Reader Friday – Secret Reading Places and Unique Reading Habits

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Many surveys of reading habits have been done here at TKZ on Reader Fridays. I couldn’t find any on unusual reading habits, so I thought that might be a good topic for today.

Many people read on busses, subways, trains, and ferries. Children climb into tree houses or just a branch on a tree. People read on boats and in the park. But, in what unusual or unique places have you read or observed others reading? Or what unique locations have you given your characters to read in?

Do you practice, or have you observed, unusual activities while reading? Or have you given a character the unique ability to read while doing something other than sitting quietly. Please tell us.

While you search your memory’s database, here are a few I’ve seen or practiced:

Growing up, in my early years, Reader’s Digest and other magazines resided on the top of the toilet tank. I thought that was normal. It wasn’t until years later that I realized it may have had something to do with my mother growing up in a home without indoor plumbing and with an outhouse “out back.” If you were going to use the pages from “Monkey Wards” for toilet paper, you may as well read them first.

During those early years, I also checked out books from our small-town library, climbed up into the branches of a tree in front of our house, and read while people walked by on the sidewalk below. Somehow, it was more fun to go unnoticed.

In my college years I visited relatives in the Virginia mountains. Many of them had gardens, and more than a few guarded their gardens. Apparently, groundhogs could mow down a row of lettuce very quickly. Sunny days were spent on the back porch, in a rocking chair, overlooking the garden, and holding a gun while reading a book.

Early in my training, I spent many nights in the hospital. I found that the ward clerks who really took their reading seriously requested the graveyard shift where there was less paperwork and more time to read. And, the paperwork definitely had lower priority than the reading.

Now it’s your turn.

  • What bizarre unusual “unique” reading habits have you seen in others or given to your characters?
  • What “special” reading habits do you practice?
  • Do you have a secret place to hide from the world so you can read uninterrupted?

Improving Your Creativity

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Creativity is the phenomenon of finding imaginative ideas and turning them into reality. It’s the process of bringing something new and original into existence. The results can be intangible products, like theories and songs, or tangible products such as inventions and the new crime-thriller novel I’m struggling to create. Creativity appears to come easier to some folks than others, and we tend to see high achievers as gifted, natural creators rather than nurtured normals.

But is that so? Are there a chosen few, born with greater creative ability? Or can creativity be learned—a skill that can be taught, practiced, and mastered?

Back in the Greek and Roman days, creativity was seen as facilitated by a muse who connected individual human minds to the gods. Daemons were the Greek equivalent of guardian angels. They accompanied a soul from birth to death, some being highly creative which manifested themselves in outstanding and intuitive people like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Romans saw these paranormal intermediaries as Geniuses—disembodied messengers from a heavenly intelligence, delivering divine wishes to mortals.

The Renaissance era disagreed. Creative individuals were enlightened, they posed. Creativity came from within the self and gifted ones—DaVinci, Beethoven, and Shakespeare—were born intellectually superior with unique abilities to create. They were the geniuses; being able to connect directly with a plane of higher intelligence rather than having an imaginary genius translate for them.

Today’s neuroscience has another view on this. It sees creativity as a complex psychological process that occurs via the brain’s ventral striatum and amygdala and can be enhanced through neuroplasticity or rewiring the brain through practiced behavior. In other words, a planned and continual workout program for your brain can definitely improve your creativity.

Improving creativity starts with a foundation of subject knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering a proper way of thinking. You build on your creative ability by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using imagination, and synthesizing information. Learning to be creative is like learning a sport. You need a desire to improve, develop the right muscles, and be in a supportive environment.

You need to view creativity as a practice and understand five key behaviors:

  1. Associating—drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields.
  2. Questioning—posing queries that challenge common wisdom.
  3. Observing—scrutinizing the behavior of others in, around, and outside your sphere.
  4. Networking—meeting people with both common and different perspectives.
  5. Experimenting—constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge.

Read this as — listen, watch, ask, mingle, and stir. Sir Richard Branson has a mantra that’s bred into the corporate DNA of his Virgin staff — A-B-C-D — Always Be Connecting Dots. Branson swears that creativity is a practice and if you practice these five behaviors every day, you will improve your skills in creativity and innovation.

Now, if these five behaviors put you in the right direction for improving creativity, then there must be behaviors to avoid. I found eight:

1. Lack of courage—being fearful of taking chances, scared of venturing down new roads, and timid about taking the road less traveled. Fear is the biggest enemy of creativity. You need to be courageous and take chances.

2. Premature judgment—second-guessing and early judgment of outcome severely restrict your ability to generate ideas and freely innovate. Let your initial path expand and follow it to its inevitable destination.

3. Avoidance of failure—you can’t be bold and creative if you fear failure. Creativity requires risk and making mistakes. They’re part of the process.

4. Comparing with others—this robs your unique innovation and imagination. Set your own standards. Be different. Something new is always different.

5. Discomfort with uncertainty—creativity requires letting go and the process doesn’t always behave rationally. Accept that there’s something akin to paranormal in real creativity.

6. Taking criticism personally—feedback is healthy, even if it’s blunt and harsh like 1&2-Star Amazon reviews. Ignore ridicule. Have thick skin, a tough hide, and don’t let criticism get to you.

7. Lack of confidence—a certain level of uncertainty comes with any new venture. Some self-doubt is normal but if it becomes overwhelming and long-lasting, it will shut down your creative abilities. The best way to create is to first connect with your self-confidence.

8. Analysis paralysis—overthinking renders you unable to make a decision because of information overload. “Go with your gut” is the answer to analysis paralysis.

Aside from positive and negative behaviors, there is one overall and outstanding quality that drives successfully creative people.

Passion…

Passion is the secret to creativity. It’s the underlying feature that’s laced the successes of all prominent creators in history.

Passion is a term we’ve heard over and over again. Chase your passion, not your pension. But few understand what passion implies. The word comes from the Latin root “pati“ that means “to suffer“. Passion is what perseveres in getting to your goal despite fear, discomfort, unhappiness, and pain. It’s the determination—the motivation—to push through suffering for the sake of the end result. And this passionate feeling of motivation has its source in your brain.

A study released in the Journal of Neuroscience identified the ventral striatum, in connection with the amygdala, as the brain’s emotional center that controls the motivation feeling—the higher degree of motivation you feel, the higher the activation will be in this part of your brain. So that intense feeling of motivation you feel when you are in a creative state—that feeling of euphoria when engaging in something you feel truly worthwhile and meaningful to you—is real and is something physiological occurring in your brain. It’s one of the least researched areas of psychology yet has the biggest impact on your creativity.

I sense you’re wondering if there’s a trick—a method to stimulate your ventral striatum and amygdala—in improving your creativity. Well, yes there is. It’s long been known and practiced by the greats:

Relaxation, along with definite purpose.

Relax. Put your thoughts and desires out to the ether. Relax and wait. Creative ideas will come.

I’m a life-long student of the Napoleon Hill Philosophy of Personal Achievement which is the psychology behind one of the world’s bestselling self-help books, Think and Grow Rich. Hill clearly outlines the path to unlimited creativity which he postulates comes from the source of Infinite Intelligence that we all can tap. To get creative ideas from Infinite Intelligence, first you must know what you want, then you must relax and let Infinite Intelligence deliver ideas or answers to you.

Relaxation can be done in many ways. Meditation. Workout. Vacation. Change of environment. Retail therapy. Long showers. Reading. Music. Deep breathing. Long walks in nature. Maybe a stiff drink or two. The methods are varied but whatever you choose, it needs to put you in a headspace receptive to creative ideas.

Napoleon Hill didn’t have the anatomical knowledge of how the ventral striatum and amygdala worked, but he sure understood that definite purpose, motivation, and relaxation opened the doors of creativity. Hill described this part of the brain as being like a radio transmitter and receiver which exchanged creative thought with Infinite Intelligence.

So, if I can give one single piece of advice on how to improve your creativity it’s to read, understand, and practice the seventeen principles of success Napoleon Hill outlined in Think and Grow Rich.

A postscript to this article—while I was researching this piece, I came across a TED Talk with well-known author, Elizabeth Gilbert. Her presentation on creativity for writers is a fascinating look at the process. Click Here to watch it.

Kill Zoners: Enough of me preaching T&GR. How do you find and improve your creativity?

Walking The Streets Of Texas

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By John Gilstrap

As I write this, I’m sitting at a scarred desk in my room on the third floor of the Holland Hotel in Alpine, TX. A century old, more or less, the Holland started life as a cattlemen’s hotel. Night before last, we rested our heads in the Hotel Paisano in Marfa, TX. The combined populations of the two towns is fewer than 8,000 people. Traffic doesn’t really exist (except at the moment when you want to cross the street, at which point a convoy of vehicles will roll through). At the local watering holes, my request for my standard drink–a Beefeater martini–is met with cocked-head puppy dog stares. It was 107 degrees yesterday. But it was a dry heat.

And I’m loving every minute of it.

My lovely bride and I are traveling with our good friends Reavis Wortham and his own lovely bride to enjoy a part of the U.S. that we’ve never seen and that they know so well.

People are different here than they are in bigger cities. In restaurants, strangers start up conversations with the patrons at another table. When people ask, “Where you from?” they seem to actually care. There’s no way a New Yorker (or even a West Virginian) could write about these places without having been here. They wouldn’t know about the 20-degree drop in temperature when the sun goes down, or the marvelous desert breezes that blow up out of nowhere. Or the flies. Good God, the flies. They seem to be mustering here in anticipation of the next cattle drive through town. Yesterday, Reavis treated us all to our own swatters. All I need is a cross-draw holster and I can feel like Doc Holliday as I walk the streets, ready to defend myself and my family from the winged bastards.

It’s impossible to be in surroundings like these and not be flooded with story ideas–or if not stories, the locale for a scene. Every person any of us meets on any given day carries physical and mental burdens, some of which they talk about, but most of which they don’t. How are those burdens different when living in a tiny town than in a megalopolis? I imagine it’s equal parts blessing and curse to have all of your neighbors know all of your business.

Imagine how much harder it would be to get away with a crime. Or would your neighbors rally to protect you and hand you an alibi?

Hey. I believe I just got another idea for a story.

Research Notes and Fun Facts

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JSB’s post yesterday reminded me of all my notes in my phone, many of which I’ll never use. So, I thought I’d share them with you. Perhaps they’ll spark some ideas for the WIP.

Some are random thoughts, others are research tidbits I’d learned during the day that I didn’t want to forget, with a few fun facts mixed in.

Research

Mystery/thriller writers, this one’s for you!

  • Ankle monitors aren’t monitored in real time by law enforcement. In many cases, they’re only a GPS tracker. Some devices don’t even have geographical restrictions. The GPS track is stored by private companies, not law enforcement or prisons. Parolees have even committed murder while wearing them!

Need a creative way for your detective to find a clue? Check out this nifty tidbit I discovered.

  • Privately owned garbage trucks and tow trucks come equipped with license plate readers. The recordings are loaded into a private database, and police can ask for permission to access those databases without a search warrant.

For fiction bathed in reality, how might you use this next one?

Brainwaves: We have three brainwaves in our lifetime, depending on age. Scientists can study each brainwave independently through an EEG.

Did your contemporary killer leave behind a shoe impression? No problem…

SoleMate FPX is a new and improved system that combines a comprehensive footwear evidence management tool with an extensive footwear reference database for the rapid identification of shoe prints.

Using combinations of shapes, patterns, text, and logos to describe the visible characteristics found on a shoeprint left at a crime scene, it’s possible to identify matching items of footwear in a matter of minutes via the intuitive FPX search interface.

Fun Facts

Mystery/thriller/suspense writers, do what you will with the following fun facts.

 

  • Zinc Phosphide = rat poison.
  • To mummify a corpse, bury in kitty litter. Or, for a more thorough job, dismember the corpse and bury the body parts in kitty litter.
  • Necrophilia is also a diagnosis.

Ahem. Moving on…

  • The heart beats 2.5 billion times per lifetime.
  • Mistletoe kills the tree it hangs on! Expect an article about this during the holiday season. 😉
  • One million seconds equals eleven days.
  • A corpse can often have bowel movements for days.
  • A decapitated head can have consciousness for 15-20 seconds after death. In my phone there’s a checkmark after this fun fact because I used it in Silent Mayhem.

Calling all nature lovers!

  • Plants can recognize their siblings, and they’re given preferential treatment.Biologists discovered that plants exhibit competitiveness among strangers of the same species but are more accommodating toward siblings. Researchers found root allocation increased when groups of strangers shared a pot, not when groups of siblings shared a pot.

    In other words, plants compete with strangers by allocating more of their roots below ground. This helps them as they fight for access to water and soil nutrients.

  • Plants are just as capable of deception as animals.

Many plants release scents or volatile chemicals when they are stressed, attracting insects and other animals that can help them escape a dangerous situation. Ready to get your mind blown?

  • The smell of freshly cut grass is actually a plant distress call.

Crazy, right? Now you know why I jotted it down. 😉 

  • Trees are the longest living organisms on earth. One of the many reasons they live so long is called “negligible senescence.” Meaning, rather than declining in health and productivity with age, some trees actually get healthier and more productive.
  • There’s a plant that’s able to simultaneously produce tomatoes and potatoes, called the “ketchup and fries” plant (unverified, so check this fact before you use it).

Historical fiction writers, these next few are for you!

  • Some prehistoric societies de-fleshed the bone from their dearly departed.

During the medieval period, bodies that needed transportation over long distances for burial were also de-fleshed, by dismembering the body and boiling the pieces. The bones were then transported. The soft tissues they buried close to the place of death.

  • Throughout early modern times, up until at least the mid 19th century, it was a common belief that the touch of a murderer—executed by hanging—could cure all kinds of illnesses, ranging from cancer and goiters to skin conditions. Afflicted persons would attend executions hoping to receive the “death stroke” of the executed prisoner.

Need a realistic way to misdirect readers away from your antagonist?

  • A heart murmur can often cause a person to fail a lie detector test. Doesn’t matter if they’re 100% truthful. The heart murmur will read as deception.

If you’re wondering why I’d share notes from my phone, I’ll leave you with this proverb.

Nothing in nature lives for itself.

Rivers don’t drink their own water.

Trees don’t eat their own fruit.

The Sun doesn’t shine for itself.

Flowers don’t spread fragrance for themselves.

Living for others is the rule of nature.

Did I jumpstart your creative juices? Any favorites?

 

Happy Release Day, book baby!

Three unconventional eco-warriors are on a mission to save polar bears from the nation’s largest animal trafficking organization—one dead poacher at a time.

Now available in ebook and paperback.

 

Your Magnificent “What If” Muscle

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I’ve often thought of the imagination as a muscle. With proper care and exercise, it gets stronger. Leave it alone, and it atrophies.

For fiction writers, the imagination is our stock-in-trade. The healthier it is, the more likely the production of fresh, original writing.

One of the best exercises for the imagination is the “What if” game. Through daily practice you train yourself to ask “What if X?” in response to the stimuli—usually visual—that come your way in an ordinary day.

You’re driving and come to a stoplight. What appears to be an elderly woman pushing a shopping cart stuffed with belongings enters the crosswalk. Are things just as they appear? Probably. But not to your creative mind! So you ask:

What if there’s a bomb in that shopping cart?

What if the lady is the heiress of a large fortune, but went insane? Or was driven insane?

What if it is really a man in disguise and he’s on the down low because a contract has been put out on him?

The light turns green and off you go, letting the ideas simmer in your brain.

You pass a billboard of a happy family—smiling dad and mom, two laughing kids—at a theme park. Happy to most people, maybe. But:

What if Dad is a hit man on the side?

What if Mom is the assassin-for-hire?

What if one of the kids is an alien?

Two minutes have gone by and you already have six or seven ideas.

If you’re diligent about this exercise, your imagination muscle will churn all the time, often without conscious thought. Then the issue won’t be, Where do I find my next idea? but, How do I choose from all the great ideas my imagination has already provided?

As I look back at my own books, I think I can safely say that most of the ideas sprang from a What if conjecture. Sometimes that was the product of just sitting down and telling myself to come up with something. Several times it was me riffing off some odd news item.

Like an L.A. story that haunted me for a few years. A man shot his wife, drove to a freeway overpass, got out of his car and shot himself. He fell 100 feet onto the freeway below. His body smashed into a car, killing the driver, a woman.

I clipped the story from the newspaper and put it in my “idea box,” where I kept all sorts of clippings. Every now and then I’d look through the box to see what still interested me. This incident always did. Finally one day I asked myself, What if the woman in the car was my protagonist’s fiancé? I sat down and wrote an opening, in First Person POV, that ended with this:

This would have been simply another dark and strange coincidence, the sort of thing that shows up for a two-minute report on the local news—with live remote from the scene—and maybe gets a follow-up the next day. Eventually the story would go away, fading from the city’s collective memory.

But the story did not go away. Not for me. Because Jacqueline Dwyer was the woman I was going to marry.

Try Dying took off from there.

Here’s another one.

Years ago I got an email out of the blue from a fellow I knew in high school. It had been nearly thirty years since we’d communicated, and even back then he wasn’t a close friend. He said he’d found my website and saw I was a writer and thought it would be good to get together, and could he buy me coffee?

Unfair as it may have been, my immediate thoughts were: a) he has always “dreamed of” being a writer, and thinks I can help him; b) he has written a novel and can I help him find an agent?; or c) he’d like to tell me about Herbalife. My What if muscle was flexing, and went to: What if this guy wanted to do something to me? Or to my family? And why?

We spent a perfectly harmonious hour together, and that was that. Or so I thought.

It just so happened that about this time I re-read one of my favorite John D. MacDonald novels, The Executioners (basis for the Cape Fear movies, the original with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum being the best). Talk about a spiral of suspense!

That’s when I knew I had my next novel. I wanted that spiral! My novel would be about a guy from the past who contacted my family-man protagonist for a friendly get together, but then…

The book was published by Zondervan and hit the CBA bestseller list. Now it’s back in indie iteration as Can’t Stop Me. What if it launches today at a special deal price? We shall see!

So are you intentional about asking What if? What do you do to work out your imagination muscle? How to you decide what book you want to write next?

Just One Book

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Back in the early 1980s, I taught school under my good friend Curtis, who was then an Assistant Principal. Like me, he absorbed books by the dozens, and we spent hours discussing authors, books, and writing.

He knew I had dreams of getting published some day, and often encouraged me to finish a manuscript. Just one manuscript. “Finish the stinkin’ thing!”

We all know how that goes, but I started and abandoned a dozen ideas hammered out on an IBM Selectric typewriter. One manuscript even grew to seventy-five pages, and when I look back at it today (it’s still in the bottom drawer of my desk), I know why it died.

Years passed, and one day I got a newspaper column published and eventually self-syndicated those writings while his own career advanced.

He took a position as high school principal in one district, then assistant superintendent in another, and finally became superintendent of a small East Texas town before eventually coming back to Garland, Texas, the tenth largest district in the state.

I remained in Garland and had moved up as the assistant director of Communications and Public Relations. I was the guy on the front lines when things went wrong, and was the spokesperson for the district.

After I found myself again working under Curtis, we picked up where we left off and continued our talks about books and writing.

More than one lunch flew by as those conversations became more intense and in my case, somehow desperate. “I just want to get a book published. Just one.”

“You will.”

“It hasn’t happened yet. Look at us, were getting older by the minute and you’re getting gray headed.”

“Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

“Once, but there was some old guy there. Look, I think I’m missing out. Some day you and I’ll be in rocking chairs on the front porch, still talking about the works of other people. Then we’ll be gone and those books will still be on the shelves, maybe for generations. That’s what I want. A book on a shelf to tell a story, and to let people know I was here.”

“Don’t give up, then.”

“I never said I was giving up.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Shut up and pay the bill, boss.”

“You shut up and write.”

So I did. In 2011, my first novel was published, and in the ensuing years, there are more than a dozen on those shelves, with many more already written (waiting their turn to hit the shelves in the coming months and years), and right this minute, others contracted by two different publishers.

We’re both retired now and get together every couple of months. Curtis and I met for breakfast the other day and he grinned across the table, holding my book bearing the newest title which I signed to him. “Just one book, huh?”

“Yeah, and I made it.”

He sipped his coffee amid the smells of frying bacon and onions. He eyed me. “Now what?”

“What?”

“I know that look.”

I took a swallow from my mug. “I’ve been offered to ghost write a couple of novels.”

His eyebrow arched and he pushed his empty plate to the side. “You want to publish under another guy’s name?”

“No. I want the money that comes from publishing under another guy’s name.”

I outlined the deal and an unusual offer that would bring in even more than simple contract work.

He shook his head. “But your name wouldn’t be anywhere in those pages.”

“No.”

“You have a distinctive writing style. People will figure it out.”

“Maybe, but that’s not the point.”

“Aren’t you already writing under your real name for them?”

“Sure, but this is extra and those kinds of books just roll off without taking up too much time. I can write them, and still produce my Red River series, along with the new Cap Whitlatch westerns.”

“How many books a year is that?”

I sighed. “Three. Maybe four.”

“And how many standalone novels are you hammering out.”

“Two.”

“You can’t do it. You don’t have the time.”

“We’ll find out.”

He grinned down into his coffee. “And I remember when your dream was a single book on a shelf. Now you have a second career. I guess you need to get after that keyboard.”

So I’ve agreed to ghost write. I know half a dozen authors who’ve done the same thing. One is so prolific I was stunned by the number, and laughed aloud when he told me the names he wrote under. It’s been a great living for him, and he doesn’t care that his name is on just a few of them.

I look at the shelf to my left and my books under Reavis Z. Wortham take up most of the space. I have my wish, with many more to come.

But there’s the carrot out there that will swell my bank account.

Is that why we write?

Money?

Or is something else?

 

Reader Friday: TGIF and Humor

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With so much angst, strife, and division in our world today, we need to be reminded that we still have much to be thankful for, and that laughter continues to be good medicine. Thank goodness it’s Friday!

My life is currently crowded, probably my manic side pushing to take charge, and by the end of the day I don’t feel like reading nonfiction and studying. I want to turn off my brain and be entertained. The book I’m reading now is Lawrence Block’s The Burglar on the Prowl. I love the Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery series, and particularly Block’s use of humor.

Since we’re discussing humor today, I looked for previous articles from the archives. JSB had a great article On Using Humor in Fiction (December 2020). There are many others posts worth reviewing. Search the archives under “humor” and you’ll be surprised. Another recent article – Do I Need to Use a Dragon? – Humor  is the beginning of a series of blogs on the topic. And in “Seven Reason to Use Humor in Your Fiction” (November 2016)  Writer’s Digest discusses using humor in serious fiction.

But, today, let’s approach humor from the reader’s perspective. Here are the questions:

  • What authors do you enjoy because of their use of humor?
  • How do they incorporate humor into their writing?
  • Is there a particular genre where you enjoy the use of humor the most?
  • What books or authors would you recommend to the rest of us because of the author’s use of humor?

True Crime Thursday – Victim, Villain, Antagonist

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By Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

Dictionary.com defines victim as:

a person who suffers from a destructive or injurious action or agency: a victim of an automobile accident.

a person who is deceived or cheated, as by their own emotions or ignorance, by the dishonesty of others, or by some impersonal agency: a victim of misplaced confidence; the victim of a swindler; a victim of an optical illusion.

a person or animal sacrificed or regarded as sacrificed:war victims.

a living creature sacrificed in religious rites.

Merriam Webster defines villain as:

a character in a story or play who opposes the hero;

a deliberate scoundrel or criminal;

one blamed for a particular evil or difficulty.

Merriam Webster defines antagonist as:

one that contends with or opposes another.

~~~

At 2:30 a.m. on January 19, 2023, a car crashed into the downstairs bedroom of a home in Austin, Texas, while the resident was asleep in the bedroom upstairs.

Homeowner Chris Newby described the accident:

“It sounds like a plane hit the house, I mean, I felt like I hit the ceiling,” Newby said. “The whole house just shook…Basically, there’s an entire car, right here inside the bedroom.”

See photos of the damage at this link.

Emergency workers rescued the driver. Police arrested him on suspicion of DWI.

End of story?

Not quite.

Ten days after the crash, Mr. Newby received a letter from the city of Austin, dated the day of the crash, informing him of code violations because of the condition of his house.

Fox News reports:

Every window, skylight, door and frame shall be kept in sound condition, good repair and weather tight,” one of the violations reads. 

Another violation said that “all exterior walls shall be free from holes, breaks, and loose or rotting materials. 

According to KXAN.com:

The letter explained Newby had 30 days to get his house in order or face consequences, including as much as a $2,000 fine per violation, per day.

The letter apparently was in response to a report by the Austin Fire Department that had responded to the accident scene.

Mr. Newby said of the letter: “I’m in violation for being a victim.”

Per KXAN: 

[Austin Code Department division manager Matthew] Noriega explained the citation is the city’s policy and procedure, with the ultimate goal of ensuring safety.

“This was a catastrophic incident and they wanted to ensure that the homeowners were safe and the building was safe,” Noriega said.

“If an extension is needed, we will give them that extension,” Noriega explained. “We work with the owners or management.”

The code department granted an extension. The driver’s insurance will pay for repairs.

~~~

TKZers: What are your thoughts about which roles are played by the real-life characters in this true crime story?

Travel as Writing Fodder

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Travel as Writing Fodder
Terry Odell

"Salome" Bergen, Norway.

“Salome” Bergen, Norway.

I’m back, and after a prolonged bout of de-jet-lagging, almost functioning again. Before I left, I made the conscious decision that this trip was a vacation. I had no plans to set a book where we traveled. Since I’m an indie author and I haven’t established a due date for the current WIP with my editor, I was free to leave the writing behind.

A week after arriving home, I still hadn’t opened the WIP. My critique partners had sent their feedback on everything I’d written. Their messages sat, unopened, in an email folder. Still no guilt.

Even if I was on vacation, the writer brain never really shut down. I’m willing to predict some of my observations and experiences will show up in a book eventually. Here are a few.

On approach

The Travel Process
Our trip began with a flight to Bergen, Norway. Lacking the Enterprise’s transporter, it was Denver to Frankfurt, then to Oslo, then to Bergen. Note to travelers: just because your ticket shows Bergen as your final destination, and because the luggage tags say that’s where it’s going, if you’re going through Norway, it’s not that easy. Something about not being part of the EU, I think, but your baggage is offloaded in Oslo, and you have wait to reclaim it, recheck it, go through passport control and security. And Norway wants everything scanned. We put our hand luggage through the same way we had in Denver, but here they wanted laptops, tablets, cameras, and even one of the Hubster’s lenses. Did they ask for all of these at once? No. They asked about laptops, etc., so we took out our iPads and they sent them back through. Then they asked if we had cameras, and we repeated the process.

We had 90 minutes between flights, and that wasn’t nearly enough given the size of the airport and how many different “stations” we had to find, so we had to get booked on the next flight (fortunately, there are frequent ones), and then figure out how to notify the tour company, which would be meeting our original flight, that we would be late. Helps if you’ve used a travel agent. Helps even more if said agent is your son.

Anyone seeing any plot complications, tension, conflict here?

Communication
Given Bergen is a lot closer to Europe than the US, most of the passengers were from what we’d consider “somewhere else.” I was impressed and embarrassed at how almost everyone could manage to communicate in English. We Americans expect to be understood (and if we’re not, we speak louder), but it’s an arrogant assumption. I made the effort to use my VERY rudimentary German where appropriate. The people I spoke with were good-natured about it and helped me out, but my mastery of their language didn’t come close to their mastery of mine, and they tended to answer me in English. We spent some time with a couple from the Netherlands, and they had little trouble switching from English to German to Dutch.

And, speaking of languages, the primary language on the trip was English, but they repeated all announcements in German and French as well. They offered listening devices to anyone requesting them, and they had staff translating all the lectures as they were presented, which were transmitted to the deivces. What if one of the translators was unreliable? Sneaking coded information to some passengers?

Well, How About Them Apples?
In books, coincidences have to be dealt with very carefully. When we were seated at dinner the first night, the couple next to us spoke “American” and, of course, we asked where they were from. “Colorado.” Could I use that in a book? I’m not sure it would be believable, but they were from the Denver area, so about 2 hours from where I live.

Suckling pig, carving station MS Spitsbergen

Food
Food, of course, has infinite possibilities. Our ship served all meals buffet style, and there was an abundance of choices. How would characters react to seeing a suckling pig at the carving station? Or five varieties of herring? Three flavors of ice cream (plus toppings, of course).

People
Then there are the characters. There’s the one who makes sure she’s right next to the guide on tours, asking constant questions designed to show off her knowledge of any subject imaginable rather than care what the guide’s answers were. Or the two young couples on a ship filled with predominantly “mature” individuals.

Okay, I’ve droned on long enough. And, as a thank you for reading this far, here are a few pictures. I’ll have more as I work through them, but it’s been slow going. There have been computer issues, which I’m “solving” by getting a new PC, but that’s another whole set of complications.

If there’s interest in me sharing trip details, since our stops were at places far from what most of us probably think of as cruise destinations. Have you ever been to Lerwick, Elduvik, Akureyri, Tórshavn, or Bakkagerði?. Have you ever heard of them? Could you find them on a map? I couldn’t have. Let me know and I’ll follow up with a more “travelogue” style post or two.

Storefronts, Bergen, Norway

Bergen, Norway, waterfront

Signpost, top of Mount Fløyen, Bergen, Norway

Bakkagerði street

Puffin, Iceland

Would you feel guilty taking a pure vacation, TKZers? Any questions about the trip?

Cover image of Deadly Relations by Terry OdellAvailable Now
Deadly Relations.
Nothing Ever Happens in Mapleton … Until it Does
Gordon Hepler, Mapleton, Colorado’s Police Chief, is called away from a quiet Sunday with his wife to an emergency situation at the home he’s planning to sell. A man has chained himself to the front porch, threatening to set off an explosive.

Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”