Fatigue Factor

Sharon Wildwind

From last Wednesday to Sunday, I was on Prince’s Island, enjoying the Calgary Folk Music Festival. We started with a volunteer walk-through of the site Wednesday evening. I worked volunteer shifts Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and two on Sunday. Because Creedence Clearwater Revisited, whose music I love, were the closing act on Sunday night’s main stage, there was no way I was leaving until after the final encore.

Fortunately, I’ve learned to pace myself and emerged from the weekend energized; healthily fed; well hydrated; and tired, but not exhausted. Not so some folks around me. It was fascinating to watch how fatigue crept up on people and how otherwise sensible individuals didn’t realize how tired they had gotten.

One of my gripes about mysteries is how fast the hard-boiled types recover from beatings, blood loss, and bullets. Yes, I know the story has to keep moving, so the cop taking two weeks off isn’t on, but super-human recovery times still destroy the similitude of real life. It’s the same with what I call the Non-stop Bunny Detective. Like the famous pink rabbit with the base drum, this gal keeps going and going and going.

She rarely gets a full night’s sleep. She drinks too much black coffee and too much wine. Her diet is abysmal, and her stress level taller than the Calgary Tower. She rarely exercises, except when the author needs her to do a 10-mile run, first thing in the morning. At that point she throws on her exercise clothes — which we never knew she had — and runs her favorite route — which also had never been mentioned before — clearing her head so she recognizes a vital clue she missed before.

Things I’d love to see both amateur and professional detectives do in books

Have a regular fitness program. I’m willing to believe the 10-mile run as the vital-clue-head-clearer if she runs more often than once in the book.

Carry water bottles and healthy snacks. Even a small amount of dehydration and/or low blood sugar can confuse thinking and increase decision-making errors. I would really prefer that people sifting through clues are fed and hydrated.

Sleep on a regular basis. Real cops have down time. Some police forces have rules about how long detectives can work without going off-duty. That’s why detectives work in teams.

Have a cop put his head down on his desk and fall asleep in the middle of a shift.

Use fatigue as humor. Imagine if the cop is using eye drops to cover eye redness from fatigue, only he sneaks away to put them in, and his buddies are concerned that he is developing secret a drinking problem because he keeps disappearing for a few minutes several times during the shift. Or what kind of grief will the detective take when she converts to working at a stand-up desk?

Now, as part of my Folk Festival recovery program, I’m going to take a nap.

Quote for the week

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence, and that is activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of this innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace, because it kills the root of the inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

~ Thosmas Merton, (1915 – 1968), Anglo-American Catholic writer, Trappist monk, priest, poet, social activist and student of comparative religion

Advice Plus Ten Years

Sharon Wildwind

Ten years ago being a writer seemed simple. To paraphrase the often-quoted and likely apocryphal quote from Michelangelo, “I just remove everything that doesn’t look like being a writer.”

I was reminded of that last week when I found a misplaced and forgotten computer file “Tips on Being a Writer,” dated 2003 February 4, in which, I’d compiled advice from other writers.

Naivety provides a certain protective quality. It surrounds us like bubble-wrap and cushions us for the journey ahead.

The advice I’d received ten years ago included

Cut back on your day job

I’d already done that, but no vast swaths of spare time ever emerged. Working full-time, working part-time, being retired doesn’t  matter. Life expands to fill the week. Writers learn to work around that.

Live on less

This turned out to be good advice. Writing always pays less than you think it will.

Exercise on a regular basis. Eat healthy. Get more sleep, on a regular schedule.

Strangely enough, these worked, except for getting more sleep on a regular schedule. That new job I’d taken in order to have more spare time turned out to demand less sleep, on a more irregular schedule. Many writers have survived far worse.

Join a group related to writing

Only one? By last count I belong to nine.

Find the best time of day to write.

The best time of day (or night) to write is any time I have two writing neurones to rub together. The Muse doesn’t wait. Incidentally, the Muse of writing is named Calliope. She’s usually depicted with a writing tablet.

Determine if you are more productive as a writer when writing for short or long periods.

What I learned since then is that extroverts can rarely write productively longer than an hour at a time; introverts usually need a three to four hour block to do anything productive. I aim somewhere in the middle, about two to two-and-a-half hours at a time.

Don't interrupt writing time for lunch with friends, or to run errands, or to do house work.

On further reflection, always interrupt writing time for lunch with friends; then reschedule the writing. Most errands can be rescheduled. Housework can fall off the edge of the universe and no one much cares.

Develop more computer skills, such as being able to type faster, or how to use more features in word processing programs.

At the time no one mentioned web site set-up and maintenance.  Blogging. Tweeting. Googling. Pining. Skyping. Linking-in. As I said, naivety offers a lot of protection.

Set up a home office so there is a formal place to write.

Except for the days when your desk is so cluttered that you have no room to write, in which case you end somewhere else, with your trusty writing tablet in tow. Calliope probably understood this.

Find ways to inspire yourself about writing. Post little cards or quotes that mean something to you where you can see them.

The absolute best writing inspiration is to read another author who writes so much better than I do. The sound of the competition drives me to the computer faster than all the quote cards in the world.

Today's writing advice?

Write.

Play.

Pay attention.

Be in the moment.

Roll with the punches.

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Quote for the week

Art and life are subjective. Not everybody’s gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.

~ Whoopi Goldberg, American comedienne, actress, singer-songwriter, political activist, author and talk show host

Retcon

Sharon Wildwind

We’ve had the Lord of the Rings prequel; a Star Trek reboot; Dallas: The Next Generation; and so many Sherlock Holmes wiggle-woggles I’d need a data base to keep them straight.

Movies and television are deep in retcon territory. Even though the word has been around for about twenty years, I heard it the first time last week.

Retcon (noun or verb): to retrospectively revise a work of fiction so that plot shifts dramatically, inconsistencies make sense, or a new world interpretation is created. It often upset fans/readers, causing them to take side or concoct elaborate explanations that cement their world back together. The original term was retroactive continuity, shortened to retcon.

The grandaddy of all retcons is, “Then I woke up and it was all a dream,” for which the Grand Chutzpah Award goes to Lorimar Television, which turned the entire ninth season of Dallas (the original one) into Pam Ewing’s dream. Everyone went back to where they had been at the end of season eight and started season ten.

Sometimes retcons were attempts to revive sagging story arcs. Two early TV shows, Maverick and Bonanza, played around with unexpected relatives. A third Maverick brother and a cousin showed up out of the blue. Little Joe Cartwright found out unexpectedly that he had a maternal half-brother. Neither of these surprise family extensions worked as well as the producers had hoped.

Television and movie retcons were often more about labor disputes than story line. Richard Thomas decided to leave the Waltons in the late 1970s. Fortunately there was a war on at the time: not Viet Nam, World War II. John-Boy Walton was badly burned and in a coma. When the bandages came off after he recovered consciousness and had plastic surgery, Robert Wrightman played the character.

Crispin Glover and the Back to the Future production company couldn’t come to a contract agreement, so in Parts II and III, the part of George McFly, Marty’s father, was played by Jeffrey Weismann. In Part II, the company went to great lengths not to alert the audience that a change had been made. Weismann wore prosthetic makeup and appeared only upside down, explained by a complicated plot where he had back trouble for which the treatment in 2015 was to be suspended upside down in an anti-gravity harness.

Glover sued, contending that his likeness had been used without permission. The Screen Actors Guild revised its collective bargaining agreement to prohibit producers and actors from reproducing an actor’s likeness.

In no particular order, here are some well-used retcons:

• Illegitimate child or unknown twin: relatives characters never knew they had show up to complicate their lives
• Never-recovered body: bet your boots the guy or gal is still alive and will eventually reappear
• Misidentified body: ditto eventual reappearance
• Error in medical diagnosis: a character comes to grips with dying, only to be told he is perfectly healthy
• False arrest and imprisonment: takes a character neatly out of the way, but if the actor wants to sign a new contract after all, there’s a convenient release and pardon once the true perpetrator is known

Here’s my question: is a retcon playing fair with the viewer/reader?

Quote for the week

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

~ Thomas Edward Lawrence, (1888–1935), British Army officer, archeologist, and author

Have discussion groups died?

Two mistakes writers make:

 Marketing to other mystery writers.

 Marketing to the same group too often.

 ~Jeffrey Marks, mystery writer and marketer

Jeffrey wrote that quote maybe ten or eleven years ago, about the time I was learning to market at all, so marketing to other mystery writers seemed a safe and comfortable way to start, like a bike with training wheels. I figured my fellow mystery writers, having themselves been where I was, would cut me some slack.

One of my havens was discussion groups. I belonged to half a dozen. In case you don’t go back that far, or have forgotten, discussion groups were text-only e-mails, something like the call-and-response of some African and Indian songs. One person would post a question or a comment and other people would comment on it.

The rules were simple, and by today’s standards, archaic.

No images; no attachments.

No politics; no causes; no religion.

Play nice.

Stick to the subject, which was usually writing. Occasionally the group diverted into recipes, childhood memories, or television programs. After a couple of days the moderator announced that, as of midnight, she would pull the plug on the off-the-topic discussion, so if we had anything we were desperate to get out of our systems, please do so by the end of today.

No marketing. A little self-promotion was permitted, but it had to be discrete and preferably identified by BSP—blatant self-promotion—in the message’s subject line.

Over time, the rules crumbled. Promo lines attached to signatures worked their way in; ditto links attached to signatures. Then links in the messages themselves. Then, “I know I’m not supposed to post this, so I’ll just do it really quickly. My daughter is walking for a good cause and if you could support her, that would be terrific.”

The catastrophic downslide began with the phrase, “Read my blog…” What had been lively centralized discussions fractured into exclusive enclaves, with participants essentially saying, “I have something great to discuss, but I’m not sharing with anybody who doesn’t come play at my house.”

The other thing that happened to discussion groups was an explosion of personal messages. I met and grew to care about a lot of terrific people through these discussion groups. I wanted to know when they had health issues, when someone close to them had died, when they had been affected by a natural disaster or, conversely, when they sold a book, won an award, or got a movie offer.

But did the responses have to be public? What’s wrong with sending a private e-mail? Especially when the responder included the entire original message and add “I’m sorry to hear this.” or “Congratulations,” only to have the next responder pick up the message and add their sentiment, on and on sometimes through a dozen well-wishers, until the message became unreadably long.

I still belong to a few discussion groups, but honestly, I mostly look at the subject lines to see if anyone has died, and I rarely post anything myself. Yet, I’m really on the fence whether I should pull out or stay. I can’t decide if it’s long-term loyalty or I keep hoping they will magically get better. What I know for certain is that the noise-to-useful-information ratio in every discussion group has degenerated to an intolerable level.

 I’m curious to know if this same thing has happened to anyone else? Did you ever participate in discussion groups? Do you still find them useful? If you’ve never participated or have gone on to something else, what’s your current favorite way to keep up with what’s happening in your profession, and with others who do the same thing you do?

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Quote for the week

Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting.

~ Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia