and Brezhnev eyebrows don’t add up to a sucessful pirate or brooding artist look. Instead I’d come across as a remorseful Elmer Fudd after a cheap wine drunk. Finally, I kept manufacturing nightmare scenarios where fishermen would hook my earring while casting for spring Chinook and I’d be yanked into an icy river or my wife, miffed at some real or imagined transgression, might decide I looked like a 230-pound pull toy.

The earring idea, as you can imagine became a non-starter.

Today, in the shower room at the community center gym where I work out, I observed a guy with an amazing art gallery of tattoos. And before you ask, no, I was not staring at a naked man in the shower. I just happened to notice him while reaching for my oatmeal-hyacinth body wash. Anyhow, he had a three-masted sailing ship, a screaming eagle, a peace sign, a Star of David, a grove (not one or two, folks, an entire grove) of Pacific Cypress Trees, and caricatures of the entire starting lineup of the 1995 Seattle Mariners Baseball team. (Okay, I made that last part up. But he could have had them. He’d left the shower room before I could drop my body wash again.)

Carolyn and I have talked about getting tattoos. She wants a small and tasteful dragonfly on her ankle. I’d almost decided on a buffalo (the animal I feel most cosmically similar to), but now I’m not so sure. After the guy in the shower it feels, well, unimaginative. Maybe I’ll save my nickels and dimes and have a gifted artist stencil the opening dance number from West Side Story on my left gluteal. Or how about the poker-playing dogs from that famous black velvet painting? Or . . .

On the other hand maybe I’m not ready to do something that over-the -top. Perhaps I should ease into it a little. Write some poetry that doesn’t rhyme or order the 20-ounce white chocolate mocha instead of the 16 or show up at the 10-items-or-less line at the supermarket with 12 items. (11 wouldn’t make a bold enough statement).

Maybe Gene had the right idea. Let’s ease into this outrageousness thing. Start small and work our way up. Where’s that empty tuna can? I think I can just make this weeks garbage pickup. Oughta really honk off our neighborhood evangelical recyclers. Then I’ll work up my nerve to load my supermarket basket and clog the express aisle.

BARK-COUNTER BARK

Max: Remember last summer when we had fleas?

Bubba: (Biting at her paw) Yeah, it was horrible all that itching and scratching. And every time I got comfortable, Mom came after me with the flea comb.

Max: Or Dad vacuumed the rugs and I had to bark at the vacuum. That thing’s like a dog-sucking monster.

Bubba: I have nightmares. And then Mom washed our beds.

Max: And Dad vacuumed the sofa cushions and I had to bark.

Bubba: And Mom gave us baths.

Max: Dad vacuumed behind the dresser and I had to bark.

Bubba: (Shuddering) And Mom slathered more flea stuff on us.

Max: Yeah. I hate that stuff. It burns. Plus all the little fleas are scurrying around screaming “Help me, Help me.”

Bubba: I thought that was you.

Max:  Nope, I’m way too manly for that. But you know what I figured out?

Bubba: That the house was cleaner than it had ever been?

Max: No. (Runs in a tight circle, then jumps in and lays a full lick tongue on Bubba’s nose) I figured out that Mom and Dad do a lot of stuff for us. They buy food and walk us and brush us and put those drops in your eye, and brush our teeth.

Bubba: And clean up after us. Like the other night when you ralphed on the bed.

Max: (Looking innocent) Must have been that carrot.

Bubba: That’s the ticket. Blame the carrot.

Max: Don’t get me started on what you did behind the chair.

Bubba: I got caught short. The sun was in my eyes. My rising sign was sinking into Venus. I—

Max: Try the carrot excuse, it worked for me. The point is, we should get them a present or something.

Bubba: With what? (growls accusingly) Have you been banking your biscuits?

Max. No, you’d find them and eat them, anyway. Besides, dog biscuits aren’t recognized as monetary units by financial institutions.

Bubba: (Sitting down and scratching forehead with her paw.) Whoa! Big words from a dog who hasn’t figured out what ‘Max come here’ or ‘Max get off Daddy’s chest’ means.

Max: Like you have room to talk, Miss Sits-In-The-Window-and-Barks-Her-Brains-Out-Even-After-Mom-Tells-Her-To-Stop.

Bubba: Hell-oh oh. It was a cat! On our lawn!

Max: Oh. A cat on the lawn. Well, excuuuse me.

Bubba: (turning and mumbling an aside) Secret cat sympathizer.

Max: (Running to get in front of her) But, see, the point is that Mom and Dad get all stressed out sometimes and sometimes we’re kind of not helping that, so we should do something nice for them or they might start thinking that we’re not worth the effort.

Bubba: (Gulps.) Much as I hate to admit you have a good idea, it might pay off to do something to distract them.

Max: I can dance.

Bubba: Not special. You do that all the time now.

Max: Jump through the hoop?

Bubba: (Yawning) Old hat.

Max: Look adorable?

Bubba: (Gagging) Been there, done that.

Max: Load the dishwasher.

Bubba: (Holding out paw) Really? Really? No opposable thumbs, remember, dufus?

Max:  Oh, yeah. The thumb thing. Oooh. Oooh. Oooh. I know what!

Bubba: What?

Max: It’s perfect. It distracts me every time.

Bubba: Not—?

Max: Yeah. It takes my mind off of everything. See next time Mom and Dad are stressed out I’ll just point to the back yard and yell—

Bubba: Squirrel!

Max: (Slams into glass sliding door) Where? Where?

KILLING TIME

          By Carolyn J. Rose

 

 “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” Richard II

 “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” Walden

         

If I had a page for every squandered hour of my life, I’d have at least a hundred more novels to my credit. Some of them might be a waste of paper or download capacity. Some might be just about worth reading. One might be pretty darn good.

         But life doesn’t work that way. So those wasted hours are just that—wasted, worthless, gone forever.

         I’m not talking here about the hours given over to activities that are a normal part of our biology and/or the routine of life—sleeping, eating, bathing, grocery shopping, cooking, getting an education, etc. And I’m not talking about hours lost to events over which I had little or no control—sickness, surgery, storms, friends in crisis, family in need.

I’m talking about the hours left after subtracting all of that.

         I chose to forfeit some of those lost hours—whiling them away watching mindless TV shows, driving endless miles to get no place in particular for events that, in retrospect only barely beat out watching paint dry, smiling through dinner and a movie on fix-up dates where it was obvious from minute one that there wasn’t a single volt of electricity between us. And I wasted many minutes wishing I was taller, thinner, and smarter, and lamenting rejection in all its many forms for all its many reasons. Those minutes are still accumulating.

I resent my poor time-management choices, but I hoard more resentment for those who intentionally squandered my time. I’m talking about bosses addicted to endless meetings with fuzzy agendas that expanded like accordions, professors who managed to take topics with the potential of raging wildfires and deliver lectures with no more heat than a smoldering chunk of charcoal, agents and publishers who held onto manuscripts for a year or more and forced me to ask for the rejection.

And I reserve much resentment for myself because I should have walked out or walked away.

So my resolution for the year to come will be to take more care with the time that’s left. I vow to kill less of it, to strangle fewer seconds, murder fewer minutes, and to find myself guilty of hour homicide less frequently.

Will I keep that resolution?

Only time will tell.

Sleazy is as Sleazy Does

Sleazy is as Sleazy does.

And little lambs eat ivy. Oops, wrong song.

It’s a funny thing about book reviews—especially when someone is turning a critical eye to your own work. Often, you realize that other people don’t always view your characters in the same light you do. An example:

Steve Moore just wrote a nicely-crafted critique of my hard-boiled mystery Shotgun Start for Book Pleasures dot com. He liked the book, for which I am grateful, and gave it a generally positive review and recommended it. All good. But he had an interesting take on my protagonist, Neal Egan, a former cop who is eking out a living as a golf hustler. Steve says: “Egan is a jerk, cad and misfit.” My immediate reaction: “A cad? A jerk? Is not.” The misfit part of the equation, I’ll concede. But a cad? Steve, this isn’t a Noel Coward play. You might as well have called him a bounder.

But then, I began to think about it. Neal was tossed from the police force because of anger management issues. He makes a living fleecing rich suckers out of their money on the lush country club and resort golf courses of the Albuquerque area. His P.I. partner is a serial adulterer. Now past his 40th birthday, he still drives a vintage muscle car and listens to headbanger music turned up to the bleeding ears range. He withholds evidence from the police. Estranged from his mother, he hasn’t talked to her for ten years.

He doesn’t call his mother regularly? Okay, maybe he is a bit of a cad.  A bounder even. But, I would say, Steve understood the changes I was trying to bring about in Neal’s life and outlook. He notes: One thing I will give him, though, is that he stays away from drugs, something hard to do in his sleazy life where drugs seem to be all around him. “Sleazy” refers more to his obsessions with drink and women—his roomie calls him Slick many times in the book and the name is appropriate.

Sleazy? Sleazy? Okay, I was willing to admit Neal is a cad, but sleazy? Does sometimes starting his day with a Negra Modelo, sharing a house with a beautiful bohemian painter of erotic art, occasionally sleeping with strangers and busting into a biker bar, handgun at the ready make his life sleazy? I think not.

A conversation with my wife revealed that she agrees with Steve about most of these observations about Neal. This made me think about context and frame of reference. As a teenager and college-age whelp, I was one of those kids your parents warned you about. I stayed out late, hung out at pool halls, learned how to French-inhale Marlboros and, had testosterone slapping through my arteries like the Rogue River funneling through a narrow slot in the rocks and would have pretty much slept with anyone of the female persuasion unwise enough to encourage me. My favorite pub featured a bartender nicknamed "Dirtbag" who earned his moniker on a daily basis. I also may have inhaled some marijuana, although Arkansas Bill asked me to deny it. Is it any wonder I drifted into a career as a disc-jockey and professional ne’er do well?

Carolyn, on the other hand, earned a 6.45 on the 4 point grade scale, treated her parents with respect, worked hard at part time jobs and flew through the University of Arizona with flying colors. After that she joined Volunteers In Service to America and helped improve the plight of poor people in Little Rock. I’m pretty sure she was overqualified for sainthood. From what I can gather, she also stayed away from boys like me.

Here’s the point. Because of the direction I steered at that stage of life, Neal’s lifestyle doesn’t seem sleazy to me in the least. In some ways, it mirrors my own experience. I too popped a top while watching Mr. Rogers in the morning. I, too, gambled on the golf course. (Mostly losing). I too, had consensual sex with people I hadn’t been properly introduced to. The people he hangs with are very much like the folks I chose to surround myself with. For Carolyn, (and apparently Steve) Neal and his gang (we’re not a gang, mijo, we’re a social club) were people you crossed to the other side of the street to avoid. That’s too bad. You probably would have enjoyed having a cad or bounder in your life.  

I’m not suggesting that writers should change their approach to characterization to cater to the predilections of the more innocent and naive among their potential readership. I do think we need to keep in mind that the impression your characters make on readers may not always be what you expected.

DISTANT VOICES, INSTANT MEMORIES

My son, Rob just turned forty, two weeks before my sixty-third birthday. I spoke to him the other day, teasing him gently about the inexorable march of time. His response was good-natured, but still, I could hear in him the tone of disbelief that his youth was a distant dot in his rear view mirror and that middle-age was more than something to await, poke fun at and dread. It is, instead, his present reality. He has transformed from the straw-haired gamin-bodied boy of the fading photos in my album to a bald (a gift from his mother’s side of the family, I think), somewhat thick through the waist, hard-working globe-trotter of the first order. His job, coordinating webcasts for Intel studios sends him all over the world. Sometimes, it seems like he spends more time in airplanes than his apartment in Hillsboro. Recently, for the first time in his life and mine, he got a raise and moved into an income category I never attained in my forty-three years of broadcasting. This is a good thing, and I reminded him of the many times he slept on our couch and occupied our spare rooms during the student/multi-hair colored thrash rocker/between jobs phases of his life. “Buy a king-sized futon,” I advised him. “You never know when Carolyn and I will show up at your door.” He laughed, but I detected an uneasy quality to his guffaw.

Coincidentally, about a week before our conversation, I’d discovered an unlabeled flash drive in the glove box of the Prius. It moved to a counter in the living room for a few days and finally, I took it down and plugged it into my computer. When the menu came up with the contents, I remembered where I’d gotten it—a birthday gift from last year’s birthday from Rob.

When my son was nine or ten, a small portable cassette tape recorder became his toy of choice. At the time, I co-owned and operated a four-track recording studio and creative advertising concern with my friend Rick Huff. Rob spent quite a bit of time there and even voiced his first paying commercial, a cute testimonial for McDonalds that padded his Chuck E Cheese arcade game contingency fund by $25. Soon, he was “laying down tracks” of many of the events of his life.

The flash drive contained dubbed-to-digital snippets of Rob, in a quavery sing-song boy-soprano commenting on our day to day life in Albuquerque, spinning stories about imaginary super heroes and editorializing on the “weirdness” of his dad and his partner Rick. This last part is hard to deny—it’s a matter of record with dozens of eager-to-testify witnesses. He also invents and sings songs—about his pets, about school and makes the random joyful noises only a kid knows how to generate. There are also clips of the television shows he was watching, including running commentary and several minutes of me, co-hosting the local segments of the Jerry Lewis Telethon.

I’m not overly sentimental about the past (Who was it said nostalgia’s not what it used to be?), but hearing his voice (and the younger version of my own) put a lump in my throat the size of a ruby-red grapefruit and dampened my eyes. He was a great little kid, a difficult, but still quality teenager and young adult. Now he’s a middle-aged man I’m proud to call my son and my friend. The flash drive is a sobering reminder that I don’t see as much of him as I’d like to.

Thank you, Elizabeth Lyon. (I think.)

         

For ten years, until the end of 2010, I was an associate editor for Elizabeth Lyon’s Editing International.Under her guidance, I worked on 10-12 projects a year, learning to identify strengths of manuscripts as well as weaknesses and/or missing elements. I learned how to model ways to convert “information dumps” into bits of backstory woven into the tale and how to link that backstory and description to character development. I learned to demonstrate how to turn narrative into dialogue and how to inject conflict and subtext. I learned how to link description to action and point of view, and how to enhance character voice and author style . . .

During those ten years I edited for writers who disputed every word of my evaluations and for those who wrote to thank me for my suggestions and kept me updated on their progress toward publication. I edited for writers who probably still have my photo up on their dart boards, and for one or two who became friends.

By the end of that decade, I was pretty good at editing. And I was so tired of it I couldn’t wait to retire.

I came to think of it as having the job of carving the Thanksgiving turkey for a hungry group already gathered at the table. There was no time to admire the bird. I had to slice it apart and get it on the platter.

Other days I thought of editing as looking through a window at an awesome view for a moment, then focusing on the smudges and streaks on the glass, the cracks and chips, the fact that it was only a single pane and not insulated.

Editing changed the way I responded not just to the manuscripts that came across my desk, but to every book I opened.

So, thank you Elizabeth Lyon, for making me aware of what makes characters feel real, what makes dialogue sound like conversation overheard, what makes a story satisfying, layered, rich, memorable.

Thank you for insisting that I demonstrate and model as I evaluated. Because of that, I internalized elements of novelcraft that previously I’d struggled to learn.

And—sigh—thank you for making me aware of all the reasons that a book might fall short. My search for missing elements and weak spots made me better able to see the flaws in my own projects.

Thanks to you, Elizabeth Lyon, I’m a better writer than I was when you first asked me to “take a look” at the mystery written by a client.

But, thanks to you, Elizabeth Lyon, I’ve grown impatient. If a book doesn’t hook me in the first few pages, I put it down. If an author writes away from a critical scene, summarizes a fight in narrative, gives me talking heads in a generic setting, or intrudes to explain something, then I close that book.

Thanks to you, Elizabeth Lyon, I’m so aware of the skeleton beneath the skin, of the muscle and meat and tendon, that it’s difficult for me to see the whole Thanksgiving turkey, to simply enjoy the experience.

Thanks, Elizabeth Lyon. You made me the reader I am today—picky, picky, picky, picky.

http://elizabethlyon.com/

My fantasy life becomes a book

There has been all kinds of speculation about why people write stories. But most would agree that it's a way for them to work through unresolved personal issues, gain perspective on the events of their lives and, in some cases, wreak revenge on people who have wronged them by using fictional characters as catharsis. I co-wrote The Hermit of Humbug Mountain because of a night of terror (all created by the overactive imagination of the precocious 9-year old me) spent wandering around lost on an Oregon Coastal headland. 

Shotgun Start, my hard-boiled detective novel set on the high desert of New Mexico, is, in part, the fulfillment of a life-long fantasy--to be skilled enough at a sport to compete at the highest levels. I have to confess, I have recurring dreams about soaring above the rim and over the hands of the athletic giants of the NBA. Mike Nettleton, the greatest six-foot tall, white, non-jumping power forward in the history of the game, that's me. At 62, I still fantasize about throwing a curve-ball that fools even the most accomplished hitters in major league baseball. A-Rod. Whiff. Ichiro?--sit down bud !!! And golf? I'm totally delusional. 

I've played the game since I was twelve years old, taken lessons from a dozen pros, all of whom, after taking a look at my swing would shake their heads and ask me if I'd considered taking up bowling. "At least you don't have to go look for the ball," one of them told me. As hard as I've worked at it and as much as I practice, I'm only a slightly-above average golfer. Depending, of course on your definition of average.

Creating the character of Neal Egan for Shotgun Start let me live vicariously, as the disgraced former cop hustles rich suckers on the tightly manicured fairways of the country clubs and resort courses of central New Mexico. Neal's talent is offset by the disaster that is his personal life and the danger he faces when his ex-wife's lover is shotgunned to death and the police believe he might be an accomplice. His inability to stay out of the investigation leads him into a world of murderous bikers, the methamphetamine trade, internet pornography and the Mexican Mafia. 


Here's a question for you. What is your longest held secret fantasy? What would you have liked to have done, that you never had the chance (or ability) to do? Would love to hear about it.