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.