Blown Away In The Breeze

A million people over the past 80 years have referred to Gone With The Wind in glowing terms, quoting Vivian Leigh or Clark Gable with all the zeal of somebody who just walked across the Red Carpet.

Almost nobody who knows anything about Margaret Mitchell's book has any idea what's in it. They remember a movie and a few classic bits. The whole thing is about the Civil War.

Yep, so far ... so good.

The book is a little bit more complicated than that, but then again -- so is the damned Civil War, which is usually boiled down to a couple of inane comments, depending on your point of view.

Mitchell's opus spreads across more than 1,000 pages and is some of the smoothest writing possible for its time frame (around 1933-34). It's wordy and over the top, and it is very badly flawed.

It's still great literature, the topic notwithstanding. Mitchell's story isn't one that would sell easily today. She glorifies the planter class in the South, claims the Yankees are all scoundrels and murderers and -- worse -- she colors over slavery as if to suggest that the 'darkies' are just 'negroes' who don't really have much to fear. In fact, they seem almost 'white' with a bit of a crudeness that manifests itself in a jibberish conversational tone.

The main characters are fairly well-defined. Scarlett, for all her personal angst, is much younger than she is portrayed by Ms. Leigh. But Mitchell's attempts to turn Scarlett into a conniving victim are successful. I almost want to cheer for the horse to spray mud on the bitch's dress.

Ah, there I go ... stereotyping.

The Civil War, as one of the most provocative events in global history, has more nuggets than a gold mine. But you need to know the facts about the years leading up to the conflict. GWTW doesn't actually present facts -- the story is set in Georgia, not Mississippi or Texas or Iowa or Vermont.

To get the whole picture, you need to do more than watch the movie.

A lot of life is not a movie.

Frankly, my dear ... you ought to give a damn about that.

(I snatched that photo off the internet and I didn't ask permission to use it. I will think about that tomorrow.)

The silliness of naming characters

The amusement over what to name characters in the trendy fantasmal worlds of "other galaxies" and "other times" is enough to make me want to ROTGDMFFALMAO.

Why use ordinary English to describe everything that's going on in the story, including dialogue, and resort to naming the characters Deslaharma or Zeanderlal ... and of course, all of them in the Land of Frothinotina. Having a world with consecutive 'a' sounds is always fun, as in Miaamiaa or Flaaridaa.

Cheesh, why not just call them Saam and Ellaa?

If you intend to invent a world, invent a world. Don't just use the same one from your video game and invent some new names. If you can't invent a language, why bother? If you invent a language that has no grammar rules, no conjugations and no continuity,



Maybe just stop fucking around with it?

When the Devil comes calling ...

To the blathering majority of pre-something writers who would rather invent some dystopian empire in another galaxy and pretend their all-powerful teen-aged heroes and heroines can save everyone:

There has never been a more terrifying month in world history than the one that began sometime early on March 24, 1913.

There
Just
Isn't.

That day, which was officially Easter that year, something peculiar occurred. An El Nino weather pattern concocted a form of evil that can only be described in books.

So why write about some cockeyed amateurish "world building" story that has no impact on anything?

Here are some headlines from the first four days of the week of March 24, 1913:

The tornado that hit Omaha was the beginning of the terror. The storms moved on into Illinois and eventually killed 30 people in Terre Haute, knocking out the telephones to the rest of the world, which had no idea

What

Was

Happening.

Then it began to rain. 

And rain.

And the flooding that resulted killed many, tore out bridges, swamped entire towns, washed away railroads, broke levees and sent nearly a third of America into shock.

If this isn't more interesting than some robotic manufactured creep from the planet Archinoxia, well ... shit! 

If you plan to be a writer, look around. These are real events that only your form of Hell could create. 

In places where they could in 1913, they prayed for salvation.

It didn't come in a can. Loosen up and go to the library. Nobody gives a damn about your video-game fantasy novel. And neither do you.

My old home town

I have a separate blog and a sustained website that covers the history (as we perceive it) of the erstwhile town of Fairfield, which was in a nice cozy corner of the Whitewater Valley (East Fork) in Franklin County, which is in Indiana, not far from Ohio and not even close to the city of Franklin, which is in Johnson County, not far from where Jacob Whetzel put his stake in the ground in around 1808.

That data dump will bring you quickly to the present, which has disappeared as swiftly as your click on another URL.

To the degree any of this is important connects to my willingness to go looking for the fun stuff that happened a million-million years ago. The newspapers of the time have provided eyebrow-listing experiences.

And a lot of laughs and OMG moments.

To the point: Fairfield's history has been recorded by many former residents who were shoved into the Dumpster of progress between 1964 and 1970, when the US Army Corps of Engineers engineered the dam just north of Brookville.

By 1975, the valley was a lake and we gathered our love for home and stashed it. As years went by, we collected it all and put it back into a readable form. There's a lot we've recorded. In 2015, we'd have celebrated our town's bicentennial. (No I wasn't there for all of it.)

The other small towns around the area expressed some astonishment that Fairfield could care enough to achieve that. Most of those towns are weed-infested junk yards -- like they were in 1959.

By collecting that history, I came across people I knew, places I remembered and many events I had no idea about.

Spending a year gathering information and producing a blog -- the highlight of my writing career. The blog mattered to me.

If you're sure what to write, just wait. Do the blog. Get a sense of yourself and your own place in time.

The book will follow.

THE FAIRFIELD I REMEMBER 

THE BLOG FOR OUR 200TH ANNIVERSARY 

What to read

I picked up a random book at the library one day, tucked in with the other 2-for-a-buck paperbacks in the Friends room. Second floor, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The title was Dust, by an author named Charles Pelligrino. The thing was amazing. In his story, the dust mites have decided to take over the world, which wasn't the first time they'd done this. The dinosaurs, Pelligrino claimed, were the first victims. That annoying asteroid was just salt in their wounds.

The story seemed marginally palatable on a lot of levels, especially since 10 percent of America thinks the government is lying about global climate change for reasons they haven't fully explained.

Either way, it was an amazing sci-fi trip.

Beyond that, I have found a lot of interesting books, and I tend to pick up stragglers, things that were written 10 or 15 years ago. It's funny seeing how writers tackle the technology that changed before the book was published.

No need to do that now. You can fix 'er on a fly with some self-pub options. I've decided to dabble in that. I will explain it more when it's clear to me what I've done.

The $1.56 so far in royalties has me highly optimistic.

One operation that seems curiously interesting is Fresh.ink.com. Check it out. You download an app and do beta reading for us authors who can't get an agent interested in anything that doesn't include Misty and Brandon and their quest to take over the Robotics factory on the planet Zenophonia.

PLEASE BUY MY BOOK!

I've been all over the lot looking at the process for getting my work out of my head and into yours. So far, it's a lot of this, some of that and ... really, a whole bunch of nothing.

Which isn't the end of the world, or even a cause for consternation.

Con-stur-na-shun ... you get some pills for that. I will explain later.

I self-published Deenie's Hotel a year or so ago and I've sold one copy, which gives me 64 cents in royalties. I priced the thing at $2.50 for an ebook, which is OK. I don't really need the money.

I mean, I used to need the money. Now I just don't give a rat's badonkis about it. Just buy it, read it, tell me what you think. If you don't read it, that will be a problem for me.

Con-stur-na-shun. iT'S ALL ABOUT THE LIVER.


DEENIE LOVES YOU

Genre spelled backwards is Erneg

I try sometimes to come up with creative ways of telling people what I write about.

The best one so far has been 'porn.' Women mostly go 'saaaaaa!' which is their way of telling their friends they'd never EVER read that since it's demeaning to women.

I don't disagree, but who cares? It's a friggin' book. I mean, there are lots of books about weird stuff that are demeaning to somebody or other. That of course is a false equivalency.

It does matter.

Lately, I've written everything from a flirting ghost to a saboteur in the time travel booth, and a group of people lost on a dying planet. I think somewhere in there, I wrote about a woman who was digging turnips on a cold October morning.

You know, the standard erneg material.

My latest work is a pretty nifty concoction of mystery, crime, romance, paranormal creatures and overall slothful behavior.

I think I might turn it into a series.

The first book is tentatively titled Tooth of Toad. I have some other ideas for the rest of this boxed set.

No, it ain't a damned sequel!

Here's the cover I designed. It's a cool cover, almost as cool as the book. Please ask me about the book, not the cover. Thank you. Bonny and Jonny will be most happy.

'Write what you know'

The old standby about writing about things, places, people that you recognize or understand is similar to 'feed a fever, starve a cold' or ... my favorite, 'there's more than one way to skin a cat.'

What's important here is that the bullshit that continues to run downstream is never evaluated for anything. It's either accepted or dismissed as unstated fact.

Unproven.

Why do you even need to skin a cat?

Why do you write?

If you write, you ought to have enough gumption to at least ask why a fever needs to be fed. If you aren't inclined to even ask that question, then why are you even in the fucking room?

Somebody needs to question all this.

Writing what you know ought to include having enough brains to listen to what's being said, why and when it even mattered.

Margaret Mitchell did not appear in real life during the Siege of Atlanta. She wrote a novel about it because she was intelligent enough to read about it. Therefore, she wrote about what she knew.

She got educated.

The current trend is to promote writing about the 'marginalized' groups, which is a convenient way of saying, we expect you to fail because you didn't even bother to ask about why cats needed to be skinned.

Or how much fun is in a barrel of monkeys. Why are monkeys in a barrel?

Seems like marginalized people are the ones who don't know enough to write about anything. If you were never outside the Earth's atmosphere, how can you write about space travel? What is space travel and why do we even bother with it? There isn't anything out there, at least anything that's truly useful.

Did you bother to think that through?

Margaret Mitchell did just that.

You need to know about life, not just pitter down the cliches that allow us to actually accept that God works in mysterious ways, because if it ain't on Facebook, it's a lie.

Write what you know. Your fever will be happier that way.

The cold? Not so much.

Pretending people of the alphabet marginalization throng needs to have literature written for them, about them, sympathetic to their voice ... what about this did you miss in the conversation?

If pandering to your own beliefs is your way of writing what you know, it's that you know what somebody else wants and you are by-God gonna deliver.

The part about writing what you know is way more complex than that. It's telling you something.

Pay attention.

Historical friction

The idea that almost everything is the product of some other event strikes me as so obvious as to make me wonder: Who doesn't know that?

Still, you'd think we would learn from it.

Somewhere around 1900, give or take, an amazing product called the Electropoise was invented. It sold for $25 and was supposed to cure everything but a bad temper. Before the thing hit the market, even the quakiest doctor said the Electropoise was a fraud.

It kept selling. In those days, the best form of punishment was tar followed by feathers.

Then in the 1920s, a Kansas duck named J.B. Brinkley managed to get rich convincing millions of people that a goat's gland extract would cure all their ailments.

Brinkley eventually lost his radio license over the lie and continued to pawn off his remedy from a radio station based in Mexico.

The curiosities here are the stuff of writing. These were real people, not the movie version of the Rainmaker. They also keep happening. It's called aloe vera treatments now, or some kind of shining-armor tea from the western side of Everest.

We all want to live forever.

As writers, the lure of historical fiction is often too great to pass up. The parts of historical fiction that make the genre amazing are the ones that include real freaks, real liars, real events.

The big picture isn't always what it seems.

People took the first train to California in 1850 and they found what they deserved to find. They also keep voting for promises because promises is what made the Electropoise the most amazing product since electricity.

Shocking.

America didn't have much faith in doctors in the 1880s and the newspapers are littered with ads that promote healing through the gentle but effective purging of the kidneys and bowels. The belief that the germs should be flushed ... shit rolls downhill.

There's plenty there for the creative writer. The ads were written by men and the women were told what was wrong with them and what they needed to do to be right with the world.

Rosy cheeks.

Send a dollar and we will fix you right up.

Piggly Wiggly, PO Box 123, New York

Calendar journalism

In my years as a newspaper hack, the dreaded 'it's been 5 years since ...' and 'we'd like you to do a story on it' popped up about every six months.

The term 'calendar journalism' emerged, meaning -- the only reason we were doing the story was because it met some convenient set of rules, such as the fiftieth anniversary or ... 'it's been two years since the big fire ... how are the survivors adapting.' It was a reminder that it didn't happen to us but we're sensitive to your pain. I called it bullshit.

So off we'd go, doing nothing practical in the quest for a career, instead  re-writing somebody else's reporting, adding in special charm that connected to back-story, as well as the benefit of knowing all that had transpired since the original event.

Newspaper editors were not only tedious, but they were in lock-step with everything they claimed to be distasteful. 

Just to fill space in the paper with somebody's melancholy. Calendar journalism is equaled only by the 'top 10 stories of the year' that wastes everyone's time.

I was apprised of this earlier this year (2019) with the advent of two events -- the 1919 World Series and the 1969 Apollo moon mission. One small step, etc.

What we got from both is a complex view of history that couldn't have been possible at the time. We learned over the century that the 1919 White Sox either (a.) threw the Series (b.) were unwitting dupes or (c.) were part of a much larger lie. The (d.) here is whether you want to believe it.

The Apollo 9 story is laced with everything but the obvious: Going to the Moon was, under any circumstance, one of the most reckless activities since they dropped the test bomb at Los Alamos. We got virtually nothing from the missions, spent too much money, invested way too much patriotic capital ... but we got some wonderful calendar journalism.

We even have photos!

Neither of these stories gets past the 'hello' part of a conversation if the year doesn't end in a '9'.

The trick is to be creative with stories like these. It's possible. The facts are there.

Calendar journalism doesn't allow for that. The editors who assign those vapid treadmill exercises are the reason the print media went under. Inevitably, television will go the same way.

Don't fall for it.

If you want to do period history, event history or just trend color, do your own story. Read the original transcripts or reports, follow your own footprints, no matter where they lead. Don't just top it with 'It's been x-years and we thought we'd remind you.'

There is a difference between historical research and calendar journalism. One of them makes you wish you'd gone to bartender's school.

How I met Jill

A number of years ago when I was looking here and there for a character and a voice for my writing, I came across "Jay Hughes," who is -- without embellishment  -- me. It means JU's.

Ol' Jay shows up in most of my work as the guy I'd rather be than not. I see the world through his eyes and he is what I am at times.

But as I dabbled, I decided to explore some diversions to 'white guy meets white girl, they have an adventure and live HEA.'

So, I thought, let's see if an interracial relationship can work. Regardless of intent, content, or camping tent, I thought the story initially had legs. Lacking true context, I tried to envision a plot that could hold the story line together.

After 40 pages or so, I came to the conclusion that an interracial relationship would contain the same elements of any other with the contrived exception of the friction such a relationship might have endured at a time in our nation's past.

Bigotry. I know about it, have observed it and probably have endured it as much as my own victimhood will allow. 

So, I trashed the whole thing and thought, why not just make her green, from another planet and see what works. I wrote the thing. There was a real story attached to that.

It sat around for a long time, living inside its pointless bigot-free world. Last spring, I dredged it up, re-wrote it and it's now a story I can hopefully sell.

I don't harbor illusions much these days. I am running out of tomorrows, having squandered a lot of yesterdays. But what I have written is mine, it's done for the right reasons and is worth sharing.

"Jill" could be an important person in a world that may someday  exist. She's impetuous and full of adventure. She likes beer, Paul Anka and eats redwood planks for a snack. She deals with bigots in her own unique way.

And she likes Klinger, the dachshund.


"Jill" is a good yarn.

Really, it is. You might also like to learn about Segoy, but that's another story.

Sports books and movies as frauds

I've seen a lot of sports movies. I like them for a couple of reasons. I dislike them from the obvious reasons.

First off, most sports have rules. Well, all sports have rules. Some rules regulate the games, some regulate the leagues and some regulate the management of the games, the leagues and (ta! da!)

The Players.

Don't do a sports book without knowing what is or is not a rule.

I saw a movie a lot of years ago called Murder at the World Series. It was a made-for-TV flick with ordinary actors with ordinary resumes and it was in color, had the usual commercial breaks and was, all in all, not a terrible story.

The baseline was, the main character was a rookie who had been called up from the minors the day before to pitch in the Big Game. Houston was the fictional team when the Astros were still in the National League.

The problem, which could never be rectified no matter what -- there is zero rule, zero option, zero exception, zero chance -- not even God-given, to allow a pitcher to come up from the minor leagues the day before the World Series and pitch in the game.

It isn't allowed, never has been, never will be and is a useless argument to even postulate a 'yabbit waddif' scenario.

The folks who made this film could have made a phone call to the nearest VFW and asked the drunk at the end of the bar if this could reasonably occur, and they'd be told, 'No.'

So why didn't they?

Because they figured the viewers wouldn't care.

In the end, it was a TV movie that had no discernible value. I don't even remember who was murdered at said World Series, or why.

Maybe it was the pitcher.

There are other less egregious examples of bad research that builds onto an otherwise useful sports book/movie premise. Hoosiers cuts a lot of corners but most of the acting is acceptable. Hoosiers fails on the cutting room floor, not the gym floor.

Non-fiction sports stories are usually pretty dull. They are also not terribly useful. A fictional sports story can be fun. I did one once, and it turned out all right -- not that I want to offer it to a publishing house. It's not  inspirational. I did it for the exercise.

I might do something of a fiction about early 20th century baseball. There's plenty of low-hanging fruit there. Basketball is more difficult to write. I don't like football or hockey enough to care. Soccer is a sport about the fans, not the teams. Polo, ping pong, pool, perhaps. 

 I understand sports a little bit, especially the parts that are possible and legal within the rules. You can have somebody murdered at the World Series, or in the city park for that matter, without cluttering up the story with shoddy research.

If you don't know what you're doing, do something different.

Let the world be your crutch

Searching for historical events has never been easier, and it figures to become even smoother as technology feeds off its own successes and failures.

Wikipedia has become America's go-to resource, which is fine. It's typically well-grounded and organized, and it's in a writing style we understand. That's not nothing, as we are inclined to say in this incarnation of the language.

But the fun part is seeing how the world pursued the facts before Wikipedia and Google, or Bing, or Jeeves.

If you're building a story off historical fact, there's nothing cheesier than reciting Wikipedia, using only that as your resource and telling the world you just built it up based on hours of back-breaking, heart-wrenching, finger-throbbing research.

Modern history is condensed, and it's often modified now from the original. That's called something many people find insulting. I claim it's getting it right. It's not linear and it's often complex, slow to react and laced with irrelevant trivia, all of which is quite intriguing.

Wikipedia sometimes leaves out the juicy bits because the author either didn't think the juicy bits were as juicy as we thought they were or, worse, didn't know the juicy bits existed. In a phrase, if all you know about anything is what you read in Wikipedia, anybody who reads Wikipedia knows that's all you know about it. Don't be that person.

(It's fine to use Wikipedia just to get a date or place, if your only reason for using it is for reference. Nobody much cares about that.)

Anyone can learn about the Rosenbergs with a Google search.

Which is fine. It anchors you to the ground. Even the book you read about them will be well-known to anybody who's interested in the topic. If your story is about Julius and Ethel, the experts already have this history down -- pat.

But that should not preclude you from doing a story about the time the Rosenbergs existed, and the intrigue and drama surrounding this infamous 20th century Red Scare tale. Hundreds of movies and books cover the Cold War and any or all of them still resonate. Patriotism paid big royalties in those days. Joe McCarthy was a cruel man.

You can build a great book around real events without having to quantify all of it. You just need to be inspired. You need to be accurate with facts and believable in the parts that could have been facts. If it couldn't have happened, that will stick out like a sore toe.

What if your tale is about a man who knew the Rosenbergs' milkman? What if no such person existed? What if he did?

One of the most interesting stories of all time is The Great Gatsby, which is about the man who knew the man.

Play the game, but don't think the 50 push-ups you get from Wikipedia will get you in shape. Do the road work.

The evil that we are

In our lives, we bump into manifold interesting people, most of whom do what they do, or stopped doing it, without creating much of a ripple.

There's a slim chance that John Wayne Gacy lives down the block, or that some kid who sells lemonade in the front yard grows up to be a slasher or a mass murderer.

But if you're writing, everyone is a suspect.

I had occasion to discuss this with an 88-year-old man who had an established career as a community organizer, teacher, church leader. He said, "At my age, I've forgotten what I did 40 years ago."

"Maybe you were evil," I inquired.

He shrugged. "Maybe."

Somebody in town was probably murdered around that time.

Maybe they caught the killer.

In any event, wouldn't it behoove us to look into it?

This elderly guy has something to hide. He's not sure what it is.

Unless he's lying.

Then, there's a great story.

Relative value of porn

Twenty-some years ago when I started writing digital novelette-length stories, I found the temptation of 'dirty' too damned much fun to pass up. To me, it was a story that contained a lot of sex, usually normal sex. I called it blue-collar romance; it was easy to sell. The royalties were lousy; who cared?

There's not a lot of lesson being taught here, other than to suggest that writing sex into a novel or short story is nothing short of -- crap, you should consider it even if you hit the delete button afterward.

What we knew about that genre in 1998 was that women were identifiably the biggest market, and they seemed to like the more peculiar forms of the craft, meaning bondage, partner domination, same-gender relationships, that sort of thing. The notion of an 'alternative' lifestyle seemed to hover. It was as though the bulk of the buyers had found that doorknob and exited the closet. 

Women also do not read porn. If it's about sex, to them it's erotica. Do not confuse that term with anything else. There are a couple of print labels that specialize in romance with something more than fade-to-black.

Anyhow, if you found out back then what women wanted to read, and you could assume they were a little past their twenties, you could crank out stories, books, poems, greeting cards ... you name it. The digital publishers had nothing invested. The writer was supposed to format the work and send it on. Contracts were standard. The E-book publishers took anything they could get. Marketing was just a word. Pfffft.

I have no idea if anybody still buys this stuff, or sells it. The market at the time seemed a bit immature, at least the women writers with whom I shared contact. We'd write something, email it off and get a 'Wow, that's powerful!' and think we had the X-rated version of Gone With the Wind.

I did create a character who found himself in the middle of a lot of sordid adventures, none of which harmed anyone. The notion that a befuddled male in the middle of an ironic world could get so lucky so often was nothing short of parody. I don't know if anybody realized that. The royalty checks were small. Regular sex does not sell as a rule. It just doesn't. Who knew?

But I learned to modify the character in later work that stepped up way past the childishness of blue-collar romance. I don't even see a need to include a rambunctious romance scene now, beyond what's just obvious.

I have a few of the old stories around here, and I might recast a couple of them. The plots work, the characters are interesting, and the stories make sense. A little less on the crude might work. Might not.

My greatest challenge was to write the perfect steamy shower scene. I think I have it, but I've not used it yet. 

It's the alternative bathroom lifestyle. Easy on the soap.

Real time travel

I subscribed to newspapers.com, mostly because I wanted to do something over the winter that did not include casino games on the computer. Little did I know:

The old papers, as far back and as diverse as paper and ink, are a joy, a trip backward in time that we only envision in science fiction or an arcane 'we can't really explain this but --' time travel book.

I know. I wrote one. The Amos Milton Caper was a ton of fun. I might post that on my board eventually. Back-edits and such.

What's truly amazing about the old papers, depending on how far back you go, is the writing style of the various editors and reporters. It isn't to say that all of them were literary wizards. They knew how to spell and they knew how to get their point on paper.

Fair enough.

But the scale of the adventure is immeasurable. The year 1919, for example, a century ago as this blog item is being shared, tells stories that we didn't learn in school.

Hell, most of history was boiled down to a couple of paragraphs, with the important part being blah-blah-blah 'shall not be infringed' blah blah blah.

I was alive for some of this stuff.

The really fun papers are the specialty journals, though most of them lack any real context.
The best stuff is from the late 1800s, mostly about kings of Europe, the various forms of patent medicine and the price of shirts, coats, boots and hats.
The advertising is amusing, less informative. There's almost nothing that doesn't make you do a double-take. Laugh, share, absorb . . . and get a taste of the world as it was happening. You also have the benefit of a long time to reflect on what it meant. When it was published, nobody knew that.

But if you're writing period history in America, get on the 'horn' and subscribe to newspapers.com. It's not free, it's not expensive and it's a great way to avoid wasting time.

It's better than the movie and it's not the same crap you learned from Mrs. Applebottom, who only taught you what she felt like teaching you. This was before her time, too.

It's important to know that history is not linear, time is not linear, and the decisions the world made in 1874 are somewhere etched in the present. The war didn't end just because your history teacher made up some arbitrary date.

This article from the April 17, 1865 edition of the Richmond Whig, one of many periodicals over the course of American history, where the process of freedom of speech is unique across the world. The South, at least the editors of the Whig, had forecast a period of peace after Appomattox, and this dreadful act was seen as another Chapter of Hell.

If you are writing in this period, isn't it useful to know this? This, by the way, was NOT on the front page of the paper. The relative value of news isn't the issue here, since you have to go looking at times. "Jesus Returns" might be big news, but the guy who bought the liniment oil ad paid the bills.