Christopher H. Jansmann's Blog, page 14

Las Vegas Culinary Treasures

A hidden door in the food court at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas led to an unexpected adventure

While I am usually in Las Vegas annually to attend the ST:LV convention, every now and then a programming conference for my day job will have a stop there and allow for a second foray to Sin City. That happened to me last fall, sending me to the MGM Hotel and Casino for a full week of nerdy stuff that filled multiple (virtual) notebooks with ideas on how to improve the various products we supply to our clients.

As good as that conference was, though, each day generally ended at the dinner hour, leaving me free to roam the strip and experience some of the amazing culinary delights unique to the city. I am not one to try my luck at the casino, so that pretty much ruled out sitting at a table playing poker or feeding a slot machine. Food, on the other hand, is one of my major weaknesses, so eating my way up and down Las Vegas Boulevard was far more in line; fortunately, the walking made me feel slightly less guilty about all of the calories I packed in during that short week.

One amazing happenstance was being able to connect with a dear friend of mine while I was in Las Vegas; being a far more frequent visitor than I — and also being a fellow foodie — he immediately began to recommend interesting places to try based on his prior visits. When I told him that I had plans to stage a few scenes of my upcoming books in Las Vegas, he took that as an additional challenge and made a Herculean effort to seek out spots that my detectives might enjoy. That my characters were fictitious didn’t stop us from sampling multiple goodies in their name, or seeking out ever more interesting experiences, one right after the other.

A more “adult” Tiki Room at the Wynn

One of our first stops was a hidden patio bar at the Wynn; we’d heard that there was a water and laser show that took place just after dark, and to our surprise, found that they also included several massive animatronic birds singing show tunes. (The drinks were pretty good, too.)

The very hidden, unmarked New York-style pizzeria at the Cosmo

Honestly, while I know Vasily is a huge fan of pizza (he goes to my favorite, Naples, regularly), I have yet to write any scenes where Sean partakes of one. That didn’t stop us from crisscrossing the Cosmopolitan looking for an alleged New York-style pizza parlor that was not listed in the directory for the resort; we only found it after bumping into a beverage manager for the resort coming out of the buffet who was willing to walk us to it. (And yes, the pizza was worth it.)

A casino and speakeasy on the 66th floor? Let’s check it out

Our longest hike took us from the MGM all the way down to the Resorts World Casino/Hotel and an alleged speakeasy on the top floor. We happened to hit it on a night when a major country music performer was playing in their massive venue, otherwise I’m not sure we’d have been able to sneak in without a reservation. The views were spectacular, the drinks, divine, and the cheesecake something I would return for again and again.

But I think the most intriguing spot we found was the unassuming door pictured at the top of this post. It was behind the seats in the food court at the Cosmopolitan, and belied the fact that one of the most amazing tequila bars in the city was in operation just a few feet away from generic fast food. We’d heard about it as rumor, and after doing some internet scouring, discovered about where it was supposed to be and when it opened — which was a good thing to know, for within moments of the door being unlocked, the very small space was full of people, just like us, there for an one-of-a-kind experience. I’m not sure I’ll ever try their signature drink again — I’m not a ghost pepper fan, honestly — the other drinks on the menu looked good enough for a future return.

After I returned from my trip, notes in hand, I set about writing those books; while I feel strongly that all of these locations would definitely be places both Vasily and Sean would visit, unfortunately the plots took a slightly different turn than I’d anticipated, and (possibly spoiler here) none of them made the final cut. All is not lost, though; I’ve kept those original ideas on the back burner. They will appear at some point, I’m certain.

Tactile Reading

Which one of these is not like the other…? All of my books to date in hardcover. (Photo: C. Jansmann)

It really isn’t a surprise to me that by far the most popular format for my books is digital; I’m right there with my readers, for I have long enjoyed the simplicity of carrying my entire library with me on a single device. In fact, when my wife and I purchased our first Kindle readers as mutual Christmas gifts a number of years ago, it was a bit of defensive move for we had quite literally run out of space for our physical collection of books. I’m probably not alone in that once I’ve purchased a physical book, I have a hard time giving it away for I usually wind up re-reading it multiple times.

Still, while most of our newly purchased books are done digitally, we do continue to add physical editions to our library, albeit in a far slower manner. Most are new volumes in an established series we’ve read for years, such as Outlander, but every now and then we stumble across something new and decide to invest in the hardcover. (Often we will first find such books at our amazing local library; once we fall in love, we take the relationship to the next level.)

That’s one reason why I have always ensured that there are inexpensive paperback versions as well as quality hardcover editions for my novels. Unlike some other publishing houses, Ephram Cotte is pretty tiny operation (wink wink) which is an oblique way of saying the digital versions will always, sadly, be the most affordable option for readers on a budget. Interestingly, I have no insights as to whether any libraries have picked me up at this point — the statistics I get from the printer are pretty vague on that front — save for the Library of Congress. (If you’d like to see me in your local library, be sure to tell a librarian — I have it on good advice that they take patron requests pretty seriously.)

I get a little emotional each time I see the hardcover for my first book, Blindsided; it’s a physical manifestation of years of dreams. I keep it on my nightstand as a reminder not to ignore your heart, a message that becomes all the more potent when each successive novel arrives to join the stack. I truly feel like I’ve finished a work when the box arrives carrying the hardcover, and yes, I do actually sit down and read it — again — as soon as the box is opened.

You can see from the photo above that my most recent book, Downhill, looks a bit different than the rest; I ran an experiment with that one and shifted to a less-expensive printer only to find that I ultimately didn’t like the results. I’ve rectified that, but as of this writing, I’m not sure the updated hardcover has appeared online. If you’re looking for one, though, hang in there; or, better yet, support your local bookstore and ask them to order it for you.

Final Touches

Reviewing the paperback proof for Bygones

As the calendar shifts to August I find myself going through the final checklist of items prior to the September release of Bygones, my fourth Vasily Korskovach novel. Much of it is what you might expect, including making any final last-minute edits on the manuscript based on editorial comments; it’s also the stage at which the more physical aspects of the final product of novel writing become visible. Don’t get me wrong: seeing my work appear in the Kindle Store is pretty darn exciting, but I’ve never gotten over the joy of receiving a package from the printer holding the proofs for the paperback or hardcover editions.

The paperback proof for Bygones arrived last night and I’ve already begun flipping through it, scanning for layout issues that weren’t apparent when I reviewed the initial PDF version. That’s just the first step; the next one involves getting a nice cup of coffee, sitting down, and physically reading the book cover to cover to ensure that nothing glaring got past the many eyes that had already reviewed it up that point. There’s no question it’s one of the hardest final steps to complete, for more often than not, I find myself getting lost in the story and having to back up and re-start being the critical reader.

I have to admit that I do some light editing as I write; it’s an unfortunate habit born from having had to write so many term papers in college and doing so on deadlines that required getting the manuscript right out of the gate. When I transitioned to fiction writing years later, I had to dial back that tendency quite a bit, for obsessing over sentence structure was often a killer of creativity. The rise of fabulous word processing software makes it insanely easy to get lost in those weeds while writing; while I am a huge fan of being able to correct spelling errors on the fly, I often feel like the built-in grammar checker is judging me, making it hard to ignore the inevitable double-underlines that appear as I craft a story.

I had an English teacher back in the day who lamented how technology had in some ways damaged the writing process; they were a huge proponent of doing a first draft on a typewriter, something I have never done (and plan to never do). I completely understand the concept, for the general idea of just letting the words flow is a sound one, something that is quite difficult to achieve when the AI is literally looking over your shoulder. And yet, somehow, I never find it in me to completely turn off such tools; I may not always agree with the suggestions during the first draft, but there have been times on the second or third pass where they make sense — at a point when the full story has been developed completely, and I understand (in my head at least) how I want the language to work.

I suppose it’s a bit of a win that Microsoft Word now recognizes Korsokovach and has stopped prompting me to correct it as a spelling error; the same goes for Windeport and, oddly, Colbeth. As a developer, I completely understand the brilliance of what is going on under the hood with my word processor, but as a writer, I still feel like I have a love-hate relationship with it…

Travel Goodies

A bag from the Ethel M. Chocolate Store at McCarran International Airport, Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo: C. Jansmann

My wife is traveling as I write this, headed to meet with family and celebrate a life that we lost a few months back; as it was the final wave of the last COVID-19 variant, memorial services were curtailed until such time as it was safer for everyone to gather. Given how amazingly eye-popping airfare was this summer, I’m home dog sitting Rocket; not my first choice, for I’d prefer to be there in support of both her and our missed relation, but like everyone else right now, we’re paying close attention to our finances and trying to make the best choices we can.

That doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about being on the road, though; if you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I’ll be headed to my annual Star Trek convention in August, or later this fall, will hopefully get back to see my family on the East coast. In fact, the Star Trek convention last summer (2021) was the first trip I’d taken since being in Atlanta for work in February, 2020; my second trip landed me right back in Las Vegas for an application development conference just after Thanksgiving. It was a tiny window between COVID variants that almost made life seem normal — however brief — which allowed me to indulge in a tiny tradition my wife and I had long observed.

Getting in and out of Tucson by air generally means flying to another hub; unlike our bigger sibling, Phoenix, there are only a handful of nonstop destinations we can get to. Traveling anywhere else requires heading through a hub city like Denver or Las Vegas, and given our druthers, we tend to opt for routings though Sin City since it’s slightly closer than Denver (and doesn’t feel like we’re going backwards quite as much as Los Angeles does). On one of our first trips through McCarran, we had time to kill and wandered through the various terminals and played tourist; as with most major airports, there were plenty of shops to peruse, including a purveyor of chocolate named Ethel M.

Having grown up on the East Coast, both my wife and I were aware of such luminaries as Fannie Farmer and Russell Stover; to our delight, we found Ethel M. was of a kind, if not of a higher order altogether. (Much later, on a vacation to Las Vegas to take in the Love show, we took a tour of the Nevada chocolate factory and discovered that Ethel M. was founded by one of the original “M’s” in M&M Mars.) That first trip, we walked out of that shop with more chocolate than we’d intended… and very little of it made it home, either.

So now, with every subsequent trip through Las Vegas, we go out of our way to swing through Ethel M. and pick up the latest Willy Wonka-esque confection they’ve dreamed up. Yes, it’s that good.

Missed Helpers

Tigger, one of the “two cats” mentioned in my author bio (Photo: C. Jansmann)

Shortly after the pandemic forced a shift to remote work, I found myself spending longer than normal hours at the desk that typically would be where I craft my novels; after a few weeks of trying to do my day job on a personal MacBook that had never been intended to be treated as a development workstation, in late March of 2020 I made an emergency trip to the office and retrieved my full-sized desktop with it’s glorious 27″ screen for what I naively assumed would be just a few weeks of working remotely. I’ll save the fear I felt over making that trip despite knowing the building would be a deserted ghost town for another entry; we knew so little about COVID-19 in early 2020 that it felt as though each breath we took was suspect.

Setting up the desktop at home required some rearranging and no small amount of creativity; while my home office setup was by definition cozy, I’d never thought about what others would see when we began holding all of our meetings virtually, not to mention just how much of a luxury the space in my office actually was. You can see from the photo of my feline helper that what little counter remained after adding the massive desktop had to be shared in ways that I would never have considered before.

And yet, as those weeks turned to months, and then months turned into a year, I found that having those special helpers with my in that cozy little home office — along with the rest of my family — turned out to be integral in getting through the worst of what the pandemic offered. We’ve always been pet owners, my wife and I, and while we’d long enjoyed their companionship, it took on a completely new meaning as we weathered the shelter-at-home together. Taking care of them became just as important as the rest of our family, and took enough of a focus that we could convince ourselves, albeit briefly, that the world hadn’t gone completely topsy-turvy.

There were challenges, of course; Satchel, our burly adoptee from the county shelter developed a urinary tract infection that triggered his just-hiding-beneath-the-surface diabetes, sending us to the emergency vet. We quickly found that they, too, had been overwhelmed by the pandemic; spending hours in a the parking lot under the blazing Tucson sun, masked up and social distancing with the vet so I could learn how to do insulin shots is not an experience I ever hope to repeat.

Which of course we did. Tigger (pictured above) was a senior citizen when the world closed down in March, 2020, and had the insane timing of becoming a diabetic herself just as Satchel got his under control; for her, it was the first of many challenges that ultimately proved too hard for her to overcome this past Christmas. I look at this snapshot now with fond memories of how she used to hop onto my desk and snuggle in between the edge and the monitor, blithely unconcerned about sitting atop a project document or being on camera for a meeting. I never moved her, of course; I figured after being with us for nearly twenty years, she deserved to lounge wherever she saw fit.

I miss both her and Satchel; it’s been six months now since we lost them and I still see them in the shadows, or I’ll run across a cat toy that rolled under something and only recently resurfaced. Rocket still looks for them, too, though not as much as in the early days. After having had so many fur babies underfoot and their requisite activity, just having a single dog somehow makes life seem quieter now (which it isn’t). Either way, the gift of unconditional love they gave at just the time when we needed it the most is one that I will continue to treasure.

Epcot

Spaceship Earth at Epcot during the 2022 Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend. (Photo: Personal collection of Chris Jansmann)

I’ve made no secret of the fact that Vasily Korsokovach‘s love of Disneyland comes directly from me. I’ve been a fan of Disney for as long as I can remember, and ached something awful when my best friend was able to visit Walt Disney World during the late 1970s. One of the worst things my parents did to me was to add the newly created Disney Channel to our cable package, for while it routinely played amazing content from the archives, it also provided a mind-blowing play-by-play account of EPCOT Center as it was being built. The early 1980s were a time before the internet, so these tastefully crafted teases of what was to come down in Florida were irresistible, especially to the Saturday Morning Cartoon Set.

My worlds collided when William Shatner hosted the opening festivities in 1982; I honestly don’t remember what channel aired it, but I do recall forcing my family to switch to it so we wouldn’t miss a moment of what was being unveiled. And then that wound up not being the end of it, for over the next few years, even more stuff got added to EPCOT, all of it carefully documented by the Disney Channel.

By the time I was able to visit the park, EPCOT Center had become, simply, Epcot, but in 1995 it was still fairly close to the original concept. I spent nearly an hour talking to someone from Oracle about relational databases at their booth in Innoventions, then saw some impressive demos of what was being called “broadband internet,” something that offered speeds higher than the dial-up modems we’d been stuck using. Kodak was demoing the first wave of digital cameras, and out on the lawn, John Deere had a solar-powered robot cutting the grass.

World Showcase was insanely interesting for someone like me, whose passport is rather devoid of entry stamps. Having lived in Maine, I’d once visited Canada, but walking around the lagoon at Epcot told me there was far more to explore. Interacting with people in the pavilions and learning about their culture (while enjoying the representative food and spirits each had on offer) was an eye-opening experience, one that I still find on each subsequent return just as cool.

The park has changed quite a bit in the years since I was there that first time; attractions have come and gone, and the Disney characters that had been conspicuously absent in the early years have begun to creep into every corner. It’s not a terribly bad thing — such updates keep the experience fresh and new — but there are times when I find myself nostalgic for the park I’d once known. Thankfully, I have a ton of photos from my various visits, enough to continue to remind me of what once was.

Will I go again? That’s a hard question to answer now that I live so much closer to Disneyland than Walt Disney World. The experiences of the two parks are so fundamentally different, though, that I find myself leaning into the probably, why is this even a question? category, especially given just how much I truly enjoy the time I spend at Epcot. For there just isn’t a park like it anywhere else in the world.

Rocket

Rocket, my writing companion

I’d originally started off thinking this post was going to be about the Muppets — those furry critters that have been near and dear to my heard from the moment I first saw Kermit The Frog do a breaking news report from Sesame Street. To say I had simply grown up with them would infer that I’d somehow grown out of liking them, which as my wife would quickly attest to, is something that has yet to happen. (I know that she loves me deeply for she continues to follow me into MuppetVision*3D every time we go to Walt Disney World despite having seen the show something like a million times. True love is the fact that she can quote the lines right back to me.)

While I was perusing my photos for something I could use for this very topic, I quickly became distracted by a tranche of snapshots featuring the various cats and dogs we’ve adopted over the years. Several recent updates to macOS have added a touch of artificial intelligence to my photo library, making it quite easy to group similar subjects together; in this case, a ton of photos of Rocket, our Shar-Pei mix appeared front and center, including a number from the week where the two of us were playing bachelor while my wife was back east. You can tell from the photo that he is a handsome young man who had a bit of a rough life before he joined our family; we don’t know any of the details other than what the Humane Society was able to tell based on the medical examination they did upon intake.

Looking at the photo, I remembered the day we went to visit him three years ago, the day when we decided he was the one. I think he would have followed us right back to the car that very afternoon were it not for the fact that papers needed to be signed before he’d be able to be sprung; we took him home the next day, and I will never forget how he proudly hopped out of the backseat of our car and marched right up to the front door of our house as though he’d always lived there. We’ve never been away from him for more than a week since — he has a severe case of separation anxiety, which isn’t surprising given how he was found; when the pandemic hit a few months later, taking care of him injected a sense of normalcy into an otherwise dystopian period.

These days, when I work from home (one of the few positives that came out of the pandemic is a hybrid schedule), Rocket tends to take up position on his dog bed just behind me, positioned perfectly so he’ll always be on camera during my Zoom meetings. (I feel obligated to point out that I didn’t place his bed there — he did, almost as if he knew the proper angle for exposure.) When I’m working on my writing, he splits his time between me in the den and whatever my wife is doing, eternally vexed by trying to keep both of us in view. The best days for him are when we are together so he doesn’t have to choose, though I know Rocket well enough now to know that when push comes to shove, he’ll seek out my wife and settle in. I’m okay with that, if not a tiny bit jealous.

Maybe I’ll write about the Muppets in a future post, but for now, I’m going to reach over and give Rocket a good scratch between the ears and see if it’s time for another stroll around the neighborhood.

Breakups

Photo by Alena Darmel on Pexels.com

I blogged a bit ago about writing a chapter in Requiem where Vasily finds himself interviewing a boyfriend from twenty years prior; it wasn’t an easy chapter to write, given the emotions that were bubbling up for my character. In fact, I think it took the better part of a week to get to the final cut, one that I felt was true to the visceral nature of the experience while also moving the plot forward

As I often do, I had to circle back to that moment for a later scene in the book, and wound up re-reading it again in it’s in entirely. While we don’t get to see the actual breakup that happens between Vasily and his first love, seeing the ache on both sides of that equation had me catching my breath — and remembering a few of my own early missteps in that area. Sean has a line in Bewitched that sort of paints in how that feels:

Emotions always ran higher for teenagers, and I was no exception to that rule; that I had the ability to work them out in the pool had been something of a godsend, but not a complete salve, either.  It wasn’t hard for me to recall that fateful day in the halls of Windeport Regional High when I first discovered how fickle teenage love could be — or, perhaps more importantly, how love could blind one to more important truths lurking just beneath the surface.

Bewitched (Chris Jansmann)

I’ve always been fascinated with how each of us views our past — and how, when we’re in the moment, we often don’t understand the true importance of what is happening to us. I’m sure I wasn’t the only teenager who thought my life had ended when my one true love told me there was someone else; finding out there could be more than one person fitting that description always felt like an epiphany, one I could only truly appreciate when my actual soulmate came into my life many years later.

Working through the past lives of Sean and Vasily has helped me to further understand how these key moments in our lives can start off as a single stone tossed into the smooth surface of a pond, and how the ripples that are generated from that single act have ever expanding ramifications for the kind of people we become. Science often refers to this as the butterfly effect, the notion that a small change at one end of a system can cause large effects at the other end; while it generally is applied as a theory to things like the weather (or, in science fiction, the inherit risks of time travel), I’ve found it to be a tidy formula when thinking about human relationships — certainly one of the most complicated systems out there.

So, breakups can be bad — horrific, even — but the sort of person we become after them is informed by how we get through them. Do we mope? Do we drag ourselves through the pain, forging something entirely new out of the crucible we’ve been thrust into? Or, as happens every now and then, do you get a magical second chance to pluck a Happily Ever After from the ashes?

Any of those options are valid — humans are a richly diverse lot, and react accordingly… which makes them incredibly interesting to write about…

Independence Day

Photo by Rick Han on Pexels.com

It’s not an accident that Vasily has a particular affinity for the Fourth of July — he gets that from me, which I proudly admit to. (Sean has other feelings on the matter, but you’ll have to read Bewitched to find out more.) Some of my earliest memories as a kid revolve around that one night every year when my parents would take us to the center of town, stake out a place with blankets, then await the marvelous light show that would appear once the sun had finally set. Only later did I learn the special significance this date holds for me as an American; two hundred-plus years later, the events of the the late eighteenth century still fascinate me, as does the path my country took to the modern era. There have been some amazing advances — and, sadly, more than a few regressions — but the spirit the holiday embodies seems willing to continue the the struggle to form, as one of our founding documents says, “a more perfect union.”

My best friends — yes, plural — live in Southern California, and some years ago invited us to spend the first of many July 4ths with them. That first year, we were actually helping them pack for a new apartment they were moving to, and managed to get it completed just in time to head down to the Disneyland Esplanade for a holiday celebration done with all of the fanfare the House of Mouse is well known for. Stationed somewhere in the middle of the space halfway between Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure, we were blown away by the pageantry in the skies above Anaheim, perfectly timed to patriotic music with just the right hint of Disney. I came away thinking it would be impossible to see anyone else try and top what we’d seen, and so far, I’ve been right.

One other tradition we’ve long observed is watching the movie, Independence Day, together on (or around) the Fourth of July. I don’t entirely recall how we got started on that kick — it runs along the same lines as thinking that Die Hard is a Christmas Movie — but save for one year, we’ve never missed a viewing. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to get a bit creative, and last year, we discovered the joys of “viewing parties” through Amazon Prime or Disney Plus. Now that there is a sequel, we have to block out even more time to ensure we can watch both — and still be done in time to tune in for A Capitol Fourth.

Between the traditional summer food, good friends and great content, it remains one of my favorite holidays on the calendar — second behind Christmas. Which, as it happens, is also a holiday Vasily enjoys… I wonder why…?

Other Genres?

Photo by Vanessa Garcia on Pexels.com

If you’re this far into my blog and/or have spent a fair amount of time going through my website, it’s probably clear by now that I’m a huge fan of the mystery genre. Ten books into two series featuring distinctly different detectives, I’m pretty happy with the small niche I’ve carved out for my work and pleasantly surprised by the generally positive response to it.

Still, there are days when I ponder if I’ve chosen the right genre, or if it would be wise to branch out into another just to spread out the wealth (so to speak). I started this long journey as a writer many, many years ago writing an epic science fiction story in my dorm room at the University of Maine; while I don’t seem to have that original manuscript around anymore, I’ve toyed with several versions of that base story a few times in the decades since, but have never really gone anywhere with it. (Technically, I still have the file for that novel on a 3.5″ floppy disk that no current computer I own can read, written using a software package I no longer own. I suppose that is the very definition of lost to the sands of time…)

One problem with my science fiction efforts is that, invariably, it always winds up looking and feeling like the Star Trek tome I’ve desperately wanted to write since picking up Gene Roddenberry’s novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture some forty years ago. I’ve re-read that paperback so many times, I had to buy it again on Kindle just to keep the font readable; the nuance in that book truly makes the movie itself more interesting, but also provides such valuable insight into the universe the Great Bird of the Galaxy crafted. Someday, maybe, I’ll finally be discovered (or an agent will take my submission) and my name will at long last appear on a cover featuring Mister Spock and Captain Kirk; until then, I’ll continue to dream.

My writing friend who I often bounce ideas off writes in the Fantasy genre; other than some fan fiction for a certain animated superhero show I love, I’ve not really dabbled in that space much myself. I find it attractive in many ways, though, for while it also allows for the sort of world building I do in my mysteries, the added ability to bring in elements from mythology or magical themes is pretty compelling. I love what I’ve seen from my friend so far, and do think about possible throwing my hat into that ring at some point, too. I don’t know if I should admit to this, but there was one early version of Sean Colbeth where he was a witch, using all of the magical tools at his disposal to investigate the disappearance of another. I may or may not have come up with that angle around the time that the Twilight series was insanely popular; I didn’t get too far into the manuscript, though, for I quickly realized that story just wasn’t working for me.

I do think I could write something in the straight-up fiction department, though, for while my books currently tend to focus on the mystery du jour, that is only a part of what goes on within them. I find character growth quite appealing, but have always enjoyed juxtaposing it with a situation that might bring out the unexpected in someone. I’ll probably stick to what I’m doing for now, but hey, you never know. Maybe this time next year, I’ll have something new to offer…