(Patreon Page)

I’ve been talking about it for a while in various formats: writing a book on the craft of writing. The idea both excites me and makes me anxious enough to feel sick to my stomach. (Me? Write a book on writing?!?)

But the time has come. I’m not the best writer ever, but I am in the right spot to write a book on writing, at least for writers who have read all the beginning-writing books and are having issues moving further forward. This isn’t a book for grand masters of the craft. It’s just a book for people who are entering the messy middle of writing, and who feel as lost and helpless I did, when I first entered that realm. I’ve written over 50 novel-length works of fiction now, both under my own name and for my ghostwriting clients. I have a solid place from which to begin this project now, and if I put it off any longer, things will just feel weird.

So: Writing Craft has begun.

Because it’s me, I’m first putting the book up as a set of blog posts. Lots of people have commented to me in person that my writing blogs are interesting and helpful, so I know the format works. I also appreciate comments when I can get them.

However, I’ve learned over the last year that instead of trying to please every reader, I need to focus on the readers who support me. Readers who support my fiction can buy books–but writers who support my craft posts can’t (yet). I debated whether or not to post the blogs on this website concurrently with Patreon, but eventually settled on drawing a boundary between publishing promotional posts for free, versus publishing other types of content. I’m doing a bunch of work that won’t sell my fiction books; I should get paid for it somehow.

I’ve restructured everything (see The Plan, below), am rewriting and re-researching posts, am putting my big-girl professional panties on, and am moving writing-related posts over to Patreon. Later, the same material will come out in ebook and print, but that may take some time.

I will still be posting on my blog, but the posts here will be reader-focused posts rather than writer-focused ones (promotional posts, in other words).  I may put up teaser craft posts here on the blog to help gather up new patrons; I haven’t decided yet.

New posts will go up on Patreon at least every other week, possibly more often if I think of something that isn’t on The Plan that I have to get written down before I forget.

Without further ado…

The Plan:

Individual books:

• Cover
• Copyright
• Table of contents
• Intro to series
• Intro to book
• BOOK (by numbered section): Vocab as necessary, What I’m gonna tell you, The main point of the section, broken down into steps as necessary, Summary, including action items, What’s next
• Fundamental assumptions section, short rehash of Vol 1.
• Analysis examples for current volume, as necessary.
• Worksheets/study projects/sanity checks, as necessary.
• Resource list
• About the author
• Also by
• About the publisher
• Newsletter signup
• Thanks

List of books:

Volume 1: Are You Ready to Publish and Other Burning Questions

1.  Are you ready to publish? A relatively sane self-assessment.

2. How to read like a professional writer (studying).

3. An in-depth discussion of fundamental assumptions, like what to write, reader focus, expectations, imposter syndrome, meta-skills, emotional breakdowns

Volume 2: Writing for an Audience, and Not Just Jotting Down the Movie In Your Head

1. The Principles of Writing Fiction Code: Immersion, Information, and Structure

2. Elements of Immersion

3. Elements of Information

4. Elements of Structure

Volume 3: Dragging the Reader Into Your Story

1. Writing from the Five Senses (and More)

2. How to Write Setting (Basics)

3. How to Write “The Rules”

4. When to Write Immersion Details

5. How to Write an Opening Hook

Volume 4: Keeping the Reader Trapped In Your Story

1. The Character in Your Head vs. the Character on the Page

2. The Elements of a Point of View Character: Background, Opinion, and Presentation

3. Inside Voices vs. Outside Voices

4. Dialogue Tricks

5. Camera Tricks

*Note: I will research a “Writing the Other”-style checklist for the appendix on this one.

Volume 5: Telling Them What You’re Going to Tell Them, Telling Them, Then Telling Them What You Just Told Them

1. One Simple Trick to Boost Your Writing: Tell Them Sooner

2. Basic Scene Structure

3. When to Tell Them What You Want Them to Know (tagging)

4. Clues: When to Tell Them What You Don’t Want Them to Know

Volume 6: Pacing: It’s All in the Timing

1. What is Pacing?

2. Story- and Chapter-Level Pacing

3. Paragraph Pacing

4. Sentence Pacing

5. Word Choice and Other Patterns

Volume 7: Keeping the Reader Up All Night

1. What Makes the Reader Turn the Page?

2. Endings of Chapters: Cliffhangers

3. Endings of Books: Riding Off Into the Sunset

4. How to End a Book When You’re Writing a Series

Volume 8: Getting Away With What You Want to Write, Part 1: The Big Picture

1. Plot vs. Structure.

2. Basic Plot Structure and the Obligatory Joseph Campbell Rant

3. Big-Picture Structure Questions: POV Characters, Story Lengths, Genre

Volume 9: Getting Away With What You Want to Write, Part 2: Down in the Weeds

1. Basic Conflict Structure: The Beat

2. Basic Scene Structure: Putting Openings, Beats, and Closings All Together

Volume 10: Steady As You Go: A Rough Guide to Editing

1. The Trap of Constant Revision, and Possible Paths Ahead

2. The Story You Expected to Write, vs. the Story You Actually Wrote

3. What Actually Went Wrong, and How (and When) to Fix It

4. Are You Ready to Edit Other People’s Work?

5. Rules of Thumb: Critique Groups and Other Feedback, When to Start Over, and Other Reasons to Despair

Volume 11: Writing Like a Magician: Hidden Elements of Fiction

1. Subtext: The Text That May Not Be Written

2. Clues, Red Herrings, Foreshadowing, Hints, and Misdirection

3. Subplots and Other Hidden Structures

4. The Biggest Secret of All: Theme

Volume 12: Getting Away with What You Want to Write, Part 3: Special Topics in Pacing

1. Writing Fast-Paced Scenes

2. Writing Slow-Paced Scenes

3. Writing Suspense

4. Writing Action

5. Writing Comedy

Volume 13: Writing Synopses and Other Sales Materials for Fun & Profit

1. The Fundamentals of Selling Books

2. What Are You Selling? Translating the “Unique Selling Proposition” Question

3. Who Is Your Audience?

4. Guidelines for Synopses

5. Guidelines for Query Letters

6. Guidelines for Book Description and Cover Copy

7. Guidelines for Ad Text

Volume 14: So-and-So Is Selling…Why Not Me?

1. First, Write Good Books (WIBBOW and Writing for Money–or Not)

2. Speed vs. Productivity (Research)

3. Production & Publishing: The Basics

4. Promotions & Marketing: The Very Basics (Genre)

5. Running a Business: The Very Very Basics, Plus, Not a Lawyer

 

Note: If you’ve seen this before, well, I decided to write this up again; I can’t remember if I posted it here earlier or not, or just posted it on my newsletter. Anyway, I added/changed a few points, based on observations. 

As I look back over the lessons I learned in the previous year, the main one that strikes me is establishing my asshole theory.

Here’s my theory:

About one in four people are assholes.

I got this from walking along a high-traffic, easy-to-access bike and foot trail in Colorado, a place where there are no bars on the cell phone and no one to help you but your fellow travelers. One particularly bad day, I started waving at people. At everyone.

About a quarter of those people who weren’t listening to music or talking to someone else didn’t acknowledge the greeting. They made eye contact. They just didn’t react, or reacted negatively, with contempt.

Colorado, I might note, is a friendly place, where greeting other people is the norm. And I wasn’t doing this in Denver, but in a remote location where it was in the best interests of people to wave: I might be the person who had to get help in case of an accident, after all.

I acknowledge that some people might have waved who were, at heart, assholes, and some people might not have waved who weren’t. But, after several times of doing this, I felt pretty secure in the general proportions. Men, women, people of my race, people not of my race, little kids, old people: it all seemed to run to about one in four people going, “Even though it’s in my best long-term interests to extend some kind of minor acknowledgment of other people’s existence, I won’t.”

(Men will tend not to smile if they were with female partners or if I was with a male partner; I stopped counting those responses. I also didn’t count it if a big group passed by, and only one person greeted me, in case the social dynamic was such that one person was the public “face” that day. Also, people with fishing rods are almost universally not assholes, which is pretty cool.)

What was so game-changing about this theory was that I only just really started to set, and maintain, boundaries this year. Which means that previously, no matter how much I complained or whined or dragged my feet about it, I would, given enough time and pressure, would do what other people wanted to do.

And it was wrecking my life.

The details are still too hot and painful to me to recount in much detail, but to sum up: a lot of people who were my family and friends took advantage of me in ways that made me miserable, broke, and lonely.

Me being able to say “This person is an asshole, that is, a person who thinks mainly or only in terms of selfish, short-term gains, or is controlled by an asshole and is therefore also not reliable” was a relief.

People wanted things. They lied about what they wanted and why they wanted it. They guilt-tripped me, gaslit me, emotionally and verbally abused me, and blame-shifted it all on me.

I was able to go, “It was never about me. This person is an asshole.”

It was a relief.

Side note: I’ve been reading books about sociopathy and narcissism, and it seems pretty standard for the authors to say things like, “about one in twenty people are sociopaths” or “about one in twenty people are narcissists.”  If they’re not exaggerating, that means about one in ten people is a diagnosable narcissist or sociopath. But it’s hard to tell; sociopaths and narcissists tend not to believe that the problem lies with them, and even when they do, admitting a diagnosis like that can get you fired or ostracized.

…

Time passed and I blocked a lot of people on Facebook. I started to ask myself how I could learn to live with assholes. How to cope. Obviously, with such a big percentage of the population being assholes (at least, by my perceptions), some sort of strategy is necessary: you can’t live your life without having contact with at least some assholes.

I didn’t have a clue what to do at first, but I did start noticing some patterns:

First, the person would go completely overboard building up a bank account of goodwill. Normal people tend to try to do nice things for other people when it doesn’t interfere with their lives. Assholes try to smother you with how impressive the amount of benefits you will receive if you’re their side.

Second, the person would try to manipulate me. Because I didn’t have good boundaries, this would generally work, even though I would pretend to independence—while chewing my fingers until they bled.

Third, the person would become upset because they didn’t feel as rewarded by whatever they got out of me as I felt from what I got out of them—but it didn’t take much to make me feel rewarded, where they had a much higher bar to feeling rewarded, and it didn’t last very long.

Fourth, the person would try punishing me, since establishing that bank account hadn’t worked.

Fifth (usually after several cycles of varying tactics), the person would lash out at me to make me leave without having to actually tell me to leave.

The “story” would then shift so that I had been gaslighting, abusing, and manipulating the asshole all along.  Poor thing!

When I started reading books about narcissism, what I was seeing became not a surprising discovery but old hat, with corresponding terms like “love bombing” and “discard phase.”

In a way, it was reassuring to find out that I wasn’t discovering anything new. But it did make me wonder: why?

It’s not like assholes do a bunch of research before they start acting the way they do. What is it that makes assholes, who, at heart, are really only united by not waving back at strangers on a public trail, behave so similarly, both in the short term and over time?

My theory was incomplete…

…

I’ll write more of this later, but the article was getting long. If you liked this, try signing up for my newsletter, here. If you’re a writer, please check out my ongoing craft posts here, on Patreon.

 

For some people, 2019 was a difficult year to get anything read. For others, such as myself, 2019 was a great year for reading. My year, as a reader, was made great by two things:

• I survived some difficult periods by retreating into books.
• I planned ahead to make sure I had interesting, well-chosen books to read when I was too upset or depressed or whatever to do anything but read.

Which is not to say that my plans always worked.

The big plan that didn’t work out as anticipated was to read more diverse work, both in the sense of reading authors who weren’t like me, and in the sense of reading more deeply in other genres than horror and mystery.

It was harder than I thought. Like, ridiculously so.

I realize this essay is going to alienate some people—that me, writing down whether or not I met my own reading goals on my own time without preaching about how other people should do the same—is going to alienate some people. Some people will be strongly tempted to contact me to tell me that none of this should matter, or that I’m overthinking things.

Let me state clearly here that it’s important to me, and that if you need to complain about people who think, you may be reading the wrong author.

In 2018, my goals were to get through several best-of lists in horror and crime fiction. It resulted in reading a lot of books that I hated, particularly in the horror genre, where aggressive, offense-intended sexism and racism are often the order of the day, mostly written by Dead White Guys from America and Great Britain. I feel that reading my way through those best-of lists was truly worthwhile (for example, reading 120 Days of Sodom in 2018 made me realize that most people who set out to be offensive are pikers in comparison), but I needed a palate cleanser this year.

My first pass, in early 2019, was to come up with a list of a hundred books that I wanted to read. I divided them into the following quarters:

• White Men Writing in English
• White Women Writing in English
• People of Color Writing in English
• Books in Translation

And I decided to keep an eye on several best-of lists as well.  Lots of them: a reader-generated list of gothic fiction, NPR’s best-of horror list, the SF Masterworks and Fantasy Masterworks lists, and a list of early crime fiction selected by HRF Keating. Oh, and I was going to magically find time to read a lot of nonfiction somehow. And graphic novels. And new releases.

Sure.

By June I had read fewer than a third of the books I had on my list, almost no nonfiction, almost no graphic novels, and no books written within, I don’t know, the last decade. I had read a hundred books (one of my superpowers is speed reading). Just not the ones I planned to read.

I tried again, wiping off the list the books I’d read and the books I’d started but couldn’t finish.  Despite my plan, I mostly fell back to my Dead White Guys again, even when I was mostly skimming and hate-reading books to finish them.

(Side note: I decided I can’t read Tananarive Due’s books. She’s excellent, but her stories are about women who are ongoing victims of abusive narcissistic assholes and these women don’t recognize that’s what’s happening, and I finally decided I didn’t need to feel like screaming “Get out you fool” and twitching with PTSD for entire novels at a time. If that’s your sort of thing, I highly recommend them. But they can’t be on my list anymore.)

By November, it was clear that the same pattern was going to emerge: not a lot of nonfiction, graphic novels, or recent work, and a disproportionate amount of Dead White Guys.  This is not to say that the books by the Dead White Guys were objectively—or even subjectively—worse than books by other types of people, just that, after a while, they get me in a rut.

For example, let’s take “Some asshole causes harm to the people around him, mostly written from the perspective of the asshole” as a plot.  It’s a pretty common plot. (One famous example of this is The Shining.)

I read books featuring this plot:

• White Men/English: 30
• White Women/English: 9
• People of Color/English: 9
• Books in Translation: 9

The assholes didn’t have a specific gender. I didn’t count books where this was a subplot, just the main plot.  It’s not that those books were necessarily good or bad, or that they rewarded or punished the asshole in question; it’s just that I got tired of playing “yes, yes, plot twist, the narrator is the main problem here, I got it.”

There are other ruts. This one in particular got on my nerves.

(Side note: At least one of those white men was a trans man, which made me slap my forehead and realize another area where I was falling down.)

This year, I read:

• White Men/English: 110
• White Women/English: 56
• People of Color/English: 31
• Books in Translation: 40

Which is lots better than I did in 2018. (There may be errors in counting here, but I’m not dedicated enough to debate them.)

The logic inherent in my categories is that, in the U.S., about two-thirds of us are white and non-Hispanic, and about a third of us aren’t, with about half and half men and women (and half of two-thirds is one third).  I also just like to read books in translation, so I threw that in as another category, to turn my thirds into quarters: the math was easier.

I didn’t track LGBTQIA+ people, Jewish people, handicapped people, or a bunch of other things that I now kinda regret. The main thing I started with in 2018 was going, “I read mostly Dead White Dudes, and I’m getting tired of it.” Then, of course, once I started tracking numbers even after I decided to do something other than read mostly Dead White Dudes, there I was, still reading mostly white dudes, dead or otherwise, and reading too many “written from the perspective of an asshole” books.

So.

November.

I gave myself a budget to-be-read (TBR) pile of 30 books. A book a day is rather ambitious even for me, but I knew there would be a certain number of books that I started and didn’t want to finish or didn’t feel like reading that month after all, and I wanted some wiggle room.

I went through the house, my Kindle, my phone, and the books on my nightstand, and added those to my November list. Then I added the books I thought would come in at the library before December. Then I went, “This is already a disproportionate number of White Dudes.” Because it was.

So I filled out the rest of that list with other types of people.

November went okay.

• I read more nonfiction than I had been reading, although most of it was writer-related business books rather than the ones I had planned.
• Graphic novels: on track.
• Best-of lists: making less progress, but still some on each list.
• Proportions: 10 White Guys, 8 White Women, 4 People of Color, 3 Books in Translation. Still not great, but better.

December went even better.

• Nonfiction I fell down on, but did get some read. The books that I have on tap for nonfiction tend to be either in print, or ebooks that I bought. However, what I read first is books that are due back to the library, and books in ebook format (I can read on a Kindle after my spouse is asleep without keeping him up, but the lamp and page-turning sounds of paper bother him).
• Graphic novels: on track.
• Best-of lists: on track.
• Proportions: 6 White Guys, 5 White Women, 6 People of Color, 2 Books in Translation and 8 volumes of a graphic novel in translation.

In conclusion:

Writing these numbers out feels surreal.

I’ve been trying to stop reading mostly Dead White Guys for a year now, and have made improvements but haven’t reached my goals yet, because apparently changing my reading habits is harder than it looks. A white woman, determined to change her reading habits and having the access to the books needed to do so, was unable to successfully do so in the course of a year.

Although she did make strides.

In case you missed a newsletter, here were my best books of 2019:

• January: Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad–and Surprising Good–About Feeling Special, by Craig Malkin (White Man).
• February: Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Person of Color).
• March: The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson (Book in Translation).
• April: The Once and Future King, by T.H. White (White Man).
• May: Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, by Haruki Murakami (Book in Translation).
• June: H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald (White Woman).
• July: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer (Worldwide Anthology, edited by a White Guy and a White Woman, with the White Guy’s Name First, so I’m going with White Man: since that’s who gets credit for the book, when only one person does).
• August: The Land of Laughsby Jonathan Carroll (White Guy).
• September: A Man Lies Dreamingby Lavie Tidhar (I waffled on this but decided it counted as Person of Color, since Mr. Tidhar’s from Israel and didn’t slide into the assumptions I wanted to avoid).
• October: A Night in the Lonesome Octoberby Roger Zelazny (White Man).
• November: Quichotte, by Salman Rushdie (Person of Color).
• December: Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones (Person of Color). This was a difficult month. I read a lot of great books (in the month that I managed to stick closest to my goals).

Proportions: 5 White Men, 1 White Woman, 4 People of Color, 2 Books in Translation (with two fudges on the numbers; 4/1/3/2 if you leave out the fudges).

Disproportionately, the books that I liked (compared to the total number of books I read) were written by people of color. And three of them I wouldn’t have read if I hadn’t assigned myself the task of reading more people of color; they weren’t on best-of lists (Mongrels is on the NPR best-of horror list).

In the sense that my tastes have been broadened and my life enriched? This year was obviously a success. In the sense that I still read too many books with the same plot, ehhhh…better than 2018, at any rate.

And finally…

My favorite book of the year? A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar. It was magnificent, and I wish it were being picked up for an HBO series or something. It brutally mocks Hitler, serves as an analysis of why pulp fiction was both good and horrible with a lovely homage, is packed with super-dry humor, and has one of the world’s perfect endings.  Mwah!

…

Like this post? It, and more like it, can be found in the Wonderland Press Newsletter!

 

I Like My Science…MAD
(Blaze Ward Presents Book 2)

Universal Sales Link | Goodreads

Come with us on a twisted journey of science gone wrong and gods rising to threaten us all. Of private detectives on the moon and dieselpunk ladies saving the day. Academics making dark pacts and taking vengeance into their own hands. Mad.

Includes my story, “The Legends of Castle Frankenstein.”

What is the true story of Castle Frankenstein, the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s famous novel? Was there ever a mad scientist? A monster? A pursuit across the Arctic ice? Because there is a Castle Frankenstein, and you can go there and walk around the ruined stones, poke around in the forest, and eat lunch.

The legends that get told by the people who work at Castle Frankenstein are strange, but the layers leading downward into the truth are stranger.

And stranger…

An alchemist with no soul. A mysterious object falling from the sky. Terrified peasants with pitchforks and torches. An eerie whistling that echoes through the forest. A fallen tower. The elixir of life.

How much is real? How much is just legend?

And just how much of it are the locals covering up?

…

Let me tell you a story about Castle Frankenstein.

Not the novel written by Mary Shelley but the castle, which actually exists.  Once, years ago, I went to Europe on a Wanderjahr, a year where I toured all over Europe, sketching architecture and seeing parts of the world that weren’t Iowa.  I fell in love that year, had my heart broken, and saw some things that blew my mind.

And, while I was there, visited the actual Frankenstein Castle.

Let me just say, straight off, that the legends you hear about the place are fake.

In case you haven’t heard the fake legend, let me get you caught up on it so I can tell you the real one.  Frankenstein’s Castle is nothing but ruins now, but it was built in the thirteenth century in order to keep an eye on the bandits in the area.  The Baron “von und zu Frankenstein,” was actually a guy named Conrad Reiz; the family eventually died out in the early sixteen hundreds.  The castle was sold to another noble family, the Landgraves of Hesse-Darmstadt, who, having better things to do than take care of the place, started to let it fall into ruin.

The landgraves aren’t the mad scientists in this scenario.

But there was one.

Johann Conrad Dippel was born at the castle in 1673 and was later hired on as a professional alchemist.  Back then there really were such things as professional alchemists.  He created a formula that was supposed to be the Elixir of Life: a nasty, sludgy black liquid that was supposed to extend the life of the user to one hundred and thirty-five years.

In the fake legend, Dippel blew up one of the castle towers while making the elixir of life, then offered to trade the (now ruined) castle in exchange for the recipe.  The landgraves refused. Dippel went elsewhere with his discovery, eventually using his elixir of life to help create a synthetic version of Prussian blue pigment—which was a huge deal at the time, considering that you used to have to make blue pigments by grinding up lapis lazuli stones, literal jewels.  So trading a castle for the recipe to a cheaply manufactured pigment might not have been a bad idea at the time.

However, Dippel was no misunderstood hero.  He was a complete asshole.  He would dig up corpses and perform anatomical experiments on them.  Aha, you’re saying.  Just like in the novel.  Right, but it gets weirder.  One of the things he tried to do was switch souls between bodies using funnels.

Not living bodies, mind you.  Just dead ones.

Dippel was so off-putting that the benchmark of religious oddity at the time, Emanuel Swedenborg, called him “a most vile devil…who attempted wicked things.”  This from a guy who believed that he could freely travel between heaven and hell and speak to angels, demons, and the dead.  He also claimed that Dippel tried to sway people away from Christianity and “take away all their intelligence of truth and good, and leaving them in a kind of delirium.”

Finally, Dippel decided it was time to put his money where his mouth was and drink his elixir of life, after which he promptly died.

Afterwards, this elixir, known as Dippel’s Oil or bone oil, was used as an insect and animal repellant and was even used in World War II as a chemical warfare agent.  Dump some oil in a desert well, and the water would be undrinkably foul, but not actually fatal (Dippel’s death to the contrary).  Which meant that using it wasn’t a violation of the Geneva conventions.

How much of the above is true, I can’t say, other than that Dippel didn’t blow up a tower, because there weren’t any.  They were added during the nineteenth century, long after his death.

There are other cool legends about the castle that have nothing to do with the “Frankenstein” story.  For example, there’s a fountain of youth that only married women could use, and then only one day a year and only if they performed a feat of bravery.  The original St. George versus the dragon story possibly happened in the area.  And Siegfried of the Nibelungenlied might have been murdered nearby, of which the fat ladies of Wagner’s operas doth sing.  A section of the forest, the Odenwald, has magnetic rocks that screw with compasses.  The area is so famously weird that the Ghost Hunter International crew even filmed an early episode at the castle.  Every castle has its ghost, often headless, and sometimes they’re nuns.  The devil has a dozen landmarks named after him.  Witches are everywhere.  Some of them are like, “Black cats?  Pffft.  Hold my beer and watch me turn into a pig.”

Mary Shelley was known to have come within ten miles of the castle two years before she wrote her book, but never saw the castle itself.  But the coincidences between the legend and her novel seem too much to ignore completely.

As in, the book’s called Frankenstein.

Duh.

But, as I said, that’s not the real legend, just the fake one.

Want to read more? Click here.

Uncollected Anthology: Crossroads Hotel

Universal Sales Link | Goodreads

Negotiate a convention of funeral directors and order a grilled cheese sandwich. Discover how walking upstairs can change your life or a watch can end it. Park your car out of the rain and unpack your suitcase. Just don’t piss off the kitchen staff. 8 stories where fate controls the front desk!

Includes my story, “Memento Temporis.”

It’s thirty years to the day that Jim lost the love of his life, Laina Jarvy, back in 1929. Now a colleague’s wife has a gift for him: a watch that will take him back in time to save Laina, and instructions on how to use it.

Jim’s willing to pay whatever price is necessary to save her–but the offer that he’s given in the past, at the mysterious Crossroads Hotel, smells more than a little like yesterday’s fish.

Is he about to save Laina?

Or get stiffed?

…

I drove carefully on my way to the hotel. The last thing I wanted to do get in a car accident.

In my pocket was a yellowed piece of paper. The thing had to be decades old. It had some instructions on it, and an address to a place called “The Crossroads Hotel.” I had hired a car, a 1927 Moon Sedan manufactured in St. Louis, Missouri. It was a brand-new car, but I had some trouble adjusting to the old-timey controls.

In my pocket beside the yellowed piece of paper was a pocket watch. It looked like a Lalique piece, and about as delicate as a perfume bottle. The front was studded with moonstones and enameled with a design of bats and witches. The bats and the witches sort of faded into each other, so it took some investigation to tell where one started and the other ended. On top of the winding-stem, for the chain-loop, was a snake eating its own tail.

Inside, the watch face was more unusual than I care to explain. The watch had nothing to do with telling the time, and everything to do with telling time what to do.

I had come from 1959, all the way back to 1929. Thirty years.

Science hadn’t brought me here. Aliens hadn’t crash-landed in the Nevada desert, bringing time-traveling technology down to mankind. A nuclear explosion hadn’t knocked me for a time loop.

Instead, I had borrowed a pocket watch from a woman in 1959. Nancy Mattson was the wife of a junior colleague at Concordia University, in Portland. She had a wide brow and a cleft chin. You could just as easily imagine her in a suit and tie as a cocktail dress. She had that kind of mannish face. She was a good hostess—kept the vodka in the freezer box and was never afraid of putting out the sardines or Tabasco sauce.

I don’t know how she knew to give me the watch, but she did.

It was that time of year again, July 16th. I wasn’t teaching summer classes and I didn’t have anything to get me out of bed in the mornings other than running out of cigarettes on my nightstand. It was the anniversary of her death—the woman who should have been my wife. I had lost Laina in Portland thirty years ago, to the day. Now instead of being a young writer with promise, I was a middle-aged professor with leather patches on his elbows to cover up the fabric getting worn through.

I had been invited to a faculty dinner-and-drinks party at Mike Mattson’s house, and I had accepted on the grounds that being bored to death by faculty summer gossip would be less fatal than being home alone that night.

About eight o’clock, Nancy pulled me aside by the drinks table. “Jim, you look like death warmed over. Whatever is the matter? You didn’t get fired, did you?”

“It’s that date again,” I said, swaying a little. I hadn’t gone easy on the ice-cold vodka. Or the sardines. I must have been a real jewel. “Thirty years now. Christ, I shouldn’t have come tonight.”

“That date?” she asked. “What date?”

And, there and then, I was drunk enough to tell her what had happened…

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Crime du Jour: 31 Tales of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

Kindle | Goodreads

A crime a day keeps the injustice away.

31 very short tales of crime and criminals, from Aggravated Assault to White-Collar Crime, for those days when you need to escape from law and order…

…and through the loopholes to the dark side of justice.

…

These are the same stories as in the October 2019 series below, but now with an introduction, more editing, and a convenient ebook format.  The ebook is currently exclusively on Kindle as I do some sales testing, but probably won’t stay. Please contact me if you need a non-Kindle verion and are willing to leave me a review on Goodreads or Library Thing 🙂

The major change is to the Homicide story, which is now renamed “The Little Old Ladies’ Club” and has the ending reworked, because I hated it. C’est la guerre.