Being sick in a book

The best way to remove characters from a novel is to have them die.

This can be achieved in several ways.

1. They can be murdered, which is necessary in a murder mystery.
2. They can die in a war, which is necessary for almost any book.
3. They can be killed in an avalanche, flood, earthquake, asteroid attack. That's pretty handy in an opus.
4. They can die of a disease, which usually happens as a means of creating sadness, angst or a sense of indefinite helplessness. I tried to save him but he was too far gone.

What we seldom see in books is attempts to save the infirmed. Oh, the good doctor orders up some tea or chicken soup, rest and "keep him warm and comfortable. The rest of it is in God's hands."

The crap about God intervening or having a role is useful because a recovery, regardless of how predictable, can be attributed to prayer or a divine miracle. Divine miracles, when actually in use, can make a difference in the outcome of the whole book.

What's missing are remedies that transcend chicken soup and herbal tea. Those deal with the bowels, the kidneys, the liver and continence overall. Do some research on this. You will learn that patent medicine killed more people than it cured.

Carter's Little Liver Pills are still around. You just need to watch more television.

And become a complete idiot by doing so.

Still, if you want realism in your books, going to the bathroom regularly can keep your characters alive. Although, asteroids might be a slightly more complex problem. The remedies are still being sold on the internet and on offbeat cable TV programs, mostly by borderline actors or sideshow celebs.

The doctors are mostly scoundrels who've managed to retain their licenses by convincing the AMA that they aren't doing any harm.

The difference now is that one traveled by horse and wagon in the olden days. This is not a character to be overlooked. At times, the treatment is more interesting than the outcome.

And it only costs $1.

RWA ... the bane of romance

Over the last few years, lately (2020) more pronounced, comes an internal battle with the arcane Romance Writers Association, which has been universally panned, dissected, drawn, quartered and burned at the stake by almost everyone.

It's easy to do that when you have people patting you on the back for joining in on the torch-burning procession up Frankenstein's Hill.

RWA is one of those demagogue organizations that was set up to promote an agenda and allowed the agenda makers to change the rules. Chief complaint evidently is about racism.

Well, that is the chief complaint about everything now. Success or failure depends largely on which side of the fence you choose to stand. Even if you don't have a fuckin' idea about racism, you get to have an opinion about it. If you don't have a fuckin' idea, the people who are being racism-ed will surely let you know this. (You can't know what it's like to be ................)

To RWA's credit, they've apparently come out publicly saying they intend to address the problem. That's not good enough for the steamroller faction, which insists that RWA is lying about that and the proof is .......... well, somehow out there.

Women of color or indefinite gender are the heroes of this story, since they apparently are the chief victims. The regular (white, racist, southern) writers are the villains because they allowed this culture to exist and thrive.

I reckon that's true.

Romance as a genre contains 4 characters -- the two would-be lovers and somebody on either side of that line who either promotes the relationship or is determined to see it fail. There's not much of a story line beyond that. They skip over the plot to get to the sexy scenes, then pretend they are doing the plot again until the climax, where HEA or HFN happens.

Being angry about how that happens is the current trend. The gayness of it all is apparently abhorrent to RWA and lord-forbid, a "colored" perspective should emerge.

The Inuits of northern Alaska are yet to weigh in on that, but as a representative group, RWA has caustically overlooked it in favor of Paula Dean southern fried chicken and the 21st century version of Rhett Butler.

Whatever RWA does to fix its image will never be enough, the critics say, because it will have been a sham and a superficial lie that will re-emerge later on. Of course, it's impossible to not be a member of this group.

Everybody else just thinks they need to file a lawsuit, which never fixed anything but the lawyers' bottom line. It's always better to sink the ship than inspect the cargo before it sails.

The Inuit are interested in seeing their romance stories explored. Anybody advocating for them this year?

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 1818.

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-lifting 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.