An Editor's Advice on Publishing

Sandra Parshall

John Betancourt’s Wildside Press is hundreds of miles from New York, but from his vantage point in Bethesda, Maryland, he has a clear vision of what’s happening in publishing and what the future holds. His wide-ranging talk at a recent meeting of the Sisters in Crime Chesapeake Chapter had me furiously scribbling notes so I could share his comments with PDD’s readers.

Betancourt is a successful science fiction author of many short stories and about 40 novels. He and his wife Kim started Wildside Press in 1989 to publish speculative fiction, but it has grown over the years and now publishes mysteries (including my friend Sasscer Hill’s first book, Full Mortality, out in May) as well as nonfiction, e-books and magazines. One of the company’s imprints, Juno Books, became a co-publishing venture with Simon & Schuster as of January 2009, with an emphasis on dynamic female protagonists in contemporary/urban fantasy/paranormal fiction. Authors like Carole Nelson Douglas are publishing with Juno. One of the imprint’s budding stars is Washington area writer Maria Lima, who began with an obscure small press but moved to Juno after Betancourt read her first book and fell in love with her captivating style and voice.

He came to our meeting to present the chapter’s new anthology, Chesapeake Crimes: They Had It Comin’, which Wildside is publishing. The anthology is a trade paperback, one of the formats that Betancourt believes will replace mass market paperbacks. “I’d like to see mass market paperbacks go away,” he said, pointing out the generally low quality of the paper and binding used in the books. He believes e-books will replace a lot of the print book market within a few years and could become the favored way to introduce new writers. He predicts that e-books will soon be making more money than mass market paperbacks. For print, trade paperbacks and hardcovers are of higher quality, last longer, and earn more money per copy for both the author and the publisher.

Online publishing, he believes, can be a good way for beginners to attract attention and break in. “Online publishing is your friend,” he said in answer to a chapter member’s question. “Even if it doesn’t pay, it can get attention for your writing.”

The inevitable questions about finding an agent led Betancourt to tell his own career story. He has sold his books himself, then hired agents to negotiate his contracts. He doesn’t believe agents are particularly good at selling books because of their limited contacts and their tendency to give up quickly. However, with big publishers that accept submissions only through agents, writers have no choice but to use them from the start. He advised meeting personally with an agent before signing with him or her. A personal meeting at a conference or workshop is the best way to find an agent, preferable to cold querying. Be at your best for such a meeting, he said. “Make them want to know about you and your writing. Be outgoing, funny, charming.” Sell yourself and you’ll make the agent eager to sell your work.

Publishers have become frighteningly quick to drop writers these days, Betancourt pointed out, so after signing with a publisher, you have to be pleasant to work with, or you might discover that you’re replaceable. He recalled a bestselling science fiction author of Star Trek novels who phoned her editor several times a week for lengthy conversations. The writer’s contract was dropped. The moral of the story: “Don’t piss off your editor.”

The internet offers a lot of opportunities for self-promotion, Betancourt said, but a heavy-handed me-me-me approach will turn off potential readers. Don’t plaster the internet with self-promotion and “don’t push yourself as a writer” on internet groups, he advised. “Be interesting, be entertaining, contribute something.” Nobody will read a blog that is about nothing but the writer and her new book, and if the only time you show up in an internet group is when you have something to sell, you won’t win over any readers.

A few other bits of Betancourt advice culled from my notes:

Make sure people remember you and your books. Memorable titles and memorable author names are always a plus. Betancourt advised Lynda Hill to use her middle name, Sasscer, for writing. He advised Maria Y. Lima to drop the middle initial to make her name flow more easily off the tongue. Change the spelling of your name if that will make it stand out.

Try to avoid selling the paperback rights to the same company that brings out your hardcovers. You’ll get more money by going elsewhere.

Never let an editor keep anything for more than three months. Always hold editors to the time limits they give in their guidelines or on their websites.

Try writing intelligent, thoughtful online reviews of other people’s books as a form of self-promotion. If readers respect your opinions, they’ll check out your writing.

Not by Holmes Alone

Sharon Wildwind

We often forget is that Sherlock Holmes’ stories didn’t fill each and every issue of The Strand. One of the reasons that Arthur Conan Doyle was so successful is that detective fiction, thrillers, and spy stories were immensely popular in Britain. Given below are a list of 17 authors who were as popular, or in some cases more popular than the residents of 221 B Baker Street.

How many of these authors can you match with the information given below? Answers at the end of the blog. (No peeking)

1-Adalbert Goldscheider/Austrian (Viennese sleuth Dagobert Trostler)

2-Arthur Morrison/British (detective Martin Hewitt)

3-Baron Palle Rosenkrantz/Danish (Lieutenant Holst, Danish police detective)

4-C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne/British (ship's purser Mr. Horrocks)

5-E. Phillips Oppenheim/British (John Laxworthy, reformed crook)

6-Ernest Bramah/British (Max Carrados)

7-Fergusson Wright Hume/New Zealand (Hagar Stanley, the Gypsy detective)

8-George Griffith/British (Inspector Lipinzki)

9-Guy Boothby/Australian (Simon Carne)

10-Jacques Futrelle/British (Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen)

11-L. T. Meade/Irish (Madames Koluchy and Sara)

12-R. Austin Freeman/British (forensic detective Dr Thorndyke)

13-Robert Barr/British-Canadian (Eugene Valmont, French private investigator)

14-Robert Eustace/British (trade investigator Dixon Druce)

15-The Baroness Orczy/Hungarian, living in England (Polly Burton; Lady Molly of Scotland Yard)

16-William Hope Hodgson/British (Carnacki)

17-William Le Queux/Anglo-French (Duckworth Drew of the Secret Service)

a) Created a detective who thought like Holmes but was also ordinary, short, good tempered, and gladly cooperated with the police.

b) He collaborated with Dorothy Sayers on The Documents in the Case.

c) He created a detective who was every bit as smart as Holmes, but unlike Holmes was lively, interested in the social scene and fascinated by the romantic entanglements of the nobility.

d) He published the first Holmes parodies, entitled “The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs” and “The Adventure of the Second Swag.”

e) He was the earliest writer of spy fiction as understood today, and invented the rogue male school of adventure thrillers.

f) He wrote over 150 novels dealing with spies, international intrigue, and the possibility of Germany invading England before World War I began.

g) Her detective recognized domestic clues foreign to male experience. She entered police work to save her fiancé from a false accusation. Once she accomplished that, she very properly married and left the police force.

h) His detective was a ghost hunter, and both the occult and life at sea figured prominently in his work.

i) His detective was methodical and intelligent, though not brilliant.

j) His gentleman-thief preceded the more famous Raffles by two years.

k) His The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), became the best selling mystery novel of the 19th century.

l) Issues of the Strand magazine featuring his blind detective frequently outsold issues featuring Sherlock Holmes. George Orwell acknowledged one of his speculative fiction books influenced the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

m) Many of his adventure tales involved futuristic air warfare reminiscent of the current steampunk stories.

n) Many of his stories are set in the South Pacific.

o) Raymond Chandler wrote of him, “ . . . a wonderful performer. He has no equal in his genre ... There is even a gaslight charm about his Victorian love affairs, and those wonderful walks across London ...”

p) She featured women masterminds, who ran criminal gangs

q) This author died on the Titanic, after giving up his space on a lifeboat.

For extra points:
Two of these detectives wrote as a team. Which two?

One of these writers has to have the longest name of any mystery writer ever. Which one?


Ready for the answers? Here they are.






1-c
Adalbert Goldscheider’s detective was smart and loved the end-of-the century social life in Vienna.

2-a
Arthur Morrison felt that Martin Hewitt would work equally well as a kinder, gentler detective.

3-i
Baron Palle Rosenkrantz’s police detective was an ordinary man simply doing his duty.

4-n
Most of C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s stories were set in the South Pacific.

5-e
Blame E. Phillips Oppenheim for all those rogue male adventure thrillers, and quite a few spy stories as well.

6-l
Ernest Bramah wrote his blind detective with sympathy and understanding. The author was also an accomplished futurist.

7-r
Fergusson Wright Hume wrote the best selling mystery novel of the 19th century.

8-m
George Griffith wrote lots of futuristic war-in-the-sky stories.

9-j
Guy Boothby created a gentleman, who unfortunately, was also a thief.

10-q
His wife’s last sight of him was smoking a cigar with John Jacob Astor on the deck of the Titanic.

11-p
Her real name was Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith and she co-wrote a series of books with Robert Eustace.

12-o
Raymond Chandler said a great many complimentary things about R. Austin Freeman’s work.

13-d
Robert Barr wrote the first of innumerable parodies sending up Sherlock Holmes.

14-b
Robert Eustace was a great friend of Dorothy Sayers and her collaborator on a non-Peter Whimsey book.

15-g
The Baroness Orczy also wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel series.

16-h
William Hope Hodgson, like Conan Doyle, had a great interest in the occult and the supernatural.

17-f
William Le Queux was fascinated by conspiracy theories and tried unsuccessfully to warn the public about the danger Germany posed to Britain

Extra points:
L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace were the writing duo.

Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála, Emmuska Orczy de Orczi has to be the longest author’s name. How would you like to have to squeeze that onto a book jacket?
-----
Quote for the week:
Irene Adler: Why are you always so suspicious?
Sherlock Holmes: Should I answer chronologically or alphabetically?
~Okay, so it’s from the movie, but I still thought it was funny

Why I Love The Oscars

by Julia Buckley

I spent last evening watching The Oscars; this is a yearly pastime for my family, and one that I always enjoy. This year's broadcast was, I thought, particularly good. What I like best is not the pageantry and the Old-Hollywood glamor--it's the writing. Not the writing of the introductions, necessarily, although some of those were quite good (especially the Steve Martin/Alec Baldwin exchanges, as well as the Tina Fey/Robert Downey Junior repartee).

No, what I like are the little snippets of the screenplays, and then the acceptance speeches of the writers.

These people are always grateful, humble, even surprised, that the ideas which inspired them enough to write something also inspired their audiences enough to earn them a major award.

How wonderful to see the success stories of people who never imagined they'd stand on a giant stage in a tuxedo or glittering gown--the people who are much more comfortable in front of keyboards or in the landscapes of their own imaginations.

Mark Boal, who won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for THE HURT LOCKER (also winner for Best Director and for Best Picture), said something in his acceptance that becomes a recurring theme every year. He said that he spent time in Iraq, came home and thought that he had a good idea for a story. And then, somehow, his path led him to a year full of awards, culminating in his Oscar win.

Perhaps one of the reasons I love watching these moments on the Oscars is that it allows writers' dreams to come true--and all writers know about dreams. The first dream is to make the idea flowering in one's imagination come alive on the page; the second is to have readers appreciate that idea for what it was meant to be.

For some writers, there is a third reward . . . accolades beyond their imaginings. While no writer would expect this or take it for granted, every writer must consider it a dream come true when a work of his or her imagination captures the imagination of the world.

So congratulations to all the writers who were nominated and those who won. And all writers everywhere should be encouraged in their own dreams every time one of those Oscar champions takes to the stage with a beautifully heartfelt and--of course--beautifully written--acceptance speech.

Photo link here.

The Land Waits

Deborah Biancotti (Guest Blogger)

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.
~Charles M. Schulz

Deborah Biancotti is an Australian author of urban and dark fantasy. Her first published story won an Aurealis Award and her first collection, A Book of Endings, was shortlisted for the 2010 William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book.

Deborah is now working on her first novel, working title Broken. She has new fiction coming out in time for the 2010 WorldCon in Melbourne, including a novella set in contemporary Sydney from Gilgamesh Press. She also has an upcoming essay on “No Country for Old Men” in Twenty-First Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels since 2000.

She continues to write short stories and refer to herself as a 'tired idealist'.

Where did it begin?

I blame school. All the schools. There were too many of them, for a start. One ordinary day at an ordinary school in an ordinary series of schools, I shut down.

The world is adversarial, that’s what I was learning (age nine, stuck in a giant school assembly, one of only two kids who didn’t have school uniforms yet—the other kid being my little sister). I was learning that the world is not on my side.

The world, if you’re lucky, ignores you. And if you’re unlucky it rains down upon you. That’s the world for you, kid. Welcome aboard.

On to the next school and the next one, pitstops in an unpredictable but oddly conformist landscape. I moved from small schools to large ones, from houses that backed onto sugar cane farms, to increasingly surburban and then inner city urban space. It wasn’t until I left school that I learned to hide. It wasn’t until then I felt safe.

It wasn’t until well past school, way past school, that I admitted publicly something that will never be fashionable.

I hate the Australian landscape.

I know we're meant to find our true expression somehow in the outback and the precious 'land'. I know most Australians dream of escaping to the coast and spend holidays at the beach. And there are the few eccentrics so obsessed with hanging off the edge of the landscape that they build huts on cliffs and dare local authorities to get rid of them. These same few occasionally make the news for their full-body tattoos and their penchant for filing their teeth to look like shark teeth. (Okay, maybe that's all just one guy.)

But the older I got, the less I could play at 'let's pretend'. I stopped pretending I found the landscape anything but creepy and revolting. The sweaty, swollen rainforests that threaten, in my memory, to tip into the thin wedge of playgrounds. The vast brownness of some places, the spindly silver trees, the ungenerous scrub by the sides of roads, wild grasses that whip the edges of beaches. Strange powers control those spaces. Indifferent powers. Wind alone doesn’t describe the movement.

Fear always starts in my sternum, and that’s what the grasses feel like. They feel like fear.

On the subject of hate, I hate—oh! how I hate—that damn poem by Dorothea McKeller. “I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains”. My Country. Man. Has anyone ever written a more banal poem about a more fatal place?

“It’s always been drought here,” one daughter of a farmer told me. “I’ve never not seen drought.”

Drought. We are defined by the absence of things. Of water, for instance. The desert is our greatest definition. The red dirt and damage of the uninhabitable centre of the country.

The landscape is looking to trip you up. The landscape—mad, bad, dangerous, faking emptiness—the landscape encourages you to throw yourself at it. The landscape, though, rarely gives back.

We grow up being taught what to do with the danger of place. What to do if we’re trapped in the desert (don’t leave your car, whateveryoudo), if we’re confronted by a snake (don’t run, whateveryoudo), if we spy strangers on a deserted road (don’t stop, whateveryoudo).

Generations have tried to tame the place, dragging their foreign flora into the country, making pastoral British lawns and Mediterranean vegetable gardens and stunning Balinese-style tropical retreats tucked behind fences and swimming pools. These are inelegant compromises amidst a climate that wants us gone. Cockroaches move into our skyscrapers and dust storms coat every window and street.

Of course, I’ve drifted into talking about the city. My city, Sydney, seen here in the great dust storm of September 23, 2009.

Because of another hate: I hate the notion that to be more authentically Australian, a screenplay or a story or a poem has to be set in the ‘great’ Australian outback. As if the urban experience, being more new, is less real, less great, for chrissake. I’m a climate control kinda grrrrl. I’m a city chick, an urban aficionado. I don’t need desert and rainforest, I don’t need beaches.

Though I do like beaches, but generally I like them more during rainstorms. In fact, I like rainstorms a lot. I love the punch of a sudden Sydney downpour and the kind of drizzling shower that goes on for days.

Once, a teacher told me she’d moved to Australia to be someplace new. Italy was too old. She meant the cities were old, of course. She was looking for a place where the famous Coliseum hasn’t been butchered to supply marble to local homes for hundreds of years, where museums weren’t bloated by centuries of art and thought.

She didn’t mean the land, the stolen land, because the land has been here as long as the world has. Aboriginal habitation of Australia began maybe 40,000 years ago. You get that feel, too, if you spend time in the ‘great’ outback. You get 40,000 years of whispered voices out there, you get the genocidal white history that’s laid thinly and shamefully on top. Especially at night, especially in the remote dark of night. You find yourself wanting to say ‘I’m sorry’ like a litany, hoping that will be enough for the landscape and its burden of horror to leave you the hell alone.

She came to Sydney, the teacher. To that relatively clean and utterly unplanned city, springing up from a series of coincidences and ill-thought-out roadways that disallow expansion, grand ‘old’ (like, a-hundred-and-fifty-years old) homes that squat precariously on what have accidentally become major motorways. The city goes on, unplanned, reacting to new populations and cultures with benevolent indifference. Asian grocers and Indian spice shops spring up, unexpected. Belgian chocolate shops and Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, Lebanese restaurants fight for space.

But the landscape still wins. It seeps in. With the humidity of a Sydney summer (100% humidity more than once this year) comes the seething plant life growing through cracks in the windows. Parasites of every kind thrive. The cat’s food has to be protected from ants, slugs, cockroaches, and rats. The human food is susceptible to moths. The sticky moth traps in the pantry are littered with moth dust but no carcasses.

The ants eat them even before they die, wings flapping against the glue of the trap. Spiders the size of my thumb spin webs across the entire expanse of my backyard, webs so strong you need two hands to break them.

The landscape tries to box us in. Cut our spaces up, divide-and-conquer style. There is nothing but wildness out there, waiting to get in.

It’s not a wonder to me, then, that I write so much unsettled (occasionally unsettling) fiction. The wonder is more of us don’t. The world tears people apart. The world doesn’t hate us because we don’t recycle. The world just hates us.

So I write about it. An act of revenge on the world. I write about the world breaking us with its wide spaces or its heavy, untamed wildness in stories like “Number 3 Raw Place” and “The Distance Keeper”: both stories with heroes that are isolated and, ultimately, destroyed by the worlds they fear. I write about the unsustainability of our social structures in “Coming up for Air” and “Watertight Lies”. Both these stories take the latest politics around environmental sustainability and dare the reader to wonder ‘what about the social sustainability?’

Because I suspect and I’m afraid that our attempts to partner up with the world will come to nought. The world is rearing and bucking like a stallion, and it dreams of throwing us off.

And I write about the triumphs—the relative, fragile, fleeting triumphs—of the city. In “Diamond Shell” from Book of Endings, one woman finds a way if not to exist than to succeed.

The world, gentle reader, rains down upon us.

Deborah can be found online at http://deborahb.livejournal.com and http://deborahbiancotti.net.


This cover is a portrait of me by artist Nick Stathopoulos for a Jack Dann book. No, I don't actually write as Jack Dann. He’s a completely different person, but I love the spooky look to this cover.

-------
The bush is old, it's ancient, and it's waiting for us to leave.
~Robert Hood, Australian speculative fiction writer

Is it spring yet???

By Lonnie Cruse

Forty-nine out of fifty states had snow on the ground at the same time this year. My hubby says if a snow stays around on the ground, it's waiting for another one. Oh dear. Really? There is snow on our lawn from yesterday. Oh. No.

This has been a very cold winter (in case it somehow escaped your notice.) In February we traveled to Florida for a Bible lectureship in Temple Terrace. We avoided the worst of the snow. Yipieeeee! It was colder than usual, even way down there. Sigh.

One thing about a winter this cold, with this much snow, one (who has reached a certain age) tends to stay inside by the fire, reading. If one's neighbors are brave enough to venture to one's hill for sledding, one does not any longer put on one's warmer outer garments and venture up that hill with sled in hand. Rather, one leaps out onto one's front porch, camera in hand, at the ready, snaps pictures of the insanity, and leaps back inside where the hot chocolate is. I have no clue what that orange thingy is in the picture but the neighbors DID ride it down the hill. I did mention insanity, did I not? I missed getting a shot of the neighbor who slid (or attempted to) down the hill on a chair. Sigh.


One has plenty of books and hot chocolate on hand for such emergencies. One does not sweep porches or sidewalks. That's what husbands or neighbor's sons were born to do. Nor does one clean off the car. One pretends to have two broken hands. Trust me.

I find myself longing for the sight of the daffodils which herald true spring, even if they are surrounded by snow. I think longingly of our sun porch, fully closed in but with not enough heat out there at this time of year to make it worth my while to sneak out there to read. Sigh. BUT, the good thing about all this snow is that I'm able to find time to read. Time when I'd normally be outside doing yard work. Or running errands. Or chasing grandkids. Or just plain busy. Hmmm, what did the almanac say about our next snow?

I know most of the rest of you had it FAR worse than we did. Sandy and Liz, for example. Far worse. Probably weren't even able to find a decent hill to sled down, with all that snow? You're both welcome to use mine. I'll take the pictures.

Besides reading and hot chocolate, this winter was a good time for a huge pot of chilli, for gaining a few extra pounds, for watching TV, for snuggling with someone you love, for lots of things that don't take us outside into that mess. What's your favorite winter activity? Keep it clean!

Why People Stay Stuck in Bad Relationships

Elizabeth Zelvin

Almost everybody has had at least one bad relationship. I blogged about this briefly a while back in my post about answering hard questions, of which “Why don’t they just leave?” is one. I propose one way out, only partly tongue in cheek, in the title of my mystery, Death Will Help You Leave Him. I had a piece in the Holiday 2009 Mystery Scene tying my book to the issue and titled, “Why She Can’t Throw the Bum Out.” But this is one of those questions to which people have chronic difficulty hearing the answer. Both men and women burned in bad relationships go on to make the same mistakes again. And the people around them criticize and judge them, unable to see that destructive relationship choices are not dependent on reason and common sense. So let’s talk about it some more.

At least two different ways of looking at toxic relationships work for me. One is based on attachment theory, a psychological model that focuses on the bond between infant and mother. For healthy development, a child needs to start out life with security about this basic attachment. If mom is absent or unavailable emotionally, children experience insecure attachment. This affects their ability to form attachments in their adult relationships. This may play out in a number of different ways: desperation to latch on and cling to an inappropriate love object; preferring abuse or coldness to abandonment; an unconscious fear of the kind of intimacy in which it’s safe to let down all defenses, because a relationship in which that can’t happen feels more familiar.

Bad relationships can also be attributed to addiction—not sex addiction, which is something entirely different, but love addiction. We can also call it relationship addiction. The 12-step program Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous talks about addiction to “romance and intrigue,” which I think is an excellent way of describing the “high” of falling in love with someone seen through the lens of fantasy rather than the hard light of reality. One key point about addictions is that, regardless of what caused them, they take on a life of their own. The phenomena of craving, increased tolerance, and denial apply as well to love addiction as they do to alcoholism or drug addiction. “Just throw the bum out” is as irrelevant as “Just say no” to someone whose destructive behavior has become compulsive and deeply rooted in the unconscious or “inner child.”

Societal messages that tell women to “stand by your man” and confuse passion, sexual tension, anxiety, danger, and dominance with love contribute to both men’s and women’s difficulty getting out of bad relationships or even thinking they should. And there’s no question that economic considerations and physical fear may play a part in not believing they can. But there’s a lot more than that going on. And I can’t say too often that common sense has nothing to do with it.

In Death Will Help You Leave Him, I take a look at three bad relationships. One provides the matter for the mystery plot: abusive, two-timing, drug-addicted boyfriend is murdered, codependent, long-suffering girlfriend is prime suspect. The second gives the protagonist, Bruce, a conflict to struggle with: he’s attracted to a sweet young woman who might love him, but can’t stop going back to his troubled ex-wife, who manipulates him through both sexual attraction—and charisma fueled by manic episodes and drugs—and his desire to rescue her from suicidal depression. The third is the ex-wife’s own relationship addiction, both to an abusive man and to Bruce, whom she can’t allow to abandon her even though she doesn’t love him any more. Near the end of the book (and don’t you dare peek!), I’ve tucked in evidence that her behavior comes not from cruelty or out of nowhere, but is rooted in the pain of her own past. When it comes to love, one individual can be both victim and oppressor.

Snirt!

Sandra Parshall

After every snowstorm, I think of Rich Hall. I’ve been thinking of Rich Hall a lot this winter.

If you’re younger than 40, you probably don’t remember the comedian who became famous in the early 1980s on the HBO show Not Necessarily the News. Hall gave us sniglets – words that aren’t in the dictionary but should be. Sniglets are blended words or sound-alike words with different spellings and meanings. An example of the latter is sarchasm, the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and those who don’t get it. A perfect example of a blended word is snirt, a pile of dirty snow.

In the Washington, DC, area where I live, we’ve had three gigantic snowstorms this winter, one in December and two in February, along with a couple of storms that deposited less impressive amounts. And we have snirt by the ton, everywhere we look. Mountains of black-or-getting-there stuff that was once pristine white. Even newscasters sometimes use the word snirt when referring to it. This is one sniglet that may end up in the dictionary yet.


So every time I see a pile of snirt, Rich Hall comes to mind. But I don’t think snirt was one of his sniglets. It’s so perfect that it ought to be credited to Hall, but I couldn’t find it in his books. (He produced five: Sniglets, More Sniglets, Unexplained Sniglets of the Universe, Angry Young Sniglets, and When Sniglets Ruled the Earth – all still available here and there if you take the trouble to search.) I had a lot of fun looking for it, though, and came across sniglets that still made me laugh all these years after I first heard them.


NURGE: To inch closer to a stoplight in the belief that you can make it change faster.

PUPSQUEAK: The sound a yawning dog makes when it opens its mouth too wide.

PIGSLICE: The last piece of pizza that everyone is secretly dying to grab.

CHWADS: Disgusting wads of chewing gum stuck under table and desk tops.

PROFANITYPE: The special characters used by cartoonists to replace swear words.

FLOPCORN: The unpopped corn kernels at the bottom of the popper.

FRUST: The line of debris that refuses to be swept into the dustpan, making you pursue it across the floor until you give up and sweep it under the rug.

Some sniglets are sadly dated now, progress and change having left them behind.

ESSOASSO: A person who cuts through a service station lot to avoid a red light. (“Sunocoasso” doesn’t have the same ring.)

SPIBBLE: The metal barrier on a rotary phone that stops your dialing finger at 0. (The world is now filling up with people who have never seen a rotary phone in their lives.)

PERCUBURP: A coffee percolator’s last gasp, alerting you that the coffee is ready. (Does anyone still own a percolator?)

After browsing through the sniglets books, I became curious about Hall himself. I knew that after Not Necessarily the News he went on to Saturday Night Live, but what happened to him after that?

I discovered that the popularity of his sniglets proved to be a burden to Hall. When he did standup comedy, all people wanted to hear from him were more sniglets. He did a 1986 Showtime special called Vanishing America, and in 1990-91 he hosted a Comedy Channel talk show. But sniglets haunted him, and he fled to England to escape their shadow(s).

These days Hall divides his time between England and the US, and he’s still working as a comedian. To me, though, he’ll always be the sniglets guy, and whether snirt was his brainchild or not, I will always think of him when I see a mountain of filthy snow.
*******************************
Over at Jungle Red Writers today, Roberta Isleib asks me some questions other interviewers never ask.

Training Wheels Come Off

Sharon Wildwind

My husband and I were discussing a word processing program we use. We both allowed how we really should take the time to recreate our most used style sheets because we’ve been using the programs long enough that we can create a much more stream-lined style than we could when we first bought the program.

He said, kindly, “You’re a power user now.”

No, I disagreed, “I’m not writing my own code yet.”

But, he countered, “The training wheels definitely came off a long time ago.”

Ah, the training wheels.

The summer I learned to type Bob Dylan graduated from high school, Vice-President Richard M. Nixon visited Russia—Remember the kitchen debate? (Bonus points if you can tell me in whose kitchen the debate took place.)—and Hawaii becomes 50th US state.

In other news, in my bedroom, it was me, a rickety card table, a portable Underwood typewriter on which my mother typed her masters’ thesis in 1940, and an instructional manual entitled, The Fundamentals of Typing: a Complete Professional Course for Secretaries and Other Clerical Office Staff.

I thought that manual was terrific. It was printed on thick, slick paper with just the faintest gray tinge to it. The exquisite black-and-white photos showed the correct professional posture for typing and the hands poised delicately over the keyboard like a concert pianist ready to strike the first note. Best of all, it had this flap at the bottom, which folded back and held the book in a slightly-slanted position, so that it could be viewed while typing.

There was the requisite chapter on the importance of typing: it developed hand-eye coordination, precise attention to detail, and was the life-blood of the modern office. There were also chapters on typewriter parts, maintaining a clean work environment, proper typist attire, and how to change those pesky inky ribbons. Learning to type appeared to be a cross between taking religious vows and being entrusted with the most arcane symbols of a secret society.

The most important rule was that you must never, ever, ever look at your fingers while you worked. The fate of the free world depended on looking only at the copy you were transcribing or, should you, in a wild, undisciplined frenzy be creating your own work instead of typing what someone else had written, it was permissible to stare at that little space on the patten, where the letters emerged one-by-one as you pressed the keys.

All right then, eyes on the manual, head up, spine straight, feet firmly on the floor. You may begin.

asdfg
;lkjh
asdfg ;lkjh
as
gas
had
add
lad
fad
lass
dash
lash
half

But boy, when we got to Upward Finger Extensions, Level One—I’m sorry, but even today that sounds rude—things really took off. By mastering qwert and poiuy, all of a sudden I had command of all of the vowels.

The dashing lad had a fad for hash

Of course, I had to wait for Downward Finger Extensions before I could add a period to end the sentence. Periods came along, if I remember correctly about the time Robert Allen Zimmerman mounted the high school stage in Hibbing, Minnesota to receive his diploma.

All these years I’ve been waiting to get this off my chest, so here goes. I never learned to touch type Upward Finger Extensions, Level Two, in other words the place where the numbers live.

To be painfully honest, I peeked. I looked at my fingers when I typed numbers. I still do.

In retrospect it was probably because my child-size hands couldn’t extend fully to the top row yet, or maybe it was because of my slight dyslexia with numbers where I can type 238 and read it as 283 that I didn’t trust myself to fly over the top line without training wheels.

Oh, yeah, and when I went back to school in September and TYPED my first assignment, I got into big trouble. My teacher insisted that my mother must have typed my homework for me because children my age did not know how to type.

It took a trip to the Sister-Principal’s office, where I sat at the secretary’s desk—head up, spine straight, feet dangling in mid-air because my legs weren’t long enough reach the floor—and touch-typed my way through several paragraphs of the religious catechism before the nuns believed that I had taught myself to type over the summer. Fortunately, the catechism had only a couple of number in them, and I slid past those with a quick downward glance at the keyboard.
-----
Quotes for the week:
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
~Willa Cather (1893–1947), American author

Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.
~Gene Fowler (1890–1960), American journalist, author, and dramatist.

Nancy Drew, Where Art Thou?

by Julia Buckley
The Nancy Drew books of my childhood were lovely, yellow-spined hardbacks with gorgeous full color covers and alluring titles like Password to Larkspur Lane and The Mystery of the Moss-Covered Mansion. To my child's eyes, these were sophisticated books, because they replaced the kiddy paperbacks and the tall thin children's books I'd read before I "grew up" and embraced Nancy Drew.

For a while, she was an addiction. I asked for those books for every Christmas and birthday until, between my sister and myself, we'd accumulated quite a collection. And then, suddenly, we were done with them. We were reading older stuff--Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt, and Nancy seemed immature now. We donated the entire collection to our tiny town library.

Nowadays, Nancy Drew is an advertising brand. Put her name on a product, and it will sell, because Nancy's mystique has been passed down through generations of women--little girls who grew up and encouraged their own little girls to read Nancy. So there are Nancy Drew journals and stationery and pajamas. And, inevitably, there are Nancy Drew video games.

Check out Her Interactive, where you can preview some of the games and play some of them for free, allowing you to solve along with Nancy in a way we never could when I was a child.

My concern, though, is that these games do the imagining for the child who plays them. And this Nancy doesn't have titian hair, but a dark bob that makes her look more like George than like the Nancy of my imagination (and Keene's descriptions).

Sure, even in the old days "Carolyn Keene" was a fiction, and Nancy Drew was a successful conglomerate. Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys were always about sales, but little girls and boys made them about more than that. They became a part of our memories, our nostalgia, and therefore, a part of our imaginations.

It's not horrible that Nancy has morphed into new forms--it's just not Nancy--not as we knew her once.

Is that bad or good? Are these games entertaining or not? They are visually pretty, and probably please the little girls of today the way that the old covers pleased me.

But I wonder . . . is change always necessary? Must Nancy become a video to stay alive?

The books that enchanted the children of this generation, especially the Harry Potter saga, were all immediately made into video games. I know, because I was instructed to buy them for my boys even AFTER I read those seven books--ALL SEVEN--out loud to them.

The boys tell me that the books and the videos are utterly different things; that one experience doesn't really inform the other. So what of the children who don't read the books at all, and go straight to the videos? Are they missing out on the magic of Nancy? Or is the magic of Nancy that she can please children in various forms?

THE BISHOP SAGA

I didn't originally plan to write about Amy Bishop, the Alabama professor who (allegedly) shot six people, but the unfolding story has been too good to ignore. Since Amy spent quite a few years living and attending college in Massachusetts (where I live), the papers and the local news stations have been filled with background details, photographs, and anything else they could dig up–a few years too late.

For those of you who have remained happily oblivious of all this, here's a quick review of the facts. Amy Bishop was a high school student who looked like someone we all knew back then. She went to college and graduated cum laude. A year later she married. She obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard and held several post-doctoral research fellowship, a fairly normal career path. Finally in 2003 she obtained a faculty position as an assistant professor of biology in Alabama. Along the way she and her husband had four children. A normal life, and one that would be called successful by most popular standards.

This month that nice, normal woman shot six people; three of them died. And if you turn over that shiny resume and look at the dark side of Amy Bishop's history, the warning signs were always there.

1986: the peculiar death of Amy's younger brother, from a shotgun blast–a shotgun she admitted to holding when it went off. After the shooting she fled the scene and tried to take a car from a nearby auto dealership–still carrying the same gun.

Amy's mother said the shooting was an accident. That was the end of the investigation. The procedural issues are at best troubling:

–Amy and her mother, the only witnesses, were not questioned until 11 days after the event–Amy's story and that of her mother differed in significant details. –The attempted car theft was never investigated by police, nor the fact that Amy was wandering around threatening people with a loaded gun.

Now, of course, everybody who was involved–local police, state police, and the county district attorney–are pointing fingers at each other and whining, "but you never told us!" It was a paperwork problem?

1993: Amy and her husband were considered suspects in the mailing of two pipe bombs to one of Amy's then-supervisors, with whom she had argued. It was investigated, but no charges were filed. But why was she a person of interest?

1999-2003: Amy and her husband made frequent complaints about noisy neighbors and children playing, and were well known to the local police.

2002: Amy burst into a shrieking and profane rage and hit a woman at an IHOP because the woman would not give up the last infant seat. Amy was given probation and told to seek anger management counseling. There's no record that she did.

2010: Professor Amy Bishop "allegedly" opens fire at a faculty meeting at the Alabama college where she is employed, killing three and wounding three others. Her husband suggests that perhaps the fact that she had recently been denied tenure might have been a factor. It was reported that when she was arrested and escorted to a police car, she was overheard saying, "it didn't happen."

A twenty-year history of irrational and angry acts, sprinkled through a normal life: she completed a degree at Harvard, obtained and held jobs (although she fudged her resume a bit), married, had children. Her husband claims to be baffled by the most recent turn of events. This is a man who has been living with her for over twenty years. He didn't know she was capable of that kind of violence?

But you have to wonder, how does anyone maintain the facade of normalcy with that kind of anger bottled up? How did Amy hold it all together for long stretches of time, and fool so many people for so long? How do you go from being wife/mom/working woman to killer overnight? What did authorities–and her husband–miss?

I will admit when I first heard this mentioned in the news, I was incredulous. Who would believe a story like this? Then I started thinking as a writer. Okay, maybe the pacing is a bit slow, with events spread out over twenty years. But scattered along the way were clues–brief, startling glimpses of that rage, that disappeared as quickly as they had come. Maybe they looked harmless until you put them all together. As writers, we'd provide a few hints into why she was so angry, and had so few channels for expressing it, short of extreme violence. But as the reality has shown us, it was possible for everyone–authorities and family–to ignore this problem for years, until the most recent turn of events.

In a final, perverse twist, it turns out that Amy has (in her spare time?) been working on a novel–a thriller titled Amazon Fever, in which she describes a woman struggling to save her failing career while in the midst of a global pandemic. She belonged to a writing group and hoped to get it published.

I'm wondering if the publishers be fighting to print it now. What a way to make a sale.

PS. I should add that the story is nowhere near over yet. Just this morning the local paper reported a curious CSI-like twist: investigators found another clue when they enlarged a photo from the original shooting of Amy's brother, and found they could read a newspaper clipping that suggested...well, you'll just have to keep reading.