Monthly Archives: July 2019

The Honest Epitaph

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Photo: Ben Churchill [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Having recently celebrated a birthday that was (once again) well past my life’s statistical half-point, I’m feeling a bit maudlin. And maudlin is so dull!

So, tell me. What would your honest epitaph be? It’s the very last bit of writing you share with the world. I’m not looking for the reverent words that loved ones will no doubt honor you with, but the words you would put on there if you didn’t mind embarrassing your kids, your partner/spouse, your mom.

Remember, it’s important to put honest bits of yourself into everything you write…

A few of mine:

“She Wasn’t Good, But She Had Good Intentions.” (via Lyle Lovett)

“Wait! That Wasn’t What I Meant to Say!”

“She Was F.I.N.E.”

“Go Away, I’m Reading”

“Of Course I’m Listening”

“She Was Late for Her Own Funeral”

 

Now it’s your turn, TKZers!

 

 

 

First Page Critique – Counting Mountains

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Credit: Joshua Fuller, Unsplash

Good morning, TKZers, and let’s welcome the brave Anonymous Author of Counting Mountains. Please enjoy this first page submission then we’ll open the discussion.

~~~~~

Title- Counting Mountains

My name is Tessa Stynes, and I was witness to and involved in all the horrible things you’ve heard about the Australian Massacre in London. My name used to be associated with my family, my university, my friends, and if I’m being optimistic, maybe my photography, or my smile.People used to tell me I had a nice smile.

Now, and I think for a long time to come, my name will have a very different association in thousands of people’s minds. People think of my name and they think of murder, fear, and death. This is hatefully unwanted- but not necessarily unwarranted. I didn’t touch the Ripper’s knife, but it knew me, hunted me, found me.

I can tell you how I almost died, how parts of me most certainly did.

If I want to dig at the wounds and baby scars that tear open so easily, I can tell you how I was responsible for people dying. I dig a lot, trying to figure out which parts of me are gone forever, which parts I can resurrect with time, and which wounds deserve to lay open, festering. Even though it hurts, it’s cathartic, like pulling six-foot weeds out of the ground, or trying to reconstruct a broken clock.

I’m attempting to build my story – and the Ripper’s – from the ground up, pulling strands and dark clumps out of my head that are hiding and digging themselves in; picking out the broken parts, so that I can hope to build something new and shiny out of the rot.

Someone once said to me; there are mountains in everyone’s path. They are all different shapes and sizes, but they are all mountains, and they are all difficult to breach.

Right now, I’m counting mountains. Some I conquer, and some sit in front of me, daunting and ice covered, just like that winter.

In the beginning of our story, it was cold. I remember the cold being a constant reminder of how far I was from home. We were in the winter of 2010, the coldest winter on English record and in anyone’s memory. The feeling of cold in England seemed worse than the cold I had felt in actual cold countries like Norway, Estonia, or Finland. The cold I felt that winter in England was harsh and bone deep, like a blow I wasn’t expecting.

~~~~~

Brave Author, I found a lot to like about this first page. It doesn’t start with action or in media res. It opens with the character alone thinking—a technique that we at TKZ often caution against. However, the voice is strong and the situation is compelling, making me want to know more.

In other words, even though you take a risk by ignoring conventional wisdom, your technique works. Well done.

Why does it work? I believe it’s because of the theme.

Tessa Stynes has been the victim of “the Ripper.” She also feels responsible for other deaths evidently caused by this serial killer. She survived where others didn’t. Her name is linked to horrific crimes—she is doomed to a haunted life of guilt by association.

The theme of guilt by association works because it’s a universal plight. Most people have suffered injustice where their proximity to a person, group, or incident taints their  reputation. There’s an immediate bond between the reader and a character who reminds us of the unfair shunning we’ve experienced ourselves.

Further, the Author has set high stakes. Tessa is not the victim of everyday petty injustice. The stakes of her suffering are life and death. Others have died in a “massacre.” Although this story is being told about events that already occurred, there is a suggestion Tessa herself might die in the future from repercussions of the tragedy.

James Scott Bell talks about death stakes that can be physical, professional, or psychological.

Tessa states: I can tell you how I almost died, how parts of me most certainly did.

She has faced all three forms of death that Jim describes. First, she almost died from knife wounds (physical). Second, she apparently once had a good name as a photographer that’s now tarnished (professional). Third, her musings show an ongoing emotional struggle that prevent her from living a normal life (psychological).

The Brave Author takes another chance by addressing the reader directly. In theatre or film, this is called breaking the fourth wall when a character speaks to the audience.

This technique momentarily disrupts the fictive dream the author wants to create, which can have negative results if the reader is pulled out of the story.

However, it can also promote the sense that the author is sharing an intimate secret with the reader. This character who witnessed terrible crimes is willing to reveal knowledge no one else has. The reader wants to learn the inside truth of what really happened.

For those reasons, I believe breaking the fourth wall works here. 

The setting is London in winter of 2010. Tessa is evidently a visitor to England, a stranger in a cold, forbidding land. The mood is chilling, physically as well as emotionally. Nice job of making the setting and weather reflect the plot.

Now to the aspects that tripped me up:

The Australian Massacre in London is treated like a news event that everyone’s heard about. I googled it and didn’t find a corresponding real-life occurrence. Not a problem but it momentarily sidetracked me.

By using “the Ripper,” readers have certain automatic, ingrained reactions to Jack the Ripper, who killed victims during the 1880s. That reference started me down a historical path. However, you then say the story begins in 2010, leading to other questions: Will this be a time-travel fantasy? Or is there a new Ripper in contemporary London?

These are not necessarily problems but merely things to consider as you draw readers into the story. You want to be mindful not to lead them off onto false trails.

You write strong, active sentences but the order in which you present them could be rearranged for more dramatic effect. What do you think of this:

People used to tell me I had a nice smile.

My name used to be associated with my smile, my family, my university, my friends, and my photography.

Now, and I think for a long time to come, my name will have a very different association in the minds of thousands of people. People think of my name and they think of murder, fear, and death. This is hatefully unwanted—but not necessarily unwarranted. I didn’t touch the Ripper’s knife, but it knew me, hunted me, found me.

I can tell you how I almost died, how parts of me most certainly did.

My name is Tessa Stynes, and I was witness to and involved in all the horrible things you’ve heard about the Australian Massacre in London in 2010.

If I want to dig at the wounds and baby scars that tear open so easily, I can tell you how I was responsible for people dying. I dig a lot, trying to figure out which parts of me are gone forever, which parts I can resurrect with time, and which wounds deserve to lay open, festering.

Next, you go into a mashup of similes and metaphors about pulling weeds, repairing a broken clock, strands of hair, clumps, digging, shiny objects, and mountains. Because these figures of speech are not obviously related to each other, they got distracting. Suggest you stick with the mountain motif, since that’s your title, and delete the rest of the debris.

Regarding semicolons: I fall into the camp of never in fiction. If you do use them, use them correctly.

Delete the semicolon in: Someone once said to me; there are mountains in everyone’s path.

The sentence could be rewritten in two ways:

1. Someone once said to me: there are mountains in everyone’s path.

2. Someone once said to me there are mountains in everyone’s path.

The second option (without punctuation) is my preference since it’s not a direct quote.

The following is a nice segue from Tessa’s thoughts into the story:

Right now, I’m counting mountains. Some I conquer, and some sit in front of me, daunting and ice covered, just like that winter.

In the paragraph that follows, you use a variation of cold seven times. Even if you intentionally repeated the word for effect, it wore thin.

The line like a blow I wasn’t expecting didn’t work for me because blow is a sudden, abrupt action whereas bone-deep cold creeps in more gradually, like gangrene.

There is additional repetition and overwriting in that paragraph you might condense. How about this:

The winter of 2010 was the coldest season on English record and in anyone’s memory. I remember the harsh, bone-deep chill that felt worse than the cold I’d experienced in actual frigid countries like Norway, Estonia, or Finland. The cold was a constant reminder of how far I was from home.

Brave Author, you took risks with this opener and they paid off. Your voice, theme, and premise are all compelling and make me want to read more. Good job!

 

How about you, TKZers?

Did this opening draw you in?

What suggestions do you have for our Brave Author?

 

 

 

Debbie Burke’s award-winning thriller Instrument of the Devil is on sale for 99 cents from July 7-14. Here’s the link.

First Page Critique: A Goan Holiday

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Happy Monday! Today’s first page review is for a novel entitled A Goan Holiday – which seems appropriate since I just got back from India (although, sadly, I’ve never visited Goa). My comments follow and I look forward to feedback from our great TKZ community. Read on!

A Goan Holiday

For the leftover hippies sunbathing nude on the beaches of Goa, drug-induced illusions were often indistinguishable from the breath-taking reality of the moss-covered cliffs and the bright blue sea. Back in the ’sixties, Vagator was one such beach few knew of until a forty-year-old American tourist with only eight fingers trudged down the mud track to the nearby village, starting a hippie stampede to the settlement. The disgruntled children of the West left the residents puzzled by adopting the matted hair, the rancid clothes, and the broken sandals of the homeless, seeking enlightenment in LSD and heroin, but there was one enterprising fellow who saw in the new arrivals a chance to make an easy buck.

Gossip had it his ramshackle shed at the far end of the beach was the designated cop-free zone where the hippies rented cots to crash at night. To the surprise of no one who knew him, the owner of the establishment disappeared one day, only to resurface the next week as the corpse found in a fishing boat adrift a few miles from the shore.

Half a century later, the shed’s owner was forgotten. Rich, young locals and backpackers from around the world still partied to trance music on the moonlit beaches of the former Portuguese colony on India’s west coast, the pungent smoke from industrial-sized rolls of charas, the home-grown weed, swirling all around. White surf frothed over rocks, tickling the feet of the stoned couples as they groped their companions for the night and made promises which wouldn’t last past daybreak.

The shed itself morphed into a hip café which served delicious seafood and fine wines for exorbitant prices. It was where the rich and the famous were frequently caught in carefully choreographed candid pictures. At least, that’s what the kaamwaali bai—the maid—employed at the Joshi vacation home a few miles away claimed. The woman showed up at her leisure and barely did any work if she could help it but always carried news of the movie stars spotted in the seaside village where her cousin lived.

None of the celebs seemed to have ventured outside this lousy night. Lucky for them, thought Anjali Joshi, skirting the group of tourists dancing to ear-splitting music on the beach despite the ominous dark clouds rolling across the half-moon. Each screech from the synthesiser thrummed across her skull. Even her eyeballs were vibrating.

Overall Comments

To be honest, this first page reads more like a travelogue at first than the start of a novel.

In my opinion it suffers from way too much data dumping about the history and clientele of the beaches of Goa and also from a lack of immediacy. Everything in this first page feels distant and third-hand to me – whereas I really wanted to be sucked into the drug scene at the beach and the ear-splitting music at the bar. I wanted to be introduced to a main character I could care about. I I wanted an inciting incident that would draw me into the story. Instead, I wasn’t sure who the book was really going to be about: Was it the forty-year-old American tourist with only eight fingers who started the hippie stampede to the settlement? Was it the enterprising fellow who saw a chance to make an easy buck and whose corpse showed up adrift a few miles from the shore? Was the maid who showed up at her leisure and barely did any work relevant to the story at all? Is Anjali Joshi who shows up in the final paragraph actually the protagonist? All of these characters have great potential but they are placed scattershot on this first page with no hint as to their relevance or importance to the story.

In this first page, nothing about the actual story is really clear and until the reader gets a handle on the story itself, the description and background to the drug culture in Goa doesn’t resonate (and, though I liked some of the detail and descriptions, most of this information could be inserted into the first chapter in discrete chunks rather than all at once).

So my main recommendation to our brave submitter is to start again – start the novel where the story really begins. Let us walk along the beach with Anjali Joshi and feel the music (I liked the image of her eyeballs vibrating BTW). Let us be drawn into the drama of an actual scene. Who is she? Why is she there? What incident is going to propel this story forward? Is it the discovery of a celebrity’s corpse? What dark events do the the ominous dark clouds suggest? Once we get these answers on the page, then, as readers, we will want to turn the page and care about the novel and its characters moving forward. Until then, this first page reads more like an interesting catalogue of the drug and hippie culture of the Goan beaches rather than the beginning of a novel.

TKZers, what advice would you provide to our brave submitter. How would you tackle the issues I’ve outlined?

 

 

Mad Magazine, RIP

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Alfred E. Neuman

And so it ends, after 67 years. One of the great American institutions, Mad Magazine, is closing up shop. Gone but not forgotten will be the famous Mad mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, whose mysterious background is discussed here. So popular was he that he occasionally ran for president, with the slogan: “You could do worse… and always have!”

Along with my parents and my teachers, Mad played a major part in the formation of my young life. Its influence is with me still—and I hope it always will be.

My big brother bought Mad religiously, and thus I got the issues second hand. I learned about politics from Mad. I knew who Castro and Khrushchev were only because of the cartoon renditions within its pages.

In those years they had literate, educated satirists who were able to skewer sacred cows with a precise wit that appealed to adults, too. And the artists! Here I must call out two of my favorites—Mort Drucker, master caricaturist; and Don Martin, whose mind-bending cartoons blew right past the safe and predictable into uncharted realms of hilarity.

Of all the talent, though, my absolute favorite was the poet laureate of Mad, Frank Jacobs, who, at age 90, is still among us. Jacobs did the libretti for many of the Mad satires of famous movie musicals. I also have a first edition of his legendary collection, Mad For Better or Verse. The amazing thing about Jacobs is that his satirical songs always scanned perfectly along with the originals. He never hit a bad note.

Here’s an example. One of the first political pieces I remember from Mad is East Side Story, a send-up, of course, of the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical. It was Jacobs at his best, along with the fantastic caricatures of Drucker (also still alive, also 90. Comedy is healthy!)

Remember how West Side Story begins with the “The Jet Song”?

When you’re a Jet
You’re a Jet all the way
From your first cigarette
To your last, dying day!

Well, East Side Story begins outside the U.N., with all the major Communists of the day, led by Nikita Khrushchev, snapping fingers and singing:

When you’re a Red
You’re a Red all the way
From your first Party purge
To your last power play!

When you’re a Red
You’ve got agents galore;
You give prizes for peace
While they stir up a war!

You set off a test,
And when you’re halfway through it–
You point at the West
And say they drove you to it!
That’s how you do it!

We are the Reds … With a punch in the face … Which we’re aiming today … At the whole human race … At the whole–! Ever–! Trusting–! Human–! Race!

That, my friends, is genius.

Some of the other satires I recall from Mad’s golden age include Who in Heck is Virginia Wolfe?, Voyage to See What’s on the Bottom, 201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy, Botch Casually and the Somedunce Kid, and my personal favorite, Hack, Hack, Sweet Has-Been or Whatever Happened to Good Taste? This was a combo satire of the films Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It featured the following cast: Olivia DeHackhand, Bette Devious, Joan Clawfoot, Joseph Cuttin, Agnes Gorehead … and Greer Garson as a headless torso.

I ask you, what child soaked in such material could fail to grow up into a happy and productive citizen?

And whenever Mad turned its gimlet eye upon social structures, it skewered them with unerring insight. As in their 1961 send-up of the suburbs, titled “A Child’s-Eye View of ‘The Affluent Society.’ ” Look at the chapter called “The Lessons” and tell me it’s not still timely:

Children in the suburbs are kept very busy.
They are forced to take many lessons.
Lessons on how to dance,
Lessons on how to play musical instruments.
What does the suburban child learn at these lessons?
He learns that he is pleasing his parents!
Too bad he cannot take lessons
On how to be a child!

Suburban children must be a credit to their parents.
They must not lie.
They must not cheat.
They must not steal.
Poor suburban children,
They are so unprepared for the adult world!

So goodbye old friend. I shall remember you fondly. And whenever the kultursmog becomes thick with putridity, and the zeitgeist attempts another brain heist, I will bring to mind Alfred E. Neuman’s immortal words to live by:

“What, me worry?”

So what periodical was your favorite as a kid? How did it influence you?

An Amazing Research Resource for First Responders

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Jordan Dane
@JordanDane

Happy July 4th! I’m grilling and celebrating with my family. I hope you all have plans. It’s a time to celebrate the birth of our nation. Freedom does not come free. 

***

When I think about what makes our country great, I think of emergency first responders who are on duty 24/7/365. It takes a special kind of person to protect the public-from EMTs to firefighters to police.

While working with another author, I found a great resource that I thought TKZ might find useful as a resource for first responders. The show primarily focuses on two EMT teams in New Orleans, but other groups come into play, too. Look on HULU for season 2 – 4 of NightWatch which follows the most dangerous shift time from 9pm to 3am. For those of you not streaming HULU, Season 1 is on A&E and those episodes are available at this LINK.

WARNING: This is graphic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen what EMTs see firsthand as they arrive on scene, for example.

From a writer’s perspective, what I found most interesting is:

1.) Fast paced action with stories well-told. Not sure who writes or directs/produces this series, but it is extremely well done. It’s a good reminder of how to show action scenes with the author craft principle of ELLE – Enter Late, Leave Early.

2.) Dialogue is tight. The scenarios are not staged so the treatment must be the first priority. Quick medical lingo between EMTs is carried on without explanation. You see the action as it happens, but when there is time to narrate, the EMTs share what’s medically happening and why they are doing it. You get to see how each case affects them.

3.) See inside first responders’ heads – EMTs (and other first responders) share their thoughts as they come onto the scene, as in what they expect to find. Often, they are surprised and have to react quickly. Dispatch details can be sketchy. The compassion of these people is striking. They are patient and calm amidst chaos and their first priority is for the patient. They calmly talk to them, reassure them, and do whatever it takes to keep them calm. Sometimes the emergency isn’t about a medical solution and more of a human resolution. It’s all there.

4.) You get to see what dispatch communicates to first responders and how they locate the scene with the GPS equipment they have on-board the vehicles.

5.) You see how the first responder teams work together. One of my favorite teams is a man and woman EMS unit. You can see the camaraderie and the banter while they are driving to a scene, but they jump into action and work intuitively with each other. You also get to witness how the other services work with them. Good stuff.

6.) New Orleans as a Venue – My newest series is set in New Orleans and this series is very helpful to get oriented. I make notes and check each location on an online map to see the streets and how it’s oriented in the city.

7.) Local Dialects & Speech Patterns for Emergency Teams – It’s been helpful for me to hear the speech patterns for first responders (especially in New Orleans) but the banter and emergency jargon and official dispatch lingo/code is authentic.

8.) Medical Lingo & Equipment – For the EMTs, they discuss what equipment they have on “the truck” and how it can assist different patients. They’re proud of their service and what they carry on-board. You also get to see what happens in an emergency and what they have to clean up after they drop the patient off at the hospital.

This series is addictive. I find it helps me get  my head into the writing I am doing, since it takes place in New Orleans, but this series is fast-paced and authentic.

DISCUSSION:

What other movie or TV resources do you use to add authenticity to your writing?

No One Heard Her Scream – Ebook Reissue Now Available (in print soon).

Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2008 – Mass Market

Book Tour!

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By John Gilstrap

Total Mayhem, the 11th book in my Jonathan Grave thriller series dropped on June 25, and now I’m on the road meeting booksellers and fans and fans-to-be.  There’s something exciting and romantic in the phrase, “book tour.”  It’s a heck of a conversation starter.

“What brings you to town?” asks the desk clerk or Uber driver.

“I’m here on my book tour,” I reply.

“Oh, you’re really an author?  I love to read.  What’s your book about?”

And we’re off to the races.  “Terrorists are targeting Mid-American small towns, hitting high school football games and county administrative buildings.  We expect major targets to be hit in big cities, but when the carnage comes to soft targets that have always been considered safe, the nation is rocked.  When the FBI learns that one of the terrorists knows Jonathan Grave, it falls to Jonathan to root out the network and destroy it.”

And then I give them a business card (and a bookmark if I have one on me).

Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop

My first stop was Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop, in Mechanicsburg, PA., and that turned out to be my favorite format for these things.  People had to sign up in advance, and the outstanding management team provided soft pretzels and dipping sauces (as if there’s a better dipping sauce than mustard).  I spoke for about 45 minutes, then it was time for the ice cream social and book signing.

I had another nice crowd in Sea Isle City, New Jersey at the main library branch there.  Thanks to BAM for providing books for sale.

My lodging in New Jersey was a bed and breakfast in Cape May.  Here’s where it got a little weird.  (Full disclosure: I’m a Hyatt and Hilton kind of guy, but there’s a three-night minimum this time of year.)  Using AirBnB, I reserved a “room with a private bath.”  It had already been a long day when I arrived, and I was shocked to find that in a town that’s famous for its Victorian extravagance, I found myself in a suburban rambler.  My room was just the guest room in a lady’s house, and my “private bath” was down the hall.

The Brown Room at Congress Hall

That night, I Uber’d downtown to see the sights and enjoy the food in Cape May–which really is a gorgeous town.  After dinner, I wandered into Congress Hall, a stately old hotel, which features The Brown Room.  The picture leaves no doubt where the name comes from.  I got a comfortable seat on a sofa, ordered a martini, and took out my fountain pen and pad of paper, and started writing away on Hellfire, the next Grave book which is due to the publisher on September 15.  The lounge was crowded, a talented piano player was tickling the ivories in the corner, and I got totally consumed by the scene I was writing.

Here’s where it got really interesting.  Some people are unnerved, it turns out, when a guy sits by himself and writes page after page.  Three different people interrupted to ask what I was doing–but with a paranoid edge.

One asked, “Are you writing down what we’re talking about?”  Think about that question and the hubris it represents.  Truth be told, I had no idea what they were talking about because I was playing with my imaginary friends.  I told her, “No, I’m an author on book tour and I’m on deadline for my next book . . .” (See paragraph 2 above.)

Another was just the curious, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but you seem so intense.  What are you writing?”  See above.

But this was the craziest: “You’re writing a review of this place, aren’t you?  How are you qualified to do that?”  See above.

As I write this, I’m leaving Rehoboth Beach, Delaware on my way to Sykesville, Maryland.  After the Maryland event, I go straight home, where we’ve got to get the house ready for a launch party this weekend, where we’ll have over 100 people.  That’ll be a lot of signing.

Then, next week we’re off to New York for ThrillerFest.

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

Guilty Pleasures: Goodbye To
Two Of My Favorite Writers

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“I’ve discovered writers by reading books left in airplane seats and in weird hotels.”— Lee Child

By PJ Parrish

Some days, you just don’t want sushi, free range chicken, or, god forbid, kale salad.  You want…Goldfish Crackers, Gummi Bears, Pepperidge Farm Milanos,  Kraft Mac and Cheese, McDonald’s french fries, with two scoops of Moomer’s Cherries Moobilee ice cream, washed down with Faygo Rock & Rye.

Some days, your soul cries out and the only thing you can do is give it what it craves — junk food.  But it has to be good junk food, I say.  Life is too short to eat a Wendy’s Quad Baconator.

Some days, you also need to read junk-food books.  Sometimes called airplane books, the idea being that flying is so grotesque now that you need something soothing or numbing to get through it. I can’t read bad junk-food books on planes. I need the hard stuff. And the hard stuff — really good junk-food books — are in a category all their own. They…endure.

Two of my favorite “junk-food” writers died recently — Judith Krantz and Herman Wouk. Now, don’t get all huffy with me for calling them junk-food writers. I mean that as a sincere compliment. Krantz and Wouk had amazing, long careers creating hugely entertaining books. They got me through countless hard nights in high school, one divorce, the time I was fired from a job I loved, and the week my cat died.  They took me to far away places with strange sounding places.

Judith Krantz died in her Bel Air home on June 22. She was 91.  She didn’t publish her first book until she was 50 — the seminal Scruples.  It’s the story of Wilhelmina Hunnewell Winthrop — first nicknamed Honey, then called Billy — and her journey from a chubby “poor relation” in an aristocratic Boston family to a thin, rich Beverly Hills glamazon — with stops in Paris and New York along the way. (So described by Jezebel, the self-proclaimed Supposedly Feminist Website, which recommends it as a “juicy retro read.”).

God, I loved that book.

Why? It’s a take on the classic Cinderella tale. I was a pretty naive 27 when it came out and it took me to worlds I had no hope of ever knowing — Paris, New York, Beverly Hills, French couture, and rich folk. (I eventually got to all those places, and found out hanging with rich folks isn’t all it’s cracked up to be but that a vintage Chanel bag can change your life). It was really fun and often very funny. It also had some really hot sex:

After that first time he used every art he knew to bring her to an orgasm, as if that might be the key that would unlock the door between them. Sometimes she achieved a fleeting little spasm, but he never knew that it came from her one recurring sexual fantasy. In her mind she was being made love to by an anonymous lover, lying on a low bed surrounded by a ring of men who were watching her avidly…

I can’t print the rest of the paragraph since we are a G-rated blog. Scruples was made into a mini-series starring Lindsey Wagner. Rumor has it Natalie Portman is doing a remake. Bad idea. Just read the book. It’s great junk-food. As Jezebel points out, why settle for Fifty Shades of Garbage when you can get the real deal?

Or as Krantz herself once put it:

“It’s not Dostoevsky. It’s not going to tax your mental capacities. It’s not ahhrtt.”

Now, Herman Wouk, well, most folks wouldn’t classify his books as junk-food. But the critics were brutal to him. Still, many of them begrudgingly gave him props for his propulsive narrative style. He died May 17, a couple days short of his 104th birthday.

Wouk became a bestseller with his shipboard drama The Caine Mutiny.  I didn’t read that as a youngun, but I did feast on his page-turners Marjorie Morningstar and Youngblood Hawke. The first was another coming-of-ager set in the ’30s with a feminist theme (a girl trying to become an actress in a male-centric world). When I read it, somewhere around age 13, I didn’t even know a Jewish person. (Yes, my childhood was that white-bread). But back then, when I was dreaming about getting out of the Detroit suburbs alive, I loved Marjorie’s grit and related to her big dreams.

Youngblood Hawke was also about a striver — a Kentucky boy who dreams of being a novelist and becomes the toast of New York — but there’s a tragic fall from grace. I read this one when I was maybe 35 and thinking of trying to write a novel. Wouk supposedly had second thoughts about making his protag a writer. “Writers are the world’s dullest people!” he wrote in his notes.  Dull this book is not. It’s got sex, money, betrayal, and characters that live on in your head after you close the book.

And then were Wouk’s World War II epics The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. At 814 pages and 941 pages, they were door-stops! Wouk originally intended them to be one book but decided to break it into two when he realized it took nearly 1000 pages just to get to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The appeal of these books for me was their vastness. I love meaty historical fiction, but with Wouk the history lessons were overlaid by a grand drama about the gnarly family tree of Pug Henry, naval officer and FDR confidant. I learned more about the wars from Wouk than from any of my history classes. Ditto for the Irish conflict and the founding of Israel from another of my favorite authors Leon Uris.  Yes, Wouk had things to teach me but he always, first, entertained me.

Which can make critics, well, crabby. One guy, Stanley Edgar Hyman, described Wouk’s readers as “yahoos who hate culture and the mind.” Wouk, for his part, had this to say about his oft-nasty critics:

“I’ve been absolutely dead earnest and I’ve told the story I had in hand as best as I possibly could. I have never sought an audience. It may be that I am not a very involved or a very beautiful or a very anything writer, but I’ve done the level best I can.

“In the short run geniuses, minor writers and mountebanks alike take their chance. Imaginative writing is a wonderful way of life, and no man who can live by it should ask for more.”

Rest in peace, Judith and Herman. And thanks for all those sleepless nights.

So, crime dogs, who are your guilty pleasure writers?

 

How Can 1 Person Have 2 Different Sets of DNA?

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Image by Elias Sch. from Pixabay

A human with two different sets of DNA is called a chimera, and it’s more common than you might think. Most chimeras don’t even know they have this strange phenomenon going on inside them.

You could be a chimera, and so could I.

As we go along, take note of the interesting tidbits you could twist into a plot to add conflict.

Without any help from the scientific community, the process of becoming a chimera occurs naturally. Numerous books and movies explore chimerism using a killer who’s had a bone marrow transplant or blood transfusion. But are these characters based in fact?

Let’s take a look and find out.

The tissue inside our bones is called bone marrow, and it’s responsible for making white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets. When someone has a bone marrow transplant, doctors use chemotherapy or radiation to destroy all the recipient’s diseased bone marrow. The donor’s healthy marrow is then introduced and continues to produce blood cells with the donor’s DNA, thereby transforming the recipient into a chimera.

In some cases, all of the blood cells in a person who received a bone marrow transplant will match the DNA of their donor. But in other cases, the recipient may have a mix of both their own blood cells and donor cells. A blood transfusion will also temporarily give a person cells from someone else, but in a bone marrow transplant, the new blood cells are permanent, according to the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California.

What if we’ve never had a transplant?

Doesn’t matter. There are other ways to become a chimera.

Early on in pregnancy a mother can be carrying fraternal twins and one of the embryos might die in utero. The surviving embryo may absorb cells from the deceased twin. When the baby is born, s/he can have two sets of DNA. Since twin loss occurs in 21-30% of multiple-fetus pregnancies, think of how many chimeras could be walking around. Are the story wheels spinning yet?

It can also happen with a normal pregnancy.

In the 1990s, scientists discovered that a pregnant woman may retain some DNA from her baby, if fetal cells happen to migrate into her bloodstream and travel to different organs. The New York Times referred to this as a “pregnancy souvenir”— but it’s more scientifically known as “microchimerism.”

A 2015 study suggests this happens in almost ALL pregnancies (you read that right), at least temporarily. The researchers tested tissue samples from the kidneys, livers, spleens, lungs, hearts, and brains of 26 women who died while pregnant or within one month of giving birth. The study found fetal cells in all of the women’s tissues. The researchers were able to tell the fetus cells from the mothers by searching for Y chromosomes (only found in males). The deceased mothers were all carrying sons.

Writers: Don’t take the obvious road. Think victims instead of killers.

  • What if a human brain washed up on the beach?
  • What if the Medical Examiner wrongly assumed the victim was male due to the Y chromosomes?

This is one way to use research to our advantage.

  • What if the brain contained animal and human DNA?

Remember, we’re thinking victim, not killer, which puts a different spin on it.

According to Live Science, fetal cells may stay in a woman’s body for years. In a 2012 study, researchers analyzed the brains of 59 deceased women ages 32 to 101. A shocking 63 percent had traces of male DNA from fetal cells in their brains. The oldest woman died at 94 years old, suggesting that these cells can sometimes last a lifetime.

The blood-brain barrier is the body’s defense system to block many drugs and germs in the bloodstream from entering the brain, but doctors have found this barrier becomes more permeable during pregnancy, which may explain how these fetal cells migrated into the brains of their mothers.

  • What if a serial killer only targeted people with chimerism because s/he viewed them as freaks of nature?
  • How might the killer find potential victims?

If you said the medical field, you’re not thinking outside the box.

Interestingly enough, 26 of the 59 women had no signs of brain disorders while alive. The other 33 were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers found that women with Alzheimer’s were less likely to have male DNA in their brains than women without the disease.

Previous work on microchimerism suggested fetal cells might protect against breast cancer and aid tissue repair in the mothers, but could increase the risk of colon cancer. Microchimerism can also incite various autoimmune diseases. Autoimmune diseases occur when a person’s body is mistakenly attacked by its own immune system.

Past research suggested Alzheimer’s is more common in women who had a high number of pregnancies than in childless women. One of the limitations of this research is that the number of brains studied was relatively small. Other researchers involved with microchimerism want to explore what effects a mother’s cells might have in her offspring’s development and health.

Imagine all the different scenarios? Parts of your writer brain must be on fire by now. No? Then check this out …  

Are you a chimera? 

You may never know. Unless you wind up in a similar situation to a woman named Karen Keegan. In 2002, her story became a report in the New England Journal of Medicine after doctors told her that she wasn’t the biological mother of her children.

Imagine? Think of all the ways this one conversation could implode an MC’s life.

  • Maybe the woman’s marriage broke up and the only reason her and her husband reunited was because she said she gave birth to his child while he was stationed overseas.

Turns out, the DNA in Karen Keegan’s bloodstream didn’t match the DNA in her ovaries. The doctors later determined she’d most likely absorbed a fraternal twin in utero.

How’s the ol’ writer brain feeling now?