Author Archives: Joe Hartlaub

About Joe Hartlaub

Joe Hartlaub is an attorney, author, actor and book and music reviewer. Joe is a Fox News contributor on book publishing industry and publishing law and has participated on several panels dealing with book, film, and music business law. He lives with his family in Westerville, Ohio.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Posted on by

hith-father-christmas-lights-iStock_000029514386Large-A

A confession: I had a post all written and ready to go, zip, zap, rock ‘n’ roll, but something about it was bothering me. I checked this and checked that, looked here and there, got an idea about what was causing my hesitation, and verified the source. Lo and behold, one of my fellow TKZers had written an excellent post on the identical topic a couple of weeks ago. You will see mine eventually, though not for awhile.  We like to provide variety here at The Kill Zone. Unfortunately, it’s somewhat late and I don’t have another topic to write about. So…

…let me thank you for stopping by on what is probably the busiest weekend of the year. If you are having trouble thinking of what to give that special someone, might I suggest that, rather than stressing out, they would probably rather have you — “nice you” — rather than 1) a present or 2) “stressed you.” Just a thought.

With that in mind…if you can take a moment, tell us: What is the best present you’ve ever given? What is the worst?

Thank you again for all of your visits, all of your comments, and all of your contributions this year. I get choked up thinking about it. But don’t tell anyone. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and we’ll see you, God willing, in a few weeks.

A Different Word for Everything

Posted on by

accent

I am reading THE LAST WITNESS, a new crime/police procedural novel by Denzil Meyrick. It’s been a bit of tough sledding for me. The story itself is terrific; it concerns a crime lord who has seemingly returned from the dead after being murdered several years ago and who is making up for lost time by getting revenge upon old enemies and traitors in very innovative and brutal ways. It’s an element of the dialogue that is doing me in, even though it is clever, inventive and in many instances hilarious.

The problem I am having is related, in a way, to Meyrick’s characters. They are all Scots, and talk like them. This is not exactly a coincidence, since Meyrick is himself a Scot. It’s tough to decipher. I wouldn’t change a thing, by the way. A couple of times, after figuring out what the wee lads in the book are saying, I’ve tried saying the sentence or three in American English and it just isn’t as good. When Myrick wrote The Last Witness I am reasonably certain that he wrote it for the British and not the American audience. And there we are. I’m still having fun with the book; it’s just taking a bit longer.

This brings up a question, however. How do you handle accents and dialects in the dialogue of your work in progress? Do you write it as if every character speaks “General American,” which is generally what American broadcasters use? Or, if your book is set in the south (to name but one example), do you write it using a southern accent, of which there are six different dialects and several sub-dialects? My own rule of thumb — generally — has been to write the dialogue using General American, but to describe a particular accent or dialect that informs the character’s accent after the character’s first sentence or two. For example: When she spoke, her accent conjured up images of magnolia trees, of the soft sound of paddles propelling a skiff across murky swamp water. And I did say generally, didn’t I? Sometimes, as in The Last Witness, pairing up a dialect to the dialogue makes things interesting, as I did in a story of mine titled “Disappearing. Soon”:

 

“We couldn’t figure out why  the pilot of the airboat had a baseball bat at the ready, until he swung it suddenly at a tree branch, hitting a low-hanging cottonmouth which went flying across the narrow channel. “Yee-ah!,” the pilot yelled. “I ain’ gonna get bit taday, me!”

 

So how do you handle this issue in your own writing, if it comes up at all? And how do you feel about it when you encounter dialect in your reading? Does it add to the story for you? Or would you rather the narrative just be straightforward?

Getting to Jack Reacher, or Someone Like Him

Posted on by

reacher said nothing

I am reading an extremely interesting book which will see the light of day next week — Tuesday, November 24, 2015, to be exact — everywhere books are sold. It is titled REACHER SAID NOTHING: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me. It is written by Andy Martin, who teaches at Cambridge but is nonetheless capable of writing a fun book, and more so, a fun book about the writing process. What occurred is that Martin approached Child via email in August 2014 about writing a book that would take the reader from the very beginning of the process by which Child does what he does so well to the very end. Martin’s timing was perfect, given that Child was about to start writing what ultimately became MAKE ME, his latest Jack Reacher novel.

 

I’m not going to present my review of REACHER SAID NOTHING now — you’ll have to go here next week over the Thanksgiving weekend to see that — but I can tell you that if you have ever thought of writing a novel you need to get a copy of REACHER SAID NOTHING and sit down and read it. You’ll feel better about the process, for sure. I can assure you that, whatever problem you may have had with completing your work, Child has had it as well, and yes, still has it and works to overcome it year in and year out. You will find within the pages of REACHER SAID NOTHING how he does it, as well as the very first thing that Child did when he started writing the very first Reacher book, lo those many years ago. Child utilizes many tools — copious amounts of coffee and cigarettes among them — but you don’t have to have move into Starbucks or have access to a secret stash of Chesterfield Kings to have similar results, with “similar results” being finishing your book, and then writing another, and another. And no, I’m not going to give away the specifics. Martin gave up a year of his life following Child around with  proximity and access that would make a proctologist jealous, and then compiled it all into something readable, so it would be neither fair nor right. I will tell you in one general word, however, how Child does what he does: discipline. That’s it. He sits down (among other things) and gets it done. The process of doing that is a part of Martin’s book, and so far, that book is an entertaining hodgepodge of an account consisting of emails, diary entries, and transcripts of conversations.

 

Will reading REACHER SAID NOTHING help you to write a bestseller or a critically acclaimed work? No. No. No. Life is not fair. Equity is not equal. If you want justice go to theology school and cross your fingers; maybe you’ll get it. But, if you model your work ethic after Child, you’ll finish your book, The rest is a combination of luck and ability and timing. As far as writing goes, remember that just because you like sausage doesn’t mean you want to make it. Have at it, by all means, but know what you are getting into. And if you still want to by the time you finish REACHER SAID NOTHING, by all means: start, and never stop until the job is done.

 

From my house to yours: Happy Thanksgiving! I’m old and grumpy and experiencing a health issue that is more an inconvenience than a herald of mortality but it’s a reminder that the sand is running, ever running, through the hourglass. Still, I have much to be thankful for, and you would be very high on that list, for stopping by The Kill Zone and spending a few minutes with us. Thank you.

 

Getting Your Rocket Fizz Going

Posted on by

rocket fizz

Photo (c) Columbusunderground.com

There is a nationwide chain of stores named “Rocket Fizz.” We have had one in the Columbus area for a little over a year. It’s not on the Weight Watchers approved list, for sure, which means that it is a fun place.  I have watched people walking by the place who seem to hit an invisible shield when they see the front window, which promises a party inside. They come in, too. The store layout gives you an excellent idea of what Rocket Fizz is all about from that first glimpse inside. The front has candy that I haven’t seen in a half-century or so, items like Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy, Sugar Babies, Teaberry Gum, and Bit O’ Honey. The periphery displays all freaking sorts of bottled soda (Judge Wapner has his own root beer. Who knew?),  taffy (about fifty or so different flavors), posters, tintypes, toys (I almost — almost — laid down thirty bucks for a set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beanie babies), and novelty pranks that will remind you of what you do in your office when no one is around (you’ll know it when you see it).  There are tables piled with merchandise but none higher than five feet or so, the result being that even someone of my very normal height can see the entire expanse of the establishment from the front door. The back of the store displays all sorts of imported items like Japanese Oreos (those folks know how to do Oreos) and English toffees and chocolates of all types and configurations.Wonders beckon.

I take my granddaughter, the eight-year old antichrist, to Rocket Fizz on occasion. While she is respectfully prowling the place, looking for new opportunities for me to spoil her, I like to stand in the corner of the store furthest from the entrance and watch people as they come in. The face of each and every person lights up as they break the plain of the front door. This is true even of grumpy old me, and it’s true every time I visit there.  It’s pure entertainment. A youngster sees unfamiliar types of candy that looks like fun; those of us whose boots first hit the ground in the middle of the last century remember going to the drugstore and paying a quarter for a box of Fizzies (yes, they have those too, and no, they aren’t a quarter anymore). You hear lots of “Oh wow!’s and oohing and ahhing from people of all ages as they walk through. I have never seen anyone step inside of Rocket Fizz and turn around and walk out. No. They walk in, going deeper and deeper. They spend time and yes, they spend money.

Someone did a lot of work figuring out what would work for Rocket Fizz, and it shows. There are fifty odd Rocket Fizz stores scattered across the country and that number will double in a year or so.. I don’t know if the people who came up with the concept of Rocket Fizz sample their own wares or not, but they want their customers to be happy and have fun and hopefully spend money. And we, as authors, can learn from that. I sometimes forget who I am writing for and have to remind myself that if I am writing for me then a diary would serve the same purpose. If I am writing for someone else — or a whole bunch of someone else’s, hopefully — I need to make my book attractive to my audience, not just to me. “I couldn’t get him to stop screaming” is a stack of twelve ounce cans of cola by the front door; “He kept screaming. He didn’t stop, even when I caved his head in” is a twelve ounce glass bottle of Mighty Mouse Blue Cream Soda, made with real cane sugar. It attracts attention, and makes the reader wonder who, why, and next. As far as that next thing goes…you don’t want displays of generic animal crackers. You want gold foil chocolate coins or candy flavored cigarettes (OH, THE HUMANITY!) or Star Wars JellyBellys. This is where you start introducing characters, which you can base upon everyone from the uncle no one ever wanted to sit by to the really, really strange woman who works in the produce department of your local supermarket who won’t meet your eye and just points to what you want. As for your ending…you want exotic. Endings are dessert, at the back of the store. A creme sandwich cookie is okay, but what does a small box of double-fudge covered Oreos with Asian lettering all over it say to you? It says that it’s something familiar, but different. It’s at the back of the store, and is more interesting than anything that came before it. That’s what you want to shoot for. Even if, like me, you miss more often than not. You can’t hit something if you don’t fire.

Have you read anything recently that puts you in the mind of Rocket Fizz, as described? I have a couple of examples, one being THE HOT COUNTRIES by Timothy Hallinan, the latest and best in his Bangkok-based Poke Rafferty series. The other is THE GOLEM OF PARIS by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman, the genre-bending sequel to last year’s THE GOLEM OF HOLLYWOOD. It has it all, from exotic locales to explosions, romance, history and religion. And if you haven’t read anything recently that fits the bill…do you have a Rocket Fizz in your city? Have you been there? What did you buy?

 

 

What Scares YOU?!

Posted on by

spider

Photo (c) Copyright 2015, New Media Investment Group.

It is almost Halloween. The Just Born Candy Company (the fine folks who bring us Marshmellow Peeps!) have Ghost, Tombstone, and Pumpkin Peeps (as well as some pricey limited edition flavors) out right now. They don’t have Spider Peeps. I consider that to be a good thing, for the reason set forth below.

Long time TKZ visitors will recall that I have blogged on the topic of fear and what scares you and me. Given that we are approaching Halloween, I thought that we might visit it once again, giving our more recent visitors a chance to weigh in as well. Fear is a great inspiration for writing. Take what you fear most and write about it, spinning the topic out to its worst case scenario. I have three major fears: 1) spiders, 2) spiders, and 3) spiders. I apparently have some notoriety in this regard as, when one does a image google of me, a couple of pictures of spiders appear within the montage of America’s Most Wanted posters. How nice. I also don’t care much for heights or closed-in places. Put me in a spider-filled coffin suspended fifty feet in the air and you might as well kill me. In fact, if I’m ever in that position, please do. I spray the interior and exterior of my house twice a year with an insecticide called Suspend (and a tip of the fedora to Carl Causey, husband of author Toni McGee Causey, for that suggestion!) but, as this article in the Friday morning news demonstrates, the spiders in my house and their homeslices have merely withdrawn and are regrouping on a bridge in Columbus, five to ten thousand strong, planning a flank attack even as I type. I’m waiting for you, demon spawns, with a sprayer full of Suspend and cleated boots and a twelve-gauge shotgun. I don’t care what the guy in the video in the article says, about how interesting they are, or how their fangs aren’t sharp enough to pierce the skin of a human being. Is he nucking futs? He’s gonna let one of those things get close enough to you to determine whether or not its fangs will break your skin? Not me.

There was a time during the past year when I was driving over that bridge twice a night, every night. No more. The current occupants are probably busily weaving the largest web you’ve ever seen, even as they chitter, “{{{wherrrzzz Joezzzz?}}},” ready to drop it on me as I drive by. It won’t happen. Obviously, I won’t be traversing that route until the temperature is somewhere south of zero and they are all curled up in a glare of ice. And those folks who are walking on the bridge to get a peek at what five thousand spiders — at least — look like? Unbelievable!

So what scares the living daylights out of you? Have you written about the topic of your (ir)rational fear? Do you plan to?

 

In the Produce Aisle

Posted on by

carrot

Stories can be found everywhere. You don’t have to look for them; they come to you. Richard Matheson wrote the immortal short story “Duel” after a highway encounter — what we would now call “road rage” — with the driver of a tractor-trailer. I read another great short story, decades ago (and I wish I could remember the author) about a guy who brought his Sunday paper in from the front porch and there was a gawdawful bug on the inside of the newspaper bag which tried its best to kill him and almost succeeded. The author in his Afterward noted that the story was born as the result of a spider catching a ride into his house in the manner presented in the story. And so it goes.

I got the spark — and I mean the SPARK — yesterday in the produce aisle of a local supermarket. I was looking over the carrots and such when I heard a male voice, coming from close behind me, saying, “Hey, old man.” I ignored it —I mean, surely the guy could not be talking to me — yet the person persisted. “You,” he said, using a low voice. “With the concealed carry.” As it happens, I do have a concealed carry permit, and at the time had in my possession a .38 in a pocket holster. It’s very unobtrusive, so that it is not easy to tell when or if I’m carrying, unless someone is specifically looking for it. I turned around to find a stranger of about my height and age, wearing sunglasses and a gimme cap, smiling somewhat strangely at me. “You a fast draw?” he asked. I just shook my head and asked, “What do you mean?” He answered, while moving a step closer to me. “You got a gun. Think you can outdraw me?”

I was thinking at that point that I was dealing with someone who was very foolish at best or mentally unbalanced at worst. My primary concern, however, was that the store was busy. The produce department in this particular store is located close to the entrance and exit doors and everyone  from retirees in golf shirts to moms in yoga pants were making cross patterns near us. I needed to move this encounter elsewhere, and quickly. I said to him, keeping my voice level, “This isn’t a conversation we should be having in here. Let’s go outside and talk about it.” My plan was to wait until we got into the store vestibule or just out to the parking lot where I planned to suddenly trip him, immobilize him, and have someone call 911.

This all changed when the stranger, instead of answering me, smiled, took off his sunglasses and cap, and said, “Hi, Joe.” The stranger turned out to be  a friend of mine, someone I have known for decades and with whom I speak frequently but rarely see. He is retired from a very elite government agency where he was renowned for being able to substantially change his appearance with just a hat or glasses a talent which he demonstrably still possessed (and yes, the passage of time helped him, too). He was pranking me. Some might regard what he did to be foolish, but he knew exactly how I would react, or intended to react — much of what I have learned about such matters, I’ve learned from him — and thus inferred that I would not take action beyond that which would reasonably be called for at any particular point in the situation. As for myself, it took a few minutes to get my heart rate back to normal, as I went through the stuttering motions of keeping up a conversation  and then completing my shopping. In addition to carrots, I suddenly needed to buy some bleach.

After I arrived home and got the groceries unpacked (note to the gentlemen out there: no husband was ever murdered by his wife while he was unpacking the groceries, no matter how egregious his sins) and started some laundry I realized that I had the opening hook of a domestic thriller which I’ve been toying with for months handed to me. Actually, I had several different beginnings handed to me. All of them involve a supermarket, a shopper seeming minding their own business, and an unexpected intervention which sets the plot for the rest of the book careening into a number of individuals’ lives like a bee bee in a box car.

So, tell us, please: have you been pranked recently (after all, it is the Halloween season)? Did it have a short or long-term effect on you? And does it have a potential as the springboard — a spark — for a story? If the answer to any of those questions is a yes, please share if you wish, but hold close if you must.

 

Beating Free

Posted on by

monk

February 1973 was a month of uncertainty for me. I was ready to graduate from college in a few months and had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do when I “grew up” (a state of mind which continues, verily, to this very day!). I somehow found myself being interviewed by the head of an insurance firm, a very nice guy who sensed almost immediately, as I had, that putting me in his office would be inserting a round stick of dynamite into a square…well, office. We had a cordial conversation anyway, and at the conclusion of it he showed me a blocky machine that was hooked up to a television. “This,” he said, “is the future.” He picked up a rectangular object that looked like an audio cassette on steroids, inserted it into the machine, and turned on the television so we could watch a gentleman nervously give a lecture about actuarial tables and premiums and whole life insurance and the like. What I was being shown was something called a VCR in U-Matic format, the forerunner to Betamax and VHS and the grandparent to DVDs and yes, streaming. I was assured that within a few years there would be one of these machines, or something like it, in every home in the country. My new friend probably had no idea how that machine, and its descendents, would change things. I didn’t either, but I felt that ground move. This thing was a game changer.

I had the same feeling, and not in a good way, when I was wading through my emails yesterday and found a news release about a company named CzurTek (pronounced “SEE-zer Tek”) which has developed a relatively high-speed book scanner called “Czur” (just like Julius) which it appears to intend to sell for around $169.00 and which it is attempting to bring to market by crowd-sourcing.

czur scanner

The video of it is impressive, for sure; Czur does involve some human interaction, but nothing that a semi-sober fraternity brother couldn’t handle. There is a lot of talk about algorithms and the like that I didn’t understand but the legal part of me got went on high alert: the bad kind. I remember what happened, and is still happening, to the music industry, when CD players and copiers started appearing as basic equipment on home computers. “RIP AND BURN!” became the catchphrase of the day. It used to be that if you wanted to have a bestselling album you had to sell a million copies or more in a week. A lot of people did that, too. Now, not so much. You can hit the top of the charts on some weeks by bringing home unit sales of five figures. People don’t buy a lot of music anymore; they go to peer-to-peer sites or they stream it but they don’t buy a lot of it. It’s tough to beat free. It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened fast enough that no one knew what was happening. I think that we are about to see the same thing happen, and with books this time. And it comes at a time when the industry, including the publishers and authors, can’t take the hit.

The folks at CzurTek know exactly what they are doing. The video I have linked you to above seems benevolent enough — there’s talk of copying rare and delicate manuscripts to preserve them, for but one example — but when you go to their Facebook page the 800-pound bear in the room is too much to ignore. Witness this, taken from the August 30, 2015 post off of CzurTek’s site, which infers that the idea for Czur sprung from the high cost of textbooks:

Normally one textbook is more than 100 dollars, and sometimes a professor will ask us to buy 6 or 7 of them.

In order to solve this problem, some of my schoolmates would buy second-hand books, or photocopy them. I once borrowed my roommate’s camera to take pictures of an entire book. It was really tiring, and hard to get high-quality pictures when the pages are curved.

Two years later….

in Shenzhen, we decided to have a go at solving this problem. After several attempts, we found that digitizing the books seemed to be the best approach. However, a book scanner costs tens of thousands of dollars, which is beyond the reach of ordinary people. So we decided to create one ourselves! Over the past 3 years, in the course of visiting numerous factories and testing our algorithm hundreds of times, we have turned ourselves into specialists in this area.

Now….

In other words, if a book is too expensive, just copy it. If it’s due back at the library and you’re not done with it, copy it. If the books are too darn heavy, copy them. Edit the text and put it in your essay! The CzurTek website even talks about building your own library for free, of course.

I’m not without sympathy, up to a point. College textbooks are extremely expensive. There are reasons for this, particularly with respect for those dealing with higher mathematics, biology, and physics, but that’s a topic for another time. But does the cost — or that they’re too heavy, or due back at the library — make it okay to steal them? Just copy them.

This isn’t the future. It’s already here. There are a bunch of book scanners on the market right now that don’t quite do the job well, but have the basics down. If Czur isn’t the gamechanger it appears to be, someone else will make one that is, and make it soon. The issue then becomes whether you want to spend a year of your life creating something that gets copied and probably illegitimately disseminated as soon as it is published, with no compensation to you. To go back to the music business: musical artists have found other revenue streams, such as licensing their music to film projects, tee-shirts, bumper stickers, tours, and the like. Their music? The newbies give it away, in the hope that someone will come to their concerts and buy merchandise. What are authors going to do? Tours? Please. Do you really think that someone is going to buy a ticket to listen to (fill in the blank) read or give a talk. Tee-shirts? C’mon.

I’ve prattled on a bit too long on this, and I apologize for that. I see this, however, as a significant problem. Am I Chicken Little? Or am I Dr. Miles Bennell? If I’m right, what are we — you, me, and the publishing industry — going to do about it? You tell me. And as for you folks at CzurTek…how would you feel about someone reverse engineering Czur, and giving it away for free? Sound good?

 

Beginnings

Posted on by

ten commandments

A short one, this time…

I was trying to think of a topic for discussion when a random thought occurred to me, an immutable law, if you will:

Every great story begins with someone doing something they should not.

Tell us (one of) yours. I’ll reciprocate. Eventually.

A Little Birdy Told Me

Posted on by

cardinalbaby

Inspiration, as has been often discussed on this spot, comes from strange places. Anyone who has put cursor to screen for more than a few sentences also knows that inspiration is but the very important start of any story, long or short. One needs interesting characters doing interesting things, or characters who have interesting things happen to them. Sometimes, when dealing with the latter situation, authors find themselves with a character who is not only painted into a corner but also glued to the wall. There are times when that happens where one must give up, go back a couple of pages, and do a re-write. Another alternative, however, is to step back, look at what is around you, and see if the world around you provides a solution. That alternative was given to me on Wednesday by happenstance.

My wife loves wild birds. We have feeders in the back, front, and side yards, and birdhouses in the front yard tree. We have so many feeders that the Franciscan monks send money to US pay for seed (just kidding). We do get a lot of birds around the house, though,which means we don’t leave doors open. Birds don’t like to fly into buildings, but they sure wind up in a lot of them. Go into any big box store, particularly one of those giant supermarket operations, and look up. You’ll probably see a bird or two flying by. When I was a wee lad attending Catholic grade school nothing would crack the eighth grade girls’ choir up faster than a starling dive bombing the loft. Yeah, birds are like cats in that way: they try really hard to get in somewhere, and then decide they would rather be somewhere else, like outside. This is of course selectively true across the biological kingdom — and no more so than among the males of any species — but today we’re just talking about birds, and the noise in my house.

I was working on a tale a couple of days ago, a story which begins with a guy waking up in the middle of a desert and having no recollection of how he got there. He realizes after a few moments that he is surrounded by something really unpleasant and potentially dangerous. He gets out of that problem and jumps from one problem to the next. My unfortunate fictitious friend possesses neither firearms nor adaptive skillsets so he can’t fight his way out of predicaments, and they’re not really the type of situations that he can think his way out of, either. That doesn’t leave many alternatives, but his creator (that would be me) did a little of this here and a little of that there and before you know it my character was leap-frogging pans and straddling fires like no one’s business. I then reached a point where I painted him into that corner I mentioned earlier, and couldn’t figure out a way to get him out of it that would be consistent and, more importantly, believable when one considered what had happened before. I really liked the pages leading up to the dilemma, too, and was loathe to rewrite them. Benign neglect of a few minutes’ duration seemed to be in order. Then I heard THE noise. It was coming from right above my basement office, which is beneath our attached garage. I went upstairs, opened the door leading from the garage to the house, and got dive-bombed by a cardinal. I’m not referring to the kind that lives in a cathedral but takes a vow of poverty; I’m talking about the feathered type. It had gotten trapped in the garage and couldn’t find a way out. I managed to get the door to the house closed behind me before it flew deeper into the residence (that would have been really interesting). It seemed that a little common sense was in order so I opened the garage door. I was worried the bird was going to damage the garage and I would have to call someone like https://balancedgaragedoors.com to come out and repair it! I’ve had a few issues with my garage door before and I was hoping I wouldn’t have to pay out for a repair again. Repairs can be really expensive! Luckily the bird didn’t damage anything so it saved me some money, but I know a few great garage door companies who I would’ve called if I needed to.

Cardinals, it seems, will never be employed at Oak Ridge doing atomic research. This bird, like my protagonist, couldn’t find its way out, despite the wide open garage door that was present just a couple of feet behind it as a careened posterior over elbow all over the garage. It was too frightened to see the way out. It struck me, after watching my new bird friend for a few minutes, that my story needed a similar exit strategy, one that would have been obvious to an observer who was not panicked but that my hapless protagonist was overlooking in his fright and haste. I started thinking creatively along those lines while I watched the bird and as it finally realized that 1) the door was open and 2) it was open to OUTSIDE — worms, seed, sunlight, and all it could want — it flew out. I put the garage door back down and spied it a few moments later as it sat on the bird feed outside the front window, pecking contentedly at seed. I was content, too, as I had solved my creative dilemma.

I doubt that the cardinal learned anything, but the lesson for me was that you can learn a lot, and even occasionally solve a problem, by watching what is going on around you, even when at first it doesn’t seem to be relevant. Does anyone have similar stories? What do you do when you’re writing and get stuck on a problem? Do you back up and take another path, or do you bulldoze your way through it?

BEING YOUR OWN PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

Posted on by

josephhartlaub_1340562776_140

I have a friend (hereinafter referred to as “Friend”)  who is a brilliant and creative guy, one of the smartest and nicest people I know. Each and all of those qualities made it very difficult for me to hear the story he was telling me. Friend had a creative project (not a book). He needed some technical assistance to bring it to fruition;  to that end he procured the services of a company (hereinafter referred to as “Company”) which is based outside of the state where he resides. Company, without Friend’s knowledge, outsourced the work he hired them to do to one of Company’s subsidiaries in another country. That subsidiary company has now hijacked the project. Friend now cannot access his project. Further, after tendering his payment to Company,  he is not getting his telephone calls returned.  After commiserating with Friend about this matter I did a bit of research and within sixty seconds found all sorts of reasons why Friend shouldn’t have come within five hundred miles of Company. Specifically, I found a number of instances where Company had outsourced work, violated working agreements, suddenly became non-responsive to client queries, and in at least two cases was sued for breach of agreement. Friend was shocked. He wondered how was I able to find out what I did, and so quickly. He asked me if I have access to some sort of super-secret website that only attorneys and private investigators can visit. My answer to that question was and is…

…no. There is a wealth of information available online, for free, to anyone, at anytime, which will aid a prospective buyer of services or seeker of soulmates in making a decision regarding same. Given that writers and authors (particularly independent ones) frequently outsource tasks such as (final) manuscript typing and/or editing, cover artwork, and the like, the availability of such information becomes particularly important before you entrust Your Precious, which you spent hundreds of hours bringing to  fruition, to a stranger. You should be doing due diligence before you retain the services of a company or a professional, before you go out on that first or second date (or before your offspring does), or before you make a reservation at that hotel. There are a few ways that you can do it so and you don’t need to a Captain Midnight decoder ring or the keys to the kingdom to do so. I do these things before I deal with anyone. I am not a genius by any means, so if I can do it I am sure that you can as well. Or better.

My first step, in the case of services,  is to look at online reviews. You can get these by searching, for one example, “(hotel name here) reviews.” While it is rare that there won’t be at least a couple of negative reviews for any business that you search, if  you find several that list the same complaints (“roaches on the floor,” drug deals transacted openly in the lobby,” “sex industry workers trolling in the parking lot”), then you’ll want to go elsewhere, unless, of course, you’re looking for that type of thing. The same applies to a plumber, garage door repairman, or landscape professional. If most or all of the comments are negative, there is probably a problem with the service. There are paid sites that keep track of this sort of thing, such as Angie’s List, but the Better Business Bureau website is free and is a good place for further checking as well.

If you want to see whether the service, business, or prospective soulmate has real problems, however, the gold standard of information for the average citizen is the website maintained by your local clerk of courts. Note well: not every court in every jurisdiction has case information online. Many do, however, and if the court having jurisdiction of your area (or the area of the business or individual you are curious about) does it is worth doing a case search of your local municipal court and court of common pleas, for civil and criminal cases. Keep in mind that there are any number of reasons why someone may be the subject of a court action, or the filer of same. If, however, you find several breach of agreement actions in the case of a business, or a number of felony/misdemeanor charges filed against your prospective Romeo or Juliet, you may want to seek services or love elsewhere, or at least bring up what you’ve found to the object of your research and give them a chance to explain themselves. Doing so over the phone or in a public place is recommended.

Last of all…there is always social media, particularly Facebook. If that prospective date feels the urge to post every random thought that races through their head, including how nervous they are about whether the Wassermann test they are having tomorrow will be positive… well, their impulse to share everything with the world tells you something right there, does it not? And if they can’t resist posting selfies of their latest, self-administered tattoo, do you really want to get a look at that in real time? If they haven’t updated anything in six months, however, there is an excellent chance that they won’t be telling the world about the great time they had with you, when and if you and your prospective sweetheart reach the point where you’re, uh, having a great time.

The lesson here? Before you commit your time, your manuscript (or anything else), your money, or your heart to something or someone…take a few minutes and do some research. It may save you from problems down the road.

Does anyone have any stories they would like to share about how researching a company or person helped to save them from a bad experience? Or where the failure to research caused them problems later? We’re not looking for complaints about specific companies or individuals here, so please…no names. Situations, however, are welcome. Thank you.