I’m never without a notebook — for stray ideas and interesting facts — but sometimes it’s easier to pull out my phone and take a quick photo. Sometimes I’m snapping a photo of a poster on the street so I can go to the website associated with the advertised event. But most often this is at a museum, when I’ve been looking at the work of an unfamiliar artist or the museum’s commentary is particularly intriguing. I’ve seen other people do it, too. But when I was walking to the post office the other day (yes, I still use snail
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Local Words & Phrases
A while back I ranted here about authors setting novels in a New York City they obviously knew only from movies and TV shows. In their City, subways stopped in the wrong places, it’s easy to find a parking place and everyone is fearful and rude. Bad cop shows from the 1970s, vintage Woody Allen films and urban legends about the sewers replace real research. Language can also be local and require a bit of research. I was reminded of this today when I was asked, “Which way is Avenue of the Americas?” by a woman walking on 12th street.
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The TIME in Time & Place
It seems like everyone wants to visit Paris. Maybe not the Paris of today’s tourists with long lines outside the Louvre Museum and very expensive coffees? The romantic daydreams are of another Paris — the city of Ernest Hemmingway, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and company. Many places shine at particular moments in history and they become perfect settings for fiction. Sometimes it’s historical. The Cairo of 1922 when Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb is one of my fantasies. (Probably too many Mummy movies as a child.) Other people yearn to visit Richmond, Virginia as the Confederacy crumbled; London in
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Miss Congeniality
Do protagonists need to be likeable? A flawed hero is one thing, but an obnoxious principal character can be a challenge for the reader. I happen to enjoy central characters with less-than-pleasant personas, but many readers either want to identify or picture having a coffee (or a beer) with the fictional friend. Like-ability is the issue. On television, prickly characters always have a soft/loveable core. The experience of inviting the characters into your home (via your eyeballs and a screen) seems to require buffing the rough bits off until the character is easy to like. Yes, there was DEXTER and
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Chatterboxes & Strong Silent Types
I enjoy writing dialog. But my affection for telling stories in the words of my characters is a recent development. I’ve worked on it — hard! My motivation was the preponderance negatives examples I read in otherwise well-crafted books. All too many authors wrote dialog as if ALL the characters were the same. A chatterbox hairdresser with an expertise in single process color and zero interest in literature will not use the same vocabulary as an erudite professor of 19th century poetry. Yes, those are extreme examples, but I’ve read books where you’d be hard pressed to figure out who
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Extraneous Clutter
Getting rid of extraneous clutter on my desk and in my apartment is an ongoing task. But what do I do about the extraneous clutter in my head? The same brain that must write down ‘buy cat food today’ can’t seem to forget things that aren’t exactly useful right now. It’s one thing to remember all the words to ‘Another Tequila Sunrise’ — that’s a generational phenomenon — but I’m stuck with songs by Aztec Two Step, poems I memorized in elementary school, my lines from a play in Junior High, the way my college dorm friends took their coffee,
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On the Edges of Fame
The crazed fan story is practically a sub-genre in fiction. This special kind of stalker makes the news, too, but many people are fanatical to a lesser extent. They collect autographs, contribute to fan fiction sites, follow film stars and sometimes spend impressive amounts of time & money hunting down their quarry, only to smile and stutter “I’m your biggest fan” or something similar. Occupying the space on the edges of fame, most of these people simply feel a deep and unusual connection to someone they admire. One of my friends has a serious crush on Richard Armitage. He’s a
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The Game and the Players — A Mysterious Tale…
It began with a party given by Belle’s hairdresser. “It’s like a Tupperware party, but not exactly,” Sue said. She giggled as she handed her longtime client the pink invitation. “It’s a lingerie party.” Belle came home with a sexy French maid’s costume and Bernie was enthralled. He enjoyed pretending that he was not a fifty-five-year-old accountant employed by the county for nearly 30 years. When Belle put on the frilly, black lace lingerie and a faux French accent, Bernie ‘became’ another person, too. He became an international spy, pursued by operatives from a foreign intelligence agency and hiding out
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Curio Cabinets
As I wondered around museums in the Amsterdam and Berlin, I was reminded of the “curio cabinets” of historical collectors. I know that in the 21st century we still collect a wide variety of objects — from creepy dolls and international beer bottles to souvenir thimbles and baseball cards — but the curio cabinets of past centuries held a wild variety of strange and unusual items. Fossils, skulls, seashells, chipped Roman glassware and items associated with magic filled home collections and spilled out into the public museums of earlier times. Over and over again, I’ve been enchanted by these odds
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