We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete. –Ross MacDonald

PJ Parrish

I ran across a fascinating essay the other day written by one of my favorite writers Ross Macdonald. Its title was intriguing enough — The Writer As Hero. I mean, shoot, who doesn’t like to think of themselves as hero at one time of another?

Most of us will never be called on for true heroics. We won’t go to war. We won’t run into a burning building. Our names won’t be etched in history books like Harriet Tubman or Miep Gies. The best we can aspire to is a series of small but constant kindnesses.

Ross Macdonald was speaking of different sort of heroism, which we as writers can perhaps examine and absorb. Let me try to set this up properly.

Macdonald was having a meeting with a producer was toying with the idea of making Macdonald’s detective Lew Archer into a television series. He asked if Archer was based on a real person

“Yes,” Macdonald said. “Myself.”

The guy gave him “a semi-pitying Hollywood look.” Macdonald tried to explain that he knew some excellent detectives and had watched them work.

“Archer was created from the inside out. I wasn’t Archer, exactly, but Archer was me,” Macdonald told the producer. From the essay:

The conversation went downhill from there, as if I had made a damaging admission. But I believe most detective-story writers would give the same answer. A close paternal or fraternal relationship between writer and detective is a marked peculiarity of the form. Throughout its history, from Poe to Chandler and beyond, the detective hero has represented his creator and carried his values into action in society.

That really got my mental hamster wheel going. My series protagonist Louis Kincaid, damaged as he might have been, has a strong core of values. It, more than anything, is the connecting thread in my books. Where did this code come from? Where did his ethics, his way of seeing the world, emerge from? There was only one answer — me.

The more I thought about this, the more sense it made. Even in my stand alones — two very distinct and difference charcters — the way those characters look at the world is filtered through my moral prism. Even though their lives bear no resemblance to mine, they are me.

I’m having trouble making my point there. Let’s allow Macdonald to try, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and his detective Dupin:

Poe’s was a first-rate but guilt-haunted mind painfully at odds with the realities of pre-Civil-War America. Dupin is a declassed aristocrat, as Poe’s heroes tend to be, an obvious equivalent for the artist-intellectual who has lost his place in society and his foothold in tradition. Dupin has no social life, only one friend. He is set apart from other people by his superiority of mind.

In his creation of Dupin, Poe was surely compensating for his failure to become what his extraordinary mental powers seemed to fit him for. He had dreamed of an intellectual hierarchy governing the cultural life of the nation, himself at its head. Dupin’s outwitting of an unscrupulous politician in “The Purloined Letter,” his “solution” of an actual New York case in “Marie Roget,” his repeated trumping of the cards held by the Prefect of Police, are Poe’s vicarious demonstrations of superiority to an indifferent society and its officials.

Poe’s detective stories, Macdonald says, “gave the writer, and give the reader, something deeper than obvious satisfactions. He devised them as a means of exorcising or controlling guilt and horror.”

Macdonald then moves on to Chandler and Hammitt and their creations — Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. He says both writers were working in opposition to the old cliches and tropes. In 1944, Chandler wrote, in a dedication to the editor of Black Mask:

“For Joseph Thompson Shaw with affection and respect, and in memory of the time when we were trying to get murder away from the upper classes, the weekend house party and the vicar’s rose-garden, and back to the people who are really good at it.”

It was a revolution. As Macdonald notes, “From it emerged a new kind of detective hero, the classless, restless man of American democracy, who spoke the language of the street.”

Hammett had been a PI. Spade wasn’t a complete projection of himself but he knew him inside and out and gave him a sort of bleak compassion. But his narrow code of conduct makes him turn his murderous lover over to the police.

Chandler’s vision is disenchanted, too, but Macdonald suggests Chandler had a self-awareness and, like his hero, wore two masks — the hardboiled one concealing a poetic and satiric mind. And that our pleasure, as readers, comes from figuring out the interplay between the mind of Chandler and the voice of Marlowe. He gives as an example the marvelous opening of The Big Sleep.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Here’s the key quote from Macdonald about that opening:

“Marlowe is making fun of himself, and of Chandler in the role of brash young detective. There is pathos, too, in the idea that a man who can write like a fallen angel should be a mere private eye. The gifted writer conceals himself behind Marlowe’s cheerful mindlessness. At the same time the retiring, middle-aged, scholarly author acquires a durable mask, forever 38, which allows him to face the dangers of society high and low.”

That’s the part that really got me thinking about my own books. What am I revealing of myself when I put those thoughts about childhood in Louis Kincaid’s head? What am I mourning from my past when I make my character a failed dancer who’s struggling to find an authentic life? Who are these people I’ve created? Who am I?

I think that’s it. Yes, I write for pleasure. But it goes so much deeper than that. I write to find out things about myself, to untangle old yarn skeins, to reorient myself on the path. They say we dream to make sense out of what happens in our real lives. What is writing, if not a kind of dream state?

Like Ross Macdonald, we’re all searching for heros.

Here’s the link to the Macdonald essay in full. Be patient. It sometimes doesn’t load quickly. http://www.thestacksreader.com/the-writer-as-detective-hero/?fbclid=IwAR30zE0Fr2ci7kNRD45aAFixOp8EhvK7kTe609Dqp5xoCKwzRUfZjcXE_BE

The full-blood, six-foot-six Cherokee speaker held up a bound document two or three hundred pages deep. “This is the Dawes Roll and it’s gold for anyone looking for their Oklahoma ancestors, or who have questions. I had a lot, and still do, but now all the old people are gone and I can’t ask them. This helped me find a few I didn’t know about.”

I perked up at the session, though I’d been listening carefully to his discussion of the Trail of Tears and his grandmother who loved to tell stories.

“Please feel free to come look at this when I’m finished.” Now in his late seventies, John Grits continued to tell the story of his people and family to the attendees at the Western Writers of America conference, and my mind went back to so many things I wish I’d asked my old people.

They weren’t much storytellers, but I learned to sit quiet in a living room, on the front porch, out in the yard, or at the stores in Chicota, Texas, and listen as the adults talked. From the old men there, who Miss Esther called the Spit and Whittle Club, I learned about farming, the weather, cattle, stock prices (which didn’t register much at the time), hunting, fishing, and “adult” issues which were vastly more interesting.

The family get-togethers I mentioned provided some information, including the story about an old man who stayed with my grandparents when Mama was little. He’d been captured by Indians (they never said what tribe) and somehow escaped one night. Tiring, he crawled into a hollow log. Laying there in the darkness and holding his breath, he counted the steps of each pursuer who placed a foot on the downed tree as they raced after him. I recall it was over twenty.

I know nothing else about the incident she related, and have often wondered about the rest of her tale.

Miss Esther told me her mother burned to death in front of her while making soap when my grandmother was little, I know nothing else other than she’s buried in a cemetery in Grant, OK, (which Miss Esther often said), but I never asked her exactly where or drove her up there to point out the plot.

I do have a fading photo of her and her siblings along with my great-grandfather on the porch after the funeral. It was 1913 and kids are barefoot, though their clothes look somewhat fresh, and the looks on their faces are blank from that great tragedy. I want to know more now, but the opportunity is long gone.

That leads us to the next regret. Family lore says we have some Choctaw blood, but there’s no marriage license between great-grandma Minne and Miss Esther’s daddy, Ed Gentry. With that missing piece of the puzzle, we’re stymied, which leads us back to the beginning of this discussion.

After John Grits finished his presentation, I borrowed his Dawes Roll and looked up Minnie Roberson. A four-year-old was listed, and two lines underneath was my grandmother’s first name, but it was Esther Roberson (maybe someone she’s named after?), but the dates didn’t seem to add up, and those folks were from northeast Oklahoma.

The National Archives explains “The Dawes Rolls, also known as the “Final Rolls,” are the lists of individuals who were accepted as eligible for tribal membership in the “Five Civilized Tribes:” Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminoles. Those found eligible for the Final Rolls were entitled to an allotment of land, usually a homestead. The Rolls contain more than 101,000 names from 1898-1914 (primarily from 1899-1906).”

So…we might be Cherokee, or Choctaw (a tiny, tiny percentage), or not. The names I found might not even be them, but that’s not the point here, either. This discussion isn’t primarily about the rolls, or ancestry, but is a way for me to urge y’all to talk to those who are still around and record their lives, and your family stories.

With today’s technology, it’s as easy as pushing a button on your phone and leading them to tell what the remember. I know, we had tape recorders back in the day and I didn’t use them because the tapes and pushing all those buttons was intrusive. People looked at those devices like I’d put a live snake on the table.

But a deft push on a cell phone screen is so common no one will notice, and if they do, quickly forgotten, and you might be able to hear stories that wouldn’t come out any other way. Be careful, though. My own grandmother didn’t want to talk about some of those old times because, “We all have skeletons in our closets and should leave the doors closed.”

Like so many people through generations back, it never occurred to me that I should have been looking to find out more about those who’re already gone. I also want to know the stories they told, what they lived through, and what they knew about their own grandparents, relatives, and beyond.

Before people started writing these things down, information was passed down in the form of tales and recollections around the campfire, and in front of the fireplace and stoves. They also spun them under the stars, and I got some of that in the evenings beneath the dripping mimosa tree, or the sweet-smelling sycamores while lightning bugs flashed around us.

Now we have air conditioning, cell phones, and computers, and don’t go visiting like they did. People are more interested in television programs, movies, inaccurately titled Reality TV, or those damned devices in our hands.

It became easier to watch television and no talk, and soon there was no need to entertain each other with recall about what happened when my ancestors crossed the red River from Oklahoma and Arkansas, or on Dad’s side, through the southern states and up from Houston to Lamar County.

Folks, it’s a crying shame that most kids know a quarter of their family history that should have been passed down through the years, mine included. My grandparents all married right after the turn of the twentieth century, survived scratch farms, this country’s involvement in WWI, the Great Depression (which made them who they were), WWII, and even Korea, before I came along, but I don’t know enough about what they went through, what they liked and disliked, or what they knew of the Armstrong/Wortham/Vanderberg/Gentry stories.

John Grits admitted he only knows a small piece of what his own family experienced in those horrible times for his people, and laughed when he said his grandmother always knew there was a foot trail on their Missouri property, but not the story behind it.

Only a few years ago this man who’s closing in on 80 found out that trail down behind the house where he was born and delivered by his own grandmother was the Trail of Tears his people survived. His great-grandmother had walked that trail herself, but apparently assumed her daughter and family knew.

The stories that are getting away from us will be lost forever unless you, and I, record them in some way. Gather those stories and cherish them, and for your writers, it’s a fountain of ideas for future works.

It’s the Fourth of July. Happy Independence Day to all my American friends and colleagues. Although I’m Canadian, I’ve spent a lot of time in the US—visiting or passing through 37 of the 50 states. I must say, I’ve never had a bad experience in America, and I look forward to the next trip which is to Chicago and taking the Amtrak down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

I was going to write something unique for today’s Kill Zone contribution but I’m going to cheat and recirculate a piece I recently published on my own site at Dyingwords.net. It’s about a time management tool I tried out. Here goes:

There’s only one area where we humans are truly equal. Time. Each of us are given exactly the same amount of time in our day. 24 hours. 60 minutes. 60 seconds. It’s how we use, track, and manage our time that sets us apart. Think of what you could accomplish with your time, and your energy, if you were able to supercharge your schedule with the game-changing 100 blocks strategy.

This strategy of dividing your waking time into 100, 10-minute blocks and tracking it comes from Tim Urban. Tim is a thought leader and prolific writer who hosts the popular website Wait But Why. I’ve followed Tim Urban for years, and I find him a fascinating man. One of his posts was titled 100 Blocks a Day. With credit to Tim for the images and graphs, I’ll paraphrase and personalize the content.

You probably sleep 7 to 8 hours per night. That leaves you with about 1,000 active minutes in your day. If you break that into 10-minute intervals, you isolate 100, 10-minute blocks.

Click Here or on the Image to Print This Graph

Throughout your day, you spend your time progressing through the 100 squares of blocks. When you wake, you’re in the first block and you run out of blocks when you go to bed. By stepping back and looking at what you’ve done in each block, you gain immense clarity from which you can supercharge your schedule.

By time tracking with blocks, we can readily see where we’ve been productive and where we weren’t. We can see time management efficiency, or we can see a complete waste of this priceless resource called time. We can see where to cut back and where to double down.

Ask yourself if each time-block furthered your definite purpose in life and which block was merely enjoyed for its moment. Ask if each block was a time gain or a time suck. Ask if each block allowed you to constantly create, to continue to consume, or to just comfortably cruise.

If you imagine your time blocks laid out on a 10×10 grid, you’d get a total screenshot of your day. How much of it was spent at work, and how much of that work time was productive and necessary? Or unnecessary? How much of your leisure time was worth the lack of effort? How much of your family time and friend time was enjoyed? And what really mattered in your day?

Graphing and tracking time blocks let you think about everything you spend your time on in context of value per 10-minute block. Preparing dinner might take 3 to 6 blocks. Ordering in takes none. Meditation might take 1 block and a yoga session 3 blocks. Ask what the dollar-per-hour or return-on-investment might be.

2 blocks of reading per evening might add 15 books per year to your mental library. Writing a novel might take 20 blocks per day and researching/writing/formatting/publishing something like this 675-word post takes 23 blocks or 3.8 hours. I know because I tracked it on the 100-block graph.

As part of this post, I recorded my entire day from the time I awoke to the time I shut down. I’ve always kept a journal and loosely tracked my time, but this was the first crack at being so detailed. Here’s a screenshot of my 10-minute time blocks for June 28, 2024.

I have to say this exercise was enlightening. It made me focus intently as I moved from morning to night. In my writing/content producing world, I have a massive project underway called City Of Danger. It’s in its third year of production, and it’ll be a year or two more before release because the delivery technology is under development. From this point forward, I’m going to religiously track the City Of Danger production time with the 100 block strategy. I’m curious if I’ve finally found something that can increase my focus and productivity.

Tim Urban of Wait But Why has three more insightful graphs. One is a 90-year period of human life in years. One is a 90-year period of human life in months. The other is a 90-year period of human life in weeks. Feel free to download them and begin plotting your blocks, supercharging your schedule, and changing your game.

Kill Zoners—Have you heard of this 100-block thing? Do you have a time management system that you use? Or, do you find that trying to track and manage time is just a waste of time? Comments please.

By John Gilstrap

After reading Reavis Wortham’s post on Saturday, I figured it was okay to tell this story.

I’ve posted before about our beloved dog Kimber, a mix of Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and Boston Terrier called a Caviston. (And yes, it bothers me that it’s not spelled Cavaston, but no one consulted me.) When we first moved to the woodland house in West Virginia, she weighed less than five pounds and I was keenly aware that the entire world posed one big hazard for her. Not only was she prey to most other creatures, her girth was smaller than that of the floor vents which hadn’t yet been covered.

We fenced in about a half acre of the backyard/woods so Kimber could have a place to wander, but for the first, say, nine months of her life, she never wandered without an escort. I was her primary security detail. After a year or so, she’d filled out to about 18 pounds and had outgrown reasonable threats from owls and hawks. Only the largest dogs ever outgrow threats from eagles, but our eagles stay distracted by the Potomac River smorgasbord a few hundred yards away from our place.

Once permitted to wander her fenced domain alone during the day, she turned into quite the squirrel hunter, chasing them great distances until the critters cheated and shot up a tree. I don’t think Kimber ever figured out why she couldn’t follow. She’s an avid deer chaser, too, though I’m not sure of her plan for when she caught one.

As neighbors joined our community, her canine best friends became a German shepherd and a Rottweiler. They let her hang out with them and played without crushing her. Like many small breeds, Kimber always thought she had way more wolf in her than she ever did.

As a human in her life, I of course knew better. Although Kimber aged out of danger from smaller predators, very real danger remained from larger carnivores–coyotes in particular. Even at her top adult weight of 20 pounds, she never went out at night without an armed escort. My rifle of choice: a Rossi Circuit Judge chambered in .45 Long Colt. The coyote gun lives its life staged at the back door all the time, easily accessible when needed. Often carried, only used once. On a snake. That’s a lot of gun for a snake.

Then came last week.

Last week was reasonably cool for a June afternoon, so we left the downstairs door open to allow Kimber to come and go as she pleased to and from the back yard. My office sits on the second floor, overlooking the backyard and the woods beyond. I was doing as I always do while staring down the maw of an approaching deadline, pounding away on the keyboard, playing with my imaginary friends when a cacophony erupted from out beyond my windows.

Growling and barking. My wife screaming at Kimber to come. To stop. I heard other animal sounds.

I knew this was bad.

I bolted from my desk and raced down the stairs, down the hall, and through the family room to the back door, grabbing the rifle on my way out. I still had no idea what was happening, but the noise of it all had not decreased in intensity. If anything, it had gotten louder.

Outside now, I turned the corner and the crisis became clear. Kimber had tangled with a woodchuck (or groundhog, depending on where you live). Normally docile, woodchucks are herbivores and hover near the bottom of Mother Nature’s food chain. When confronted with a carnivore, they survive by running away. But Kimber was faster and she cornered it against a tree.

Best I could tell, Kimber thought it was a game. Her tail was wagging hard enough to dislocate itself at the root as she bounced around, taunting the woodchuck that thought it was fighting for its life. Those critters have wicked incisors and long claws that would tear a little dog apart. Given a clear shot, I was going to kill the woodchuck.

Let’s not forget that my wife was in the mix, too, trying to separate the sparring parties. One thing for sure: I had no safe shot to take.

And then I did.

Woody Woodchuck broke into an open field run and for a good three or four seconds, he was all alone. As I shouldered the rifle, though, my wife yelled, “No, please, don’t!” In that instant of hesitation–my fault, not my wife’s; mine was the only finger on the trigger–Kimber woke up to the chase and re-entered the sight picture, chasing the woodchuck down until it somehow managed to climb under the fence and make its escape.

So, Woody lives on to make another appearance. Maybe he was traumatized enough to stay away from our backyard. I look for him every day. So does Kimber, who is fine, by the way. Not a scratch on her.

But a known danger lives on because of a momentary hesitation. Though Kimber sleeps in our bed at night, she is a country dog and she’s happiest when she’s outside. It’s too late to turn her into an indoor dog, and I wouldn’t want to anyway. So, if you’re a woodchuck or a coyote or a copperhead and you’re reading this, do yourself a favor and hang out at a property down the road. At the very least, stay outside the fence.

If there’s a writing related takeaway to this story, it’s that opportunity is often fleeting, and that hesitation–indecision–keeps doors shut that could otherwise be open. Whether it’s a job opportunity or a creative decision in a story, sometimes making a decision–any decision–is better than stewing about it overnight.