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 quackiest 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 are 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 for 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 iteration 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.