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When you walk into a room, whether you are at a conference hoping to win a big award, picking up a pizza, or on a first date – you are the star of the show playing out in your mind. You see the world from your own unique perspective and are acting in accordance with your own desires. The same can be said about the main character in that scene you are struggling to get right. Experimenting with the point of view might help you get unstuck. When I get frustrated with a scene I’m working on, if it’s feeling flat or lacking tension or spark, I allow myself to break out of the point of view in which I’ve chosen to write. Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you are in that ballroom filled with your peers, other writers. You have been nominated for a big award and the winners are about to be announced. Your ambition got you in that room. Your desires govern what you hope will happen. Your fears dictate how you act (or don’t act.) You are the center of the action, the one under the spotlight. Everything you see, think, and feel is influenced by everything that has ever happened to you leading up to this moment. Are you flashing back to high school when you were a runner-up, but not the winner, for an academic prize? Are you privately grumbling because you are up against your nemesis who always edges you out? Are you afraid you will cry if you don’t win? Are you worried you will trip on the way to the podium if you do win? Are you hoping to win because you want to rub it in the face of your ex, who also happens to be nominated for this award? Now freeze the frame. Look around the imaginary table where you are sitting. Every single person in that scene believes they are the center of the story. And their internal dramas have nothing to do with yours. The waiter might be concerned about being late getting home for the babysitter – again. They can’t risk losing this sitter, but their boss doesn’t give a crap. The smiling author at the table next to you is bereft because it’s been three years since she has been nominated for anything. Her husband next to her is bored out of his mind and is secretly listening to a horse race, which he bet a lot of money on. Maybe this one will pay off and he won’t have to tell his famous author wife he took out a second mortgage to pay off his gambling debts. Everyone in the room is experiencing that same scene – the awards ceremony – through a different filter colored by their individual circumstances and experiences. Every person in that room wants something. And, for the most part, none of their desires have anything to do with you. This thought experiment – recognizing that everyone in the room thinks they are the center of the story – makes for a helpful writing exercise, especially for those pesky scenes that just feel off, where the tension falls flat. Step One: Make a map. Just as you did in that imaginary awards ceremony, I want you to enter the scene you are struggling with. Look around the room or the space. Notice the furniture, the weather, the trees, and the things hiding under tables or park benches. Where is each person standing or sitting? Where are they in relation to each other? Sketch the scene. You don’t need to be an artist. Stick figures will work just fine. Step Two: List every person in the scene, even the unnamed minor characters, the waitress, and the guy walking his dog in the background. Next to each person’s name answer the following questions: What are they looking at? What draws their attention? What are they thinking about? Why are they in this scene? What are they hoping will happen in this scene? What is at stake for that character? What obstacles stand in their way? Now repeat this line of questions for every person in the scene. Step Three: Now shift the lens. After the main character, who is the next most important character? Get inside that person’s head, and write the same scene from this character’s point of view. Keep in mind the notes you took about that character. What do they observe, think, and feel in the scene? Are their goals and desires aligned with the main character’s, or in conflict? Do they experience the scene differently based on their job, past trauma, family situation, race, nationality, socioeconomic status, or personal ambition? How does this character’s version of the scene impact your original point of view character? Does it help the main character or hinder them? Repeat this step with as many characters in the scene as you can. Step Four: Read over all the different versions of this scene. Is your main character aware of the desires of the other characters? If so, how does it influence your main character in this scene? Notice how the other characters’ goals function in relation to the main character’s goals. Where do they rub against each other? Where is the friction? Where is the heat? How does the MC use what she knows about the other people to move toward achieving her goal? What does the MC not know about the other characters? What does she misconstrue? What does she not see? What things does the MC disregard that the other characters value or fear? Step Five: Go back and rewrite the scene from the original point of view character. Keep in mind all that you know about the other characters, even the things your MC might not know. You now better understand their motivations better and can amplify the points of tension or synergy. When characters in a scene have differing goals – as enormous as whether or not they want to launch a nuclear weapon, or as small as whether they want the window or aisle seat – seize the opportunity to amplify the points of friction and deepen the scene, keeping in mind that each of us is the hero of our own story. I find this strategy immensely helpful and I hope you will too. Have you tried shifting to a different POV to help you find the tension in an otherwise flat scene? What other strategies have you experimented with to shake up a lackluster scene? [url={url}]View the full article[/url]

Jennifer Dunbar Dorn’s letter to Lucia Berlin from the Hotel Boulderado, September 2, 1977. Courtesy of Jennifer Dunbar Dorn and the Lucia Berlin Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. In 1977, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn wrote to her best friend, Lucia Berlin, from the Hotel Boulderado, where she was staying while she looked for a house in Boulder, Colorado. Her “large corner room” became “a dormitory at night,” while “during the day we roll the beds into a cupboard in the hall.” She described the hotel as a “faded red brick run by post hippies,” a place for people on the make and on the move. This might not seem like a hotel that would have had its own stationery, but it did. The paper’s crest features a lantern and mountains, and the header reads HOTEL BOULDERADO in French Clarendon font: the typeface of Westerns and outlaws, of greed, gambling, and adventure. The hotel’s name, Dunbar Dorn recently pointed out to me, “is a combination of Boulder and Colorado, obviously, but the mythic El Dorado is ingrained everywhere in the West”—its lost city of gold. I stumbled on this letter at Harvard’s Houghton Library, where a collection of Berlin’s papers are stored in a single cardboard box. Almost everything she saved over the course of her peripatetic life is compressed into this tiny space: correspondence, notebooks, reviews, manuscripts, applications for tenure. I am Berlin’s first biographer, and I often felt deeply moved as I worked through the box last summer. Berlin is my El Dorado, and I had been looking for her for so long … Though the archivists at the library had sent me scans of some of these documents during the pandemic, it wasn’t the same as touching pages she had once touched. As I examined the yellowed paper, placing my own thumb over the smudged thumbprint at the top, I imagined Berlin reading Dunbar Dorn’s letter at her kitchen table in Oakland after a shift on the Merritt Hospital switchboard. Mostly, it’s about Dunbar Dorn’s journey from California to Colorado with her husband, Ed Dorn, and their children. Her emphasis is on their time on the road, not on their arrival—on transience over stasis and on quest over complacency, core values of the counterculture to which she, Dorn, Berlin, and their dispersed community of writers and artists loosely belonged. A postcard from the Hotel Acapulco, from the fifties. The Boulderado letter stood out to me because of the paper on which it was written. I got to Harvard in the third week of a research trip in pursuit of Berlin’s scattered correspondence, and along the way I’d become obsessed with hotel stationery. The appeal, at first, was aesthetic: hotel paper is pretty, and from the forties to the seventies, it was ubiquitous across the States and Europe. A few days earlier, while wading through the papers of Berlin’s literary agent, Henry Volkening, at the New York Public Library, I’d noticed that many of his clients wrote to him from hotels. Berlin herself first used her author name on a hotel postcard to Volkening in 1961. She had just eloped to Acapulco with her third husband, Buddy Berlin, and she described her newfound happiness, signing off: “Lucia Berlin.” But many of the hotel letters I sought out had nothing to do with Berlin’s work. By my third or fourth archive—in my third or fourth American city—I was skipping lunch breaks to call up boxes belonging to writers who I knew traveled frequently: James Baldwin, Anaïs Nin, Raymond Chandler. Here is some of what I found. Raymond Chandler’s letter to Neil Morgan from the Hotel Grosvenor, June 5, 1956. © The Estate of Raymond Chandler. Courtesy of the Estate, c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. The Hotel Grosvenor Raymond Chandler wrote to his friend Neil Morgan on Hotel Grosvenor paper in 1956, describing a recent bout of “mental, physical and emotional exhaustion” that he dealt with by “drinking enough whiskey to keep me on my feet.” At a second glance, the address on Fifth Avenue is underlined by a second one, of Room H363 at the private pavilion of New York Hospital (“But don’t write here”). Chandler wasn’t at the Grosvenor anymore; he was at the hospital, recovering from a breakdown. The hotel stationery was a respectable front for a man who had been institutionalized but who still wanted the people who loved him to know where he was. “Don’t give me up,” he ends the letter to Morgan. “I need friends.” Kenneth Koch’s letter to James Schuyler from the Hotel Claridge, from the late fifties. Courtesy of the Kenneth Koch Estate and the James Schuyler Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego. The Hotel Claridge In the late fifties, Kenneth Koch sent James Schuyler a letter on paper from the Hotel Claridge in Paris, a Champs-Élysées institution and a rendezvous for “touristes fortunés,” Koch wonders whether “fear of writing to someone always in movement” is what has kept Schuyler from keeping in touch. He continues with a riff on the New Testament: “Rise and follow me, Immity Skimmity, and never more will you want your correspondent to sit still.” As it was for Berlin and the Dorns, a particular type of transience was, for Koch, a virtue. He traveled to escape the system, not to be coddled in upholstered rooms like the luxury suites at the Claridge. There is an asterisk next to the hotel crest: “Just kidding,” he adds, “see real address above.” This, it turns out, is 41, rue du Cherche-Midi, in the then hip and nonconformist sixth arrondissement, which, since the war, had become the headquarters of existentialism and bebop jazz. He must have swiped the Hotel Claridge stationery; his correspondence wears it as a costume to play a visual trick on Schuyler—to “kid.” Gary Snyder’s letter to Shandel Parks from Timberline Lodge, July 30, 1954. Courtesy of Gary Snyder and the Gary Snyder Papers, Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego. Timberline Lodge Hotel stationery leaves plenty of space for editorializing. Gary Snyder wrote to Shandel Parks in 1954 from Timberline Lodge in the Oregon mountains. The hotel’s name and outline appear on the header, and at the bottom of the page there is an illustration of a ski lift, with tiny letters reading YEAR ’ROUND PLAYGROUND IN MT. HOOD NATIONAL FOREST. Snyder explains to Parks that he has been wandering “disconsolately about,” from “the ocean beaches to the Mountains, from there to Seattle, and thence to Mountains near Canada, and back to Mountains in central Washington, and again to Seattle, and then to a stretch of beach in central Washington, wondering, always, ‘Whence?’ and ‘Whither?’” Finally, he “chanced on a job” at Timberline Lodge, “attending to the «chair lift».” He did not plan to stay long. The double chevrons around “chair lift” are a different shape from the other quotation marks in his text, as though the language of chairlifts is not his own. At Timberline Lodge, Snyder was immersed in an unfamiliar, all-American world of commercialized leisure, one he mocks with his infantilizing caption. He kept its chairlifts running, while maintaining the detachment that pervades his letter to Parks. He makes clear that as soon as the lumber strike in the Pacific Northwest is settled, he “will go to a certain crude logging camp” and “work until the snow flies. i.e. December, accumulating hoards of money.” Back to the Boulderado By the time Dunbar Dorn wrote to Berlin in the late seventies, the Hotel Boulderado’s stationery was informed by a countercultural aesthetic that was beginning to enter the mainstream. The whimsical logo and typography suggest that the hotel catered to seekers, dissenters, and outlaws—or to people who saw themselves as such. Guests included William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Ishmael Reed, plus a rotating cast of speakers at the University of Colorado and the Naropa Institute. In his 1975 song “Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard,” John Prine describes a hippie “buying quaaludes on the phone … In the Hotel Boulderado / at the dark end of the hall.” And yet the hotel remained, fundamentally, a business. In the eighties, after scraping together funds to renovate, it shed its dissident aesthetic and reverted to the plush accessories and prices with which it had opened in 1908. Today, rooms start at two hundred dollars a night, and the “happenings” advertised on the hotel website include a monthly “wine club” starting at forty dollars per person. Burroughs and rollaway beds are a distant memory. When I called the Boulderado to ask if they still print their own stationery, the front-office manager told me that they did, but that she used it for official correspondence and welcome letters to guests. Branded paper is no longer placed in the rooms. And this brings something home: no matter how closely I follow Berlin, I can never truly enter her world, because it is gone, along with the golden age of hotel stationery. What endures, of course, is Berlin’s work. In her short story “Dr. H. A. Moynihan,” originally published under the title “The Legacy” in 1982, a dentist shows his granddaughter a set of false teeth. “He had changed only one tooth,” Berlin writes, “one in front that he had put a gold cap on. That’s what made it a work of art.” I think, for her, this was a metaphor for the creative process. She does something similar with her fiction, drawing on her experience and transforming it, too, as Lydia Davis has observed. And her interventions, innovations, additions, and omissions catch the light: they’re the treasures, like El Dorado, or the gold cap on a tooth. A prewritten hotel letter from the Mission Inn, March 14, 1946. Nina Ellis is a British American writer and scholar. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Granta, The Idaho Review, The London Magazine, the Oxford Review of Books, and elsewhere. She won an Editors’ Choice Award in the 2021 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. Looking for Lucia: A Biography will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2025. View the full article

ALGONQUIN ANSWERS file:///C:/Users/misterm/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.jpg FIRST ASSIGNMENT: Ruby Parker loved her daddy, almost more than anything. Almost as much as she hated his brother, her uncle Frank. She must find a way to save the family ranch and her daddy’s elephant from Frank. But there’s a war on and revenge must wait, as she must first help her country win that war as a welder and bring her soldier fiancé back to her. When Ruby falls from a ladder, a co-worker saves her life and befriends her. As she recovers her memory, she realizes that William used to work for her daddy on his circus. After her father’s death Uncle Frank attempted to murder William, who now joins Ruby on her vengeance quest. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: Frank Parker always played second fiddle to his older brother. Unlike Gene, Frank lives only for himself and the pleasures he can grab from life, by force if necessary. He prefers girls to grown women and often just takes what he wants; even raping his own young niece as his brother lies dying. He hates both his brother’s elephant and the young black man his brother had as much as adopted. But then, his brother dies, freeing Frank from any last restraints of decency. He steals the family’s ranch and his brother’s substantial insurance proceeds. He tries poisoning the elephant and attempts to murder the black man, maiming him for life. Within a few years after his brother’s death, as the rest of America fights Naziism, he becomes a rich and powerful man in the small Texas Hill Country community he terrorizes. Frank epitomizes both the racism and sexism of the Jim Crow South, but also, in a more veiled manner, that of the entire country – at the time – and even until today. It is these larger antagonistic forces against which Ruby and William struggle throughout the novel. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: The O’Dell Cup is my working title. It’s simple, and perhaps a bit plain, but, hopefully more than a little mysterious. While this may not prove to be the final title of my novel, I’m using it now because it refers to an actual tin cup in my family lore and is the original inspiration for my story. The cup appears in the novel’s opening scene and, later, its revelation to the protagonist becomes a turning point in the plot. It also serves as a symbol of the racism that permeated the Jim Crow South, even by those who thought themselves immune from it. Other Options: Ruby the Riveter Forgetting and Remembering FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: Water for Elephants - Sarah Gruen Who doesn’t love a circus? Not just the glitz, the danger, and the exotica, but also the intrigue and the backstories behind the tent walls. Stories about circuses offer a glimpse into a lifestyle that few have, or really want, to taste. While we may not really want to run away to join the circus it can certainly hold nearly all of us in its spell long enough for a good read. My female protagonist is based, in no small part, on my own circus family. In fact, when I first read “Water for Elephants” I thought, “How did Sarah Gruen know my family story?” – there were so many fictional accounts in her work that closely paralleled true stories from my own family background. In The O’Dell Cup Ruby relives much of her own circus experiences as she regains the memories she lost when she fell in the Liberty ship she was helping to build. Sprinkled throughout the novel, these memories and other disclosures recapture for the reader the picture of a small family circus (a “mud show”) characteristic of such enterprises in the “Jim Crow” rural South. Where the Crawdad’s Sing – Delia Owens The tie-in to this story is the strength of the female protagonist who overcomes obstacle after obstacle as the story progresses. While my novel has a different time and setting, I think it will attract the type of readers who revel in the struggles and eventual victory of a strong female protagonist. And in both stories the young white female is befriended by and receives invaluable assistance from an older black male. FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: In recovering her memory after a fall in a WWII ship she worked on, a circus girl discovers that the co-worker who saved her life is the same man who used to work for her daddy’s circus. After realizing that the girl’s uncle has seriously injured both of them, the protagonists vow revenge, but only after the war has ended. SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: In the novel’s inciting incident, the female protagonist temporarily loses her memory in an accident. Backstory reveals that she was orphaned as a teenager. As she recovers her memory, she learns that her fiancé soldier had been killed on the same day she was injured. Not enough? Finally, she remembers that her uncle repeatedly raped her when she was a child. Although she suffers through these repeated tragedies, none can defeat Ruby. Victimhood is not in her circus DNA. Like the “energizer bunny” she manages to bounce back from all that life can throw at her. Here is one sample: In the novel’s inciting incident, the female protagonist temporarily loses her memory in an accident. Backstory reveals that she was orphaned as a teenager. As she recovers her memory, she learns that her fiancé soldier had been killed on the same day she was injured. Not enough? Finally, she remembers that her uncle repeatedly raped her when she was a child. Although she suffers through these repeated tragedies, none can defeat Ruby. Victimhood is not in her circus DNA. Like the “energizer bunny” she manages to bounce back from all that life can throw at her. Here is one sample: Ruby was quiet for a few moments. Then she asked, “William, may I…would you mind…if… I touched your scar?” William’s silent expression indicated that it would be okay. Ruby reached up to his forehead where the purple line began. Slowly and gently, she traced it down his face, past the void where his eye had been, down toward his chin. As her hand reached his lips her fingers began to tremble, and then shake uncontrollably. The scar reminded her of a snake and her worst memory, the most hidden one, the one that had never been remembered, rushed into the depths of her soul. The worst memory, the one nobody should have to remember. “I’m standing above a hole in the ground, like where we buried my daddy. I look down and see… Me. I’m covered with snakes; dozens of rattlers crawling all over my body; hissing; flicking their tongues at me; tasting my body with their tongues – my fingers, my eyes, my lips, my hips, my breasts, my private place. Then the biggest snake, the evilest one, crawls inside me, staying inside, hurting me. I scream but no sound comes out. No one can hear, not even my own mind. I close my eyes, clinch my fists, but it’s still there, staying, hurting, taking part of me. Finally, the snake crawls away. I look down again and the hole is empty. The snakes are gone. I’m gone. Uncle Frankie is standing beside me. ‘This is a secret Ruby, our secret. Don’t ever tell nobody. Never. If you do, something very bad will happen.’ He squats down and looks me right in my eyes. ‘It might happen to your little pony Poky, or to that n****r boy you seem to like so much, or even to your beloved Daddy.’ “These last words were spoken with a sneer so evil and dark it seemed to blacken the sky. But the snake didn’t stay away. It came back, whenever it wanted. And it went inside me again and hurt me again. And I lived in fear of that snake. Until Daddy died. And we buried him in the rain. And his casket floated up the next day. And we had to bury him again. And I got to go away to San Antonio. It was Daddy’s dying that saved me from the snake.” As Ruby jerked her fingers away from his face William saw the look of horror on hers. “Oh, Miss Ruby, I’m so sorry. I never should have let you touch my scar. It’s bad, really bad. I know how I look.” Time seemed to have nowhere to go. It just hung there between the two of them. Unmoving. Eventually Ruby, her gaze fixed somewhere else, a faraway place to which William could never go, said, “It’s not you William. You are a beautiful man, inside and out. I just remembered the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” And then she told William what she had remembered. After Ruby had finished telling William why she had jerked her hand from his face, the two friends sat in silence for a long while. William kept expecting Ruby to start crying and had no clue as to how to comfort her. But she didn’t fall apart; just the opposite. She was growing stronger. “William?” “Yes?” “We have to make this right, you and me. We have to get even with Frankie for all he’s done. He hurt us both, real bad. file:///C:/Users/misterm/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.jpg Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it? Ruby is from the South – Texas - before the Civil Rights era; need I say more? Ruby’s life is saved by a black co-worker who then befriends her as she convalesces. As she gradually recovers bits of her memory, the black man realizes that she is the daughter of a circus owner he worked for a decade earlier back in Texas. And when he hands her the old tin cup he used to drink from, she recognizes him as the man who nursed her daddy in his final illness. They become friends and Ruby considers herself free of the prejudice that permeated the landscape of her childhood. It isn’t until she and William sit together at the staged trial of fifty black sailors that she realizes how deep her own unacknowledged prejudice runs. And William, sitting beside her realizes how he has always accepted his lot in life because “that’s just the way things are.” Sitting next to her friend William, looking across at the fifty black faces on trial for their lives, some merely teenagers, Ruby found herself on trial as well, perhaps more so. She remembered her thoughts when she had read in the Oakland Tribune the day after the explosion that the “Death toll may reach 650." She was horrified. The war had come home, right in her backyard. Other than Pearl Harbor, the Port Chicago disaster would be the worst loss of life on American soil during the war. Then, when the article went on to note that most of the victims had been Negro sailors, she had felt a sense of relief. It could have been worse. They could have been…. Even Ruby’s mind couldn’t finish that sentence. She wanted to wretch as the enormity of her thought sunk in. Her insides started to tear at her as if she had a tiger in her gut trying to rip something evil out of her, something she hadn’t been aware existed. She started to cry, first inside, and then in quiet sniffles as tears dripped down her cheek. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: Is there a more iconic structure in the western United States than San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge? Its mere mention, or a glimpse of its image conjures up memories and feelings within anyone who has ever seen it or heard of it in literature, song, or film. The novel opens, and closes, on the bridge. It is the first landmark Ruby sees when she arrives in California from Texas. And it continues to recur throughout the novel, even serving as an accidental inciting incident for what will become her career. Ruby couldn’t wait to start photographing the bridge for real. Each photo would tell the story differently; the bridge itself in different moods – early morning through the shroud of fog, late afternoons of golden sunsets, and the evening as the lights of the City began twinkling on. And her pictures would tell the story of the people of the bridge: those who designed and built it; former circus performers who itched to meet its challenges; and those for whom it promised an escape from an unlivable life. And all of its more mundane denizens; tourists, commuters, pedestrians. Across the bay sits Richmond, nondescript if it weren’t the location of one of the largest military industrial complexes of World War II. This is where the two protagonists meet, as welders on Liberty ships. Richmond California sticks out into both San Pablo and San Francisco Bays like a hitchhiker’s thumb. The setting would have been beautiful if the Whites had left it the way the Ohlone’s had it when they came. But, unless your taste in vacations ran to oil refineries, assembly plants, or heavy industry, this other “city by the bay” had little to recommend it by the mid-1940’s. …In less than two years, Richmond’s population had mushroomed from fewer than twenty thousand to well over a hundred thousand souls. By mid-’44 Richmond was a twenty-four seven, three-sixty-five, situation….All four shipyards ran triple shifts. Bus exhaust choked the air, and Susan had to keep her car wheels steered clear of the trolley tracks. Horns blasted. People were walking everywhere, both with and against the lights, as though they’d all been to pedestrian school in New York City. And the beautiful green hills of Berkely, rising above, geologically and economically, the more pedestrian East Bay communities of Albany, El Cerrito, Oakland, and the aforementioned Richmond. The imported Eucalyptus trees of Tilden Park tower over Casa Serena, where Ruby recovers from her injuries. And where her discovery of a carousel triggers the return of her memory. By the first of May, Ruby had been moved to a small facility up in the Berkeley Hills, at the edge of Tilden Park. It was no accident that the recovery center was located where it was. The setting itself was almost enough to cure anything. The brown California hills turn a brilliant green in the Springtime. Native Coastal shrub covered the ground and imported Eucalyptus trees towered above, blanketing everything with their unmistakable aroma, like the fog over the bay. It was believed that the scent emitted by the Eucalyptus oils increased brainwave activity and countered physical and mental fatigue. And, if one listened closely, she might hear the spirits of the ancient Ohlone’s who inhabited the land before the whites arrived. For perhaps thousands of years prior to the Spaniards conquest, these native peoples had made their homes in this beautiful landscape where God probably took his vacation. If one knew how to look and feel for it; how to open one’s pores to the healing ministrations of the ghosts of those ancient medicine men, she could feel a cleansing, a fullness, and a calm that even the strongest drugs couldn’t duplicate. And Treasure Island, not the fictional setting for Robert Louis Stevenson, but an artificial island anchoring the two spans of the Bay Bridge. It is where the US Navy wrongly tried and convicted fifty black sailors of mutiny following the Port Chicago ammo depot explosion in 1944. The novel’s protagonists are present at both the mutiny trial as well as the aftermath of the explosion itself. It didn’t take Ruby but about 10 minutes to realize the trial was a sham. The room was salt and pepper, black and white. The salt was sitting at the front table; older white men in their starched white uniforms, their medals threatening to topple them over. And the two younger white men arguing the fate of the pepper; fifty Black men sitting in uncomfortable chairs along the back wall. One significant scene is set in the “Last Chance Saloon” a hole-in-the-wall drinking establishment on Oakland’s waterfront frequented by the writer Jack London around the turn of the twentieth century. The saloon had survived the ‘06 earthquake but it hadn’t escaped unscathed. When they bent their heads, at least Gordon did, to step down to enter, he directed Ruby to sit with him on stools at the far end of the bar as the half dozen tables were already filled. The first thing Ruby noticed was that the bar, the original from when Jack London sat there, slanted from one end of the small building down to where they were sitting, dropping close to a foot. “This is what happened during the earthquake,” Gordon explained. The bar tilted and they never fixed it. I always sit at this end, to keep my drink from sliding down to another patron. It’s sort of the thing here. Newcomers often wind up finding someone ‘down bar’ finishing their first drink. Most of them learn after that.” As the novel reaches its conclusion the scene shifts to a small town in Texas’ Hill Country, an hour’s drive from San Antonio. It has become the undisputed domain of the novel’s antagonist, a man who epitomizes both racism and sexism. He controls the town and its citizens including the judge presiding over a trial in a musty courtroom with a foregone conclusion. The courthouse in Riverbend sat on a little knoll in the middle of town. With its three stories and belltower it was the tallest building in the community, and you could see its cupola from anywhere in the city limits. The first floor, called the dungeon by some, contained jail cells and the sheriff’s and coroner’s offices. The two identical courtrooms were housed on the second floor, accessible up fifteen marble steps through the main entrance. The courtrooms sat on opposite sides of the hall towards the back of the building, past the county clerk and assessor’s offices. Each had a double oak door carved with a blindfolded lady justice holding her scales in balance. The majestic doors belied the simplicity of the courtroom itself. The judge’s bench sat on a raised dais, offset a bit to the left to fit in the jury box on the right side. Opposing counsel each had a small desk facing the judge at floor level and there were four pew-like benches on each side of the room capable of holding six or seven spectators. The rooms gave off a faint musty smell due to the paucity of windows and there was an ominous, almost frightening, feeling about the space. As if the ghosts of criminals, themselves victims of some of the “hanging judges” of the previous century, were hanging around to see who else might share their fate.

RESPONSE TO PRE-ASSIGNMENTS PART III Below are the opening pages of my novel. Since it contains no dialog, I have added another section from later in the novel. 1985 The heavy fog, late in leaving that morning, nearly obscured the shadowy figure making its way towards the center of the Golden Gate Bridge. Although she passed just a few feet from the Sunday traffic, the small woman went unnoticed by the drivers streaming towards Marin County. Clad in a fashionable running suit and sensible shoes, she strode briskly along the pedestrian walkway. Her petite frame, firm gait, and bright red hair belied her nearly seventy years. After she’d passed the south tower, she paused and turned eastward towards Oakland first, then Berkeley, Albany, and, finally, Richmond. Slowly, she removed her shoes and set her backpack on the steel grating. Then she took a small object from her pack: a tin cup, tarnished from age and use. Standing at the guardrail, the woman lifted the old cup to her face and tenderly kissed it. Holding it above her head with both hands, like a priest lifting the chalice for a blessing, she let the winds carry the man’s spirit higher and higher above the bridge in a swirl of ash. The gulls swarmed, imitating the angels. Then, she leaned over the rail, offering the empty cup to the waves, 220 feet below. Four Seconds… The time it takes a human jumper to reach the roiling waters of San Francisco Bay. Four Seconds… The time it took that little cup to slip beneath the waves. Four Seconds… More than enough time to travel back four decades. 1944 Most mornings, as Ruby Parker stepped off the bus to begin her shift at Richmond Yard No. 2, she could just see the tip of the Golden Gate Bridge emerging from a fog-shrouded San Francisco Bay; and some days, she believed she could hear its ghosts: the souls of those desperate jumpers seeking an end to an unlivable life, and the spirits of those thousands more who sailed beneath that span to a war from which they never returned. From the outside, Ruby looked like any of the other young women who got off the bus along with her: denim coveralls, sturdy work shirt, a bandana hiding her bright red hair, lunch pail clutched in her left hand. From the outside, she looked like any of the thousands who worked for Henry J. Kaiser building ships to help the Allies win the war. She looked like she could have come off an assembly line similar to the ships she helped build. But on the inside, it was a different story. Ruby was a circus girl. If you asked, she would tell you about riding the elephant on her daddy’s circus when she was only four. And of swinging between trapeze rings a few years later. And she might tell you about her wonderful life on her family’s ranch in the wintertime. And perhaps she’d even tell you about the death of the circus, and of her daddy, during the Great Depression a few years before. And why she’d left the Texas Hill Country for the Bay Area. But she wouldn’t tell you that other thing, the one buried down so deep inside that she didn’t even know about it herself. When Ruby had started working at the shipyard, she had been a young woman with a past. And a future. And she was just about to lose both. *** “William, can you tell me what happened? Why did I leave the ranch? I want to know about my daddy and mama.” “I can, much as I know, but it’s sad. Miss Susan said not to tell you until you asked. She said that’s how we’d know you were ready to hear it. And she said that after I started to tell you about it, you’d likely start rememberin’ it yourself, bad as it might be.” “I understand. I think I’m ready.” “Ole Boss, he just got worse and worse. Spent his whole day, coughin’ up that blood. Doctor come out a couple of times. Said there wadn’t nothin’ he could do. Just keep him comf’tible as possible. It was a cold November day when he went. Day even the devil didn’t want to be outside.” “And it was raining, wasn’t it?” Ruby asked. “It was. You startin’ to remember?” “I found him, didn’t I? I found my daddy, and I screamed for you. And I was holding him when you got there. And I didn’t care if I caught his TB or not. Maybe I even wanted to. It didn’t seem like life made any sense anymore. What happened then?” “It was too muddy for the undertaker to bring out his hearse, so we bathed and wrapped him ourselves, and I made a coffin for him. The next day Richard and I dug the grave, right next to his little cabin. We did get a preacher to come out and say some prayers, and then we put him in the ground.” “And then?” “You sure you want to hear this?” “I can handle it. Don’t leave anything out.” “Well, like you said it was rainin’ like there was no tomorrow and, soon as we buried your daddy, we all hurried inside to dry out. Your mama was holed up in the back of the house, ever since she heard he was dead. She never even come out to see him. And the funniest thing; as soon as we had covered him up that elephant of his, Lucy, started bellowin’ loud, and cryin’ like, like she knew or somethin’. And it went on for hours. By the time it was dark, the rain had gotten lots worse; seemed like it was comin’ in sideways. Soon as he could, the preacher had left so it was just you and me, and Richard, and Sylvia, and your mama. It was the first night I stayed in the house. I just did and nobody said nuthin’ about it. We all just sat there, eatin’ milk and cornbread, listenin’ to the rain, and that elephant cryin’. I fell asleep in that chair your daddy used to rock in ‘fore he took sick. It was you woke me up the next morning, askin’ me to take you down to your daddy’s grave. You said we had forgotten to put flowers on it. When we got there….” “Stop,” screamed Ruby. “I know. The rain had been so bad that it had washed him out of his grave. The hole was full of water and the coffin was just bobbing at the top like a raft. And we had to dig another hole, higher up. And we tied ropes around the coffin and had Lucy drag it up the hill. And you said a prayer, I remember, before we covered him up a second time.”

The Proposal The Proposal by Mary Balogh is $1.99! This is the first book in her Survivor’s Club series, which is a favorite amongst the Bitchery. Readers loved the hero, Hugo, but I’ve never felt particularly moved to pick one up. Balogh fans, what do you love about her books? In Mary Balogh’s engaging and seductive new novel of drama and romance, a woman comfortable in her solitude allows temptation to free her heart, when a daring war hero shows her how truly extraordinary she is. THE PROPOSAL Gwendoline, Lady Muir, has seen her share of tragedy, especially since a freak accident took her husband much too soon. Content in a quiet life with friends and family, the young widow has no desire to marry again. But when Hugo, Lord Trentham, scoops her up in his arms after a fall, she feels a sensation that both shocks and emboldens her. Hugo never intends to kiss Lady Muir, and frankly, he judges her to be a spoiled, frivolous–if beautiful–aristocrat. He is a gentleman in name only: a soldier whose bravery earned him a title; a merchant’s son who inherited his wealth. He is happiest when working the land, but duty and title now demand that he finds a wife. He doesn’t wish to court Lady Muir, nor have any role in the society games her kind thrives upon. Yet Hugo has never craved a woman more; Gwen’s guileless manner, infectious laugh, and lovely face have ruined him for any other woman. He wants her, but will she have him? The hard, dour ex-military officer who so gently carried Gwen to safety is a man who needs a lesson in winning a woman’s heart. Despite her cautious nature, Gwen cannot ignore the attraction. As their two vastly different worlds come together, both will be challenged in unforeseen ways. But through courtship and seduction, Gwen soon finds that with each kiss, and with every caress, she cannot resist Hugo’s devotion, his desire, his love, and the promise of forever. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. My Not So Perfect Life My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella is $1.99! I bought this book on the recommendation of one of my book group members because she said it was absolutely hilarious. However, I have yet to read it (story of my life). I’ve heard Kinsella’s books are great palate cleanser reads. What do you think? Part love story, part workplace dramedy, part witty critique of the false judgments we make in a social-media-obsessed world, this is New York Times bestselling author Sophie Kinsella’s most timely and sharply observed novel yet. Everywhere Katie Brenner looks, someone else is living the life she longs for, particularly her boss, Demeter Farlowe. Demeter is brilliant and creative, lives with her perfect family in a posh townhouse, and wears the coolest clothes. Katie’s life, meanwhile, is a daily struggle—from her dismal rental to her oddball flatmates to the tense office politics she’s trying to negotiate. The final, demeaning straw comes when Demeter makes Katie dye her roots in the office. No wonder Katie takes refuge in not-quite-true Instagram posts, especially as she’s desperate to make her dad proud. Then, just as she’s finding her feet—not to mention a possible new romance—the worst happens. Demeter fires Katie. Shattered but determined to stay positive, Katie retreats to her family’s farm in Somerset to help them set up a vacation business. London has never seemed so far away—until Demeter unexpectedly turns up as a guest. Secrets are spilled and relationships rejiggered, and as the stakes for Katie’s future get higher, she must question her own assumptions about what makes for a truly meaningful life. Sophie Kinsella is celebrated for her vibrant, relatable characters and her great storytelling gifts. Now she returns with all of the wit, warmth, and wisdom that are the hallmarks of her bestsellers to spin this fresh, modern story about presenting the perfect life when the reality is far from the image. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Burning Roses Burning Roses by S.L. Huang is $2.99! We mentioned this is in a pervious Hide Your Wallet. There are elements for fairy tales, older main characters, and I believe a sapphic romance. Lots of catnip! However, this is more of a novella. A gorgeous fairy tale of love and family, of demons and lost gods, for fans of Zen Cho and JY Yang. When Rosa (aka Red Riding Hood) and Hou Yi the Archer join forces to stop the deadly sunbirds from ravaging the countryside, their quest will take the two women, now blessed and burdened with the hindsight of age, into a reckoning of sacrifices made and mistakes mourned, of choices and family and the quest for immortality. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Island Queen Island Queen by Vanessa Riley is $1.99! This is Riley’s first work of historical fiction as opposed to historical romance. It’s about Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a free Black woman who achieved great wealth. Have you read it? A remarkable, sweeping historical novel based on the incredible true life story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a free woman of color who rose from slavery to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies. Born into slavery on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, Doll bought her freedom—and that of her sister and her mother—from her Irish planter father and built a legacy of wealth and power as an entrepreneur, merchant, hotelier, and planter that extended from the marketplaces and sugar plantations of Dominica and Barbados to a glittering luxury hotel in Demerara on the South American continent. Vanessa Riley’s novel brings Doll to vivid life as she rises above the harsh realities of slavery and colonialism by working the system and leveraging the competing attentions of the men in her life: a restless shipping merchant, Joseph Thomas; a wealthy planter hiding a secret, John Coseveldt Cells; and a roguish naval captain who will later become King William IV of England. From the bustling port cities of the West Indies to the forbidding drawing rooms of London’s elite, Island Queen is a sweeping epic of an adventurer and a survivor who answered to no one but herself as she rose to power and autonomy against all odds, defying rigid eighteenth-century morality and the oppression of women as well as people of color. It is an unforgettable portrait of a true larger-than-life woman who made her mark on history. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article

Photograph courtesy of Kyra Wilder. For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Kyra Wilder’s “John Wick Is So Tired” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 243. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase? With the first line. It was something I’d thought a lot about—I run marathons, and in those tense few days before the race, when I’m drinking water and carb loading and meditating on what’s going to happen, I watch John Wick, specifically because of the way Keanu Reeves runs. He looks so tired, but he’s winning. In the fall of 2021, I was tapering for a marathon and then I had to go to a funeral, and suddenly my John Wick time got invaded by real grief. And John Wick was good for that, too. What were you reading while you were writing the poem? I was reading a lot of Ian Fleming that fall. I got pretty obsessed with the fact that he included a recipe for scrambled eggs in a James Bond story. In that story, Bond is completing some kind of mission in New York but also being really whiny about the poor quality of American eggs—to the point that he’s wandering around the city going into bodegas and criticizing them. So, it was either going to be “John Wick Is So Tired” or “James Bond Could Make You Some Pretty Good Eggs.” Where did you write this poem? That glissade is in there because I was writing in the car, waiting to pick up my daughter from ballet class. I write all over—sometimes even at my actual desk. I have a print from Bas Jan Ader’s I’m too sad to tell you on the wall. There’s nothing better to stare at when things are going badly. Did you show your drafts to other writers or to friends or confidantes? If so, what did they say about them? I showed it to my husband. He’s a math guy and doesn’t read poetry, but he’s usually right about my writing. When he read the first draft, he liked the first half but said he “didn’t get” the ending. Reading that draft again now, I see what he meant. That version was maybe more like a novel or a short story. We’ve started with John Wick, but by the end we’re lost in the desert. It’s chatty, reaching for all the conversations that are being missed—the speaker wants to watch John Wick and tell the lost person historical asides about nuclear bomb testing sites. Of course they do, but that’s for a novel. In the context of a poem, it’s too much, too close together. I’m hitting the meaning-gong too many times. John Wick (the character, the movies, the Keanu) is so good, and the poem is about this one feeling of where-are-you-right-now-how-could-you-miss-this-one-particular-thing, so we need to stay with John Wick and forget the desert. After I found an ending that felt more specific and focused and safely clear of novel/short story/essay territory, I sent a copy to my agent, Jon Curzon. He told me he’d once made an Instagram account called Keanu Leaves, which was just full of pictures of Keanu Reeves waving goodbye. How else did the poem change over time? I wrote it without stanzas at first, and then decided to break up the poem following the speaker’s thoughts—where the thinking shifted, or where I thought they might pause or take a breath. The stanzas got me closer to the person speaking—they helped me hear how the speaker would say the lines. As useful as they were, though, the stanzas made the poem too dramatic. They looked like they were trying too hard. We’re starting with a hatchet thrown at someone’s face—we don’t need the additional histrionics of white space. Then it was all playing with line breaks. One of the drafts has two lines with single words. It’s not that I was thinking I might eventually end up with one-word lines—it was that I was breaking the lines up everywhere and leaving them for a while to see how they looked. I was just pushing things around, moving lines back and forth and reading it again every few days. I would open the document, break up lines, and leave it for a bit. Once I got the poem to the point where, when I looked at it fresh, there wasn’t anything I wanted to change, I sent it off and left it for dead. Kyra Wilder is the author of the novel Little Bandaged Days. View the full article

She was at my side suddenly, her face in the gloom small and round, and tipped up to watch me closely. She narrowed her eyes. ‘Do you remember, Charlie?’ What do you (an anything-but-horror reader) do when one of your favourite auto-buy authors brings out a horror book? Well I can’t vouch for what you would do, but I dove right in. Was there still everything you enjoy about Jen Williams’ writing? Yep, shenanigans and malarky aplenty! Did you end up loving it? Absolutely! Did you read it before bedtime? Not a chance, and I recommend you don’t either. Jen Williams’ latest novel Games for Dead Girls is a crime thriller with heavy folk horror elements. It reminded me a little of Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, but amped up and on holiday in Broadchurch. We follow Charlie in the past and the present; when she’s on holiday with her family, the summer friendship she makes with a girl in the caravan park; and when she returns to that caravan park as an adult, ostensibly researching a book she intends to write on local folklore. As she increasingly loses control of the games she devises with her new friend, in the present we begin to piece together what happened back then and why she’s had to return. Regardless of what genre she’s writing, you can rely on Williams’ storytelling to be superb. What she’s done here with Games for Dead Girls is to bring the storytelling to a meta level where, not to get post-modern on this, but the question of who is telling the story, and how reliable a storyteller they are, becomes key. The stories we tell ourselves about events, the ways in which our memories become stories we share with those who experienced them with us. How reliable these stories and memories may or may not be. It was a theme I really loved and thoroughly enjoyed the complexities of throughout. With regards to the writing itself, Williams does a fantastic job of intertwining a thread of threat into an otherwise harmless or mundane observation, layering this ominous atmosphere in such an insidious, subtle manner. It’s like an after-taste, when you’re half-way through your cuppa and you wonder if the milk is off: They were exactly the same as they had always been. At first glance, they looked identical, but if you trained your eye you could see all the things that set them apart from each other – and if you were a little kid left to run riot around the site all day, it was vital to learn these differences. Otherwise, you might never find your way home again. There are elements of haunting and a fair bit of body horror throughout, as you might have deduced from the cover, but the mystery behind it all kept me turning the pages. By the end of the first chapter, Williams dropped so many enticing hints to draw you in to this story, just as any good thriller should. I reached the end of that chapter with so many questions that I needed the answers to – I was hooked. As a reader, you’re trying to puzzle what happened to Charlie in her past, just as Charlie begins to puzzle why there is a history of girls going missing in this touristy seaside town that turned her life upside down. There are dual mysteries to solve here, which is what made this such an addictive read. Games for Dead Girls does for horror and crime what The Ninth Rain did for sci-fi and fantasy. Williams demonstrates once more what a skilful writer she is; she takes the best elements from both genres to combine them into a chilling, atmospheric story that you won’t be able to put down. This is a dark story which highlights there are worse monsters out there than even the most over-active imaginations can dream up. As much as I’m looking forward to her next fantasy in the autumn, Talonsister, I’ll definitely be coming back for more horror thrillers too! There was a power to knowing her words were affecting her listeners. Games for Dead Girls is out today from HarperVoyager and is available here! The post GAMES FOR DEAD GIRLS by Jen Williams (BOOK REVIEW) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article

The scruffy detective is one of the purest, most persistent tropes in the crime genre. I’m not talking about the trope of the incompetent cop, but the detective who is very adept at solving crimes and less so at looking presentable/caring about other things. Personally, I like this character type. I want to watch someone roll out of bed at noon and go stagger off to follow a lead while wearing a trench coat that has not been dry-cleaned in a decade. I decided to put together a list of some of the most iconic entrants in this category. This is not a comprehensive list. Some of my lists are fairly exhaustive, while others are more like very specific, little tasting menus, if I’m permitted to be a bit florid with my description. This is the second kind, a sample of some very memorable men and women known for their practical nonchalance and unpretentious airs. And bedraggled appearances. It’s worth reiterating that this list is about rumpled detectives and not rumpled cops, so one of my favorites (Brian Keith as Gloucester Island Police Chief Link Mattocks from The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming) is not eligible for this list. We all have to make sacrifices. There are also no FBI or CIA agents on this list, which rules out Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality and Walter Matthau in Hopscotch, the latter of whom dresses up up half the time but other times works on his plans in his pajamas. Speaking of our Lord and Savior Walter Matthau, I thought long and hard about whether his Lt. Zachary Garber from The Taking of Pelham 123 counts… and although he wears that objectionable shade of yellow and works for the MTA (a falling apart, filthy institution by its very nature), I don’t think he comes across as scruffy? I wish Matthau were on this list. I thought about The Laughing Detective, I thought about Mirage, but I couldn’t shoehorn him in, and for this, I am profoundly sorry. This list is not ranked, because how would I even do that? Least scruffy to most scruffy? Get outta here. Jim Rockford, The Rockford Files James Garner’s PI Jim cleans up pretty good, but he also leads a very casual existence, living in a trailer on the beach. And if you live in a trailer on the beach, you’re going on this list. Mike Ehrmentraut, Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul Former police officer Mike Ehrmentraut (Jonathan Banks) works as a PI/fixer/hitman for Gus Fring in Breaking Bad. In Walt’s words, he’s a “grunting, dead-eyed cretin.” He’s a rough, no-frills, not particularly fashionable middle-aged guy. Not nearly as rumpled as some of the other guys on this list, but you know if he had his way, he’d be standing out in his yard, wearing his robe, hanging out with his chickens, making sure Wendell the rooster has enough to eat. Vera Stanhope, Vera The great Brenda Blethyn stars in as DCI Vera Stanhope in this long-running British series based on the Vera books by Ann Cleeves. Our girl is cranky and can even be a bit mean. All the descriptions say she’s disheveled, but I don’t think it’s it. As Brenda has said, “Sometimes, people say to me ‘oh you wouldn’t be able to wear those clothes going to work’… they’re all good clothes that Vera wears! She just doesn’t look in a mirror. She doesn’t see if this blouse goes with that skirt.” I agree! Also, people, it’s not a crime to care very little about appearances. Jake Peralta, Brooklyn Nine Nine Scully and Hitchcock are the precinct layabouts in this cop comedy TV series, but they are one-note background characters. Andy Samberg’s Jake, our protagonist, is the more significant slob. He’s really clever… but he’s also a buffoon with mice living in his desk. Shaggy, Scooby Do, Where Are You? I mean, it’s in his name. He wears an oversized t-shirt to every investigation, never shaves the peach fuzz, slacks off on every work outing to make sandwiches. Everett Backstrom, Backstrom Rainn Wilson’s Backstrom arrived to TV on the swells of the House craze. Although the show was based on Leif G.W. Persson’s darkly comic Bäckström books, about a cantankerous Scandinavian police detective, it hit American TV just when executives were wondering if what the people were wanted were shows that asked “what if a genius was also an asshole?” The show lasted one season, not just because audiences didn’t want the answer to that question, but probably because Backstrom’s issues aren’t just that he’s unkempt and crabby, but also that he’s racist! Giving us a protagonist whose bigotry is included in an umbrella of eccentricities is… bad. I don’t care to watch him redeem himself through crime-solving. So, yeah, he’s scuzzy enough for this list… too yucky to watch. Hank Dolworth, Terriers Ex-cop and unlicensed PI Hank Dolworth (Donal Logue) doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of guy who remembers to shower every day. But he’s got a lot of other things on his mind! Sam, Under the Silver Lake Andrew Garfield’s slacker Sam is the prototypical amateur detective of this category. He’s slovenly, more interested than getting high than paying his rent, but grows motivated to figure out what happened to his neighbor Sarah, who has gone missing. The fact that he’s a conspiracy nut doesn’t lend him credibility, and neither does the fact that he barely takes care of himself. Shawn Spencer, Psych Of all the detectives ever brought to film and TV, perhaps Shawn Spencer (James Roday Rodriguez), Santa Barbara’s fake psychic private detective, is the one who makes stuff up the most. Disorganized, immature, irreverent, and outright silly, Shawn is a man-child with an eidetic memory who has had years of practice honing it, thanks to training from his tough former-cop father. The scrimshanker Shawn is allergic to hard work and flies by the seat of his pants in every aspect of his life, including his housing situation (we find out a few seasons in that he lives in an abandoned dry cleaning facility). Unlike most of the other sleuths on this list, he even plays fast and loose when solving crimes. (He pretends he’s a psychic; really, he just observes or remembers things no one else observes or remembers, and solves crimes faster than the cops, and then fakes visions to get the credit/paycheck.) To Shawn, almost nothing is sacred. Brendan, Brick Part of Brendan’s scruffiness is the fact that he’s a high-schooler. Rian Johnson’s crackerjack 2005 neo-noir set among a group of teenagers in California asks young people to embody hardboiled tropes, and pulls it off to great success. Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Brendan starts off more casual than untidy, but his investigation starts wrecking his body, leaving him… a bit messy, quite bloody. Travis McGee, Darker Than Amber Rod Taylor’s chill Travis McGee is maybe a little more polished than his literary counterpart in John D. MacDonald’s 1966 novel of the same name. Maybe. He’s a beach bum, a chivalrous bachelor who is also a libertine. But like, Rockford Beach Rules apply! If you live on a boat, you’re a little bit scruffy! Unless it’s a yacht. (It’s not a yacht.) Charlie Cale, Poker Face All hail Charlie Cale! The heroine of Rian Johnson’s splendid case-of-the-week mystery series Poker Face is a paragon of this character type. Though she is extra tousled and wrinkled due to her circumstances (being on the run and off the grid—living out of her car and taking up short-lived odd jobs in towns she visits), she’s still fairly relaxed when we meet her in the pilot episode. At this point, she lives in a trailer in the desert, sits outside in a lawn chair and sips beer for breakfast, goes to the Liquor Castle in the middle of the day in a pajama set and bathrobe. Right on. Jim Hopper, Stranger Things Hopper is technically a police chief (and therefore a cop), but he does detective work, and for a while, that’s his primary function in the show. So I’m violating one of my rules from the intro (the no regular-cop rule), but for good reason. He’s a real “stares into the cereal bowl for an hour” kind of guy, the epitome of the vibe I’m trying to capture with this list. Not lethargic so much as exhausted or annoyed, his appearance is far more slapdash than his investigative work. Doc Sportello, Inherent Vice Doc, the protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, looks into the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend. But he (Joaquin Phoenix) is in a weed-fueled haze most of the time, because this is California in the ’70s. Nonchalant, easygoing, and sporting thick mutton chops, Doc is a low-key kind of guy, who can rev up a bit when he’s on the trail of something big. But he’s also cool to lay down and trip out. Shannon Mullins, The Heat In The Heat, Melissa McCarthy’s Detective Shannon Mullins is a messy, sweatpants-wearing Boston detective with a creatively vulgar vocabulary. She means well, and she’s damn good at her job. But also says asks things like, “You want something to eat? I didn’t finish my submarine sandwich from the other day.” So. The Dude, The Big Lebowski The Dude isn’t the best detective on this list. Actually, he’s probably the worst. And he’s probably the most slatternly, definitely the laziest. Jeffrey “The Dude” (Jeff Bridges Lebowski) wanders through Los Angeles in a t-shirt and jelly sandals, drinking white Russians and getting dragged into a hard-boiled mystery that’s out of his depth, after being mistaken for a local tycoon who shares his name. When he winds up becoming a detective of sorts, working for the man he was mistaken for, he’s asked, of his hoodie and shorts, “You don’t go out looking for a job dressed like that? On a weekday?” Yes he does. He does what he wants: “bowl, drive around, [have], the occasional acid flashback.” The Dude abides. The Dude abides. Philip Marlowe, The Long Goodbye Elliott Gould’s mussed-up Philip Marlowe is a far cry from the slightly vain, courtly, sardonic detective from Raymond Chandler’s books (especially the early ones), but he’s just as compelling. (Like Rockford, he can clean up really well when he needs to, and spends a bunch of the moving looking pretty slick.) Laconic, a little bit jaded, keeping very odd hours, and always with a cigarette dangling from his lips, this Marlowe perfectly blends the vague dreaminess of LA with the existentialism of the 70s. Columbo, Columbo Peter Falk’s unassuming, trench-coated, cigar-chomping detective is the granddaddy of them all. Unassuming, rumpled, and twinkly-eyed, Lt. Columbo uses his naturally unimposing, easily-underestimated vibe to his advantage, calmly finding clues and solving the mystery in his head, letting the villains think they’ve gotten away with something, before shocking them with the linchpin. “Oh, just one more thing…” and boom. Case closed. View the full article

After many showers (so, so many showers) and much pointlessness, season 27 of The Bachelor is over. So who “won?” I don’t care. Anyway, thanks to some comments from last week’s post, I found Pudding a shirt that covers the spot she isn’t supposed to lick so she doesn’t need a cone. She doesn’t love the shirt, either, but it’s better. She’s still going to poop in my shoes. We open in a studio in LA where Jesse announces this is a three hour episode. FUCK MY LIFE. They announce that Charity will be the next Bachelorette. Then Jesse brings out Ariel, who was eliminated last week. He comments on how composed she was when Zach broke up with her. That’s because she was there for the free wine, travel and friendship my dude. No one is there for Zach, not even the Kohler shower head. They bring Zach out. “I’m sure you just got done with your thirty minute shower scene,” she says. click for me She tells Zach she’s hurt that he was honest about Fantasy Suites with Gabi and Kaity, but not her (Zach had said he wasn’t going to sleep with anyone, but slept with Gabi and disclosed that to Kaity). She doesn’t like that she learned about things from watching the show. She also says by taking sex off the table, he made the entire week about sex. Then we go back to Krabi, Thailand. I shit you not, Zach takes a shower. WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH THIS? After he’s dried and dressed, he meets his family. We cut to Gabi who says she won’t meet Zach’s family unless the two of them talk first. She says she still feels like she’s wearing a scarlet letter (because she slept with him during Fantasy Suites and he made a big-ass deal about it ). Zach has been saying he feels disappointed in himself for having sex, and Gabi explains how that shames her. Pudding: Don’t worry Gabi, I’ll poop in his shoes, too. Or in his shower. Ed. note: I vote both. Zach tells her that he loves her and then they go meet his family. Zach’s dad tells Gabi that his relationship with his wife (Zach’s mom) wasn’t based on them having a great time, it was based on them having a horrible time. I…weird advice. He says that Zach was really sick when he was born and they weren’t sure that they would survive infancy. One of Zach’s sisters looks like she’d rather be anywhere than on this show. Next up is Kaity. She reveals that she’s afraid Zach will leave her like “all of the men in my life do.” Zach’s mom brings up the fact that there’s another woman still there, and Kaity breaks down crying and his mom comforts her. Then Zach’s dad pivots from “my relationship with your mother was horrible” to how his wife is his best friend, which makes more sense to me. Then he says, “It’s just my belief that relationships aren’t made in good times. They’re just not.” I get where he’s going with this, but it also seems like dude has things to process. Then it’s time for the final dates. First up Zach and Kaity go to a national park. He’s wearing an awful shirt. They go for a hike and then during dinner Kaity tells him she loves him. For their date, Gabi and Zach go horse back riding on the beach. HORSE BUDGET! Gabi tells him she didn’t know he almost died when he was born, and Zach says, “Oh, they brought that up, huh?” Nice chat. They have a lot of awkward silences in their conversation. Then Zach says he has a tough decision to make, he doesn’t know where he’ll be in two days, but he feels strongly that the outcome will be good…for him. Gabi starts to cry and tells the camera she has a gut feeling it won’t be a good outcome for her. Her tears seem kinda fake though, and Pudding and I think that she’s secretly relieved she doesn’t have to be engaged to this bozo. During dinner Zach tells her he doesn’t have “a decisive feeling.” “None of my fears were relieved,” Gabi tells the camera. At this point, BTW, Zach has told Kaity he loves her, but not Gabi. Apparently we’re skipping the Neil Lane, picking out the diamond bit, because after a commercial, Zach is standing on the beach where he’s going to propose. Gabi arrives first. She gets out of the SUV and steps into a puddle. She scolds the driver, “When it actually matters, when Kaity gets here, do not do that to her.” This isn’t said in a shitty way, but like she wants Kaity to have a really nice engagement. I think these women like each other more than either of them like Zach. Jesse asks Gabi how she’s feeling and she says, “I just know what’s about to happen.” Zach lets loose with some verbal diarrhea about their “journey.” He says, “Falling in love with you has made me a better man, but…” “You don’t have to say it,” Gabi says. “As much as I’ve been falling in love with you,” he starts. “I don’t want to hear it,” she says. “You deserve a man who picks you first every day,” he says. “Can you stop,” she begs. DUDE TAKE A HINT. Gabi says that he knew and should have told her sooner. She tells him Kaity is an amazing person. “I know you don’t want to hear this,” he says, then keeps talking, “but you have part of my heart.” Pudding: Can it be the part that stops him from talking? STOP TALKING! Click for Pudding and I In the SUV, Gabi says, “That was fucking humiliating. I’ve been strung along this entire time for what? What really pisses me off is, I fucking knew.” We cut back to the studio where Gabi is sitting with Jesse. She tells him that she didn’t think Zach would make her go through the last day of interviews and prep if he wasn’t going to propose. But like… that’s how the show works, so… Regarding the fact that they had sex, she says, “It’s extremely violating that Bachelor nation knows everything.” Then they bring out Zach. She tells the audience that Zach had told her what happened in the Fantasy Suite was “just between us,” so she was blindsided when he divulged that they had sex and she felt ashamed. She also points out that he only cared about telling Kaity and not Ariel. “I get that sex sells, but now I’ve become a narrative,” she says tearfully. Zach makes noises but doesn’t offer a genuine apology. Then we cut back to Thailand, where the driver doesn’t park in front of a puddle this time. She walks out to the beach and tells Zach she’s in love with him, and that if it’s not him, “It’s not anyone.” Zach says he loves her and proposes to her. She accepts. Back in the studio, Kaity comes out to meet Zach and Jesse. We learn they’re moving in together in Austin, but haven’t started planning a wedding. Kaity says she’s still friends with Gabi and Ariel. The last five minutes are a preview of Charity as the The Bachelorette. What did you think of this season? Ed note: As part of our new sticker collection, we have a limited-edition sticker of Pudding which supports The Pawffee Shop cat rescue cafe: Product successfully added to your cart.View Cart Pudding is the Final Rose Sticker $5.00 You can find this sticker and the others in our store! View the full article

“Harry squared his shoulders. “I am now going to step into the wardrobe,” he told her. “I will, shortly after, step back out of the wardrobe, which is, after all, just a wardrobe. And then you can go tell the goddamn world that Underhill is just in books and I am not their free ticket to fantasyland.” Have you ever wanted to step into your favourite fictional world? Middle Earth, Earthsea, Narnia? Well just imagine if you could… Meet Harry Bodie, a children’s BBC presenter, one who is failing at his job and pretty much all other aspects of life. Harry wants to be taken more seriously, he wants a big role, a more serious and prestigious acting career. Well, when Harry is invited on an episode of How Even Me?, a television show which uncovers family history, he thinks the exposure might land him the perfect role, that he may finally have a moment to shine. And… well he does, just not for the right reasons. When some long hidden family secrets are uncovered it completely destroys any credibility Harry had in the television industry. You see, his grandmother is well known for her popular Underhill book series, and with those now being brought back into the limelight, it has bizarre consequences for our Harry. What if Underhill is real and the world isn’t idyllic but in fact a nightmare? What if everything there is decaying and falling apart? And what if the characters from that world begin stalking you? And Put Away Childish Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky marries together portal fantasy with sci-fi and a dash of horror to deliver a laugh-out-loud, gloriously entertaining read. This novella is one you’ll wish was far longer. Tchaikovsky spends quite a few chapters building up Harry’s character. We learn of his loneliness, his few ambitions and we gain a general sense that Harry lacks any real purpose in life. Yet his family, particularly his grandmother, has a more colourful past than he ever knew of and when he begins to uncover the truth his life takes a rather chaotic turn. It all starts when the faun, Timon, from the Underhill books pays him a visit. Except Timon is nothing like how his grandmother had written him, he’s actually far more monstrous. This novella is where the fandom’s dream comes true. Where the imaginary places we read, the places we loved and longed to escape to are real and come to life. Yet Tchaikovsky turns that ideal on its head, he presents to us the notion that these worlds might not be as pleasant as we remember them, that they too change and decay over time, that they may not in fact be the Disney version but the Brothers Grimm one. Harry’s reaction to Timon’s appearance and the utterly bonkers events which follow is absolutely hilarious, he just cannot fathom what he has done to deserve this monumental fuck-up! “Harry ran. Just away, because he had no other reference, He ran downhill, at first because it was all downhill, and then because downhill should have been easier, except of course that was where the drifting non-snow had collected deepest. But he ran, and kept running, and the dreadful voice of Gombles resounded behind him. Perhaps he heard the shouts of Timon and Hulder, too, but right then he reckoned that was a them problem and not a him problem. He had his own problems, not least of which was discovering that not only was Underhill real, it was a bloody nightmare of epic proportions.” Along the way we meet some mysterious characters such as the shady Underlings and Seitchman, who became one of my favourites, but we also meet some extremely bizarre fantastical characters, who are indeed quite horrific on first appearances, though I expected no less from Tchaikovsky. The contemporary setting was also a clever device to show how Harry was going through quite a terrifying, surreal crisis and no world offered any kind of escape, no world made any sense. Harry’s journey takes place when the plague (whose name I will not utter here) changed everyone’s way of life, and when Harry finds himself in Underhill then later returns to our world of deserted streets, empty buildings and mask wearing, he questions whether he’d come back to the right world. I laughed so much here as it completely mirrored my own confusion at the time of the epidemic. Had I stepped into one of those dystopian worlds I’d so often read of? Was I facing an apocalypse?! “You think other books might be… I mean, for all we know, Aslan’s in a zoo enclosure at Longleat and Frodo works the night shift at an Amazon warehouse.” However, beneath the surface of this highly entertaining and absolutely bat-shit crazy story is the deeper journey of a man who goes through a monumental change in his life, whose world is literally turned upside down, but he comes out all the better for it. Without giving away too much, Harry’s life is ultimately renewed as he gains agency. And Put Away Childish Things is a story of resilience in a surreal world and the search for meaning. It is Narnia on a much darker, comical and riotous scale. ARC provided by Jess at Rebellion/Solaris Publication in exchange for an honest review. Thank you so much for the review copy! And Put Away Childish Things is out now! The post AND PUT AWAY CHILDISH THINGS by Adrian Tchaikovsky (BOOK REVIEW) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article

Today, we welcome back author, book coach, and actress Mary McDonough. Mary has kindly agreed to write a series of book-coach-related posts for us–because sometimes (often? in nearly every instance?) it takes more than a single action to deal with the boulders you’ll meet on the road to publication. Welcome, Mary! I feel blocked about writing my second piece for Writer Unboxed. While I did poop scoop today (click HERE if you missed my first article), I’m finding all kinds of other reasons not to write. Why, I ask myself? I’ve known what I want to write about since I finished the first article. But here I sit, facing an obstacle course that is holding me back. Perfect how the Universe brought me these blocks to consider as I write this article. Coach, coach thyself! My last article addressed the negative voice that sometimes, or always, takes over our headspace. The inner critic who paralyzes us and crushes our creative spirit. The “You can’t have that; you can’t do that” voice. I call it the No-No Voice. It leads us away from writing. For me, I tend to look at all the shiny things in my office instead of writing. Look, is that a woodpecker tapping into the facia on my house? What a lovely rose quartz crystal. Maybe I should hold it for a while. Meditation is always good. Oh yeah, writing the article. Focus, Mary. I often hear my clients say, “So now that I KNOW about the No-No Voice, how do I stop it?” They want to get rid of it immediately and forever. Some clients want to strangle or kill it like a character in their books, which is great because here comes the creative instinct! But I encourage a deeper dive into why these obstacles are there in the first place, so we can learn to move past or around them, because they do come back. I’ve even challenged people to use the blocks to their advantage. “But how?” they say. At times in my life, I’ve been convinced the blocks on my path stop me from getting where I want to be. It’s all their fault and now I’m stuck. When this happens, I can usually see stuck-ness all over my life. In my emotions, my relationships, driving to the market with stupid drivers all around me. Even my dog works my last nerve. It can’t be the dog’s fault. When I’m stuck in my writing, I see stuck-ness all over there, too. My plot feels stuck, my characters are stuck, my career is stuck. I just can’t get myself to enter the course to get back on track. I watch the blocks grow into boulders and then rise into unsurmountable mountains. Other times I see quicksand waiting to get me if I move forward. I see no way to get back on my writing road. This is when the No-No Voice can jump in and have a field day. The narrative can sound like this: I can only write what I know. I have a deadline. I feel pressure. I’m not that good. My story sucks. I can’t write outside my gender, race, religion, age, or experience. I haven’t lived or researched enough. I’m too… whatever. You know the stories you harangue yourself with. So what do you DO about it? How can you get out of your own way? Identify, Name, Release I thought I’d share an exercise I do with my clients to identify the blocks, name them, and find ways to release them, or even befriend them. My clients usually say: “Befriend them? Are you crazy? I hate them. I want them gone, out of my life and writing!” Notice if you feel the same. What resistance do you have about your blocks? Where does that resistance live in your body? Make a note of it. The exercise is about taking a pause, a breath, and trusting what comes in. Addressing what the obstacles really are is key. Try this exercise if you like. Step 1: Visualize Your Course. Get comfortable. Close your eyes if that works for you. Now, imagine your obstacle course in your mind’s eye. What exactly are those boulders, blocks, or quicksand on your path? Really see them. Step 2: Put Them to Paper. Write them out. Draw them on paper. (If the No-No Voice just started telling you that you’re no artist, make the drawings simple stick figures, circles, or squares.) Draw your road with everything in your way. Step 3: Name the Obstacle. It might be a person’s name, a situation, or an emotion (e.g. Carol, The Disapproving Teacher; Money Crisis; Fear etc.). Step 4: Examine Your Artwork. How does it make you feel? What emotions are attached to the blocks? What judgements do you hold about them? How big are the different blocks? Are they colorful children’s blocks, or giant impassable boulders? As you look at them, do they change? Are any blocks left over from childhood or useless now? Obsolete belief systems are like old raisins. Deflated and wrinkled. Now ask yourself who put them there. How do they serve you? Do the blocks protect you, or make you a better person? A hard worker who is deserving. Or maybe they motivate you in some way. The old hot poker. Step 5: Interact with Your Blocks. Imagine holding them. How does that make you feel? Good? Or like a failure? Can you coexist? Or do you want to remove them? Will you bring in earth movers, or walk around them? Would you like to dissolve or use dynamite on them? Imagine them sprouting legs and walking away on their own or tell them to get out of your way. Play around with whatever works for you. Remember no one gets to be wrong here. We are all just exploring possibilities. Step 6: Forge a Plan. Make a list of the blocks you want to release along with five actions you can do to let them go. Then take the action to implement your learning. (One client of mine identified her block as a critical teacher she’d had in grade school. I encouraged her to write a letter to the “teacher” from her adult self, that included all the negative things the teacher said to her. Then to write about how it blocked her life today. I gave her permission to tell/yell at the teacher. Really get it out. I asked her to read it as many times as she needed, then burn it. Let it go into the flame.) If you believe these blocks are really in your way, you may have more work to do with them. Maybe a deeper dive into their origins. Sometimes acknowledging where they originated is not enough. There’s personal work to be done around releasing their hold on us today. I think the solution also lies in reconnecting with our inner creative self. One way to do that is to clear whatever blocks us from attaining goals, or having our creative dreams materialize. Pause and take time to work on the obstacles, then reconnect to your knowing voice. Listen to your highest creative self that started you on the writing path to begin with. The problem may not be solved immediately. Some solutions take time; some are easier. Some involve giving yourself permission to take a pause in your writing. Taking a pause was key for me in this instance. While I was writing this piece, I noticed that as I stared at my keyboard with my hands in my lap, the light would fade from behind the keys. It dimmed when my fingers were away. The keyboard paused when I did. When I moved my hands back over the keyboard, it would magically light up again, as if illuminating the path for my fingers to type. I didn’t even have to touch the keys for them to glow. So I watched the light behind my keyboard fade in and out as many times as I needed to write this piece. My keyboard waited past my thoughts, distractions, fears, and then shone through my reengagement. Then I realized, maybe the blocks create the same kind of pause for us. A way for us to take stock and explore new options, and not a quicksand moment after all. What blocks are the biggest for you? Do you find that you create them for yourself from you own deepest beliefs about writing, or are they learned from others? What helps you get past the blocks in your way? 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Upon assuming power, the leader of the Bolshevik Party, Vladimir Lenin, envisioned the film industry as a valuable resource to promote class consciousness and worker solidarity in support of the new regime and communist ideology, famously stating that “the cinema is for us the most important of all the arts.” In that sense, his vision was entirely utilitarian. Foreign imports and new entertainment films meant to raise revenue, and other genres included depictions of people from all countries in order to inculcate the Soviet people with a genuine sense of internationalism. However, for the first half of its existence, horror films were taboo in the Soviet Union. One reason is that Anatoly Lunacharsky, as People’s Commissar for Education, advocated for melodrama as an art form to combine education with entertainment for the people. Even though he co-authored the 1925 film Medvezh’ia Svad’ba [The Bear’s Wedding], broadly categorized as horror, its plot and techniques borrowed from pre-revolutionary cinema more than offering something new, and the horror aspect was dialed down. Another reason is simply ideological: toward the end of the New Economic Policy, which permitted a limited market economy, and particularly in the early years of Stalin’s ascent, major film makers perceived horror as overly fixated on personal psychology and ignorant of class and social issues. The superstitions and promotion of the paranormal not only pushed against the Soviet stress on atheism, but it also promoted violent and reactionary ideas that denigrated the effort to construct a new, future oriented, socialist society built on mutuality and socialist realism. A vampire’s aversion to the cross meant nothing in a society that did not officially believe in sanctity. Horror did not really re-enter into conversation until the late 1960s, with the release of Viy in 1967. With the state’s turn toward satisfying consumer production after World War Two, the film industry gave more attention to commercial considerations over rigged ideological orthodoxy. The ninth five-year plan of 1971-1975 clarified the economic failings of the country, and the State Committee for Cinematography sought to exploit the emergence of consumer culture to raise money. Part of that strategy involved importing foreign films, giving domestic producers competition, and improving the creative output of Soviet films. This led to a veritable boom in film production, but not all films were treated equal: some were released for popular audiences, and others were shelved for crossing ideological boundaries. The film industry had its hands tied by a realist knot. Thus, what makes the period of glasnost [openness] and perestroika [restructuring] so integral to the history of Soviet cinema, and yet so paradoxical, is that it saw initiative for industry change emanate from the Party, rather than from the industry itself—the knot was finally released. Granted, members of the film industry sought and lobbied for changes well before perestroika but change only came when the regime considered it integral to its reconstruction campaign. The process of cultural decentralization, initiated under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership, released pressure from decades of suppressed creative talent and Party ideological control. Films that struggled to make waves before perestroika, like surrealist films and those seriously addressing youth issues, finally broke through after 1986. In May of that year, at the 5th Congress of the Filmmakers Union, three-fourths of the leadership was replaced by progressive members not promoted simply by Party bureaucrats. When controversial director Elem Klimov (who’s first film [Welcome, or No Trespassing] was banned as an insult to the USSR in 1964) became head of the Union, replacing the conservative Lev Kulidzhanov (led 1965-1986), spectators hailed it as a triumph, even though the decision was still heavily influenced from above. Major studios like Lenfilm also sought to reinvigorate the studio with artists and directors to encourage personal initiative in creating innovative motion pictures, which, it managed to do with horror films like P’iushchie krov’ [Bloodsuckers]. This new progressive leadership paved the way for the diversification of the Soviet film catalog, opening the possibility for genuine horror films. Not everyone liked the new developments, with one conservative film commentator noting that “the [horror] genre has become fashionable because irrationalism has become fashionable.” My book, Fear Before the Fall: Horror Films in the Late Soviet Union, uses horror films from 1967-1992 to reflect on the course of Soviet history. Beginning with the 1967 film Viy, which used a folk story by imperial-era writer Nikolai Gogol to reflect broadly on the moral bankruptcy and gluttony of consumerism, I trace several fears and anxieties that weighed on the minds of late-Soviet people. Vampires that signify generational tensions and female promiscuity, technology that heralds the apocalypse, and werewolves that signify the permanence of transformation are just a few of the themes that emerge from the study. Horror more than any other genre strikes at the heart of our fears as humans and thus provides a lucid framework for studying late Soviet culture and society. Horror films are perhaps the most capable of demonstrating the power of the moving imagine because they intentionally manipulate the emotions and experiences of the viewer by toying with something psychologically innate in human nature—fear of death, dying, change, and the unknown. The primary question of my book then is precisely what scared people most in the late Soviet Union? *** View the full article

In visions of the dark night I have dreamed of joy departed— But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me broken-hearted. –A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe Even before relocating to Baltimore in the summer of 1978, I was an Edgar Allan Poe fan. In my Harlem boyhood I’d seen the Roger Corman films on Creature Features, devoured The Raven when I was twelve and drooled over the drawings Berni Wrightson did for his brilliant “Black Cat” adaptation in Creepy #62 ” (Warren, 1974). Though I’d visited Aunt Charlotte and cousin Marie in Baltimore a few times since childhood, I never dreamed that the city where my literary hero died in 1849 under mysterious circumstances would become my new home. Two weeks after getting off the Greyhound bus at the old Howard Street depot, I was the new kid at Northwestern High. It was my sophomore year, but it had been a decade since I last attended public school. Shy and nervous, I spent most lunch periods in the library. Having gone to Catholic school for years, I wasn’t used to the unruliness of the cafeteria or the smoking in the courtyard; the library provided the perfect reprieve from the rowdiness. Besides me and the two librarians, the large room was usually empty. Sitting near the windows, I enjoyed the solitude and read books, magazines or comics I brought from home. Having turned fifteen that June, I was into the weird fantasy of Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury as well as Heavy Metal comics drawn by Jeff Jones, Howard Chaykin and Richard Corben. After Christmas break a new face appeared. The interloping stranger was a pretty light-skinned black girl who looked nerdy in comparison to the very grown-up looking female students at our school. She was ghostly pale as though sunshine had never been her friend. Sneaking glances over the tops of our books, we saw each other every day, but were both too shy to speak. While a few of my best friends were girls, I didn’t know how to approach strangers of the opposite sex without stuttering and sputtering. Finally, after two weeks of silly behavior, I pulled together enough nerve to approach her. Extending my hand across the table, I said, “Hi. I’m Michael.” Slowly she looked up from her paperback and smiled. Dressed in jeans, a thick flannel shirt and red sneakers, there was a small beauty mark on her left cheek that was darker than her skin and shaped like a discolored cloud. Taking my hand, she gently shook. “I’m Linda.” On the table was her army knapsack covered with punk rock group patches. I slid into the chair on the other side. “Are you new here too?” She nodded. “Yeah, I went to private school before.” “Dig that. I moved here from New York in August. I don’t know why, but I’m sure there was a reason. Parents aren’t always big on explaining things.” Linda grinned as though she understood my dilemma perfectly. “Where do you live?” “I’m way down on Monroe Street near North Avenue.” “That’s far.” “I use my aunt’s address. She didn’t want me to go to Douglass. Where do you stay?” “My mom and I live on the other side of Reisterstown Road, down the block from Lake Trout place. We’ve been there for a while.” Linda and I talked until the bell rang. My next class was English, taught by Mrs. Sommer, where we were in the middle of reading Beowulf. As much as I hated pulling myself away from my new friend, that was my favorite class. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Same Bat time, same Bat station.” Again she smiled, but I felt like a goof the rest of the day for quoting the tagline from Batman. Thankfully, Linda didn’t mind my corniness and, in the days that followed we became fast friends. After school we often went to the Reisterstown Plaza Mall and then I’d walk her half way home, though she insisted that I not escort her to the door. “I don’t want my mother to start bugging out if she sees me with a boy,” Linda explained. “She thinks all men are dogs, even if they’re just boys.” Most mornings, I couldn’t wait to get to school. First period was journalism followed by homeroom, humanities and biology. I was a good student, but sometimes I drifted while staring out the window at the falling rain, a bag blowing across the grass or a slowly driven car cruising down the street; and I thought about Linda. Surprisingly, we didn’t share any classes nor did I run into her in the hallway. In retrospect that was strange, but at the time I was simply grateful to see her during our 12:30 to 1:15 lunch break. I usually arrived first and waited patiently for her. I had the same amount of cool as a frantic tail wagging dog awaiting its master. When she finally walked through the door I didn’t bark or lick her face, but my stupid smile said it all. Three months after we met, on an early spring April day, Linda came to the library wearing a long sleeved black t-shirt, jeans, sneakers and a denim jacket. Carrying her book-bag, she came over to our table. “Let’s get out of here and play hooky for the rest of the day,” she blurted as though the idea had just come to her. When I went to Catholic school a disappearance from class was noted and followed up with a phone call to your parents. Yet, free from more than the mandatory uniform, those rules no longer applied. “I’d like that,” I said. “I’ve never done that before.” After stashing our textbooks in my locker, we left by the side door and kept walking until we reached the bus stop. “Now what?” I asked. Linda laughed. “I’m going to surprise you?” We boarded the bus that came and walked to the rear. Sitting next to one other, Linda gave my hand a squeeze. “You can’t cut class with everybody, but I feel safe with you.” Embarrassed, I mumbled “thank you,” and quickly turned away. We transferred to another bus at Park Heights and Cold Spring. Minutes later Linda asked, “Have you ever taken acid.” “Acid? Me? Naw. Hell, I just smoked my first joint a year ago. I didn’t think I was ready for acid.” “I’ve been doing it for about a year. It’s great.” “I once talked about it with my uncle who told me he used to trip when he was in Vietnam. He said, ‘Just try not to bring too much heaviness into it and you’ll be cool.’ I trust his knowledge.” Linda reached into her pocket and pulled out a brown pill bottle. After snapping open the lid, she shook out two tabs imprinted with Mickey Mouse clad in his Fantasia/Sorcerer’s Apprentice outfit. “Let’s trip together,” she said. “Open your mouth.” While I’d never opened my mouth for anyone except my doctor, I closed my eyes and stuck out my tongue. Instantly I tasted the bitterness of the chemically laced paper as it dissolved, taking me closer to Wonderland, Oz or whatever mystical world awaited. In my brain the opening riffs to “Purple Haze” played. Having seen the LSD episodes of Dragnet, where drugs resulted in the taker doing nutty things while hallucinating, I was scared, but I kept that fear to myself. Fifteen minutes later, Linda reached up and rang the bell. We got off and began to walk. “You ok?” she asked “I’m fine. Just waiting for the ball to drop; where are we headed?” Linda pointed across the street to a building that had a fancy sky blue sign that read Ice Land. “We’re going skating? I haven’t been ice skating in years. My mom used to take me, but it’s been awhile.” Seconds later, as I stepped through the door behind Linda, I felt the first tingle of highness. The rink had just opened and we were the first customers. We rented skates and went to the changing area. From where we sat there was a clear view of the rink where there were strobe lights overhead and a DJ deep into spinning disco grooves and creating a soundtrack for the skaters. “I’m not really into that kind of music, but it sounds good when I’m in here,” Linda said. As we stepped onto the ice, the acid kicked in like Bruce Lee’s Chinese Connection as Foxy’s soulful pop “Get Off” pumped from the speakers. The colorful strobe lights were intense, but we were never far apart. Usually I was afraid of falling and shattering my nose on the ice as blood stained the smoothness, but the acid gave me the courage of Dorothy Hamill. For the next two hours we had the Ice Land to ourselves, but when a local hockey team came in at four o’clock we knew it was time to leave. “Let’s go to the liquor store and get a bottle of Jack Daniels,” Linda suggested. “Then I have someplace cool for us to go.” Back then the drinking age was eighteen and no one ever asked for ID. We got the booze and two plastic cups from a spot called People’s Liquors. Trekking a few blocks, we reached a wooded area and Linda led me to a dirt path that we followed for half a mile as the sun began to set. There were many trees with skeletal branches reaching out in the darkness. Most were bare, but a few were beginning to bloom. “I’m glad you’re not a crazy killer,” I joked. “How do you know I’m not?” “Don’t joke like that, I scare easily.” Linda laughed wickedly. Suddenly she stopped walking. “We’re here.” To the left of me was a waterfall running into a small lake. The woods were dark except for the area where the full moon shone on the water. A dead tree lay on the bank. We sat down and poured ourselves a drink. “This is my special place. I used to come out here a lot when I ran away from home. You’re the only person I’ve ever brought out here.” We toasted and gulped the brown liquid that burned as it went down. In the darkness frogs, owls and other nocturnal creatures made their night noises. Gently, I held her hand before extending that into a hug. I spotted a deer standing behind the trees staring at us. It was a protective look as though the animal was prepared to defend Linda if necessary. Though I was nervous, I moved closer, kissed her soft lips and tasted heaven. A half hour later we sat on a bench at the bus stop. Linda smiled when a shopping cart pushing derelict stopped in front of us. “You missed the last bus,” he said. A strong smell wafted from the man’s body. Dude smelled like death. “Thank you, man,” I replied. Turning to Linda, I shrugged. “I suppose we can walk,” she offered. “Walk?” “Yeah, you know…one foot in front of the other.” We started on a journey that took almost two hours. Though I had no idea how to get to her house, Linda seemed to have taken that before. Many of those blocks had dim street lights. There were bikes discarded on lawns and the murmur of voices, both real and on television, were heard behind the doors and windows. Linda and I talked about many things including our mutual love for the Harry Nilsson cartoon The Point, our difficulty interpreting Shakespeare and the general spookiness of Baltimore, where, while standing on a Charles Street bus stop weeks before, a large bat flew from the window of an abandoned building and into my face. “Then there are the rats. I’ve seen rats the size of cats. It doesn’t help with all the digging up of the streets the city is doing to build the subway.” “I’m sure there are rats in New York.” “Maybe. I’ve never seen one there. Our subways are already built.” “So they are.” “Well, in the City of Poe I should expect creepy, strange stuff to happen here.” “Baltimore is an old place,” Linda countered. “Like Nina Simone sang, it’s a ‘hard town by the sea.’ Do you know her music?” “Not really.” “Well, I’ll have to make you a mixtape then. Can’t have you going around not knowing Nina Simone’s music.” It was after midnight when we finally reached Lisa’s house. “What a night, huh.” We both laughed until a light clicked on in an upstairs room. “That’s my mom. You better get on the road before she comes down. Thank you for a wonderful day and a beautiful night.” With me living on the other side of town, there was another walk in my future. Luckily the streets of Baltimore were safer back then, the only thing I feared were the rats. A city of alleys, and I passed a thousand on my long journey home. I also walked by takeout Chinese spots, record shops, liquor stores and Cloverland Dairy. Above me the twinkling stars were bright. Reaching my Monroe Street row house at 2 AM, I stumbled up the marble stairs. Mom was already at the front door waiting and screaming about my lateness. “Do you think you’re grown? Do you think you’re grown?” she screamed. “You got me up at all hours of the night, could’ve at least called.” She slapped me on the shoulder. “Come on, mom, I’m tired. Can we do this tomorrow please.” “Don’t think you’re not going to school tomorrow either.” I went by and slowly dragged myself upstairs to my room. That night I laid in bed staring at the ceiling and thought about what could’ve happened, the possibilities of our friendship developing into something deeper. At school the next morning I sat in the library at lunch period awaiting Linda’s arrival, but she never showed. I was thrown off for the rest of the day. The following afternoon I went to Reisterstown Plaza to look for her at our regular haunts that included the record store and Waldenbooks. The last time we went book shopping, Linda bought the angst girl’s bible The Bell Jar. “I had an old copy that belonged to my mother, but the pages were so brittle they were turning to dust every time I turned them.” After coming up with zero, I bought a frozen yogurt with banana chips. Walking down Reisterstown Road, a bus passed and I spotted Linda sitting in the rear. Rushing to the front door, my heart raced. Making my way to the back, I looked around, but she wasn’t there. Sitting in the exact seat I thought Linda was occupying was a grammar school child whose big, sad eyes reminded me of a Keane kid. A wave of sadness overcame me as I exited through the back door. Upset, I walked for blocks muttering to myself and feeling a headache beating between my ears. I stopped at the House of Pancakes and had a big breakfast for dinner with a few cups of coffee. An hour later I boarded another bus. Not paying much attention, I was making my way to the back when someone said, “Michael.” I abruptly stopped walking, gazed in the direction of the voice and saw Linda sitting next to the window. “Are you going to sit down?” I sat next to her and looked at her face. There were dark circles beneath her eyes as though she hadn’t slept in a while. “Where have you been?” I’ve been going out of my mind looking for you.” “Really? I’m sorry. It’s been crazy around my house.” “Oh, shit. What happened?” “It’s nothing I can talk about right now.” She pulled a small writing tablet out of her purse, scribbled a number and gave me the paper. “I’m going to be staying with my grandma for a while. Call me over there.” For the next few minutes the silence between us was maddening. Suddenly Linda rang the bus bell and stood-up. “It was good seeing you, Michael. You call me, OK.” “I will. I promise.” However, while I kept my word, the phone number she gave me simply rang and rang and rang. It was as though she’d vanished, disappearing in a puff of smoke. Part of me began to question Linda’s existence. It wouldn’t be the first time a lonely boy created an imaginary friend. I cursed myself when I realized I didn’t even know her last name or address, which made looking for her a lost cause. A few weeks later I bought the Nina Simone album Baltimore and played the title track. I was surprised when, while reading the liner notes I saw that Randy Newman had written the song, which was first placed on his 1977 album Little Criminals; the same disc where the infamous hit single “Short People” also appeared. Newman’s version was more melodic, damn near as noir as the city itself. Meanwhile Simone’s upbeat reggae sound that was the idea of producer Creed Taylor mixed with soaring violin strings, was more hopeful. Even when she sang, “Oh, Baltimore, ain’t it hard just to live?/Oh, Baltimore, ain’t it hard just to live? Just to live,” I had a sense that things would get better. Though I didn’t know it at the time, the year that we met (1979), Jamaican production team Sly and Robbie produced a real reggae version of “Baltimore” for the Tamlins as well as a dark dub version. By the end of the school year I finally made a few friends, became less fearful of my surroundings and began hanging in the lunchroom more. The following semester, in 11th grade, I was down with several school cliques, had developed friendships with some of the popular kids as well as the arty (visual and band) crews, a few sci-fi nerds and even a few jocks. As for Linda, she never returned to Northwestern. It was as though she was some kind of spirit, a specter sent to help me transition into my new life in that old city. More than four decades later she’s still on my mind, especially when “Baltimore” pops-up on my Spotify playlist and I hear Nina Simone (or Jazmine Sullivan) singing about that broken winged bird, that, “Beat-up little seagull on a marble stair/trying to find the ocean, looking everywhere.” View the full article

If you’re like me, when reading a book you enjoy having tea or coffee at your side. The warmth is comforting. The flavor is soothing. Recently I’ve learned that there is such a thing as pairing the right tea or coffee with your reading material. Kid you not. According to the Tea and Ink Society, Darjeeling pairs well with a classic Sherlock Holmes story, and citrusy Constant Comment goes nicely with a cozy mystery. That said, have you ever thought of flipping this idea, as in which book should you pair with your beverage? Better yet, how about reading a mystery that has tea as part of the equation? When I created the Fairy Garden Mystery series, I set the main action at Open Your Imagination, a fairy garden shop in charming Carmel-by-the-Sea. The store is stocked with items to delight your inner child and inspire you to make your own fairy gardens. For a touch of whimsy, I decided that my protagonist would feature afternoon tea on Saturdays. After all, fairies love tea, and fairies populate my stories. Yes, real fairies. Fiona, a righteous fairy, lives in the ficus trees that populate the shop’s lovely covered patio. What is a righteous fairy? One who is supposed to help humans solve problems—in this case, Courtney Kelly, the owner of the shop. What does a fairy like to eat with her tea, you ask? Why, mallow, honey, and fruits, of course. What does Courtney serve at the teas? Scones, tea sandwiches, cookies, and brownies. Now, though Courtney can cook, she doesn’t make all the goodies. A baker who works at Sweet Treats, another shop in the courtyard where Open Your Imagination is located, helps out. At least once a month, Courtney stages a book club tea and most often selects a mystery for the attendees to enjoy. When I started writing mysteries, I didn’t have a clue I’d wind up writing culinary mysteries. I sure didn’t think I’d need to come up with recipes, but I’ve had the best time doing so, especially for the Fairy Garden Mysteries. What’s not to like about making sweet treats on a regular basis? FYI, because I need to eat gluten-free, I made the baker’s sister a celiac so I could include regular and gluten-free recipes in each book. If you want to spark your inner “tea-loving” child and wish to pair your mysteries with a good cuppa something, here are a number of mysteries that you might enjoy that feature teas, tea shops, baked goods, and more. In Laura Child’s Tea Shop Mysteries, Theodosia Browning is the owner of Charleston’s beloved Indigo Tea Shop. Patrons adore her blend of delicious tea tastings and Southern hospitality. And Theo enjoys the full-bodied flavor of a town steeped in history—and mystery. In Leslie Budewitz’s Spice Shop Mysteries, Pepper Reece, after leaving a dicey marriage and losing her job in a corporate crash, has found a new zest for life running a busy spice and tea shop in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. In Vicki Delany’s Tea by the Sea Mysteries, Lily Roberts, the proud proprietor and head pastry chef of Tea by the Sea, a traditional English tearoom on the picturesque bluffs of Cape Cod, has her hands full. But nothing keeps her busier than steering her sassy grandmother, Rose, away from trouble. What is a tea without a scone? Pair that with a book and voila. In Ellery Adams’s Secret, Book & Scone Society Mysteries, strangers flock to Miracle Springs hoping the natural hot springs can cure their ills, but they often find their way to Miracle Books, where, over a cup of tea and a fresh-baked “comfort” scone, they exchange their stories with owner Nora Pennington in return for a carefully chosen book. Karen Rose set her Daisy’s Tea Garden Mysteries in an old Victorian in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish Country. Daisy Swanson owns the tea garden, and she and her aunt serve soups, scones, and soothing teas to tourists and locals. A murder in their garden puts them in hot water. In Lauren Eliot’s brand new mystery series, Crystals & CuriosiTEAS, Shayleigh Myers, aka Shay, feels uneasy about settling into the small seaside town where she grew up on California’s Monterey Peninsula and taking over an estate bequeathed to her by a woman she barely knew. Her heightened senses—an empathic gift she’s had since childhood—goes into overdrive when she tours the woman’s eclectic tea and psychic shop. Savor the mystery! *** View the full article

A Toil and Trouble by Lisa Kröger October 25, 2022 · Quirk Books Nonfiction We are in the middle of a witchy pop culture wave (see: many, many recent witch-themed romance novels, for example). Toil and Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult looks at the roles that women have played in America’s occult history. It’s a very complicated topic, and I admired the authors for being able to present an organized and inclusive, although not comprehensive, look at some of the many ways that women have been active in witchcraft, Wicca, Spiritualism, and other branches of the occult in the arts, pop culture, and politics. The book presents brief biographies of women, along with some contextualizing commentary, organized by theme instead of by chronology. This works well in terms of making coherent sense out of a broad and convoluted topic. The topics are ‘Shaping the Occult,’ ‘Politicizing the Occult,’ ‘Monetizing the Occult,’ ‘Challenging the Occult,’ and ‘Embracing the Occult.’ The biographies are the perfect length for a quick read and they are entertaining and informative,sprinkled throughout with art and wry humor. The book takes a neutral stance on the reality of any supernatural claims, instead focusing on how women have been able to shape occult culture and maneuver within it to experience and influence life beyond gender norms. I enjoyed this book and I appreciated that it brought home that all this witchy stuff is actually important to our history and to practitioners today. The book does a good job of defining a lot of complex terms and ideas and illustrating how these concepts have been used both as a tool of oppression against women and as a tool of liberation used by women to break beyond societal expectations. Toil and Trouble is a fun and informative read for anyone with an interest in women’s history, supernatural topics, or anyone who likes witchy romance and wants to go a little deeper into the world of witchy women. View the full article

In college, her news writing lab was the one that induced the most anxiety my sophomore year. We sat in front of our computers, a handout of a press release sitting on our desks, along with a copy of the AP Style Book. Our professor was tall, and imposing, with short brown hair and stern eyes to match, often dressed in a long denim skirt or blouse and slacks. She started her timer. In a very short amount of time, our task was to crank out a news brief using the limited information found in the press release. “No weasel words!” she would say. “And don’t use the word ‘is.’ Avoid the use of passive voice at all costs.” Did I mention we lost a letter grade for each AP Style mistake we made? No, well, that only added to the stress. Our armpits began sweating, to match our quickened pulses and dry mouths. We tried not to look up at the clock as we typed, read, deleted, and repeated the process all over again. You could hear classmates muttering curse words under our breath. I survived the class. Did well in it. And one day the professor pulled me aside and told me she thought I had the makings of a great copy editor. “Go to the campus newspaper office,” she said. “They need a copy editor for this semester. You’ll have to take an editing test.” She thought I, a lowly sophomore, had the chops to be the copy editor for the entire newspaper? I didn't know whether or not to be flattered or terrified. The editors I met with were kind, but I didn’t get the job. And I decided I liked the process of investigative reporting, interviewing, and writing much more than proofreading for typos and style errors. I went on to become an entertainment editor and then a news editor my senior year. I went back to that professor, who was also my advisor in the mass communication department, and took her class “19th Century Newspaper Women,” which I loved. And I learned she and her ex-husband had won a Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service in 1979 for their work uncovering abuses in drug rehabilitation center Synanon in California in the Point Reyes Light. Dr. Catherine Mitchell was stern with me when she needed to be and kind when I struggled. I couldn't help but be intimidated by her--she had received her master's degree at Stanford University and I was a poor girl from the North Carolina mountains. She once asked me why my SAT scores weren’t higher. “I’m not good at math,” I told her simply. She encouraged me to apply for a scholarship for Hispanic journalists, but I told her I didn’t feel comfortable doing that because I wasn't bilingual. This professor supported me when I needed to seek mental health counseling during the spring of my sophomore year. She was a trailblazer in the industry, and the mentor I tell people time and again when they ask how I became a writer. I don’t know where she is now, or if she is still living, but I hope wherever she is, Dr. Catherine Mitchell knows how much she always instilled in me the values of hard work, perseverance, and courage in journalism. She made history. Maybe one day I will, too. Did you have any mentors who inspired you a a writer? I'd love to hear about them! Renee Roberson is an award-winning writer and host/creator of the podcast Missing in the Carolinas. (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url]