Category Archives: Merry Christmas

See You Soon!

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Today commences our annual two-week hiatus here at TKZ. This blog has been hale and hearty since 2009, which is a testimony to the quality of our writers and commenters over the years. 

Blogging began back in 1994 when Justin Hall, a student at Swarthmore College, started publishing personal content on his website. He called it “Justin’s Links from the Underground.” This was his “log” on the web. A web log.

The term “weblog” came from Jorn Barger, a bearded James Joyce fan. Later, tech billionaire Evan Williams coined “blog” as both noun and verb, and “blogger” to designate one who blogs. As co-founder of Pyra Labs, he helped design the site Blogger which went public in 1999. (Williams would go on to co-found a micro-blogging site called Twitter.)

In 2004, “blog” was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year.

Blogs took off in the 2000s, with professional and monetized blogs like TechCrunch, Gawker, and Huffington Post becoming major players in media, offering insights into technology, gossip, and news.

Writers started blogging, too. One of the most influential blogs was Joe Kontrath’s A Newbies Guide to Publishing, which gave practical advice to writers trying to break into traditional publishing. At the end of 2010, however, his blog morphed over into leading the charge for indies. 

On August 7, 2008, a date that will live in fame, a group blog for writers called Kill Zone made its debut. Of its original cast, only our great founder and admin, Kathry Lilley, and a fellow named Gilstrap remain. I looked up John’s first post and saw this:

I faced a storytelling crisis last weekend. Staring down the throat of an August 15 deadline for Grave Secrets (coming in June, ’09), I needed an ending. 

So the first Jonathan Grave thriller was coming. It came (with a title change to No Mercy).

I mean, I already had an ending from the initial drafts, but I needed an ending. A kick-ass final sequence that would leave the reader exhausted and satisfied. The one I already had took care of the satisfaction part, but it didn’t have the roller coaster feel that I wanted.

So I shot one of the characters.

What a great tip. It’s another side of Raymond Chandler’s advice: Bring in a guy with a gun.

And that’s what we’ve always been about here. Tips and techniques and advice and encouragement for our fellow writers. God willing and the crick don’t rise, we’re going to keep on trucking (Okay, Boomer) in 2025.

While you, dear writing friends, keep on writing.

Merry Christmas and Carpe Typem. See you soon!

A Re-gifting Story

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I am re-gifting a present this year. I won’t say what it is, or who the recipient is, but the original giver is deceased so they won’t care and the individual who is on the receiving end will be delighted with what they receive, so no harm, no foul. The internet, however, is full of re-gifting advice, and horror stories about re-gifting. In the interest of adding to the latter, I hereby pass on a story that I heard decades before re-gifting was known by that name; it was simply something that people did on occasion that no one really talked about
The person in question who told this story was a Catholic priest who had attained the rank of Monsignor, which is a step above your garden variety priest and a step below a bishop. Monsignor S., as we will call him, recalled that on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination into the priesthood someone held a celebration for him and that he received many gifts. One of these was a five-pound can of pipe tobacco. Monsignor S. was somewhat nonplussed by the gift, as 1) he had recently given up pipe smoking (and not just for Lent) and 2) he had, not to put too fine a line on it, expected something a little more in keeping with his station, if you will. He accordingly set the can aside on a shelf in his study and forgot about it.

Monsignor S. received an ordination announcement a couple of months later from a young man of his acquaintance who, as it happened, favored a pipe and had not given it up. Casting about for an appropriate gift, Monsignor S. remembered the untouched tobacco can on the shelf in his study. He directed his housekeeper to wrap it and, as we would now say, re-gifted it to the newly ordained priest. A week later he received a thank you note (written in pen and ink, on paper, as was done before the advent of email and texting and selfies) which went something like this:

“Dear Monsignor S.:

Thank you so much for honoring me with your presence at my ordination last week. Your attendance would have been enough of a gift, but your thoughtful present of the canister of pipe tobacco — my favorite brand, by the way (did you talk to my mother first?) — is one I will always treasure. And your added generosity of including the one hundred dollar bill taped to the inside of the lid left me speechless. I am truly at a loss for words. I hope to emulate your generosity to others in the future.

Yours in Christ….”

Monsignor S. assured his audience that he would never do something like that again.
And with that…Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I will see you on the other side. I hope. In the interim…do you have any re-gifting stories? Either primary or secondary? We would love to read them.