Good day, Kill Zoners. As I searched for a topic, and being short of time to create something new, I remembered a post I wrote on my website at Dyingwords.net a few years ago. So, rather than whipping up something original, I tapped into my archives and found this to share. You might find it interesting.

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Leonardo da Vinci probably had the world’s most observant and creative mind. With an estimated IQ well over 190 — probably 200+ — da Vinci was a true, versatile Renaissance man. He was far ahead of his time in art, anatomy, architecture, engineering, mathematics, and many other disciplines. Few came even close to Leonardo’s prolific output of artistic masterpieces and scientific discoveries. And many deeply pondered the astounding secret behind Leonardo da Vinci’s creative genius.

Author Leonard Shlain spent years exploring da Vinci’s work and analyzing what made him so outstanding. In the book Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius, Shlain makes an excellent case that Leonardo da Vinci was biologically different from practically all other humans. According to Shlain, da Vinci’s brain was the perfect balance of right and left hemispheres. It was because of a one-of-a-kind abnormality in Leonardo da Vinci’s corpus callosum—the part of the brain responsible for controlling analytical left-brain observation and right-brain creativity.

In Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius, Leonard Shlain did what he calls a “postmortem brain scan”, seeking to illuminate the exquisite wiring inside Leonardo da Vinci’s head. It’s an in-depth psychological/neurological profile about what’s known of da Vinci’s phenomenal behavior and the ingenuity of his works. At the end of this fascinating book, Shlain concludes that Leonardo da Vinci’s brain was so advanced that his understanding of all things in nature and his grip on personal creative ability allowed him to access unique ways of thought.

Shlain postulates that da Vinci saw universal interconnectedness in everything… everywhere. Biologically advantaged by some quirk of nature, da Vinci elevated his mind to a higher state of consciousness than achieved by other people. Leonardo da Vinci—according to author Leonard Shlain—evolved into a superhuman.

Genetically, there didn’t appear to be anything special about Leonardo da Vinci. He was born out of wedlock in 1452 at the Italian town of Vinci in the Florence region. His mother was a peasant and his father was a notary—somewhat of a playboy. Infant and toddler Leonardo was raised by his mother and neglected his father who only supplied modest child support.

Because Leonardo da Vinci came from low class, he wasn’t eligible for a formal education as were nobility associated with the church and state. In fact, da Vinci had no conventional schooling as a youth. He couldn’t grasp the “secret code” associated with the education of the time. That was learning to speak, read and write Latin and Greek which unlocked the doors to classical learning. Without knowing these two prominent languages, it was practically impossible for da Vinci to conventionally participate in making the Renaissance.

Leonardo da Vinci was taken from his dysfunctional mother at age 5 or 6. His kindly uncle Francesco did the best he could to provide for the boy. Regardless of his lack of formal schooling, da Vinci showed a remarkable curiosity and intellectual ability right from a young age. He seemed “gifted” and was able to visualize abstracts including art forms and mathematical equations far beyond normality. Soon, the Florentine painter and artistic leader Andrea del Verrocchio saw a protégé and took Leonardo da Vinci under his wing.

For most of his life, the European world recognized Leonardo da Vinci as a painter. In reality, da Vinci wasn’t a prolific painter. He painted sporadically and nominally as a side-line commission. Art experts at Christie’s auction in New York estimate that over 80 percent of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings were lost over the years. Today, there are only 15 verified da Vinci paintings in the world including Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and Annunciation. Salvator Mundi sold in 2017 for $450.3 million US.

But Leonardo da Vinci was prolific in his drawings and writing. His anatomical sketches, scientific diagrams and thoughts across the spectrum fill volumes now held in private collections and public museums. Da Vinci’s unquenchable curiosity and feverishly inventive imagination consumed his waking hours. The world is extremely fortunate that many of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks still exist.

Da Vinci’s interest held no bounds. He was a true polymath who studied astronomy, anatomy, architecture, botany, engineering, science, music, math, language, literature, geology, paleontology, ichnology, painting, drawing, and sculpting. Leonardo da Vinci also invented. Concepts for the helicopter, parachute and airplane wing came from da Vinci. He even built the first automated bobbin winder before the sewing machine came to be, and Leonardo worked with solar power, double-hulled ships and even armored military tanks. He also thought-out a robotic knight.

Unlike most innovators who are a fine line between nut and genius, Leonardo da Vinci was incredibly well-balanced on an emotional scale. Besides having an extremely high intelligence quotient (IQ), it’s said Leonardo had a tremendous emotional quotient (EQ) as well. Nowhere is there any suggestion he was an egomaniac or unapproachable. History indicates da Vinci was a pacifist, vegan and humanitarian with a good sense of humor.

So, what made Leonardo da Vinci so special? Short answer—his brain. There was something nearly out-of-this-world going on in da Vinci’s mind. And there might be a scientific explanation what it was.

Twenty-first-century science knows a bit of how the human brain functions. But, it’s far from comprehensive knowledge. Science has almost no grasp or understanding of how human consciousness works, and there’s a good reason for that. Brain science is tangible where grey matter can be physically dissected, and electrophysiological waves are recordable on computerized graphs. You can fund, study, and measure with reports.

Consciousness is a whole different matter. Conventional science has no grip on what human consciousness—or any form of consciousness—really is because it’s non-tangible and can’t be defined within current terms. Because consciousness is slippery, it’s not fundable. There’s no money in it. You can’t measure to monetize it. So consciousness study is left to individual groundbreaking leaders like David Chalmers and Sir Roger Primrose… but back to da Vinci.

Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius takes a really good look at how LDV’s brain activated his mind to tap into a higher state of consciousness—the world of “Forms”, as Plato termed it, or the source of where all “in-form-ation” sits. In current consciousness research, there’s a distinct difference between the physical brain, the non-physical mind and the plane of infinite intelligence where all ideas come from.

Leonardo da Vinci’s brain was so evolved—author Shlain writes—that his mind easily accessed information not readily there for normal people. Da Vinci’s brain/mind power was so special that he “thought” his way to fantastic ideas. It also let da Vinci observe what was going on in the universe and record it. That might have been simplistic beauty as in the Lady with an Ermine, an anatomical analogy like Vitruvian Man or a geometric complexity seen in the Rhombicuboctahedron.

Despite Leonardo da Vinci being bright, talented, and affable, he was an outlier in the Renaissance period. Da Vinci was biologically different. He was a misfit in the world of conventional ideas and creativity. He thought different. He acted different. He dressed and talked different. That made others uncomfortable. Back then, da Vinci sat at the back of the bus and today he’d still be so far ahead that the rest of us would see dust. Author Leonard Shlain tells us his version why:

“Leonardo da Vinci’s left and right brain hemispheres were intimately connected in an extraordinary way. Because of a large and uniquely developed corpus callosum, da Vinci’s left and right sides constantly communicated and kept each other in the loop on observations and creative options. Each brain side knew what the other was doing, and this gave da Vinci’s mind unprecedented and unrestricted freedom to observe, understand and create.

In current brain science, the left hemisphere is the analytical and conservative side. The right is the creative, liberal sphere. Brain scientists think that’s nature’s safety mechanism to prevent humans from getting too stupid or smart in either extreme. Da Vinci’s brain seems to have found the middle ground—the apex of the triangle or the tip of the see-saw.”

In Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius, Leonard Shlain backs-up his theory with facts. The most interesting fact supporting da Vinci’s left/right corpus callosum uniqueness is his handiness. Leonardo da Vinci was a southpaw—he was left-handed.

Left-handers aren’t that unusual in human population. Studies show approximately 8-10 percent prefer left-hand prominence. A tiny proportion are ambidextrous, but the vast majority have manual-dexterous abilities with their right. However, there are unusual advantages south-paws have. They tend to be far more creative than right-handers.

It’s no news the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body—same with vise-versa. When one hemisphere is dominant over the other, a person is usually analytical or creative. But, when both sides are equally balanced, something phenomenal happens.

Anatomically, the corpus callosum—aka the callosal commissure—is a wide and thick nerve bundle sitting at the brain’s foundation. It’s the largest white matter brain structure that binds the left and right gray matter. The corpus callosum isn’t big. It’s about 10 centimeters or 4 inches long. Neurologically though, it’s huge—having about 250 million axonal projections.

The corpus callosum regulates electrical activity happening in the left and right brain sides. It’s got a big job to do. One of its jobs is responsible for the primordial fight-flight response ingrained in all of us. But the corpus callosum also lets humans get imaginative, like the right brain inventing tools to slay sabre-toothed tigers while the left side stays alert.

The Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius book goes beyond a left/right brain dichotomy. It delves deep into something uniquely known about da Vinci’s left-handedness. Leonardo da Vinci’s brain let him write left-handedly in a mirror image. Da Vinci’s writings, notes and diagram annotations have him writing right to left where you need a mirror to decipher them.

This mirror-image phenomenon provides profound insight into Leonardo da Vinci’s psyche. Here is a poor-boy without formal education who developed his own style independent of traditional academic influences—even choosing which hand to use and how to communicate with. Da Vinci was the poster-boy of self-taught, self-investigating and self-assured individuals—the likes the world never experienced in his time or so-far thereafter.

Leonardo da Vinci’s lack of indoctrination by limiting dogma taught through conventional institutions like the church and its lap-dog societal constraints liberated him from mental restraints. Combined with perfect neuro-equilibrium between inquisitive left and creative right brain functions, da Vinci broke free of earthly bounds and set his mind soaring into airy lofts not there for common minds.

Author Leonard Shlain of Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius makes another interesting observation and conclusion. Because da Vinci was removed from his biological mother’s hold so early, he became mentally self-reliant. Da Vinci was also gay or at least asexual. He wasn’t driven by a common male preoccupation with the little head thinking for the big one.

Brain science recognizes that “normal” human brain thoughts primarily focus on survival concerns like food, shelter, and sex. That didn’t seem a factor with Leonardo as he progressed in life. He just abnormally sensed reality. Then he painted, sketched, or wrote what he knew.

No, Leonardo da Vinci was much more than “normal”. He was the prime exemplar of a universal genius whose brain far out-thought humankind. Looking back… and forward, if da Vinci showed up for a job interview, his unique selling proposition on his resume would be “I have an unusual brain and my mind knows how to use it”.

That’s the astounding secret behind Leonardo da Vinci’s creative genius.

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Kill Zoners — Who are some other people, alive or dead, that possess/possessed amazing creative ability? And out of curiosity, where does the source of your creativity come from? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

By John Gilstrap 

WOODBRIDGE, VA–SUMMER, 1995. Nathan’s Run was a done deal and the marketing push to launch it was beginning to spin up. The pressure was on to submit my next book (as yet untitled) before the February, 1996 publication date as a hedge against a reality check that Nathan might not perform up to expectations. (Advances are often higher when reality is not a factor.) I was pounding away on the thriller that would become At All Costs, in which Jake and Carolyn Donovan had been exposed as longtime fugitives and now needed to flee for their lives while finding a way to prove their innocence.

In one of the early chapters, I needed an FBI agent for what I call a utility character–a walk-on that does the job required and then retreats to the literary union hall to await their next gig. I named the character Irene as a nod to my bride’s deceased mother (whom I never met). I gave her the surname Rivers because I needed a name and that was as god as any.

Those were the days when I pretended to outline my books with the result invariably turning out to be rambling, over-complicated plot lines that also invariably straighten themselves out and convinced me that I’m not an outline kind of guy. Irene Rivers ended up with a much larger role than I’d anticipated, and by the end of the story, she’d killed off a deputy director of the FBI. Cool stuff.

FAIRFAX, VA–SUMMER, 2008. With Six Minutes to Freedom in the can, and freshly inspired by all the research into Special Forces operations, I started hammering away on No Mercy, which would become the first of my long-running Jonathan Grave thriller series. I needed Jonathan to interact with a malleable but deeply honest FBI director. This character would know that Jonathan doesn’t play by the rules, but that he always finds himself on the side of the angels, so the FBI director would grease the wheels a bit for him from time to time.

I needed a name until I realized that I already had a name. Irene Rivers had fallen off the page for a decade since At All Costs, so why couldn’t she have become the director of the FBI? So now Irene, call sign Wolverine, spent 16 books lending aid to Jonathan Grave–and receiving considerable aid from him in return. In the novella, Soft Targets, I even show how Jonathan and Irene came to know each other and why they trust each other so much.

BERKELEY COUNTY, WV–SUMMER, 2023. In Jonathan Grave’s world, where time neither advance nor retreats, Anthony Darmond has been president of the United States for all 16 books. He’s beyond corrupt, and when people cross him, people disappear. Irene Rivers can’t take it anymore. Though it will likely cost her the job she loves, she conspires with Jonathan to take the Darmond administration down.

But as Emerson said, when you come at the king, you must kill him.

Now unemployed and disgraced, Irene Rivers decides to leave the Washington rat race and retire to he family estate in . . . wait for it . . . West Virginia. But she has a past that won’t go away, and she no longer has the security detail that will protect her and her family from retribution.

Which is why I just signed a two-book deal to launch a new series centered on Irene’s efforts to assimilate into her new surroundings and deal with threats that are both old and new.

The funny thing about playing with your imaginary friends is that they don’t always go home when you tell them to. I’m really excited about this. Look for the first Irene Rivers thriller in early 2025.

What about you? Do characters and story lines you thought you’d finished with find their way back into your new stuff?

“There are 500 million people on Facebook, but what are they saying to each other? Not much.” — Elmore Leonard

By PJ Parrish

Elmore Leonard was trending big on my Facebook feed this week. Everyone was quoting, but mainly misquoting, his famous Ten Rules Of Writing.

True confession time, she intoned gravely, I have read only two Leonard books. (ten bonus points if you get that reference).

Leonard is one of those titans whose stuff has been part of my cram-course in belated crime education. But like all writers, I’ve heard that he’s the Picasso of crime fiction, whose dialogue, in the words of one critic, is “like broken glass, sharp and glittering.”

But do his rules hold up? Well, I think this is a good time to go back and take a look. And I’ll be the first one to admit, I have broken almost all of them.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

I opened my book Island of Bones with a woman so desperate to escape her killer that she took off in a skiff in the middle of a hurricane. But generally I agree with Leonard here that in too many books, weather is a metaphoric crutch meant to telegraph the hero’s conflict or a mood of foreboding. Hey, it works in The Tempest, right? In the play, the small ship atoss in a raging storm is a metaphor for the characters, high-born and low, all at the mercy of natural events.

2. Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

Sigh. Broke this one, too. In my book A Thouand Bones, I am telling the story of Louis Kincaid’s lover, Joe Frye. The entire book is a flashback to Joe’s rookie year but I felt I had to connect it to Louis, so I book-ended it with a prologue (wherein she tells Louis about a crime she committed ten years ago) AND an epilogue (wherein Louis accepts what she did). But again, I think prologues are usually unnecessary. They almost always indicate the writer is not in control of back story or the time element of their plot (linear is almost always best). Or the writer tacks on a prologue where he throws out a body to gin up suspense because the early chapters are slooooow.

3. Never use a verb other than ”said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ”she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

Have broken this one, too.   See no. 4. But if you’re into “grumbled, bellowed, snapped, begged, moaned” and the like, then I’m pretty sure that the stuff you’re putting between the quote marks isn’t up to snuff. And if I ever catch you using “he barked” I will hunt you down and bite you, she yelped doggedly.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ”said.” To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ”full of rape and adverbs.”

Guilty again. I have used “whispered,” “shouted” and “asked.” But I always hate myself in the morning.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

I hate exclamation marks! But yes, I have used them. Mainly when I have someone shouting. And what’s worse, I have probably written, “Get out of here!” he shouted.

6. Never use the words ”suddenly” or ”all hell broke loose.” This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ”suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

I have never used “all hell…” That’s really amateur hour, akin to “little did he know that…” But yes, “suddenly” has appeared in my books. I didn’t realized what a stupid tic it was until I re-read Leonard’s rules. Suddenly, “suddenly” looks really bad in my chapters. And I now see that the action feels more immediate without it.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ”Close Range.”

We made this mistake in our first book Dark of the Moon. Set in the deep South, we felt compelled to drop some “g’s” and use some dumb idioms, and at least one reviewer took us to task for it. Here’s the thing: Dialect is hard on the reader’s eye. You can convey the feeling of it by judicious word choice, mannerisms, and sentence rhythm. We are in the process of preparing “Moon” for eBook and this has given us a second chance to go back and rewrite things. So y’all can bet we’re fixin’ to fix our mistakes.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s ”Hills Like White Elephants” what do the ”American and the girl with him” look like? ”She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

Whew. Finally, one sin I don’t commit. I am a strong believer in less is more when it comes to character descriptions. I think if you tread too heavily in the reader’s imagination, you stomp out some of the magic from your book. Here is how I let readers know what my heroine Joe Frye looked like:

She had a flash of memory, of sitting next to her dad in a gymnasium during her brother’s basketball game, watching the cheerleaders.
I’m ugly, Daddy.
You’re beautiful.
Not like them, I’m not.
No. They’re easy to add up. They’re plain old arithmetic.
So what am I?
Geometry, Joey. Not everyone gets it.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

This one is hard for me because I love to write setting descriptions. But I have learned to pull back some. The best advice I ever heard on this comes from Coco Chanel who said you should put on all your accessories and then take all of them off except one before you go out. So yeah, I over-describe but then I go back and take off the pearls and leopard hat.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

Like all writers, I struggle with this one. When we’re deep in the writing zone, we can fall in love with the sound of our own voices. And sometimes, a passage will come so hard that you just can’t bring yourself to delete it. But you must kill your darlings. Lately, I feel myself “underwriting,” so maybe I am pulling back too far. But I still think it’s better to leave ‘em wanting more, not less.

11. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

I have nothing to add to that last one. It might be the single best piece of writing advice out there. If you’re working too hard, your reader will as well. Here’s the quote that hangs over my desk: “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” It was good enough for Nathaniel Hawthorne — and Leonard — so it’s good enough for me.

Phoebe ready for trick or treating

Postscript: I am en route today from Michigan back to Tallahassee, two dogs in tow. If I don’t answer to your comment it is probably because I am somewhere over Cinncinati or stranded in Big Daddy’s Burger Bar in the Charlotte airport. Happy Halloween!

When I wrote my first Sonny Hawke novel, Hawke’s Prey, I structured the plot around a 100-year-snowstorm in the Big Bend region of West Texas. This arid desert sees more rain than most would believe, but the inclusion of deep snow was a surprise to most people.

To be sure I wasn’t getting into that weird world of reader volatility about reality––

“Cars always blow up when you shoot them! Don’t you watch movies?”

“You dumb writer. There’s no thumb safety on a Glock!”

“Can’t you read a map? Elm Street in downtown Dallas is one way going west!!!”

 –––I contacted local Channel 5 weatherman David Finfrock to see if he could explain how such a storm could arrive in that part of the Lone Star State. He graciously invited me to his home and we sat down with paper maps so he could show me how the elements of such a storm could come together.

I outlined the snow storm exactly that way in the book and caught grief from a number of readers who swore there had never been a two-foot snow in Alpine or Marfa, the two towns I combined into Ballard for the novel. The record was 19” back in 1946.

In 2021 and again in 2023, snow fell to startling depths that drifted more than two feet in many places, shutting down that entire part of the country. I was vindicated.

My most recent novel, Hard Country, is a contemporary western featuring Brand Inspector Tucker Snow and his brother, Harley. They work together to take down a meth dealer in rural Northeast Texas, and in the course of the story, Tucker’s late-model Dodge dually is stolen.

They get it back, and Tuck drives it to retired friend west of Fort Worth to see if he can download any data from the pick-up’s computer. The wizard of a mechanic plugs a device into the Dodge and downloads tons of data. They find that the thief linked his iPhone to the vehicle’s blue-tooth, wanting to hear some bad-boy music while he drove. That personal info helped unravel the meth dealer’s world.

This is an excerpt from the novel:

Don pointed at the computer screen. “Everything about Tuck that he didn’t know was downloaded on the truck’s computer. Look here. There are two levels to what I’m looking for. These are places you’ve been. The GPS keeps track of everywhere you drove.”

I didn’t like that one bit. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. The black box in there’s been tracking you since the day you drove off the lot. Here are the speeds you ran from Point A to Point B. They say it only records and holds the info for a short while, but it’s a lie.”

Harley chewed his bottom lip. “How long has this been going on?”

“Since 1994. It started out innocent enough, like everything else the government does, but then they started adding stuff on. The data was used to track how cars performed in crashes, but then they went off the rails with it. They’ll tell you it doesn’t track where you’re going, or record audio and video, but they’re lying through their teeth.

“Now they’re into data mining. Right now there are over seventy-eight million cars on the road with these recording devices. I ’magine ninety-eight percent of the cars sold will be tracking their owners within the next ten years, and probably doing more than that.

“That’s where the technology gets out of hand. More recent vehicles record your habits, where you go, and when. Here’s one I don’t like.” He paused the scrolling screen and pointed with the cursor. “Cameras in cars now track your eyes when you’re driving to see whether you’re watching the road, and not your phone or any other distractions. They do it in the name of safety, but I don’t believe that for one minute.

“What I’m looking for is even deeper, and more disturbing. They’re downloading your taste in music, or your voice commands. They search your history, looking at apps such as Waze, Apple CarPlay, Pandora, or Music Box…which is where I am now. You like big band music, huh?”

I felt the hair on the back of my neck prickle. I do like big band music and only listen to it when I’m in the truck by myself, but the idea of the car recording my listening habits was uncomfortable, to say the least.

“Folks are driving giant smartphones these days. The minute you pair your cell phone with the truck, either by Bluetooth or through a USB port, they tap into everything with personal data, anticipate your needs, and even log into apps that have credit card information and who has access to all that info that shouldn’t be out there.”

He poised and glanced over his shoulder at me. “I can find your credit card numbers if you want, ’cause I bet you’ve ordered stuff through your phone. Boys, you’re watched twenty-four seven. Big Brother is here and people feed him info every day without a shrug or a raised eyebrow. Give me an old ’56 Dodge truck any time.”

There’s more, but you get the picture. People said I was making all this up, but I first heard about it on the Ed Wallace radio show in Dallas. From there I did some digging, and uncovered the actual information above, and then some.

I was once again vindicated by a recent CBS 12 News Now report that featured Jen Caltrider, Director of Mozilla’s “Privacy not Included, who said, “Data is money these days and cars have the ability to collect so much of it, maybe more than any other device including phones.”

This data that is sold to third parties with deep pockets and is also shared with the U.S. Government. The personal information comes from devices within late model cars they investigated (such as Mercedes, Nissan and Ford), utilizing cameras, microphones, and censors. Some of the shared or sold data they reported in the news story includes medical information, buying info, and get this, your sex life.

Hummm…

According to this report, cars collect more of your data than even your phone, and I suspect that includes your Alexa, Dot or whatever smart device is listening in your home. I know that’s true, because one day in the living room a couple of years ago the Bride and I were talking about old school paint by number sets and one I did with my mom back in the early 1960s. That afternoon, an ad popped up on one of my social media platforms for…wait for it…paint by number sets.

Can you imagine the incredible odds of that being a coincidence?

Think of the line in the 1984 hit by Rockwell, “I always feel like somebody’s watching me.”

So do your research, suffer the slings and arrows of disbelievers, and don’t believe there’s anything left to make up. Now, get back to writing.

Hard Country. “An action fan’s dream. Non-stop excitement. Wonderful characters. A terrific locale. And a startling bulletin about how your car is watching you.”—David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of First Blood

I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for motivational quotes and affirmations. I find inspiration in sourcing words of wisdom, copying them, and pasting them into my scrapbook which I keep on top of my desk. I also have a lot of little yellow Post-Its with scribbles of sensible sayings stuck all around.

I have three daily affirmations that I faithfully read every morning. They remind me of my overall place in existence and how fast time goes by. They’re words from the Stoics or at least those who have Stoic-like attitudes. Allow me to open my book and share some of what I’ve collected.

“Contempt for failure.”

“Did I show up dressed today?”

“Memento Mori” ~Marcus Aurelius

“Ya gotta wanna.” ~Jimmy Pattison

“To understand is to know what to do.”

“Focus. Cut the noise. Double the results.”

“Invest the Time. Do the work. Tell the truth.”

“This, too, shall pass away.” ~Abraham Lincoln

“Overcome resistance. Trust the muse.” ~Stephen King

“Three common traits of winners. Desire. Determination. Confidence.”

“You don’t really understand something until you can build it.” ~Richard Feynman

“If you do what everyone else is doing, you shouldn’t be surprised to get the same results. Different outcomes come from doing things differently.”

“The long game wins come from repeatedly doing hard things today that make tomorrow easier.”

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life…the one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” ~Seneca

“Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. It’s the dogged, incremental, constant progress over a very long time.” ~Albert Einstein

“There are those who watch things happen, those who wonder what happened, and those who make things happen. Strive to be one of those who make things happen. If you show others what you can do, they will respect you far more than if you had simply told them what you’d done. Anyone can quarrel with words, but actions speak for themselves.” ~Tommy Lasorda

“Failure seems to be nature’s plan for preparing us for great responsibilities. If everything we attempted in life were achieved with a minimum of effort and came out exactly as planned, how little we would learn—and how boring life would be! And how arrogant we would become if we succeeded at everything we attempted. Failure allows us to develop the essential quality of humility. It is not easy—when you are the person experiencing failure—to accept it philosophically, serene in the knowledge that this is one of life’s great learning experiences. But it is. Nature’s ways are not always easily understood, but they are repetitive and therefore predictable. You can be absolutely certain that when you feel you are being most unfairly tested, you are being prepared for great achievement.”” ~Napoleon Hill

“I believe that life operates at two levels. The higher level if the muse level—the level of your calling. The lower level is our material plane. On that plane is the force I call Resistance with a capital R. That’s there to stop us from reaching the higher level. The purpose of discipline is that discipline is what takes you to that higher level. That’s why you have to have it—discipline. You can’t wish your way to it. You can’t chant your way there. You can’t—that book The Secret—vibe or manifest your way there. The law of attraction is bullshit. It’s not going to get you there. The only way you get there is through hard and disciplined work. You got to punch your ticket and pay the price.” ~Steven Pressfield

“Doing your best isn’t about the result. You know you did your best before you show up. Over the long term, the long game, the average person who constantly puts themselves in a good position beats the genius who puts themselves in a poor position. And the best way to put yourself in a good position is with good preparation.”

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in a world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.” ~Muhammad Ali

“One of the biggest keys to success at anything is believing you can figure it out as you go along. A lot of people won’t start until they figure it out. And because most hard things can’t be figured out in advance, they never start.” ~Richard Feynman

“Any dominating idea, plan, or purpose held in the conscious mind through constant repetitive thought and emotionalized by the subconscious and acted upon by whatever natural and logical means may be available.” ~Napoleon Hill

“Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you’re smarter than you are.”

“The Formula: The courage to start. The discipline to focus. The confidence to figure it out. The patience to know progress is not always visible. The persistence to keep going, even on the bad days.”

“Success is that place in the road where preparation and opportunity meet, but too few people recognize it because too often it comes disguised as hard work.”

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” ~Jordan Peterson

“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.”

“Pro golfers have learned to miss their shots by narrower margins than amateurs.”

“Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.” ~Charlie Munger

“Being successful is easy. Staying successful is hard.”

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”

What about you Kill Zoners? Do any of these clips resonate with you? How about sharing one, two, three, or more of your own?

By John Gilstrap

We talk about treating the process of writing as if it were a job a job, we talk about quotas, we talk about pressing through to completion on a project. As November approaches, bringing with it the stress of NaNoWriMo to compete with the other stresses of what for many is the most stressful time of year, some of you will be pounding your fingers bloody on the keyboard in effort to produce the 50,000 words that Club Nano has declared to be the goal of the 30-day writing spree.

What we don’t talk about very much is the need to enjoy the ride. It’s important to set goals and achieve them, but it’s also important to cut yourself a break and realize that life happens. If you’re adhering to the adage to treat writing as if it were a job, remember that most desk jobs bring the perquisites of sick leave and vacation time. Meeting a self-imposed deadline is nowhere near as important as attending your kid’s soccer game or giving the puppy a half hour of Frisbee frolic.

If you’re not under a legal contract to produce a work by a date certain, then a date approximate is a fine substitute. Yes, it’s important to plow through the muddled middle to complete your project, but if your February 1 deadline slips to March 15, so what? If you look back on the week and you find that you only wrote 300 words–or no words at all–of your 7,500-word goal, the Earth will remain on its axis. In fact, the world will be a better place if those squandered words paid for a smile from a family member.

I’m not suggesting laziness or sloth. I’m suggesting balance.

Fifteen years ago, more or less, I sat on a panel at Magna Cum Murder in Muncie, Indiana, when the rookie writer to my left–a practicing psychologist, no less–told this room full of aspiring scribes that in order to succeed in the publishing business, you have to be willing to sacrifice everything. Specifically, she spoke of missing family events and vacations. Failure awaited any writer who looks away from their publishing goals even for a moment. When she was done, every molecule of happiness had disappeared from the room as the newbies furiously took notes.

Mine was the next turn to speak, and I started with, “For God’s sake, it’s only a story. We’re not curing cancer here, we’re making stuff up and playing with our imaginary friends. It’s not worth sacrificing any of that. The instant that make believe feels more important than real-life relationships is the instant you need to stop writing and re-evaluate your choices.”

It’s no secret that creative types frequently eat shotguns and down piles of pills. I can’t speak to the reasons behind that, but damaged relationships are often contributing factors. If you’re a spouse, you have a commitment to the relationship you chose. If you’re a parent, you have a commitment to a human being you created. Those come first. Hard stop.

If you’re a teenager or young adult, you have an obligation to yourself to live more of your life out in the word than inside your head. Collect experiences that will serve your writing well into the future.

When you do sit down to write, enjoy the experience and celebrate what you accomplished. Don’t get distracted by what you didn’t do on the page, and instead concentrate on what you did do in the world.

Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences. — Joyce Carol Oates.

By PJ Parrish

Yesterday, Sue posted her critique of a First Page submission. Click here to review. On first read, I thought it was pretty good but something about it was bugging me. Then I just looked at it instead of reading it. It hit me that the paragraphing wasn’t quite right.

Paragraphing? Who cares about paragraphing? You just hit enter when it feels right, right? Nope. Proper paragraphing is one of the most underrated tools in your writer’s box. So allow me to wander into the weeds today and talk a little inside baseball. (I worked hard on that mixed metaphor, by the way)

Two main problems with the submission yesterday: The writer had made the common mistake of burying thoughts and dialogue within narrative.

Second problem: All the paragraphs are about the same length. Why is that a problem? Because it goes to pacing and rhythm. No variation in paragraphs is boring to the eye and that translates to boring for the reader’s imagination. But if you learn to master the fine but subtle art of judicious paragraphing, you can inject interest and even tension into your story.

Let’s address problem one first. This opening paragraph is essentially narrative. But inserted within that is both dialogue and thoughts. Here’s the paragraph:

Arizona Powers slammed her palm into the office wall, ignoring the stinging sensation. Unbelievable. “Are you kidding me? I’m not doing that. I’m a federal agent, not a babysitter.” Her boss had clearly lost his mind. She spun on her hiking shoe, locking eyes with Senior Special Agent Matt Updike. Her fingers fidgeted with a button on her shirt. I deserve a second chance. 

Dialogue and thoughts are ACTION. They deserve to be lifted out of narrative and given lines of their own so the reader can emotionally latch onto them, and by extension, your character. This opening paragraph would be more effective (and more interesting to the eye) if it were deconstructed with better paragraphing:

Arizona Powers slammed her palm into the office wall, ignoring the stinging sensation, and stared hard at her boss.

“Are you kidding me? I’m not doing that. I’m a federal agent, not a babysitter.”

Matt Updike shoved his chair backward, rose and closed the distance between them in two strides.

“I’m not kidding. You are doing this,” he said. “You don’t have a choice.”

She could smell his stale coffee breath and see a vein bulging in his neck, but she resisted the urge to step back. Her boss had clearly lost his mind. But she wasn’t going to take this. She deserved a second chance.  

See the difference? The drama of the scene is enhanced by allowing the thoughts and dialogue to stand out — all by simple paragraphing. Here’s something interesting: The rewrite is LONGER but it reads FASTER. Why? Because the reader doesn’t need to ferret out the important thoughts and dialogue. It’s your job, as the writer, to mine out the nuggets for them.

Now let’s consider the basic question of length of paragraphs and how that affects your reader. How long should your paragraphs be? Sounds like a dumb question, but it’s not. You need to consider it deeply.

About five years ago, I did a very long post on paragraphing with a lot of examples, Click here if you want to review.  But let me re-quote this from Ronald Tobias’s The Elements of Fiction Writing: Theme & Strategy,

The rhythm of action and character is controlled by the rhythm of your sentences. You can alter mood, increase or decrease tension, and pace the action by the number of words you put in a sentence. And because sentences create patterns, the cumulative effect of your sentences has a larger overall effect on the work itself. Short sentences are more dramatic; long sentences are calmer by nature and tend to be more explanatory or descriptive. If your writing a tense scene and use long sentences [me here: or long paragraphs], you may be working against yourself.

I often liken writing to music. Composers use punctuation to speed up or slow down pace and musicians use types of “articulation” to enhance whatever mood they are going for — intense? dangerous? romantic? thoughtful?

Good writers use similar tools — punctuation, length of sentences and paragraphs (short and choppy or longer and measured?) to create an emotional response in their readers. The best writers understand this not only creates emotion, it provides variety on each page and over the whole book.

Pacing is not just aural, it’s visual. How your writing LOOKS on the page is important. Which brings us back to the paragraph. How many you use per page, and how long or short your paragraphs are should be conscious choices you make. Here is the same thought, expressed two different ways:

Fragments, the length of sentences, punctuation, and how often you paragraph can all work to give a particular pace. If you really think about, you’ll realize that you can use sentence and paragraph structure to create a feeling of speed or slowness, depending on what kind of emotional response you want to induce in your reader.

Okay, that gets my point across, right? But what if I structured the same thought this way:

Think of it! You can move a reader through a story fast. Their hearts will race!

Or you can slow them down and make them use their heads.

It’s all in how your sentences look on the page.

The first is measured, more academic in pace, meant to make you slow down and digest the thought. The second is lively and urgent, making you anticipate an important climax-point. Neither is correct. They are just two different styles of pacing, word choice, sentence length and paragraphing to different affect.

I think most of us here, being in the crime business, know we shouldn’t write a lot of long paragraphs. You can get away with some, especially in description. But these days, too many long paragraphs per page looks “old-fashioned” or worse, “textbook.” It worked for Dickens and even for a stylist like Delillo. Not so much for the rest of us today.

Are any of you out there art folks or designers? Then you understand the value of “white space” or “negative space.” Simply put, negative space is the area around and between a subject. It appears in all drawings, paintings and photographs. The “subject” below is enhanced by the negative space surroudning him. (Notice, too, the crop lines that make for an even more compelling negative/positive composition!)

Paragraphing provides white space. Don’t believe me? Go read Elmore Leonard.

Ray Bradbury said that each paragraph is a mini-scene and when you hit ENTER you are helping your reader enter a new scene, thought or action. I’ll leave you with one more example. It’s from one of my favorite opening pages from a novel.

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.

That’s the opening to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I love the way the first line sits there all alone, like a roadside sign that you’re entering hell. Then he gives us this amazing loooong graph with gorgeous imagery and the nonchalance of the unnamed man. And then, a third paragraph — BAM! — he gives us our arsonist-star by name.

Bradbury could have made this all one graph. But no, he chose three. Your turn. Choose wisely when to hit enter.