Paul H. Raymer's Blog, page 5

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn

Do you ever wonder how authors can embed themselves into the minds of characters, characters who are purely evil or mentally deranged. Where do those horrific thoughts come from? I suppose it's better to write them down than manifest them in reality.

Gone Girl is written from binary first person points of view - alternating between Amy Elliott Dunne and her husband, Nick Dunne. The book starts out slowly, to the point where I almost abandoned it. Too many books too little time. But it builds and this book was listed as one of the top mysteries of the past decade AND it was made into a movie starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike so something has to happen, and it does.

Amy is amazing and she says so. She is a shape shifter who plans and schemes those future shifts well in advance so that she can punish those who offend her. She forecasts not only her own actions but how those effected will react to those actions. The writer, Gillian Flynn, is manipulating her characters and her readers and how the reader will react to Amy and the rest of the characters in the book because that’s what writers try to do.

In her diary at the beginning of the book, Amy seems to be sweetness and light. She was brought up as a star in her parents' children's book series. Everyone loves her and is devastated when she disappears. But she has set up her disappearance to point the finger at Nick as the perpetrator who has been abusing her and cheating on her.

The author does paint the story into a corner. Wonderful openings can sometimes lead to an unsolvable situation, when the options for solutions are limited. The one that Flynn chooses is possible but not the best. The resolution seemed forced and not the way the story itself wanted to play out. There are details of money and timing that bother me, and I think that Nick, the husband, although seriously badly treated could have done better and doesn't come out of this story well.

This is one of those stories that I felt the reader and the story itself was not treated kindly.

More About Words & Writing

Monetizing the Return on Mechanical Ventilation

Insulating a house saves energy and that saves money. However, using mechanical ventilation causes conditioned air to be removed from the house only to be replaced by air that requires energy to condition - to warm it or cool it. Utility programs are reluctant to pay for adding mechanical ventilation to the house because it can’t be justified in terms of energy savings. DALYs (Disability Adjusted Life Years) provide a means to monetize the savings in health and productivity. One of the difficulties is that DALYs are population aligned and not individual aligned - although populations are made up of people.

Tight, energy efficient homes must have well designed and well installed mechanical ventilation systems for the health of the occupants as well as the health of the building. So what’s a DALY? DALYs represent the total number of years lost to illness, disability, or premature death within a given population. There is a growing population of people who live in air-tight houses. We’re sealing everything up from windows and doors to light fixtures and heating systems. And not only are we making houses tighter, we’re spending more time in them - closing in on 100% of the time.

If you click on this button and enter your zip code, it will provide you with the number of years of life expectancy at your location.

Life Expectancy

There are a lot of elements that impact our life expectancy. All the diseases that we face growing up like mumps or measles or COVID-19. There is mold and soot from roads and furnaces. There may be rodents and maybe the range hood or the bathroom fans don’t get used.

And then there is cigarette smoke. Tobacco smoke contains more than 7,000 chemicals.Thirdhand smoke is residual nicotine and other chemicals left on indoor surfaces by tobacco smoke. People are exposed to these chemicals by touching contaminated surfaces or breathing in the outgassing. This residue is thought to react with common indoor pollutants to create a toxic mix including cancer causing compounds, posing a potential health hazard to nonsmokers - especially children.

EXPOSOME

The exposome, conceptually and practically, provides a holistic view of human health and disease. It includes exposure from our diets, our lifestyles, and our behaviors. The human exposome is the environmental equivalent of the human genome . It is a representation of the complex exposures we are subject to through our lives. The exposome encompasses much of what we refer to as nurture - in the old battle of nature vs nurture.

What we are particularly concerned about here are the pollutants that are floating around in the air that can be ameliorated with good ventilation. The ultra-fine particles - PM2.5 in size - have the greatest impact on DALYs. Much of the acrolein and ultra-fine particles come from cooking and those can be removed from the house with a range hood with an effective capture efficiency. Common sense clearly shows that air quality has a significant impact on human life. In fact, it has been estimated that the most common diseases cause the loss of 2,129,090 years of Europeans’ life.

But we don’t want to cut off the connection in bacterial diversity between the inside and the outside of the house. There needs to be a balance. Microbes are all around us. Many species are beneficial to us and help our immune systems to function and control and compete with pathogens and pests. We can’t thrive in a purely sterile environment. We need the air exchange that ventilation provides.

PRODUCTIVITY

Productivity is the key source of economic growth and competitiveness. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker. In the United States it’s about $34.02 per hour.

HEALTH CARE COSTS

US employers paid nearly $880 billion in health care benefits for employees and dependents. However, illness-related lost productivity costs them another $530 billion per year. That amounts to 60 cents for every dollar employers spend on health care benefits. In the U.S. almost 1.4 billion productive days are lost annually because of absent employees.

ADDING IT UP

Clearly indoor air quality has a direct impact on the health of the occupants. Changing the air - diluting the pollutants - will improve health.

Make some assumption:

Outdoor air is generally 75% better than indoor air;

Choose an effective air change rate of 0.35 ACH;

Multiply those two numbers together: 0.75 x 0.35 = 26.25%

Lost productivity in the U.S. per year is about $1,608 per person

Attributing 26.25% of loss of productivity to poor ventilation: 26.25 x $1,608 = $422/person/year.

This is not perfect math, but the assumptions are reasonable. A well designed, well installed, well maintained residential mechanical ventilation system will pay for itself in less than a year, particularly if there are two people living in the house. And it will keep on paying back year after year after year.

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Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead - Sara Gran

Genre: Mystery Thriller & Suspense

I discovered this at https://crimereads.com/the-10-best-crime-novels-of-the-last-decade/  Is there a mystery here? Absolutely. Is there a detective? Claire Dewitt claims to be the world’s greatest detective. At least in her own mind. And her mind is exceedingly complicated. But if you’re looking for a crime novel, that is not the main track of this story. A crime does indeed occur and Claire unravels the mystery, but the story is as much about the mysteries of life as it is about this particular crime.

While she is in California, Claire gets a call from a new client in New Orleans who wants her to find his uncle, Vic Willing, a prosecutor. The story is set a year or two after Katrina when the city was devastated by flood waters, and the city of New Orleans is one of the main characters in the book. There is none of the buzz and pulse and bright lights of touristy New Orleans. Houses are falling over. Buildings are abandoned. Garbage and death are everywhere, and it is a war zone populated by gangs and drive-by shootings. And Claire has little respect for the police or the criminal justice system. “New Orleans’ labyrinthine legal system, based on the Napoleonic Code, didn’t help matters. Put it all together and New Orleans had both the highest murder rate and one of the lowest conviction rates in the country.”

She is haunted by memories of her mentor, Constance Darling, who introduced her to Jacques Silette. “Jacques Silette was a genius. So I thought.” Gran does such a good job developing this fictional character that I had to do a Google search to determine if Silette or his book Détection was actually real. One of the numerous threads in the story is learning to see the world and its accompanying clues as Silette saw them. Détection magically permeates many parts of Gran’s story - levels removed from reality by Gran to Dewitt to Constance Darling to Silette. The dominant characters in the story are Silette and New Orleans.

This is not a cozy, quick read, comfy chair crime story. And it’s definitely worth reading.

More about words and writing.

It's Cold Here on Cape Cod

Dateline: March 2, 2021 Falmouth, Massachusetts

The design temperature for this part of world (the coldest temperature that a heating system should be designed for when the system is running continuously to maintain a 70 ºF indoor temperature) is 16 ºF. Right now at noon, it’s 20 ºF outside. It was 18 ºF this morning without the wind chill (which meant it felt like 10 ºF outside). It should exceed 16 ºF 99% of the time in a normal weather year. So the heating system should be designed to accomplish that. If it’s not running its little heart out at 16 ºF, then either the system is oversized or the setting on the thermostat is set to less than 70 ºF. If the system is oversized it might be able to keep the house at 70 ºF on those very, very rare days when the temperature drops below the design temperature, but much of the time the system will be cycling and running less efficiently. (So maybe I’ll go turn the thermostat up just a bit.)

Maybe you don’t want to know all this, and maybe you don’t want to know that the reason this old house is really dry in cold weather is that there are all sorts of drafts and breezes blowing in through all the cracks and holes in the shell. And you might not realize that as that cold outside air warms, its relative humidity goes down!

What I’m really interested in is the role that the temperature inside a house plays in a crime story or a mystery. When I see the covers of romance novels with pictures of bare chested men and almost naked women and the stories are set in castles or mansions, they better be in warm climates or hot weather. They wouldn’t be standing around like that in a stone castle or an Addams Family mansion in the winter. Their hands would be trembling from the cold!

I cannot think of any novel I have ever read in which the temperature inside the building played a significant role in the story. Perhaps I am forgetting. I would welcome input on this. Authors paint word pictures of skies and forests, kitchens and living rooms, laboratories and gymnasiums, but I don’t remember any descriptions of thermally uncomfortable spaces in a house. Dante talked about the “hottest places in hell” ‘are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality’ as JFK used to cite. Dante didn’t actually write that. There are a bunch of warm and cozy places in the Harry Potter stories like the Three Broomsticks, the Gryffindor common room, and the Great Hall. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods was cozy, and the Fraser cabin in the Outlander series has plenty of warmth and coziness.

There are books set in cold places like the Arctic and Greenland and Iceland. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden is the first in a trilogy called Winternight which includes a demon called Frost who claims unprotected souls in the night. And then there is the classic winter tale from Stephen King – The Shining.  I think I’m going to stop there and leave the rest of this to your imagination.

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Social Media For Authors Review

Social Media for Authors

There are a lot of very good sales people touting their services to us poor, independent authors who are doing our best to try to figure out this crazy, crazy world of writing, publishing, and marketing a book. Some independent authors appear to be outrageously successful. You don’t hear as much about the millions who aren’t. There are services and then there are services to help with the services. There are organizations who offer help in sorting through the services. But I suppose, the same thing is true with colleges and universities. You really don’t know what you’ve got except by reputation. Unfortunately many of the services, schools and individuals who offer help and guidance to struggling authors, have no reputations except among themselves. So you have to do whatever research you can, test the waters on social networking, and then jump in and try. So that’s what I did.

I’m not very good at social networking. I always loved those advertisements that showed the father sitting outside his housing torturously typing in, “I’m sitting on the patio”. I could never see the point of telling the world everything that I am doing. If I was living an adventurous life, I wouldn’t have time to type that information into my phone.  I wouldn’t be able to pause and type one letter at a time, “Well, the squirrels are back in the attic.”

So I signed up for “Social Media for Authors” from the Self-publishing School”[1] I want to start out by saying that the promotions for these kinds of courses are remarkably good. They know how to push the right buttons, the buttons that you and I are looking for, answers to your most pressing questions like become a bestseller, sell more books, become a top selling Amazon author today, sell a 1000 books in the first year. I listened to one person who said, “If you’re making a five figure income with you books now, I want to get you to a six figure income. And if you’re making a six figure income, I want to push you to a seven figure income.” Really? Where do I sign up? And another thing, it is amazing how similar these pitches are. It’s like they all went to the same school to learn how to do this stuff. Well, they better be good at it, I guess. It’s what they’re professing to teach you how to do.

The young lady who teaches this Self-publishing School course is very enthusiastic and bubbly. It must have been hot where she talking from because she seemed to be sweating. The audio was good. She scrolled through things like my kids do – at a rapid rate, which was okay because since it’s recorded you can go back and figure out what you missed as it flew by. There is a lot of hype at the beginning talking about how important an author platform is which I knew because that was why I plunked down the money (or the credit card) for the course. There was a lot of fluff when there could have been substance. “Show don’t tell.”

The description of the course says that it will cover all the fundamental social networking platforms – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. She starts with Twitter and spends the most time there. She provided information about cleaning up your account. (I think it looks pretty good: https://twitter.com/paul_raymer  ) She did a good job of showing how to search through hash tags. She talks about following people and using the daily Twitter hash tag “games” like #1linewed and #slapdashsat, things that I would never have known about.

When she moved on to Instagram, she related that the content that performs best are stories, your real face, your real life, and use of aesthetically appealing images of your book. Quotes do really well. She talked about Linktree (https://linktr.ee/ )which is a really cool way to squeeze in a bunch of connections when you only have one link to connect with.

Facebook, she said, is an older audience. I didn’t need to take this course to hear that. My kids have told me that! But that’s fine for me since the profile of my average reader is an older, well-educated audience. She provided guidance in how to clean up that profile as well. But there were little pieces of information missing like how do you set up a page as opposed to a profile. She said Facebook needs to be a very professional snapshot of what’s going on in your writing life.

When she finally got around to LinkedIn, the information was pretty thin. She made it clear that she didn’t think it was the place for fiction. I have had a page on LinkedIn for my professional profile for years and have many more followers there than on any of the other social networks. So I have taken it as a challenge to make it work for my fiction efforts. And that’s okay.

★★★☆☆

So in the spirit of the star rankings, I would give this course three stars, both for content and for value for money. I learned stuff, no doubt, but I’m not in a hurry to take other courses from these folks no matter how many times they bug me to do so. I am hopeful that there will be better places to spend my scarce, hard-earned writing dollars.

 

Oh, and one more thing. In the Master Class program, I love the way the instructors talk to me. They address me as ‘you’, as though it’s just the two of us sitting there talking. The instructor in this course talks to ‘you guys’ as though there are a dozen of us sitting here in front of my computer. Well, I certainly hope not.

[1] https://students.self-publishingschool.com/courses

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In the Ground by Jeff Carson

Jeff Carson’s In the Ground is the 14th book in the David Wolf mystery thriller series and I have to tell you that I came into this series with this book and that was a problem for me. Both going into this story and coming out of this story there are a whole lot of connections to other episodes both in the past and to come in the future. There were lot of people who were only connected to this particular story because the protagonist knew them. I didn’t know them, and I wondered who they were and why they were there.

It’s a fascinating thing about characters in a series. Some authors manage to get the books to stand clearly on their own pages. Paul Doiron does that. Patrick O’Brien, Dudley Pope, and Dewey Lamdin do that in their sea stories. Elizabeth George does it well with Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. Some authors don’t write their books in sequence but use the same characters like Agatha Christie with Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.

But it is a challenge to write the books in series, having the character age as the pages and books turn, with the risk that a new reader (like me in this case) is going to walk into the middle of it. My wife has a big family, and the first time I walked into the room and they all looked at me, I knew that I was never going to remember who they all were and how they were connected. But that was okay, because I knew that I was going to have time to get to know them. They were family and that was a reason to care.

It takes a powerful writer to rope a new reader so tightly into a group like that and keep their interest. All the characters have to be memorable. All the characters have to be interesting. The risk is that all those characters are in the author’s head, and they may be in the heads of faithful readers as well, but as a newbie to this series, it didn’t work for me. And looking through the reviews on Goodreads, Jeff Carson certainly has a lot of loyal fans.

It’s a good story. Wolf is the sheriff of a county in Colorado and he gets called into a murder scene when a body appears on the top of a gigantic machine in a mining operation. Wolf has all sorts of issues with his job and the people around him, while he tries to sort out who did the deed and why. In the process, another body shows up. Added to the mix is a female deputy that Sheriff Wolf finds attractive despite some disparity in their ages.

I wouldn’t call this a ‘thriller’ in the ilk of Robert Ludlum, David Baldacci, or Ian Fleming. The scenery is great and the main characters do have substance, but I felt that the plot line took a back seat to the ongoing story of the characters. As in all good mystery stories, the why drives the who. In this story, Using a maze of clues in following the how, Carson does a good job of burying the why until close to the end in an explosion of revelation and gunfire.

Carson’s writing is solid and the editing is good. This might be a story line that would be worth turning back, and following from the beginning.

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One Last Lie by Paul Doiron

One Last Lie is the eleventh in the Mike Bowditch series by Paul Doiron. Mike is a Maine game warden but this book starts in Florida where Mike has been sent to perform his due diligence on the background for a new chief pilot for the Maine Warden Service. Mike’s friend, Charley Stevens, told him, “Never trust a man without secrets.” This is one of Doiron’s promises to the reader. He promises that he will tell us what the lie in the title means. He promises that he will tell us why Mike is in Florida and not Maine, and who the person might be that doesn’t have secrets. That’s a lot of promises before the reader makes it through the first paragraph.

Doiron is a solid storyteller and his books are a pleasure to read, and Mike is a wonderfully imperfect protagonist. Doiron follows through on those early promises and makes and answers a bunch more along the way. This story is a treasure quest that begins with a python hunt in the swamps of Florida, proceeds to a flea market in Machias, Maine, and then a plunge into the woods and a northern trek to the border with Canada. Mike seeks to find his friend and mentor who has mysteriously professed to disappearing forever, leaving a note which in itself is mysterious. Why leave a note if you want to disappear forever and not have anyone try to find you?

There are some great lines like, “Florida is the world capital of unintended consequences”. And “My love for the old man was close to unconditional. But this day signaled the end of my apprenticeship. I had no doubt that Charley Stevens would continue to teach me life lessons, but only small boys and fools worship other men. The point of life is to find heroism in yourself.”

There are some great action scenes like in the Florida swamp wrestling with a gigantic python. Doiron puts Mike on an island in a rushing river where there seems to be no way out. Threats all around - to him, to his friend Charley, to a partially innocent bystander with an evil, Dudley Do-right character changing his skin from good guy to villain. Nature plays a role - as it should in the wilds of the Maine woods.

This is not a major Don Quixote fable, but it is a solid backwoods yarn. Mike does have problems with his girlfriends, and it seems that Doiron is undecided about which way to go with that issue. It reminds me of the Lovin’ Spoonful song Did you ever have to make up your mind? Say yes to one and leave the other behind. Mike finally ends the story by lying to himself. And that is the last lie.

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Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Roseanna was published in 1965. It is a wonderful example of what appears to be a true police investigation of that era. I was not a police officer in Sweden in 1965 so I can’t say that for sure, but it seems real enough. There is a lot of waiting. There is a lot of down time when nothing happens. And the protagonist police officer, Martin Beck, gets a cold, doesn’t get enough rest, and doesn’t treat his wife well. But the authors carry it off and managed to retain my interest even through the quiet times. Slow moving stories like quiet singing can be difficult to execute well.

A naked and abused female body is found in the Göta Canal, during dredging with no way to identify her. With dogged investigation work and little bit of luck her identity is finally established as Roseanna McGraw, a tourist from the American midwest.

Besides the complexity of the lack of identity and the fact that the victim was on a boat with other tourists from all over the world, all of whom have to be tracked down and questioned, the world in the early ‘60’s was very different in terms of communication from what it is today. No cell phones. No internet. The fastest communication was a telegram and a telephone. Evidence was mailed and carried by plane across the Atlantic and then had to be translated into Swedish so Martin Beck - the lead police officer - could read it.

The story unwinds slowly and carefully. A couple of scenes near the end of the book as Martin Beck seeks to trap the killer are somewhat contrived, but that may be the distance of years.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were the authors of the 1968 novel Laughing Policeman which was made into a movie in 1973 starring Walter Matthieu and Bruce Dern.

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Review of The Color of Blood by Keith Yocum

Published by the Kindle Press, 2016

The Color of Blood by Keith Yocum is the first in a series of Dennis Cunningham stories. The book opens with Dennis thinking about poetry while he is dying after getting shot. Then the story rolls back six months to when Dennis has just returned to the CIA Office of Inspector General after recuperating from his wife’s death. It’s clear that he hasn’t fully recuperated despite the best efforts of the agency’s psychiatrist.

He is assigned by his long time boss Marty to find an agent who has disappeared in Australia. Marty promotes it as a mundane task, just something to get Dennis started and back into the flow of things. It becomes anything but mundane as Dennis peels back the layers of what turns out to be an international, globe trotting intrigue.

It is a tangled tale much of which takes place in western Australia. Yocum demonstrates in depth understanding of the environments that he writes about from the Hilton Hotel in Perth to the Tyson Corner Center in Fairfax County, Virginia as well as the workings of spy agencies. He had me convinced that he knows of which he writes. It felt comfortable to ride along with him as he moved Dennis through all the different environments. Although personally I find long distance travel disturbs my thinking, and at times Dennis made these global hops without a care except for being bothered by the occasional turbulence.

There is a love interest with another character who is just divorced from a nasty guy. There is a family interest with Dennis’s daughter who is concerned about her father and they begin to repair that relationship. Yocum comfortably fits all the pieces of the plot together.

Yocum did a masterful job of exploring the psychological aspects of stress and trust which comes back around to how Dennis ended up on the floor in the opening scene. I am looking forward to reading the other Dennis Cunningham tales and exploring Keith Yocum’s other books.

http://www.keithyocum.com/index.html

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Review of Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

Mystic River

The praise has been effusive for Mystic River since it was published in February, 2001. The movie version came out on October 3, 2003, almost exactly 17 years ago. The movie was directed by Clint Eastwood and starred Kevin Bacon as Sean Devine, Sean Penn as Jimmy Markum, Tim Robbins as Dave Boyle, Laurence Fishburne as Detective Sergeant Whitey Powers.

Lehane draws a clear social line between Boston neighborhoods of what he calls The Point and The Flats. He paints scenes of family life of both comradely and combative relationships and sets the story up with Sean, Jimmy, and Dave playing on the street as boys when a strange event occurs that will bring the three of them  - Jimmy as a former felon, Sean as a police officer, and Dave as someone very deeply scarred by the opening event who never figures out how to fight off his internal image of the Boy who Escaped from Wolves. The story involves several mysteries that seem to be intertwined, and Lehane does a masterful job of disentangling and resolving them.

Lehane paints vivid descriptive pictures of his characters such as this description of Annabeth’s father, Theo Savage. He “entered the house, came down the hall with a case of beer on each shoulder. He was a huge man, a florid, jowly Kodiak of a human being with an odd dancer’s grace as he squeezed down the narrow hall with cases of beer on his boat-mast shoulders.”

Sean’s thinking as a cop with a cop’s intuition, “You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes – beyond logic – and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn’t want to face, weren’t sure you could. That’s what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes – to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up.”

Lehane takes liberties with the control of his POVs, shifting from the inside of one character’s head to another, but it works for the story and for the atmosphere he created. These people are in a world they’ll never escape from. The neighborhoods themselves as they are moving from long term communities to yuppy havens getting gentrified and raising rents – the neighborhoods become characters in the story, characters that will clearly outlast the occupants because they are changing and the occupants are not.

It makes a good story, one that leads the reader on. I found the ending a bit slow and I found myself wishing that Lehane would just wrap it up. I can see why it was made into a movie as the tale has a depth and complexity if you want to pursue it or filtered down to its key elements that would fit into 137 minutes.

I would rank Mystic River as a Keeper.

402 pages

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