I seldom turn down the opportunity to speak, and more than once there’s a monetary loss for gas and even a hotel room to make those events. Civic organizations, book clubs, and groups such as retired teachers or other professional organizations all have me on their annual speakers lists, and at first I thought that was a problem, because prepared speeches aren’t my thing. I didn’t want to bore them with the same talk time after time.

Watching someone stand in front of a room, reading from a script is mind numbing. Those folks are usually nervous, or unfamiliar with public speaking and it’s obvious in the way they stand and present their talk, barely looking up from their notes or pages.

That kind of thing would be a disaster for me, and like the way I write, when I give a talk I have no idea where I’m going until I get there.

Calls came in right after my first novel released back in 2011 to come talk about The Rock Hole. Having been a classroom teacher for ten years, I knew I could stand in front of a crowd and hold their attention, because if you can keep a class full of middle school students’ interest for fifty minutes, you’re a speaker.

I disremember if that first group was Kiwanis, or Lions, or Rotary, to name a few. It was a luncheon event, though, and I stepped up to the lectern and simply followed one story or idea after the other as I recounted the disastrous road to publication I’d just endured. Folks laughed at the right places, showed concern when I told them of losing my first manuscript, and clapped with enthusiasm when the story came to full circle with a tender surprise.

Oh, wait, but first let’s Let’s start with the basics and clear something up. People often confuse lectern with rostrum, podium, and dais. Personally, I’d prefer not to stand behind any of them, because I tend to move around.

A lectern is the slant-top high desk a speaker uses to read presentation notes. I prefer not to use the term lecture, because I’m a storyteller, but to remember what you’re hiding behind in that sense, think the word “lecture.”

Sometimes large audiences require a podium, which is a raised platform that places you higher than those staring upward at you with blank, expectant faces. Hint, quickly find the friendliest face in the room. He or she might be smiling, or nodding, or changing expressions as your talk proceeds. Use them as a yardstick and an anchor if you feel as if the room is drifting away.

And then there’s the rostrum or dias, which is a larger platform, or maybe a stage, on which a head table is placed during a formal dinner. You’re usually smack in the middle of those dignitaries who invited you, and a trick is to talk to them as well as the audience in order to engage those who are sitting up there with you. Make eye contact, and they’ll appreciate you even more.

As a repeat speaker for annual events, I can’t use the exact same talk each time. Right after I started this journey, I once looked out over an audience that was strangely familiar, and then realized they were a mix of organizations I’d talked to in the past few months. I sure didn’t want to tell them the same stories, so I had to adapt and improvise, to steal from Clint Eastwood’s Sergeant Highway in Heartbreak Ridge.

That was the day I realized that audiences don’t want to be lectured, but prefer to be entertained. As authors, we can stand in front of those people (some of whom are looking at their watches) and talk about outlining, character building, and motivation. But for the most part, the members of these organizations aren’t writers, they’re a captive group who’ve been subjected to countless lectures on everything from recycling to what kind of fertilizer to use on Bermuda grass.

That’s where stories come in and we become entertainers in still another sense. I don’t have any particular ideas written down to use as notes, but I’ll talk about what comes to mind and tie it all together with something to make the audience laugh.

Like the night John Gilstrap and I went out on a Florida beach at midnight after a conference to finish off a bottle of brown water only to find the resort chained and locked that return access at some point and we had to climb over a fence to get in. And for me, that fence somehow undulated like the ocean we’d been watching as I attempted to vault over it like I was a kid. I wound up hanging halfway over it like a deer strapped to the hood of a truck.

Getting John over involved curses, grunts, groans, and threats, all of which came from him.

Or the day at another conference when Lee Child told me a shocking story about a woman who’d been faking his signature on his books until she had the opportunity to get a genuine John Henry that made her so proud she admitted to being a forger. That was a two-part story, but I only hard half because a conference official took his hand and led him away to “bend his ear” for a while and he looked back at me like a dog headed for the pound.

Or back to Gilstrap again when he and I were in a crowd of thriller and mystery writers at eight in the morning when two hookers came through the hotel lobby and asked us for directions to the ladies room. Speechless for once, John pointed, and followed by their pimps, the “ladies of the morning” wove without notice through the oblivious authors who make their living about crimes and criminals. Fascinated, John and I followed them down a hall to watch their fighting men keep a lookout as the ladies eventually emerged in their “work” clothes and the entire assemblage stepped onto an elevator and headed up.

We broke off our surveillance at that time, and went back to being observers of conference life.

Depending on the crowd before me, if they’re not writers I’ll tell stories of my childhood or life as a writer that relates to the work in progress. And it seems they always do. Just recently I talked to a civic organization about my newest contemporary western series beginning with Hard Country, and told them the real story of how we owned a ranch across the gravel road from a meth house, and how those brain-dead individuals were always breaking into the house and that I’d learned they were related to someone in the sheriff’s office who tended to look the other way.

The questions that followed were fun, quick, and interesting for me and the audience.

I included those same stories at a book club event, but talked to them, not at them, about the development of two new series, my traditional western featuring Cap Whitlatch (below), and the upcoming weird westerns that will begin with Comancheria. I was surprised to find they were more interested in the horror aspect of westerns and fielded a lot of questions after that.

I think part of that was because I tend to converse, instead of using a prepared speech or lecture.

It’s all part of being an author, and though I don’t sell a ton of books at these events, they always pay off with name recognition and recommendations to to their friends and family to read my work.

No one told me this was part of the job, but I’m having a helluva time doing it, and if you’re nervous about public speaking, just get in the car and talk to yourself aloud, following a train of thought that leads down unexpected trails. It’ll do you good in the long run.

Now, as a side note, I was discussing my first western with a civic group last week and told them The Journey South is now out, but only as an eBook. That was followed by a firehose of questions concerning electronic vs. physical books, and the publishing industry itself, that led to even more stories and fun rabbit trails that interested the audience.

With that, I’d appreciate it y’all would pass the word that there’s a new western in town, and it ain’t as traditional as you’d think.

Much obliged.

AI created photo
CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 DEED

by Debbie Burke

 @burke_writer

Sales of new electric vehicles appear to be flattening somewhat due to long charging times required and lack of charging facilities.

But perhaps the most disillusioned EV drivers are criminals who tried to use them as getaway cars.

In a case from March 2023, police in Buford, Georgia apprehended two people at a Tesla charging station. They were suspected of stealing more than $8000 in electronics from Sam’s Club, a mere 10 miles away. Seems they forgot to charge their getaway car before the job.

Oops.

Even more ironic is the March 2024 story of a stolen Tesla belonging to Fox TV reporter Susan Hirasuna. Hirasuna had gone to a concert in downtown Los Angeles and came out to discover her Tesla had been stolen. But before she had time to report the theft, another report came into police of a car driving recklessly on Wall Street.

HIrasuna’s app showed that as the location of her car.

And…the battery range was down to 15 miles.

Police pursued her stolen car until it ran out of power and came to a stop in East Hollywood. One suspect was soon taken into custody but apparently two others were involved and escaped.

In a twist worthy of crime fiction, blood was found inside Hirasuna’s Tesla that tied to an earlier assault with an axe on a victim (who fortunately survived). The car was processed for fingerprints, and the search is on for suspects who are still at large.

Memo to criminals:

1. EVs are not reliable as getaway vehicles. 
2. EV locations can be tracked so the cops know exactly where you are.
3. Stealing or carjacking an EV may not get you far enough to successfully outrun your misdeeds.

~~~

TKZers: Have you heard of other crimes related to EVs? 

~~~

The criminals in Debbie Burke’s Tawny Lindholm Thriller series are too smart to depend on EVs to elude capture.

By John Gilstrap

A few months ago, I was asked and agreed to participate in a first of its kind literary event at the Berkeley County-Martinsburg Public Library here in my new West Virginia hometown. It would be a meet-n-greet, book signing supported by Four Seasons Books in Shepherdstown, WV. A few weeks later, the organizers reached out again and asked if I would mind if a second author joined the event. Magnanimous fellow that I try to be, I agreed right away, then asked for the other author’s name and genre. I had never heard of the name, probably because the genre was romance.

Well, that would be different, wouldn’t it? I’d never done a panel that mashed up romance and thrillers. I even agreed to promote the event on my radio show and put it out on my Facebook feed as the time approached.

About two weeks out, the organizers sent an email about how to get tickets for this event.

Wait. What? Tickets? In advance? They were free, but they were required to get through the door. This was new to me, and I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. When I clicked on the link to the tickets and discovered that the event was already sold out, I said to myself, “Self, you should have taken this romance writer you’ve never heard of more seriously.”

Not that anything would have changed.

It turns out that Jennifer L. Armentrout, a delightful, fabulously successful #1 New York Times bestselling author does not write romance. She writes . . . wait for it . . . young adult paranormal sci-fi romance. And she lives about eight miles from me. A bit of a recluse, I believe her when she says she has not taken a vacation or even a weekend off in over 10 years. That’s how she’s been able to churn out 60 books in that period of time. But she’s wildly active on social media, so when she announced that her fans could meet her in Martinsburg . . .

The event.

When I arrived at the library and was ushered to the second floor to the green room, I still didn’t get it. Worse, I didn’t think the library got it. They’d cleared out the entire space–bookshelves and everything–and set up hundreds of chairs. Who the hell was going to fill them?

The the human spigot opened. At 1:50, ten minutes before the event was to start, people started flowing up the stairs, each of them sporting a yellow wrist band that proved they’d been ticketed. Nearly all carried books, many carried bags of books. None of the books bore one of my covers. I have never seen such a rainbow of different hair colors, or variety of facial piercings and tattoos. I put the median age at twenty-three–twenty-five, max.

The discussion.

Once everyone was seated, the moderator introduced Jennifer and me, and we took our places behind the long table next to the display of our books. The light hearted banter we’d developed in the green room transferred well onto the stage and the audience laughed a lot, so a good time was had by all.

For me, though, there was one truly sobering moment–the one that demonstrated just what a dinosaur I am in this business. The question was something like, “Tell us how you sold your first book. How did you find your agent, you know how did all of that work?”

Jennifer answered first. The only part I remember is, “I sold my first book in 2012, and I . . .” From there, she ground through social media/computer-speak that clearly made perfect sense to the audience but meant nothing to me. She talked about promotional sites I’d never heard of and something really big on TikTok. The whole time she was speaking, my brain was screaming, oh, shit, I’m next!

When it was my turn, I played the truth for a laugh. In 1994, after I finished marking up the pages of a book called Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents, I sent my query letter and self-addressed stamped envelope . . .

It’s an entirely different world now.

The signing.

I’ve signed next to Lee Child and Mary Higgins Clark. I have never seen fans as passionate as the ones who stood in line for three hours to have their books signed by Jennifer L. Armentrout. One fan had driven overnight from Buffalo to be there, and another had taken a train from Connecticut. At least two fans were so overwhelmed that they cried.

I’m happy to say that I sold and signed a dozen or so books, too, but to be honest, they felt like sympathy sales. As much as I tried not to look sad and lonely as I was largely ignored, maybe I didn’t quite pull it off.

Lessons learned.

First, I learned that there’s a genre called young adult paranormal sci-fi romance.

More importantly, I experienced my first vivid, first-person demonstration of the power of social media to spread word of an event. Unfortunately, I think there’s a generational component to those particular social media outlets. I could be wrong, but I don’t see TikTok as a destination for the average Jonathan Grave fan.

Credit: From the site TVtropes.org

“The rain was comin’ down like all the angels in heaven decided to take a piss at the same time. When you’re in a situation like mine, you can only think in metaphors.” — Dick Justice, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

By PJ Parrish

Maybe I’m just hanging around the wrong people these days.

I’ve been lucky to have some free time this month so am reading for pleasure. But have started and put aside four books. It didn’t dawn on me until this week why: The protagonists are all hot messes. Maybe it’s because I see enough losers in real life that my patience with fictional ones has snapped its last thread. Coupled with the fact that every character on TV seems damaged, deranged or just too ditzy to live.

Now, we all love a flawed protagonist. Their personal journey is a parallel track that runs along side the main murder plot and creates interest and empathy. But man, does everyone have to be addicted, divorced, friendless, childless, and beset with demons from their screwed up childhoods? Do we really need another detective whose only steady relationships are with Cutty Sark and John Coltrane?

I really wish I could name names here because I hit some passages that are really worth quoting to make my point. And none of these books are old noir. Each is of recent vintage and a couple are big-name writers.

This all dovetailed with a recent Facebook post by my writer-friend and Shamus winner Rick Helms. He’s on a cruise with lots of time to read, but he, like me, has lost patience. To quote:

[I’m] relaxing with a generally well-written private eye novel by a writer new to me. Like many PI novels these days the protagonist is almost painfully damaged. Whether it’s alcohol, drugs, gambling, or just plain paralyzing depression or grief, a large segment of the mystery writing community frequently writes broken protags. Some of these characters have been very critically successful. I have sort of a different take. I tend to regard emotionally damaged protags as a bit of a crutch.

Sure, I’ve written them…[my PI] Pat Gallegher is a gambling addict dragging half a century of failure behind him like a Dickens ghost. My small town police chief Judd Wheeler has PTSD and panic attacks. My forensic psychologist Ben Long presents with a dramatically exaggerated version of my own high-functioning autism. In each case, however, they are coping adequately with their difficulties. While they may experience distress, they don’t wallow in it. None of them wakes up hung over to a living room strewn with pizza boxes and beer bottles and days of dishes piled in the sink (the universal literary language for desperation and giving up). They are managing well despite their problems. Their personal tragedies impact their lives, but they aren’t the story itself. 

Rick goes on to say he’s old enough to remember reading the lastest new releases by Ross Macdonald and his own work is influenced by Chandler, Robert B. Parker, Brett Halliday, and the like. He, like me, has a special love of Macdonald. To quote:

Lew Archer TOLD the stories of his investigations. He never WAS the story. The pathos and distress in his stories were always portrayed by the people he interviewed in the course of his investigations. He regards a murder victim or an oil spill in Santa Barbara with the same dispassionate observations as he might describe a businessman’s special baseball game. Archer is an observer of tragedy, seldom reacting to it with more than average empathy. He cares, but he doesn’t lose himself in his investigation. In the end, he walks away with little observable growth or change in his basic character, because he was never broken in the first place. The story was never about him. It was about solving the case.

He also cites Parker’s Spenser as a relatively mentally healthy and confident guy doing a tough job while maintaining a long-term relationship. He cares about people, but — with the possible exception of when Ruger nearly killed him in Small Vices — he rarely allows his own personal condition to do much more than put a hitch in his giddy-up.

Likewise, as Rick points out, “We know little of Phillip Marlowe’s inner emotions and mental functioning. We know his opinions, because Chandler was full of them, mostly of the sardonic variety. But nobody would refer to Marlowe as damaged.”

When did the shift to a protag’s personal journey begin? I’m not well-read in the old stuff to even guess. But I do know I’m weary of the dreary dick. Is it time to call them out as the tired cliches they are?

Okay,  we have to stop and back up. Time for definitions. I love definitions. They bring clarity to fuzzy topics like this. Is a cliche the same thing as a trope? Or is the latter just an uppity word for the former? Lemme give it a go:

Cliche: Using certain phrases, expressions, devices, or archetypes that have been used so much they lose freshness. Maybe they were once intriguing, but when readers see something too often, they become desensitized, and the idea no longer carries the currency it once had. Examples: the naive female rookie patronized by boss and colleagues. (Tyne Daly, playing clean Kate to Eastwood’s dirty Harry?) The slimy defense lawyer. The good-cop-bad-cop. The crabby lieutenant who suspends a rogue underling.  The PI who gets the crap beat out of him but jumps out of bed the next morning all dishy and doodle. Add your own to the list…

Trope: A familiar character type, plot point, setting, or writing style that has become instantly recognizable to readers. Very common in genre novels and when done well, every effective. Examples: In the romance, “enemies to lovers” trope (lifted from Jane Austen). The lone gunslinger and embattled sheriff. (Come back, Shane!)

Most folks conflate cliches and tropes but they are distinctly different. Tropes can be good things, helping a character to come across as an old friend or making classic situations feel fresh again (think Romeo and Juliet transformed into West Side Story.)

Time for some Joseph Campbell here. In his The Hero With a Thousand Faces, he drew upon works by psychoanalyst Carl Jung to develop recognizable literary archetypes. According to Campbell, everyone from Homer’s Odysseus to Neo in The Matrix is living out the same epic story. George Lucas credits Campbell for the Star Wars trilogy, using the King Authur trope to create boy-king Luke Skywalker, who gets a magic sword, is guided by an old mentor, and storms a castle to save a princess.

One of my favorite tropes is Austen’s Mr. Darcy. He’s handsome, mysterious, sexy. I loved how Helen Fielding used him in Bridget Jones’s Diary: “It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It’s like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting ‘Cathy’ and banging your head against a tree.”

Let’s face it, crime fiction is at its heart tropian. We rely on situations (crimes, usually murder), archetypes (loner cop holding out for justice) and even some “rules,” which of course can be broken.

But how do you honor the great traditions of our genre without being banal? How do you cleave to such a well-worn path and still give your readers some new vistas? How do you utilize trope and not slide downhill into cliche?

Our dilemma is that a story has to feel new and yet be familiar enough to be recognized as part of the genre. Writers often want to pay homage to their favorites from the past, but characters have to distinguish themselves in their own present or they petify into stereotypes. In the early books, Spenser seemed a Marlowe knockoff, but Parker quickly made him into his own man.

Years ago, I got into a lengthy blog discussion on this subject with a bunch of crime writers. Luckily, I kept this quote from Brian Lindenmuth: “the PI novel is the haiku of the mystery genre; there may be only 17 syllables but in the right hands those syllables will sing. There is the potential for a lot of power in that framework.”

I liken crime writing to classical ballet. There are only five positions for the feet and arms in ballet. But within that strict framework, anything is possible, from swoony-romanticism of Swan Lake to George Balanchine’s Stravinsky-twitchy Agon.

The trick, if it can be simplified as such, is that you have to take our beloved tropes and turn them into your own, like Fielding did with Emma and Bridget Jones. A while back, I contributed a short story to an anthology whose theme was honoring the PI tradition. Being on a John D. McDonald binge back then, I decided to create a female McGee whose business card read: Mavis Magritte, Salvage Consultant, Slip C12, Duncan Clinch Marina, Traverse City, Michigan. I had a ball writing that thing. Mavis has to prove her best friend Eunice Meijer didn’t kill her creepy lover Dirk. And yes, they drink gin.

Trope on, crime dogs. In the meantime, take some inspiration from the pas de deux from Balanchine’s Agon.

I’m typing this slowly today, but a hard deadline looms and despite the vertigo threatening to wash me off this desk like a rogue wave/waive, I’ll try to make sense/cents through all the fuzziness in my frontal lobes. I feel unanchored and today’s blog post tends to drift as well. If you’ve never experienced this malady, let me explain. A single snowflake would look like a blizzard the way my head is spinning.

But to use a stolen line, I shall endeavor to persevere.

Rev, don’t move your head too fast, and keep it still. At least you aren’t leaning over the porcelain throne like the first time in Key West with the Gilstraps…and it wasn’t the gin or wine/whine then, either. Quit wandering around and focus, Spin Boy! 

All right. Debbie Burke’s fun post on A Pair of Pants several days ago brought to mind something that’s been bothering me for a good long while/wile. I guess I shouldn’t let the little things irritate me, but trying to lie/lye still all day yesterday, I found my fuzzy mind wandering, especially after looking at Facebook for a couple of minutes when the world settled down for a moment. This came to me.

I’m afeared the English language all us writers cherish is slowly deteriorating, and it might/mite due to social media.

Authors can use a number of platforms to promote their/there/they’re work, but I’m of the age to embrace only a couple. Facebook works best for me. (I’d always said I’d never have an FB account and avoided it for years until my first book was published. I knew so little about it, I once called it MyFace.) I eventually learned to link it to Instagram, figuring two/too/to birds were better than one.

So that’s where I settled, and I’m dismayed by all the abbreviations and the posters’ inability to use the correct words in a sentence or idea, let alone punctuation. Good lord, we all took English in school, and someone please tell me, did half the population of this country sleep through that class!!!???

Sentence structure aside, it’s/its/its’ the wrong words people select that drives me nuts. I suspect those folks don’t know/no the meaning of the word homophone. I’m not trying to be mean here, but I’m seeing more and more of those same issues arise in novels, whether/weather they’re self or traditionally published. I ask, “where were the copy editors!!!???

Biting down the rising nausea in/inn my office that refuses to be still, let’s get back to the classroom. A homophone is each of two/to/too or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling.

Yep, these words can cause confusion when we use them in error and most word programs should catch the issue, but then again…

For the past few years, I’ve judged professional writing contests and the problem seems/seams to be getting worse. The wrong words with innocent intent are getting through. Here are just a handful I’ve seen in recent weeks, especially on social media and in other places, and in no particular order…wait, urk.

Getting back from the water closet and feeling like a freshman college student on their/they’re/there first night in the dorm, let’s/lets continue with our homophones.

Shear/Sheer

Sale/Sail

Sight/Cite

Bare/Bear

Peel/Peal

Whole/Hole

Roll/Role

Tale/Tail

Waste/Waist

Weather/Whether

Cell/Sell

Four/For

Break/Brake

Die/Dye

Heel/Heal

Creek/Creak

Idle/Idol

Knot/Not

Wright/Right

Sole/Soul

Accept/Except

Affect/Effect

Immigrant/Emigrant

Deer/Dear

Pear/Pair

Whole/Hole

Knew/New

Stationary/Stationery

Flower/Flour

Style/Stile

Know/No

Right/Write

Pane/Pain

Way/Weigh

Sweet/Suite

And of course, There/Their/They’re

Most of these came from Facebook posts I’ve collected over the past several months. Speaking of that platform, when I first became an FB user, I had the noble/nobel idea that it was a new version of the front porch on an old general store where people would/wood sit exchange positive ideas, stories, and information. Instead, it’s become a wasteland of manipulated videos, trolls who incite/insight fright or anger, and political antagonism promoted by those who hide behind an electronic wall and spew anything they want without fear of real/reel repercussion. If any of that had happened in front of a store when I was a kid, someone would‘ve gotten their nose busted and for good reason.

But back to what I was saying, this particular issue with the English language can be traced back to the way vowels were pronounced between the 14^th and 18^th centuries as individuals were more and more influenced by the introduction of other languages by migrants who moved to England after the Black Death.

Or/oar it might have come from what are known as “French loan words” (where the introduction of these words forced a change in the way English was pronounced). Another suggestion is that as the French language made/maid its way into everyday use during the war with France, general anti-French sentiments caused the middle class to deliberately make English sound less like the French.

Pronunciation is another key, and it’s hard to get specific vocalizations into what we write/right. It originates, I suspect, with our ancestors and region. For example, my former secretary from New Jersey and I often argued over the pronunciation of pen vs. pin. Each time I’d ask for a pen, she’d bring me a needle or map pin just for meanness. Here in Texas, the words are distinguishable only by spelling.

Take the word “here” for example. In Texas, we make it two syllables, whereas country music stars Dolly Parton and Dwight Yoakum have a unique Appalachian pronunciation that’s hard to duplicate unless you’re from that part of the nation. It’s an Old English soft sound produced at the back of the throat and can only be written as “hyer,” but not spoken as harsh as the spelling would dictate. In fact, I prefer their version, and though I’m a fairly good mimic, I can’t get that one down.

I believe those from the Ohio Valley pronounce “hear” with two syllables the way we do down hyer in Texas.

Trying to steer back to my original discussion in this mental tempest, no matter the origin, I suspect there are hundreds of other homophones I haven’t thought about. I bet you have your own to add, along with stories that tweak your Irritation Nerve.

And with that, I hope others find some value here in my version of English 101.

Everyone shout in agreement, here here! Which is what I thought people we saying back when I was in elementary school, (supposedly to authenticate our presence, I suppose). but then again, I soon found that the “dawnzer-lee light” was actually “dawn’s early light” in the Star-Spangled Banner, (it made sense since we pronounced “window-light” for a window pane) but I digress…and the spins are getting worse.