Lea Wait's Blog, page 35

Tracing Genome Editing Back to the Eugenics Movement by Matt Cost

In my Clay Wolfe book, Mouse Trap, I traveled down the rabbit hole into the world of genome editing, which some consider Wonderland. On the one hand, it is a place of wildly creative science trying to banish disease and disorder. On the other hand, it is a process that could lead to the demolition of human uniqueness, or what Wonderland represents, a world of absurdity, irrationality, uncertainty and disorder.

Genome editing is a process in which the DNA of individuals can be changed at the embryo stage to edit traits such as height, eye color, and just about anything you can imagine using a technology called CRISPR-Cas9. The FDA frowns upon this being used on human subjects, but as often is the case, the science has outpaced the laws on putting any real teeth in restrictions on this being done.

It could be used to make super soldiers. It could be used to change skin pigmentation. Do you want your child to have DNA traits common among geniuses, athletes, musicians, or artists? Mouse Trap posits that there are labs out there helping, for a very healthy fee, you to accomplish these aspirations for those goals for your unborn child.

At the time of researching that book, it led me to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. The primary place of research in the U.S. was at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York. It started in 1904 as a record gathering facility under Charles Davenport, a zoologist, and would quickly expand to a large part of the Carnegie Institute trying to declare certain individuals as unfit due to mental health, gender, race and other things that would lead to the involuntary sterilization of at least 60,000 people in this country.

This movement funded by the wealthiest Americans, backed by a majority of politicians, spearheaded by the lead scientists and medical innovators, was the foundation of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party. Of course, when the horrible atrocities of the Nazi’s and Hitler were revealed to the world, people began to distance themselves from the Eugenics Movement and it went dormant for years, but is now reappearing full-cycle in the form of genome editing.

The research I did on Mouse Trap led me to the information that is the basis for my upcoming Brooklyn 8 Ballo book, City Gone Askew. 8 is confronted by the possibility, in 1924, of a horrifying triumvirate of the Eugenics Movement, the resurgence of the KKK, and the emergence of the Nazi party. Coming to you July 31st. Cover reveal coming soon.

About the Author

Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014 he was released and began writing. And that’s what he does. He writes histories and mysteries.

Cost has published five books in the Mainely Mystery series, with the fifth, Mainely Wicked, just released in August of 2023. He has also published four books in the Clay Wolfe Trap series, with the fifth, Pirate Trap, just released on March 27th, 2024.

For historical novels, Cost has published At Every Hazard and its sequel, Love in a Time of Hate, as well as I am Cuba. In April of 2023, Cost combined his love of histories and mysteries into a historical PI mystery set in 1923 Brooklyn, Velma Gone Awry. City Gone Askew will follow in July of 2024.

Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A chocolate Lab and a basset hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.

The Passive Voice, Or Why I Quit the New York Times

Just when I think I can’t come up with another blog topic, something so egregious happens that all I’m reduced to is the typical Roy Kent response to insupportable and crazy bullshit, which amounts to standing in the middle of the floor and yelling F*ck.

As I’m sure anyone who follows the news at even a high level knows, OJ Simpson, once the darling of the football field and the Hertz rental car commercials, died recently. What irritates me deeply is how little attention was paid in the encomiums and eulogies to the fact that he murdered his wife and another young man. He was acquitted, yes, by a jury that seemed to be sending a message about race in America more than it was advocating for justice for the victims. But travesties like that are part and parcel of the judicial system—sometimes the guilty do go unpunished. But I can’t forgive the emphasis on his storied football career and the willingness to forget everything else. The official Heisman X account posted this sentiment: “The Heisman Trophy Trust mourns the passing of 1968 Heisman Trophy Winner OJ Simpson. We extend our sympathy to his family.” Not a nod or a word to the fact Simpson was found liable, civilly at least, for two murders.

I once had a technical writing manager who informed me that “The passive tense should be avoided.” Given that she had confused tense and voice, and in that sentence construction contradicted herself, the underlying sentiment was correct.

Good writers avoid the passive voice because it distances the subject of an action from the action itself, thereby weakening the power of the sentence. “Larry racked the shotgun” vs. “The shotgun was racked by Larry.” The former is cleaner, takes less time to say, and leaves no lingering doubt about what order things happened in.

On the other hand, politicians love the passive voice, for the very reasons I describe. It allows distance between the actor and the action. “Mistakes were made.” “Apologies have been offered to the injured parties.”

What set me off yesterday was not strictly speaking a passive construction, but along with the passive voice, our newspapers seem addicted to not saying anything straight or true. Specifically, in an AP article about the death of OJ Simpson, I learned that Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman, Simpson’s wife and her friend, “lost their lives.”

If that doesn’t soft soap with language what a bloody killing by knife looks like, I don’t know what does.

The whole thing brings to mind the reasons why I have, except for the games, canceled my subscription to the New York Times. The rampant both-siderism, the false equivalencies in the stories, especially political ones, the sloppy research—a recent article pegged the beginning of TV debates to 1968, which will no doubt surprise those of us who remember John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debating, to Nixon’s detriment. It’s a Google search away, for god’s sake.

I’m sure this sounds like an old Boomer rant, but what I have always believed, what writers have to believe, is that language counts. Words have meaning and specificity and weight, and we get sloppy with them to the detriment of our culture. Listen to some of what our news organs quote without comment from politicians of all stripes: the word salads, the meaningless thoughts and prayers, the self-distancing from anything like responsibility or truth. At least as writers, we can say what we mean and mean what we say, and what we say will not be obscure. That ought to be worth more than it seems to be.

Joyful Even After …. The Facts

 

Sandra Neily here:

On Earth Day, do we have enough residual hope to celebrate success, even as the future often looks really tough?

I made sure Sally and I had the same hats!

Today, we hear from my good friend, Sally Stockwell, Maine Audubon’s Director of Conservation. In the midst of the pandemic (2020) she sent out this inspirational Earth Day message about progress and humans pulling together.

After decades defending Maine’s wildlife and habitat, Sally should know. She was there on Earth Day #1 and, since then, every day has been an Earth Day for her. (Find links to all her great wildlife and habitat posts … below.)

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50 Years of Earth Day: I Was There

Sally leads a field trip.

BY SALLY STOCKWELL                                     April 21, 2020

“ ..  we have seen remarkable improvements in our air quality and water quality, and we have saved 99% of species listed as Threatened or Endangered from going extinct.”

I was there.  Fifty years ago.  The first Earth Day.  April 22, 1970. I was a freshman in high school and a small group of my friends and I were anxiously waiting to see if anyone would show up at the new recycling center we had just set up in the back parking lot at our school.  For months beforehand we had been collecting drop-off bins, finding vendors who would take the recycled materials, and putting up flyers and posters encouraging students and their families to collect and drop off their paper, glass and cans (there was very little plastic back then….) come April 22.  Newspapers went in one bin, cardboard in another, brown glass had to be separated from green and clear glass, and metal cans had to be separated from aluminum ones.

Today this might not seem like a big deal, since many towns in Maine now offer drop-off recycling centers at town facilities, or even curb-side pick-up, and large companies like EcoMaine happily collect recyclables.  But back then – it was novel.  I think we were one of the first sites in all of St. Paul (a city of about 300,000 at the time) to start collecting.

We gathered in the parking lot early to prepare for what we hoped was going to be a long day, and we weren’t disappointed.  Car after car arrived with trunks and backs filled with recyclables.  We sorted and filled all of our containers to overflowing and finished the day weary but ecstatic. We felt vindicated that we weren’t alone in caring for Mother Earth in our own small way. 

That year was the start of a long career in conservation for me.  That year also marked the start of a series of landmark legislation that still stand today and forever changed the way our lives intertwine with the natural world around us.  Shortly after Earth Day, the Clean Air Act (CAA) was substantially improved and amended (1970), the National Environmental Protection Agency was created (1970), and soon after the Clean Water Act (1972) and then the Endangered Species Act (1973) were passed – all in response to public outcry, all with substantial bipartisan support, and all signed into law by then-president Richard Nixon.  Together these laws and programs established a new paradigm between industry and the public.

Paul Rogers, Chair of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment during the 1970 Clean Air Act deliberations, remembered it this way: During the House floor debate on the [CAA] amendments, one of my colleagues quoted a small town mayor, who …is reported to have said: “If you want this town to grow, it has got to stink.” Before 1970, there were still many persons and companies throughout the United States who agreed with the mayor that pollution was the inevitable price of progress. In the 1970 amendments, however, Congress signaled its firm belief that economic growth and a clean environment are not mutually exclusive goals. 

(A Sandy note: Bob and I appreciate a protected river.)

Ever since then, we have seen remarkable improvements in our air quality and water quality, and we have saved 99% of species listed as Threatened or Endangered from going extinct.  After the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed in the 1970s we successfully reduced the ozone hole in the atmosphere that threatened to burn us up from too much UV light; reduced acid rain and toxic lead from falling on our soils and lakes and then into the food web; and eliminated the toxic foam and fires on our rivers caused by sulfite emissions and other pollutants.  This was proof as Representative Rogers noted, that business can carry on and protect the environment, people and the planet’s health all at the same time.

Which brings us to today, fifty years later.  Unfortunately, many other changes have occurred since the 1970s that haven’t been so great for people, wildlife, or the natural world.  Just yesterday while I was driving from my house to the grocery store on near-empty roads because of the coronavirus, I felt as if I were transported back 30 years to when I first moved here – a time when I was surrounded by vibrant farmlands and forestlands; there were no telephone or electric lines alongside the last mile of road; and there were fewer homes, roads, businesses, parking lots, and cars.  More recently, as I watched yet another home slip into a favored forest patch of mine, far back from the main road and right next to a vernal pool, I remember my young son telling me, “Mom – you can’t save it all!”  And he’s right, but we can do better.

When we come together with the future of Mother Earth and all that she gives us in mind, we can chart a positive path forward.  We’ve done it before, when we cleaned up our air and water, stopped the ozone hole from spreading, and recovered endangered bald eagles from extinction.  And even though the problems before us are more complex than ever, we can do it again. By bringing together conservationists, poets, business professionals, artists, economists, policy-makers and others we can find creative solutions to tame the dangers lurking in front of us from a changing climate – but only if we choose to, and only if we act.

One of my pandemic solo hikes.

Now as most of us are sequestered at home, taking time to wander through the remaining fields, forests, and waterways nearby to soothe our anxiety and rejuvenate the soul, I hope when this is all over, we can remember what’s really important.  For me, that’s connections with friends and family; connections with colleagues, neighbors, and community; an outdoor oasis I can walk to from my house; clean air for healthy lungs; clean water for drinking and gardening; and fresh local foods that don’t rely on chemicals and an international supply chain.

At the same time, we are all struggling with an uncertain future, perhaps with friends who have become sickened or even died, and a shrinking paycheck and economy.  But consider this – right now as we are threatened with a killer virus, most of us have changed our habits in response – not only to protect ourselves, but to protect our friends, colleagues, and families. Can we do the same to protect Mother Earth and the air, water, plants, animals, food, and wood she gives us?  These are the things we should be fighting for.  Earth is feverish and struggling to survive too.  She needs our help. And we need her healthy so she can help us.

So please join me on this 50th anniversary of Earth Day, and make a pledge to do your part to make sure we have plenty to celebrate on April 22, 2070 – just 50 years from now. That might seem like a long way off, but believe me – the time goes by faster than you think!  We have no time to lose.

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Here’s a link to all of Sally’s wonderful wildlife and conservation posts as Director of Conservation for Maine Audubon. (You’re a birder or a wanna-be? Don’t miss her bird posts.)

Sandy’s second Mystery in Maine, Deadly Turn, was published in 2021. Her debut novel, “Deadly Trespass, A Mystery in Maine,” won a national Mystery Writers of America award, was a finalist in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association “Rising Star” contest, and was a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. Find her novels at all Shermans Books (Maine) and on Amazon. Find more info on Sandy’s website.

Weekend Update: April 20-21, 2024

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Sandra Neily (Monday), Dick Cass (Tuesday), Matt Cost (Thursday) and Charlene D’Avanzo (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

Velma Gone Awry, Matt Cost’s 1923 historical PI mystery set in Brooklyn, is a finalist in the Chanticleer Mystery & Mayhem awards. The winner will be announced tonight, Saturday, April 20th, at the banquet ceremonies in Bellingham, Washington. COST TALKS continue this week, first at the Canaan Public Library in Canaan on Wednesday, the 24th, at 4:00 p.m. On Thursday, the 25, Cost will be at the Auburn Public Library at 4:00 p.m. Feel free to reach out and request a COST TALK for your organization or book club.

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

Walking the tightrope of writing a mystery series

One question I’m frequently asked by readers is “Do I have to read your books in order?”

The short answer is no. Then again, when do I ever give a short answer? I usually tell the asker no, you don’t, but while each book in my Bernadette “Bernie” O’Dea mystery series wraps up the story in the book, the character arcs and relationships develop as the books continue, so if it were me, I’d read them in order. I usually add that when I realize I’m reading a book that’s part of a series, it doesn’t take away from my enjoyment to know it’s not the first book. But once I’m done, I go back and start at the beginning.

Of course, exactly what I say depends on the situation. I had a table at the awesome Central Aroostook Chamber of Commerce holiday craft fair in December, and ran out of the first book in the series, Cold Hard News. The vendor next to me — not a writer — suggested that I don’t tell people what order the books are in, so they wouldn’t realize they’re not buying the first one. Of course, I couldn’t do that. But I did stress to potential buyers the “you don’t have to read them in order” part a little more strongly.

It’s a fine tightrope we walk when we write a mystery series. The balancing act gets tighter with each new book.

As a reader I was always annoyed when horrific life-altering things happened to a main character in a book, but they were completely unaffected in the next book in the series. On the other hand, spoilers or detail-laden references to earlier events can be confusing. Is this part of the plot of, or relevant to, this book?

Of course, once I started writing, I understood it’s not that easy to balance it out. As I worked my way through the first three books of my Bernie O’Dea series, I was conscious of walking that tightrope in a way that would be best for all readers — new ones and those who’d read previous books.

As I get close to finishing Dying For News, the fourth in the series, that tightrope is a  daily writing challenge. Bad things have happened to Bernie in the first three books, as well as police chief Pete Novotny. It’s a mystery series, so that’s par for the course. Bernie is a “normal” person, one of my goals for my female protagonist when I began writing mysteries. She doesn’t have super-human powers, fashion-model looks or the uncanny ability to intuit what the bad guy is going to do and therefor save everyone from imminent disaster. Being a normal person also means that she doesn’t take life-threatening situations in stride. Pete — sorry, buddy — has taken a beating, particularly in the third book, Bad News Travels Fast. He also has PTSD stemming from childhood trauma and his years as a Philadelphia homicide cop. The extent of his PTSD becomes more apparent with each book, a major thread of the character and relationship arc.

So, as I write the fourth book, how do I acknowledge the foundations laid by the first three without giving away clues to the mysteries that happened in those books? How do I do it without leading readers to feel as though they need to have read those books to understand what’s going on in this one? How do I do it without giving so much information that it makes it seem as though those references to the past are part of this book’s plot?

I’ve set some writing rules for walking that tightrope that I try to follow as I write the fourth book in the Bernie O’Dea series.

1 Be sure to include necessary character background. It’s easy to forget, since in my mind these aren’t separate books, but an ongoing narrative, that new readers need basic introductions to the characters. These introductions, though, shouldn’t bore established readers or give more detail than is necessary. For instance, new readers must know that Bernie bought her weekly newspaper in north-western Maine after years of working at bigger-city New England dailies, and that it’s the newspaper she started out at 20 years before. They need to know she’s from a big family and her seven siblings are all doctors and lawyers. They also need to know that Pete was a homicide cop in Philadelphia before coming to Redimere, that he has PTSD, and that his brother died at 15. Those and other basics actually become more necessary to get out early in later books, so that the deeper nuances of relationships make sense to new readers.

2 Don’t include too much character background. Revealing too much can not only be distracting and confusing, but also weakens the narrative of previous books for those who haven’t read them yet. A good developing character and relationship arc through a series must be as fun for readers as it is for the writer. Readers who don’t start at the beginning shouldn’t be left out of the fun of the journey the characters took to where they are now.

3 Refer to previous plots without revealing resolutions or saying so much that it spoils the previous books. The reason I focused on characters in the first two points is because that’s trickier for me, since the development of the relationship is a thread that runs through the books. The plots of my books, conversely, are contained within the book. There aren’t any plot cliff-hangers when the book is done. But still, stuff happened in previous books that has an impact on what’s going on in the current one. Just as with character background, revealing too much is a distraction to readers — anything from too much exposition to misleading them into thinking it’s part of the plot of the current book. So, for instance, in Dying For News, Pete has a severely injured leg because of a “hiking accident” he suffered in Bad News Travels Fast. It’s relevant to the plot, but how he got it isn’t that important. Revealing details of how he got it would also spoil the drama for readers who haven’t yet read the previous book. In another example, Bernie flips out whenever she sees, or even hears about, Fergus Kelley, a feckless reporter for an online news outlet. His lack of ethics caused issues for her in the previous two books. Readers of the new book learn fast how she feels, but can understand it without knowing the details of what he did [although a nicely placed “he almost got me killed” doesn’t hurt].

4 You can’t make everyone happy. This goes for almost every choice a writer makes. It’s a garden party where you can’t please everyone, so you have to please yourself [a post for a future day]. When walking the series tightrope, specifically, it’s up to me to make sure I follow the first three rules with as much attention as possible. Once I’ve satisfied myself that I’m revealing enough to give readers the insight and information they need to enjoy the current book without feeling as though they’re missing something, or being distracted, it’s in their hands.

5 Give readers credit. Readers who are familiar with mystery series know that if they are introduced mid-series there will likely be references to the past that they’re not going to find out more about unless they read the previous books. I’ve written before about how to read a mystery series. I fully believe that mystery lovers have it down. Readers new to mysteries will pick it up. Readers are smart about what they read, for the most part. If I follow point 4, and make sure I walk the tightrope as skillfully as I can, I know they’ll follow right behind me.

Voices

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today admitting to my fondness for movie musicals—everything from Singin’ in the Rain to Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. Not too long ago, in the course of about a month, I ended up watching three different versions of Gypsy, one starring Rosalind Russell, one with Bette Midler, and the third, to my surprise, starring British actress Imelda Staunton (perhaps best know for her role as Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter movies).

But here’s the really odd thing: when an earworm inevitably surfaced—”Everything’s Coming up Roses”—it wasn’t any of those actresses I heard singing in my head. It was Ethel Merman, who originated the role on Broadway. That got me thinking about voices.

This post isn’t about voices done by A.I. or impressionists, or even about voices familiar to us because they belong to family or friends or because we hear them all the time on radio, tv, or a podcast. My focus is on truly distinctive voices, the ones you recognize even years after the last time you heard them.

These are rare. Lots of famous actors have versatile voices, but are they recognizable instantly? When I started thinking about it, I could come up with quite a few names, but that was a small number compared to how many actors are out there. Sometimes I hear a voice-over and instantly know who it is—Helen Mirren in Barbie comes to mind. But for the most part when I hear a voice that sounds vaguely familiar I can’t identify it. It’s distinctive, but not distinctive enough.

Somewhere along the path of my musings, it occurred to me that most of the voices I immediately recognized weren’t just speaking. They were singing, which brings me back to Ethel Merman (her name is a link to hear her singing one of the songs from Gypsy). The best film to hear her in is There’s No Business Like Show Business. Another Broadway actress with a distinctive voice was Gwen Verdon. I was lucky enough to see her live in Sweet Charity and her name is a link to one of the songs from that show, but you can hear her speaking voice in the films Damn Yankees and Cocoon.

Who else came to mind? Jimmy Durante voicing a song at the end of Sleepless in Seattle. You may have noticed that most of my examples of distinctive voices are, shall we say, old. Well, so am I!

One of the most frequent suggestions given to writers is to listen to how various people speak and try to approximate that on the page. Dialogue in which every character sounds alike gets boring very quickly. On the other hand, writers who try too hard to differentiate between characters by means of regional accents, speech patterns, or speech impediments all too easily end up with dialogue that sounds artificial.

Even harder, perhaps impossible, to convey on the page is the actual sound of someone’s voice. We end up falling back on adjectives—deep baritone, high tinkly, and the like—or comparisons to the voices of real, named people including actors (a “lazy” technique frowned upon by writing teachers), or to the sounds made by animals or by inanimate objects like fingers on a chalkboard.

So, those are my musings on the subject. I’d love to hear what folks reading this post think about conveying the sound of a character’s voice on the page, as well as who first comes to mind when the question of an immediately recognizable voice is raised. I hope you’ll chime in with a comment.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new omnibus e-book editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.

 

A Crime Writer’s Adventures in Research

Kate Flora: One of the most interest aspects of crime writing is, of course, all the

Sometimes research takes me in some strange directions, like to the shooting range.

research we do. True, it is easy to put off the writing while we do one more bit of research. It is also possible to get very lost in the weeds, as one question will lead to another and then another, until the block of writing time has passed. There’s always tomorrow, though. And there’s always recognizing the necessity to apply that annoying little word I like so much: DISCIPLINE.

(You have all heard my snarky comment about waiting for the fluttery little Muse of inspiration, right?)

Recently, in my next Joe Burgess mystery, Deliver Us from Evil, (working title, at least) I needed to find something that would be attached to a blanket the victim was wrapped in that might provide a clue to where she might have been held prisoner. That led me to explore rare and endangered plants in Maine. Yes, I went down the rabbit hole, for sure. It was fun to stare at photos of plants, read their descriptions, and learn where they can be been found in Maine. Some were in too many places. Some only along the coast, while I wanted the location to be inland, in the vast, thinly settled interior. https://www.maine.gov/dacf/mnap/features/rare_plants/plantlist.htm

Along the way, I learned a term I’d never heard before: hitchhiker plants. Sure, like everyone else who tromps through fields and forests, I’ve had lots of nasty little things cling tenaciously to my socks. I’d just never heard them called that before. It has been a delight, ever since, to slip that term into conversations. Life is no fun unless I’m always learning new things.

Regular readers of this blog have already heard my story about Thea and the flashlight, and how I emailed a number of my police advisors before I had her pick up the flashlight in the kitchen and head down to the dark basement to check on why the furnace wasn’t working. I learned that  one attribute of a good flashlight when you’re searching and don’t want to give your location away is a silent UI. I had to ask what a UI was. Not just an on and off switch, but a “user interface.”

Ah, adventures in writing.

Sometimes those research adventures are physical activities, like going out with wardens

Maine Crime Writer Kate Flora, retired game warden and rookie author Roger Guay, their book “A Good Man with a Dog,” and their secret weapon, Lucy, at the Guildford Library local author event June 11.

training dogs to do cadaver searches, watching in awe as dogs found cadaver scent in trees or buried in the ground, or hidden in a filing cabinet. Research might involve tromping through tick-filled fields to watch search and rescue dogs at work. Or hiding in the woods so the dog could find me. I never did get back the tee shirt they’d used as a scent object. Or going to the shooting range with the cops.

Recently, the lovely Lara Bricker invited some of us to a mystery brunch at the Exeter, New Hampshire LitFest. Our job—the writers who attended—was to take part in an activity called “Two Truths and a Lie.” I debated long and hard about what my lie would be, because I am a terrible liar. My voice changes and my face turns red and I rush through the lie because I’m so bad a tlying. So here are my two truths and a lie. Let’s see if you can guess which one is the lie:

When I was writing a scene in one of my Thea Kozak mysteries where she is kidnapped and put in the trunk of a car, I wanted to know what the experience would really be like for her. What it would feel like and sound like, so I asked my husband to shut me in his trunk and drive me around the neighborhood.When I was up in New Brunswick, doing research for a true crime, I wanted to see where the body was found. The cop gave me a helmet and put me on an ATV to drive into the woods. I misjudged a sharp turn, banged up my wrist, and ended up in the emergency room.Once, when I was on a ride-along, they invited me to join them on a stakeout looking for some thieves who were stealing copper. We were hanging out in the car, chatting, when I looked across the industrial park, spotted a car, and said, “Is that them?” I’d found the bad guy.

Vocab Test

When my husband and I were first married, we taught and lived in a boarding school in Massachusetts. We had twenty eighth grade boys (shudder) in our care in the dorm, which as you can imagine held various perils. Someone really had to be with them at all times. Even then, a kid managed to break his arm horsing around.

One winter, the fire alarms malfunctioned and went off accidentally at 2 AM for several nights in a row. There’s nothing like shepherding adolescent boys down four flights of fire escape stairs in a diaphanous nightgown. After the second time, I wised up and started sleeping in flannel pajamas.

I look back and marvel over the schedule we simply accepted—nay, were grateful for. We had jobs. Housing. Food. We ate three meals a day with the students, dishing out portions family-style in a dining room that had lots of wildlife trophies on the paneled walls. We had two nights and one afternoon a week off, and every other weekend. For all practical purposes this meant nothing positive for my husband’s leisure time; he coached sports for three seasons and had practice and games when he was supposed to be “free.” Somewhere on the baseball field, his original wedding ring has been lost for 52 springs. And we got paid just once a month, which made those dining hall meals pretty appealing on week four even as the dead animals looked on.

One of the teachers who covered for us evenings used to come equipped with a big, fat dictionary. His stated goal was to improve his knowledge, not to bash the boys on the head no matter how much they might deserve it. He’d sit in the lounge reading it, pretty much oblivious to any shenanigans, and that was how that arm got broken before lights out.

I had never known anyone to read the dictionary as if it was a novel, nor have I met anyone since. But I’m all for being a life-long learner. I am forever grateful to my sophomore high school English teacher, Matthew Murphy. He was the first one to call me Maggie, and made us look up the root words of a lengthy list of vocabulary words each week. I never took a Latin class, yet I am somewhat conversant (or used to be) with the language. And I can usually figure out meanings from context. If not, the Internet makes finding definitions easy-peasy.

One of the few fun things about X AKA Twitter is the daily posting of four very strange words by @arealmofwonder. Most will never be used in normal conversation, and unlikely to be found in the dictionary or any book you read or write. But I will leave you with some recent spring-ish words, as I take a brief break from blogging with the Maine Crime Writers. May you be filled with vernalagnia (the romantic mood brought on by good spring weather) and your gardens soon flosculous (covered in flowers). No doubt there will be some dabbledy (rainy weather) ahead, but it sure beats snow. See you in September!

Words to live by:

“Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.” ~Mark Twain

“Never use a long word when a short one will do.” ~George Orwell

Some super-simple and effective words:

April in Maine by May Sarton

The days are cold and brown,

Brown fields, no sign of green,

Brown twigs, not even swelling,

And dirty snow in the woods.

 

But as the dark flows in

The tree frogs begin

Their shrill sweet singing,

And we lie on our beds

Through the ecstatic night,

Wide awake, cracked open.

 

There will be no going back.

I had a book review once where the reader complained she had to look some words up. Mr. Murphy must be happy in heaven, though Mark and George and May probably don’t approve.

What’s your favorite “big” or weird word?

www.maggierobinson.net

Weekend Update: April 13-14, 2024

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Maggie Robinson (Monday), Kate Flora (Tuesday), Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Thursday) and Maureen Milliken (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

 COVER REVEAL from Kathy Lynn Emerson: Treacherous Visions is still being revised and does not yet have cover art, but I’ve just released the reprint edition of Face Down in the Marrow-Bone Pie, the first book in my Face Down Mystery series. It’s print-on-demand, so it will have to be special ordered from brick-and-mortar stores. Barnes & Noble online already has copies and it will be available from Amazon, Kobo, and other online booksellers too. The rest of the series will be published in the course of 2024 and early 2025. These are trade paperbacks priced at $15.99 each.

Here’s the link to Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/face-down-in-the-marrow-bone-pie-kathy-lynn-emerson/1100068873?ean=9798224041183

Warning: For the moment you might want to avoid ordering a copy from Amazon. They’ve listed the book, but the only copies available so far are from one of their “other sellers” and that seller has added $10 to the price!

Matt Cost had a fabulous time with fellow Crime Writer, Kate Flora, and others at the Exeter Lit Festival this past weekend. He also was at the Albert Church Brown Memorial Library in China Village and was happy to see fellow mystery writer Gerry Boyle in the audience! At the time of this writing, Matt has not yet visited the Skowhegan Free Public Library, but by the time of your reading, he will have. Maybe he saw you there? Matt will be visiting a book club at Illume Books in Newburyport on Tuesday, Farmington Public Library on Wednesday, and the Gray Public Library on Thursday next week. Come on out and hear about the evolution of a book via the pirate ship Pirate Trap!

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

Writing Realistic Thrillers

Realistic fiction sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, doesn’t it? But readers love characters who feel familiar, locations they know in real life, and situations that could happen but haven’t. Except when they have.

Thirty-five years ago, author Tom Wolfe complained about having his fiction scooped by reality between serializing, then fully publishing, his New York novel Bonfire of the Vanities. In that 1989 Harpers article, he quoted a similar complaint made sixty five years ago by Philip Roth.

Fast forward to 2024, and the challenge is that much more real. As a writer of thrillers with strong technology plots, I definitely face it. I dodged it in my debut thriller Raven (High Frequency Press, 2025) by setting it in 1990 at the end of the cold war and beginning of the internet. Want to know what the internet had in store for us in 1990’s future? Just look around!

Raven is set in Boston in the spring of 1990, when Cambridge was still gritty and before the Big Dig blew up downtown. It’s easy to draw contrasts between then and now: pay phones instead of cell phones, dial up modems instead of broadband internet, less computing power in a supercomputer than you have in your cell phone in your pocket. (A current iPhone is 5000 times more powerful than the pictured  32 million dollar 1984 Cray-2 Research supercomputer!)

By most standards a book set in 1990 doesn’t even count as a “historical” novel. (Definitions of “historical fiction” vary widely: before 1950, at least 50 years earlier, etc. I call mine “near historical.” I’m a writer; I get to make stuff up.) Even thirty years gives me enough distance to make the world seem very different from our own.

In contrast, writing in the present moment, particularly with technology and politics as part of a storyline, opens up some very weird possibilities. Rob Hart, author of the 2018 novel The Warehouse, wrote in 2020 a CrimeReads blog post titled “When Speculative Fiction Becomes Reality”:

An online retail giant dominating the economy while the small business landscape is wiped out. And an exponential erosion of job security and worker protections. And children learning remotely as municipal budgets are crippled. And government sitting idly by while corporations rake in record profits.

These are the things I saw on the horizon, maybe ten or twenty down the road. Which is why, whenever anyone asked me when the book was set, I would shrug and say: soon enough.

I didn’t realize that would mean seven months after it hit shelves.

Turns out, writers of apocalyptic fiction usually don’t want it to come true in their immediate present. I found myself in much the same position in one of my current works in progress, Critical State. (Working title of course. Stories around publishers’ particularities about book titling is a whole other blog post!)  Set in the present day, Critical State follows a journalist/blogger as she uncovers a plot to weaponize social media to malignly influence public opinion. I swear that sounded really out there when I’d started drafting it a few years ago. Just close enough to reality to be relatable, not so far out as to be science fiction.

Yeah, well, I guess I need to go a little farther out.

I’ve been an avid reader of Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction my whole life, and have dedicated myself to high tech thrillers for years as well. And like Rob Hart, I believe that “no one gets into writing speculative fiction because they’re a fatalist,” but because they want to make change, to expose something that we are hurtling toward and convince us to alter course.

One of the principles of writing thrillers is to “turn it up to eleven.” (If you don’t know that reference, recommending the movie This is Spinal Tap is my gift to you.) To make the danger, the threat, the fear, even more outsized than it might be in real life. But, in my case, and in the case of countless other writers, we were perhaps too meek. You read the news and think “how bad could it get?” then realize the answer is “much worse.”

And it’s our job as writers to make that “much worse” grab you by the shirt collar and drag you along.