Following Electronic Etiquette

by Julia Buckley
Has anyone written a book yet about electronic etiquette? I've seen enough offensive behavior (and probably committed some) that this sort of book would be helpful, assuming people would read it and take it to heart. In any case I'll offer some of my own suggestions here to see if people have the same pet peeves about rudeness in the electronic age.

First, of course, is e-mail. Here are my common sense guidelines:

--If someone sends you an e-mail, you should answer it, even if it's to say that you don't have time to respond at length and you'll get back to them some other time.

--The exception to the above rule is if someone sends you one of those annoying chain letters that suggests you are bound for hell unless you send something to eighteen other people. You don't have to answer those OR forward them.

--Don't send chain letters.

--If someone forwards you something (an interesting article, let's say), don't immediately forward it back to THEM as though it was your idea in the first place. I've sent interesting things to family members only to have them bounced back with a note like "Julia, you have to read this. It's really interesting!" I knew it was, which is why I sent it in the first place. To appropriate my article this way is to admit that you didn't pay any attention to my original e-mail. This is an electronic slap in the face.

Now, on to cell phones.

--PLEASE don't ignore your children just because you own a cell phone. It doesn't give you permission to talk all day instead of parenting (or babysitting). I've seen dispirited little fellows in baseball caps dragging their bats behind them while they wait for their caregivers to get off the phone and play with them. It's one of the saddest sights in the world, as was my sighting of the little girl at a restaurant with her father who sat waiting, in vain, for him to finish his business call.

--If you MUST drive while talking on your cell phone, please still make an attempt to drive well. I've been nearly sideswiped by drivers who couldn't efficiently make a left turn because they were clutching their phone in one hand. They generally shrug at me as if to say, "What could I do? I was on the phone."

--If you MUST talk on your cell phone at the store, don't keep the cashier waiting while you finish your call. You're holding up the whole line, and you're being rude in a very universal sense.

--This one might be controversial: If you're talking to ME in person and your cell phone rings, you are not obligated to answer it and talk to that other person. We were talking first.

These really just scratch the surface of my list of complaints (apparently I am quite the curmudgeon), but I'm curious to know what peeves other people have, or if they share any of these.

Can we still be polite in the electronic age?

(art link here).

Karen Olson: Outside Her Comfort Zone

The winner of a free copy of THE MISSING INK is Beth Solheim. Congratulations!

By Karen Olson (Guest Blogger)

Every writing class, every writing instructor will tell you the same thing: Write what you know.

Writing what you know is supposed to be easier. Since it’s the familiar, you’ll be able to perhaps better evoke the emotions, the scents, the sights. You’ll be comfortable with the words, the characters, the setting. I did all that. I wrote about a police reporter (I was a print journalist for more than 20 years) working for a fictional newspaper (I worked for several newspapers throughout my career) in New Haven, Connecticut (where I was born, and I’ve lived in the vicinity almost my entire life). The characters who inhabited those books were people I knew, the restaurants were places I’d visited and dined in, the neighborhoods were ones I drove and walked through.

Writing about that world was in my comfort zone.

So what did I do? I blew off all that advice about writing what I know and wrote a book about a character and a setting I know nothing about. Pretty much everything in my new book The Missing Ink is what I don’t know. Brett Kavanaugh is a tattooist and she owns her own shop. I don’t have any tattoos and I don’t own my own business. The shop is in Las Vegas, a city I have visited exactly twice for a total of six days. My first visit was 12 years ago. The second? Last summer, after I’d already written half the book.

It’s funny, though, that something that should have been difficult to write was so easy. Once I heard Brett’s voice and started writing, I was on a roll. It was so liberating not to have to adhere to actual restaurants or streets. I created a fictional resort casino called Versailles that was so much fun, I wish it really did exist. I used a few real locations: The Venetian Grand Canal Shoppes, where Brett’s shop is located; a couple of restaurants I visited on the Strip.

I read a great book about the history of women and tattoos, which helped with the tattooing parts of the book. I went online and found tattoo blogs, a video showing how to put a tattoo machine together, and I visited a tattoo shop in New Haven.

I was completely out of my comfort zone and had the time of my life.

Have you ever tossed everything aside and written about what you don’t know?

**********************
Karen Olson's first novel in the Annie Seymour series, Sacred Cows, was the one and only winner of the Sara Ann Freed Memorial Award. She followed it with Secondhand Smoke, Dead of the Day, and Shot Girl before launching her new series with The Missing Ink. To learn more about Karen and her mysteries, visit her website and blog.

Another one bites the dust?

By Lonnie Cruse

I love getting coupons or sales notices from our local Borders and I've bought a lot of books there over time. So I was NOT happy to receive the latest e-mail notice from them: Borders in Paducah is closing! RIGHT NOW! Say what?

I had no idea. And I hate it when book stores close. Like the little book store in Metropolis that closed several years ago. Sigh.

I love books. I love the smell, the feel, the getting lost in the story, the . . . well . . . everything. And I do my best to support both Borders and BAM (also located in Paducah, and hopefully staying in business.)

From what I see/hear on the Internet, lots of independant book stores are closing as well. The economy is hitting everyone hard. And book lovers who can no longer afford to buy books are heading to local libraries in record numbers only to discover that libraries are taking hits too. Closing. OR staying open with new fees and new rules. Yikes.

Reading has been part of my life since . . . well, since I learned to read. My step-mom was a teacher and avid reader who encouraged me to read and even let me raid her own bookshelf and read books that were probably a bit old for me. FOREVER AMBER leapes to mind. I still remember that one. And I remember a day when I was pretty young, reading a book while riding in the car with her, and being so lost in the book that I jumped when she turned a corner just as the character in the book turned over in a canoe!

I read to my boys until they were old enough to read for themselves and all three of them still love to read. Ditto my grandchildren. I'm always sad when someone says they don't like to read or don't have time. Getting lost in a good book is one of the best escapes there is.

Is there an answer to this economy/book stores closing problem? If there is, I sure don't have it. But I'll do whatever I have to do to keep books in my life and encourage others to read. How about you? How are you getting your book fix? Buy? Check out from library? Borrow from willing friends?

I did make it to Borders before the store closed and cashed in on the 40% off sale, nabbing a copy of Sandra Dallas' PRAYERS FOR SALE in hardback. I'd borrowed a copy from the local library, loved it, and decided I wanted my own copy. Also got a cookbook about chocolate (okay, I'm slightly allergic, but as long as I eat in moderation . . . what? You don't think I can? Ha!) and a book for a friend in a series she's reading. Sadly, the store shelves were mighty empty when I got there, and I somehow missed the early warnings of this disaster. But I'm happy with my purchases. Just not with the store closing. Sigh.

Big Words and Little Words

Elizabeth Zelvin

In a batch of jokes circulating on the Internet recently, I found the following pair of quotations:

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

The general topic of the email was “When insults had class,” but I think these two are not just clever quips but statements of a philosophical gulf between two kinds of writing. As a college English major in the early 1960s, I found Hemingway’s language too plain and Faulkner’s so ornamented as to make the stories he was telling incomprehensible.

That is not to say that I reject plain diction. As a poet for thirty years, I was proud that no reader ever said to me, “I didn’t understand your poem.” My second book of poetry, if I remember correctly, contained only seven words of four or more syllables. Nor have I ever been afraid of “big words.” As a kid, I could rattle off “antidisestablishmentarianism” with the best of them.

Since my college days, the English language and its literature has endured what I consider the toxic embrace of Deconstructionism, with its irritatingly opaque invented vocabulary. Thank goodness that instead of going on for my doctorate, I ran away and joined the Peace Corps—and discovered mysteries and other genre fiction. I’m told that Deconstructionism lasted longer in American academia than anywhere else. And yet it’s Hemingway whose approach to language has triumphed. With my own ears, I’ve heard Stephen King (very much a writer’s writer) declare that his advice to aspiring writers is, “Read, read, read; write, write, write—and lose the adverbs.”

In the past few years, in the slow process of getting published and developing my craft to the point where I realize that the ability to self-critique is a never-ending process, I have come to understand what’s wrong with adverbial writing. Those tough action verbs can serve the writer well. But I still think it’s pretty weird for the arbiters of language to shun an entire part of speech. I have enjoyed reading work in which adverbs are used deliciously and evocatively to enhance the meat and potatoes of nouns and verbs. So it’s a different style. So what? Why not?

Hemingway and Faulkner, like cozies and noir, are too often assumed to be the only alternatives. Let’s hear it for the middle ground. Language can be rich without losing the reader and strong without being stripped stark naked. But what’s really dangerous is allowing any one literary style to be considered the only right way to write.

There’s a famous quotation about the dangers of “contempt prior to investigation.” (You can Google it to learn how it came to be attributed incorrectly to Herbert Spencer, but that’s another story.) So by all means, let expansive writers rein themselves in by deleting adverbs and replacing Latinate words with their Anglo-Saxon-based equivalents. But let’s also invite the hard-boiled heirs of Hemingway to spread themselves a little. Stick in a couple of adverbs in every paragraph, if not every sentence. Go on, try it. You might find it’s fun.

Kids in Prison

Sandra Parshall

I’ve been inside a number of prisons – as a reporter, fortunately, not as an inmate. One thing I know for certain is that these are not places where children should be confined. Yet more than 10,000 juveniles in the US are currently serving sentences in adult prisons.

More than half the states in this country allow prosecution of children as young as 12 in adult courts, and this happens to thousands of juveniles every year. If they are found guilty they can be sentenced as if they were adults. Minors typically receive longer sentences in adult court than they would if convicted of the same crimes in juvenile court. In Virginia, minors can be executed.

Does this make any sense?

A Department of Justice report issued last year cited several large-scale studies that show “a strong consistency” in their findings that prosecution of minors in adult court “substantially increases recidivism.” As the DOJ report points out, juveniles in adult prison learn criminal attitudes and behavior from the offenders they’re incarcerated with. They feel stigmatized by being labeled forever as convicted felons, they nurse a sense of injustice and a resentment toward society, and they suffer from a lack of the rehabilitation and family support they might have received in juvenile facilities.

According to the DOJ, “Juveniles in adult prison reported that much of their time was spent learning criminal behavior from the inmates and proving how tough they were. They also were much more fearful of being victimized than they had been when incarcerated in juvenile facilities, and more than 30 percent had been assaulted or had witnessed assaults by prison staff.” They are eight times more likely to commit suicide, five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, and twice as likely to be attacked with a weapon by inmates or beaten by staff. Throw a kid into adult prison and he’ll probably come out as an adult criminal with a vastly reduced chance of getting his life on course and becoming a productive member of society.

The move toward trying children as adults gained momentum in the last 20 years, as drug use spread through all levels of society and all age groups except the very young and the very old, as kids were recruited (or forced) into criminal gangs, and guns became more accessible. Statistics show that crimes by children have become more common. Our society’s reaction has been to discard many of those young lives and make it increasingly difficult for youthful offenders to look forward to productive futures. Every time we hear the news of a child murdering someone – frequently a parent or another child – plenty of people snarl, “Lock up the little bastard and throw away the key.”

Yes, kids can commit premeditated murder. Yes, kids can rob and viciously assault innocent people. Yes, kids can deal drugs, commit burglary, steal from homes and businesses. The children who do such things have to be dealt with. But putting children in adult prison is, to my mind, cruel and unusual punishment. If kids who break the law are to have any hope of turning their lives around, we need to focus less on harsh punishment and find an effective way to rehabilitate them.

Hard to do, you might say. It’s so much easier to believe our states are doing a good job of handling juvenile offenders. Even if the Department of Justice doesn’t think so. Even if the American Bar Association doesn’t think so.

But consider this:

Thousands of kids in adult prison, learning how to be adult criminals. Thousands of bitter, resentful kids who – most of them, anyway – will be released back into society someday, into our communities, where they can practice the skills they learned from their prison tutors. We might not want to think about them now, but they may very well be part of our future.

Motel Room by the Hour

Sharon Wildwind

If you want to have fun as a writer, rent a motel room by the hour.

Years ago members of a local writers’ group discovered a motel that rented rooms for $10 an hour between 10:30 AM to 2:30 PM. A few rules applied. At check-in, room renters were provided with two hand towels, a small bar of soap, and a plastic garbage bag. Rule 1: don’t unmake the bed. Rule 2: Use the hand towels and soap provided and leave both the bathroom towels and the complementary toiletries alone. Rule 3: Before you leave, wipe down the bathroom sink, put your garbage in the plastic bag provided and leave the bag and the used towels outside the door.

The idea was that since check-out time was 10:00 and check-in time was 3:00 PM, extra income could be generated during normally non-income-producing hours by renting the rooms not as bedrooms but as small meeting rooms.

Four of us decided that once a month for six months, we would split the room cost for series of self-guided writing workshops.

We didn’t dare ask what the food and drink policy was because it was a lot easier to be innocent if we weren’t suppose to be smuggling in coolers and wine, which was exactly what we intended to do.

The first month we had a silent writing day. Our original plan was to write for a little over two hours, then break out the wine and goodies and spend the rest of the time reading and critiquing what we’d written. We lasted an hour on the writing. Somehow a bottle of wine got opened early, we chatted, and well, that was that for the writing. We learned a lot about one another that day, including that we weren’t as self-directed as we thought. So we decided to add more structure.

Even with one session, we’d discovered how much we appreciated that one hour of silent writing time, so we decided that each workshop would start with that. Then a short program, a resource roundtable, and wine/snacks. One person would be responsible for the wine, another for the snacks, the third person would plan the short program, and the fourth person would lead the resources round table, beginning with a book report on any book—fiction or non-fiction—they’d found helpful as a writer. We’d rotate tasks each month.

The second month we all read Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage before the meeting, then watched Joan Hickson’s version of Miss Marple in the same story. We talked about the English country mystery and what story choices the director had made in turning the book into a movie.

The third month we did what the program person called “Fill-in-the-Blank Stories.” We started by writing 250 words or less about a real life event that had happened to us. We copied our story leaving blanks for almost every specific detail. For example if the story began,“This story happened when I was ten. My grandmother and I drove to Chicago for a family reunion” the blanks-added version would read, “This story happened to me when I was _____. _____ and I _____ to ______ for a family ______.” We switched stories and had to write a new story by filling in the blanks. Switch again. This time we could changes up to 50% of the words the previous person had used. Switch one more time and the last person could change only 10% of the words the previous person had used. Then we read the original story and the fill-in-the-blank story.

The fourth month one of the members challenged a friend of hers, a university English professor, to come and give us a punctuation review. She told her friend that if she could make the use of six punctuation marks—the comma, semi-colon, colon, hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash—enjoyable and educational, we’d feed her all the wine she wanted. Fortunately her friend was not only a gifted teacher, but had a sense of humor. It was a riotous afternoon.

Writers being, by and large, interested in people, by this time we were on first name basis with the desk staff, and that afternoon we waved gayly to them as we tottered out of the motel, English professor in tow.

Like every group activity, life happened. One of the group was ill, another had to go out of town. The fifth meeting was a quiet affair of just two people who spent the entire afternoon writing. Both had a good time.

The final month was party time. We invited the English professor to join us. Someone brought left-over Christmas crackers, so we each had a party hat. We hand-made mini-year books, full of writing quotes and recommendations for further reading to celebrate our six months of workshops. We autographed each other’s books. We played pin the subjunctive clause on the sentence—more of the English professor’s work.

When we trooped out at the end of the day, still wearing party hats, to hand the key to the desk clerk and tell him we wouldn’t be back, he said, “We’ve been trying to figure who you are and what you do out. You come in her looking serious and leave a few hours later laughing and looking a lot happier. Not that it’s any of our business, but what have you been doing?”

One of the women leaned over and said in a whisper, “If we tell you, we’ll have to kill you.” After we enjoyed his reaction, we fessed up that we were a bunch of mystery writers—and one English professor—who were working on making our writing better. He said he wished all of his guests had as good a time as we had.

-------
Quote for the Week
One of the things that changes as we age is that people stop nudging us. We need to be nudged all our lives. Find people who will nudge you.
~Dr. Gene Cohen, gerontologist, teacher, writer, and humanist

Dr. Cohen is the Director of the Center on Aging, Health, and Humanities in Washington, D.C. Visit the Center’s Website and subscribe to their free newsletter for updates on wonderful projects that are helping people maintain their connections to the arts into their seventies, eighties, nineties, and on past a hundred.

The Saddest Songs in the World

by Julia Buckley

Sad songs make me cry. My family will tell you that happy songs make me cry also, and even seemingly neutral songs can elicit tears. I am a person who responds to music, and that usually involves weeping. I am not sure why.

When I was pregnant, I became the laughing stock of my family for crying while listening to Ray Stevens' MISSISSIPPI SQUIRREL REVIVAL on the country radio station. It's one of the dumbest songs ever written, but somehow in my maternal state I found the depths of sadness in the song.


Anyway, aside from that embarrassment, I think I can identify a truly sad song, and somehow I take great satisfaction from a good tear jerker. If you asked me I could list 100 good sad songs on the spot, but I'm going to choose a top five of truly satisfying sad songs.

Number One: KILKELLY, IRELAND
My husband and I made the mistake of listening to this on a cassette tape back in the 80s when we were headed out on vacation together. It had gotten dark, and we were driving down a pitch black expressway, not talking and therefore really listening to the lyrics of this song. When it was over, we looked at each other, and we both had tears running down our faces. Here it's sung by the Clancy Brothers and Robbie O'Connell (although we heard it by the group ARRANMORE). I recommend listening to the words with your eyes closed so you can get the full effect. Tears guaranteed.


2. Whiskey Lullaby, Brad Paisley and Allison Krauss. Country singers have a lock on the sad song, and this one is hauntingly beautiful. This duo sang it live at the Country Music Awards (and they won one).


3. Early Morning Rain. This song gets deep into my bones, whether it's this Peter, Paul and Mary version or the Gordon Lightfoot version (Lightfoot wrote the song). There's something about a sad person in the rain . . .

4. Where've You Been? Kathy Mattea. As someone who's lost a family member to Alzheimer's, I find this song particularly wrenching, but even before that this one got to me. It was written by Mattea's husband, who had gone through something similar in his family.


5. You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive Patty Loveless. Patty Loveless has what she terms "a hill country voice" and it's utterly poignant in this song about coal mines and the destruction they wrought on families too poor to escape them.


6. Streets of London, Ralph McTell. Okay, I lied--I had to include an encore song here. Ralph McTell wrote this song in 1969, but he left it off his debut album because he thought it was too depressing; by 1974 it was released as a single in the UK and at one point was selling 90,000 copies a day (or so says Wikipedia). I see this as more evidence that people love sad songs.


I could go on and on. But of course I've missed some truly sad ones. What are they? Tell me so I can add them to my list.

Selling Books in a Changing World

By Ellen Crosby (Guest blogger)

New year, new book. For the fourth year in a row, the first Tuesday in August is mine--the day Scribner, my publisher, officially releases The Riesling Retribution, latest book in my mystery series set in Virginia wine country.

I’m not the only writer in the country with an August 4 pub date, though it’s nice to feel unique for a day, especially that little heart-flip the first time I see my book actually on bookstore shelves. Truth be told, I’m in first-rate company for the entire month, joining fellow mystery writers like Charles Todd, Marcus Sakey, Dan Fesperman, Marcia Talley, and Jeff Deaver (among others) who will be hitting the road visiting a bookstore near you. But how will you hear about us?

Last year my local events would have been billboarded in the calendar of The Washington Post Book World. First thing I turned to every Sunday morning over a cup of coffee: Who’s in town? Now it’s gone. I freelanced for the Post for a couple of years so that loss really hurt. More Post hemorrhaging followed, with buyouts accepted by some of the paper’s most famous names, by-lines gone for good. My former editor left two years ago for a research foundation. (Why did he do it when he didn’t want to leave? “Next time they might not offer me money.”) I met Marie Arana, former Book World editor, at the Annapolis Book Festival—she’s now at the Library of Congress. Their gain; our loss.

How many newspapers have folded their tents or jettisoned their book review sections? A story on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” discussed the slow death of book reviews—back in 2007. As for newspapers, there’s a list on a cheery website called Newspaper Death Watch. In the past year we’ve lost the print editions of the Detroit News/Detroit Free Press, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and—one I truly lament—The Christian Science Monitor. Gone for good: Rocky Mountain News and the Baltimore Examiner. The Boston Globe is on the skids. I’ve only named the big guys, but trust me, it’s a much longer list.

On to bookstores, but first please put away any sharp objects. Just in the mid-Atlantic region, we lost Mystery Loves Company in Baltimore, as well as Olsson’s and Trover’s, two beloved Washington, D.C. landmarks. One stop on my book tour is a “favorite authors” final farewell signing at Creatures ’n Crooks in Richmond, which closes its doors on September 30. I promised to go if there weren’t too many tears. (She wouldn’t promise; I’m stocking up on tissues). As I write this yet another bookstore, Kate’s Mystery Books in Boston, will close on August 1.

Is it just me, or is the drumbeat growing louder for doing away with quaint twentieth century customs like reading newspapers, buying books in bookstores, and turning actual pages instead of pressing a button? What’s going to replace the institutions we’re dismantling at the giddy pace of kids leveling a sand castle? The front page of the business section of the July 22 New York Times (yes, the print edition!) featured a story called “Musician, Market Yourself.” It spoke about doing away with “the old model of doing things” as musicians create their own direct links to audiences over the Internet.

Ditto the book world. Like it or not, we’re all becoming cottage industry promoters, each of us tooting his or her own horn on individual websites, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Is it better, worse, or just new and different? I dunno. Right now, I’m resisting—though sure, you can find me on Facebook and I think I’ve tweeted about six times. But I mourn what we’re losing because once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.

A few weeks ago I attended a bookstore event in Middleburg, Virginia videoed by a young reporter for washingtonpost.com. Naively I asked how long the link would be available, remembering how in the past some of my news stories would drift into that hole in cyberspace where broken links went to die. He blinked and stared at me. “Forever,” he said. “It’ll be there forever.”

Later an author friend explained how to post that video to Facebook. “Go to the article online,” she wrote, “and click on ‘Tools.’ It asks where you want to send the link. Click on Facebook and, voila, it’s there on your page. Doesn’t even ask your name because it knows who you are. Scary, huh?” Yeah, real scary.

As part of this individualized promotion gig—and because there are so many of us out there—we’re reaching for what’s new and different, opening doors to our lives, places we once considered off-limits, in an effort to get you readers to pay attention . . . or just to find us. Last spring I filmed a (very) brief video for Simon & Schuster answering questions about my favorite movie, favorite place, and wished-for talent. Fun stuff, a bit of fluff, all part of S&S’s new “Author Revealed” website. But I’ve decided to draw a line beyond which I won’t go in this whole promotion thing; parts of my life are private and there’s such a thing as Too Much Me.

As August 4 rolls around, I’m excited about getting out there and spending time with folks, after a year of living in my head alone in my office. Nothing virtual: real meetings, real people. In the meantime, I’m still wrestling with Facebook and Twitter. Guess I’d better get used to it; next year could be a whole new world . . . again.

***********************
Ellen Crosby is the author of The Merlot Murders, The Chardonnay Charade, The Bordeaux Betrayal, and The Riesling Retribution. Visit her web site for more information, and if you're on Facebook, please be her friend.

Oh, deer me . . .

By Lonnie Cruse

For some months now a little doe has been visiting our back yard every morning for breakfast. Deer in our back yard is not unusual. ONE lonely little doe is. They usually come in herds of six or so. She travels alone. No spouse. No babies. No friends.

She seems to have no fear and no sense of manners when eating in a human's back yard. Early in the spring we moved several Hostas from the front yard, because the hot sun every summer burnt them up, and put them in the back yard under a row of trees where they could flourish. And they were flourishing, until she started snacking on them. Sigh.

Then she discovered hubby's tomatoes. She knocked down the protective cage and ate the unripe tomatoes and a goodly part of the plant. He is not happy. So far (rapping quickly on my desk and hoping there is some real wood in there) she has not discovered my tomato plants, tucked beside the porch steps with SEVERAL large tomatoes ripening as we speak. The tomato variety is Brandywine, by the way, and the tomatoes are VERY large and delicious. And NOT planted for wandering deer. I hope.

If you look closely at the pictures above, which I took while standing right by my tomato bed, prepared to defend it to the death, (my death, not hers) you will see that she is in my rock/metal garden. I love old metal tools and collect them for this garden. It's pretty close to the house and deer rarely wander this close to the back door. She seems to have no problem wandering anywhere in the yard and she didn't run when I stepped outside to take the pictures. In fact, her attitude struck me as: What are you doing in MY area? Sigh. Perhaps it's this sort of attitude that causes her to be a loner? That'd be my guess.

Recently, on our morning walk, hubby and I stopped to chat with our neighbor, Jack. I'd been dying to talk to him ever since I'd spotted an ancient lawn chair plunked down in the middle of his yard with a fake deer sitting upright in it. I almost tripped over my shoes the first time I saw it. And the fake deer was obviously holding a sign in its lap. Too polite to dash through Jack's big yard to read the sign, I contented myself with lying in wait, hoping to catch him coming or going. The sign was ruined in a recent storm, but you can still see the deer in the chair.

/>

Jack laughed when I asked about the sign. Seems like a certain little doe has been sauntering through his yard as well on a regular basis, stopping at his (huge and lovely and makes me envious) vegetable garden to eat his tomato plants, tomatoes and all. She takes very large bites out of the green tomatoes and lets the rest fall to the ground.

Which brings me to what passes for humor in southern Illinois. Someone (Jack suspects either another neighbor or his son) sneaked the lawn-chair-sitting-deer into his yard, facing the house, complete with a sign that said: "Free 'Maters."

Bawhahahah! Okay, it isn't exactly funny to him, the damaged and destroyed tomatoes I mean, but the deer sitting in the chair is a real hoot. And who knows, it might spook the real one off, safely away from his tomatoes. If so, I'll be in the market for a chair and a fake deer. And a sign.

Someone suggested spreading Cayenne pepper on the ground near the plants to keep away the marauder, but I can't risk burning her mouth. Human hair scattered around plants doesn't seem to discourage predator deer or bunnies, though it's supposed to. And don't even get me started on the moles. I've tried chewing gum (chewed and unchewed) and everything else I can think of, and the little hills and holes just keep appearing. Our ground is very well aerated. Grrr.

Living in the country is lovely. We've had lots of different animals visit and/or set up housekeeping, including foxes, turtles, rabbits, lizards, snakes and all variety of birds from hawks to hummers. All are welcome. Please, just don't touch the tomatoes. Mine OR Jack's.

Music and Murder

Elizabeth Zelvin

I was brought up on folk music, including the high lonesome murder ballads of the Appalachians: “Pretty Polly,” “Banks of the Ohio,” “Down by a Willow Garden.” All these tell basically the same story: a man murders a woman because she’s pregnant and he doesn’t want to marry her. Then there’s the great “Long Black Veil,” written in 1959 and performed by just about everyone, from Lefty Frizzell, Bill Monroe, and Johnny Cash to Bruce Springsteen and the Chieftains. In that one, the first-person narrator, accused of murder, is hanged because his lover, his best friend’s wife, won’t speak up and give him an alibi. In fact, the song’s a paranormal: “She walks these hills in a long black veil/Visits my grave when the night winds wail.”

I didn’t discover country music until 1988, when the New Country was just getting started, although I discovered that many of the “folk songs” I’d heard in college were by country singers like Johnny Cash, such as “Folsom Prison”: “I killed a man in Reno just to see him die.” At the time, as an addictions treatment professional, I was more interested in alcoholism and codependency than I was in murder. And country music certainly had more than its share of stories about my area of expertise. Why do you think these guys went so far as to kill their girlfriends? They’d probably been drinking. And why did their girlfriends stay with violent men who got them pregnant and refused to marry them? Codependency, of course. They were hooked on love, the victims of addictive relationships.

I once gave a workshop at a professional addictions conference on alcoholism and codependency in country music. I had a great time making the tape. Some of the greatest country singers were alcoholics: Hank Williams, killed at 29 driving drunk on an icy road on New Year’s Eve. Keith Whitley, a rising star of the late 80s who got sober and then died of alcohol poisoning at 32 during a relapse. And loving a no-good man was a staple of cheatin’ songs, songs about women who loved alcoholics (“Whiskey, if you were a woman/I’d fight you and I’d win, you know I would”), and such classics as “Stand By Your Man.”

I talked about how drinking beer (rather than effete wine) was considered a virtue of the working-class culture hero in dozens of songs. I pointed out how dysfunctional some of the love situations in these songs were. “I Will Always Love You,” written by and a hit for Dolly Parton and then a megahit for Whitney Houston, was used for the soundtracks of two movies, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and The Bodyguard, in which lovers don’t live happily ever after. As a therapist, I assure you that if you don’t see somebody for thirty or forty years and have a modicum of emotional health, love passes.

Then there’s Linda Ronstadt’s gorgeous “Long, Long Time,” in which there is no love affair, only unrequited mooning over a man who isn’t interested: “I’ve done everything I know to try and make you mine/And I think I’m gonna love you for a long, long time…I never drew one response from you…Living in the memory of a love that never was.” Does this woman need therapy or what?

When I listen one of the many “darling, please let me come home” songs that male country singers still write and perform, I always think, “There are three reasons she could have thrown him out: infidelity, alcoholism, or domestic violence.” When you read between the lines, his request doesn’t sound so reasonable or his declaration of love so sincere. Nowadays, there are many other ways than murder to deal with a failed relationship or an illegitimate child. And sometimes the woman turns the tables on the man, as in Martina McBride’s “Independence Day,” in which an abused wife takes a burning-bed revenge. But underneath the surface, when they’re chirping about love, I can still see death.

I can even see a serial killer in an upbeat country song. Take Sara Evans’s “Suds in the Bucket.” It’s about an 18-year-old girl, and it’s sunny as a day in July. “She was in the backyard…when her prince pulled up - a white pickup truck…Well, he must have been a looker - smooth talkin' son of a gun/ For such a grounded girl - to just up and run/… you can't stop love/…She's got her pretty little bare feet hangin' out the window/ And they're headin' up to Vegas tonight/…She left the suds in the bucket and the clothes hangin’ out on the line.” It’s love at first sight, right? Does the image of those “pretty little bare feet” fill your heart with romance? Not me. Maybe it’s because I’m a mystery writer. Maybe it’s just me. But I don’t listen to that song any more, because every time I hear that line and imagine that young woman going off with a stranger, I think of Ted Bundy, and I shudder.