Sue Perry's Blog: Required Writing, page 10

Was There Something They Failed to Tell Me?

The first time I saw a sign like this, I jumped to an easy conclusion. Typo – need to add an s, guys!

Then I saw a second, similar sign, and my outsider complex kicked in. Had my English teachers withheld a critical piece of information?

Or does one local signmaker get a lot of work, despite gaps in grammar education? Anybody else seen signs like this?

(The WP Weekly Photo Challenge is Signs.)

Tagged: humor, postaweek, signs, Weekly Photo Challenge

A Sign It Didn’t Go Well

By the time I got to the beach, the flowers had already started to shed petals into the sea. I don’t know what went down before I arrived, but a lovely bouquet in the surf can’t be a good sign.

 

Too bold on the first date?

Thanks for the birthday flowers, shame my birthday was last week?

Flowers can’t buy forgiveness, you @#$%^?

Graduation celebration run amuck?

Or… ?

What do you think happened?

 

(The WP Weekly Photo Challenge is Signs.)

Tagged: beach, ocean, postaweek, signs, Weekly Photo Challenge

Sisyphus the Sign Mender

DMV counter, 2013:

Same counter, 2014:

New sign, same outcome. I think I see where the problem lies. When you put kids on the counter, they squirm around and hurt the sign. That’s why the sign is needed. To protect the sign.

(The WP Weekly Photo Challenge is Signs.)

Tagged: humor, postaweek, signs, Weekly Photo Challenge

Easy Glitter

Can you guess what this is? (To learn whether you guessed right, keep reading.)

Nighttime has always been my special time. For years, I complained that I was a night owl trapped in an early-bird world, until I got tired of hearing myself complain about it. My natural clock wants me up until 3a every night, but that never jived with the schedules of my jobs or my kids’ schools, and over the years I’ve been ruined by those demands. Given half a chance, I still stay up way too late – but I am now incapable of sleeping past 7a, no matter how late I go to sleep. No fair.

Actually, nowadays I get up at 4a, to work on the sequel to Nica of Los Angeles before I go to exercise class and start trying to outrun the steamroller that is my day. I was surprised at how quickly I adapted to this horrific new alarm clock time, and how much I love writing that early in the morning. Then it hit me – getting up at 4a is almost as good as staying up until then! Maybe better, because I’m fresher to enjoy the spooky magic of darkness.

One thing I like about nighttime is how often it lets me take cool photographs in dim light, provided all I want to shoot are the lights themselves…

I love this shot across the East River from Manhattan to Queens, as seen through the rooftop bar of a skyscraper. The cluster of lights at bottom are the candle at my table, reflected in the window.

This next shot makes me think of water in moonlight. But it – like the teaser photo at the top of the post (did you guess right?) – are reflections of lights on a glass table on my patio:

The table was reflecting these lights. (For the reality mongers out there, it was the camera and not my patio that was tilted.):

(The WP Weekly Photo Challenge topic is Nighttime.)

Tagged: Manhattan, New York skyline, postaweek, Weekly Photo Challenge, writing

Oh, To Be Wrong As Dazzlingly As Chandler!

Don’t ask me what book I would have if I could only have one book. I hate that. Choose one book-record-movie-food. Perhaps I approach the game with an excess of realism. I imagine being stuck on the obligatory desert island, reading the same book while eating blueberries, over and over and. No matter how long or wonderful the piece, at some point my adoration must sour and someday I’ll come down with hives.

I can say that Raymond Chandler is my favorite author. I’ve re-read his seven novels multiple times and each time my appreciation grows. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to get around to reading The Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane, which I have owned for many years. Maybe I’ve been afraid to learn too much about Chandler the man. I like having heroes and that typically requires blinders to the person behind the artist.

Alternatively, I could evolve to the point where I don’t need to pretend my heroes are perfect. But that’s another post – and maybe another person – entirely.

Another hardboiled noir masterpiece that is among my favorite books is Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain, for very different reasons. I usually need characters to root for, and there are none in Double Indemnity. But the writing is remarkably evocative, in part because it is so spare. Every word is the right one, and every word is required. I’ve encountered very few novels like that – so these qualities are not essential to greatness, but are impressive.

A predecessor of Chandler and Cain’s was Dashiell Hammett, who many people revere as a founder of the hardboiled detective genre. Hammett always leaves me flat, although I keep coming back to his books, in part because Chandler so admired him.

Turns out that Chandler didn’t think much of Cain. In fact, here is what he wrote in a letter to his publisher, Knopf, in 1942, at a time when he was unhappy about the quality of his recently-completed third novel. That novel, The High Window, is one of my favorites! Chandler was a messy and reassuring mix of self-confidence and self-doubt.

I do hope the next one will be better and that one of these days I shall turn one out that will have that fresh and sudden touch that will click. Most of all perhaps, in my rather sensitive mind, I hope the day will come when I won’t have to ride around on Hammett and James Cain, like an organ-grinder’s monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God’s sake, sound like that? Hemingway with his eternal sleeping bag got to be pretty damn tiresome, but at least Hemingway sees it all, not just the flies on the garbage can.

Heigho. I think I’ll write an English detective story, one about Superintendent Jones and the two elderly sisters in the thatched cottage, something with Latin in it and music and period furniture and a gentleman’s gentleman: above all one of those books where everybody goes for nice long walks.

Yours most sincerely,

Raymond Chandler

Oh yeah. He didn’t like Agatha Christie much, either.

All of which reminds me that my favorite speech in the movie of Double Indemnity was a Chandler addition. He adapted the novel to the screen for director Billy Wilder. Now that is one of my favorite movies, although it would not be on a loop in my screening room on the desert island. I didn’t know that Fred MacMurray was a great actor until I saw Double Indemnity. But that is a digression within a digression. (Nested digressions!) Anyhow, the added dialog was in the opening confession: “Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.”

 

Tagged: Dashiell Hammett, Double Indemnity, James M. Cain, language, novels, Raymond Chandler, writers, writing, writing style

Book Sale: Nica of Los Angeles, Today for One Dollar

In fact, save an extra penny. The cost is actually $0.99.

(When did the cents symbol leave the keyboard?) (When did I last look for it?)

Today only! Get a copy of my new novel, Nica of Los Angeles, for ninety-nine cents, at all the usual places, including:

Amazon

(ratings avg 4.7 out of 5 stars)

Smashwords

Apple

Kobo

Barnes & Noble

 

You’ve never read anything quite like this! When rookie private eye Nica takes on a mysterious case, she enters a world of multiple dimensions called Frames, where buildings and lawn chairs can be sentient, where a stray cat has great powers, where books can be killers, and clouds can be spies. At home, Nica tackles missing persons cases, while in the larger reality of the Frames she is swept into an escalating battle between good and evil.

Tagged: detective, ebook sale, fantasy, novels, writing

Adventure Is Always Present Tense

A sister-in-law: “Have you read Wild by Cheryl Strayed? I think of you as I read it, because of your adventurous spirit.”

Me: “No, but I am thrilled that you think I have an adventurous spirit. Wonder if I agree.”

A sister-in-law: “Are you kidding?”

Adventurous? Moi? I wish! I do like to try new things but I generally fall short of earning the honor of that adjective.

I can be a big chicken, but that’s not what prevents me. It’s my tendency to dwell in the past and on the future. I know I’m not the only one with this problem. It afflicts most adults of our species.

Adventure can only be had right now, in the present. Kids are good at living in the present tense. So are critters. It’s a skill I’m trying to re-acquire.

When you first learn to walk, every moment is an adventure:

A few years later, adventure is as close as your next idea, such as this tandem go-cart constructed of cardboard boxes, plywood, and skateboard wheels:

 

Red and Luna would head out each morning to patrol the yard and explore anything that might be new since yesterday.

And of course, when you’re a dog, like Shadow, adventure is always in the air – especially through a car window:

Shadow and I go for walks twice a day. I vary the route but we’ve lived here for years. No matter which way we go, we’ve done it before. Many times. Yet, each time we step out the door, Shadow’s enthusiasm is as fresh as ever, and she’s always in a hurry to get going. It’s not that she needs to go – she’s got a backyard, she’s not cooped up inside. She’s eager because you just never know what might happen next.

That’s the attitude I aspire to. Except without the affinity for cat poop.

Nica, the main character of my latest novel, is completely comfortable with adventure. I’ve never written another character that I want so much to be like!

Tagged: cats, Cheryl Strayed, dogs, novels, personal philosophy, photography, postaweek, Weekly Photo Challenge, writing

Adventure Exists in the Present Tense

A sister-in-law: “Have you read Wild by Cheryl Strayed? I think of you as I read it, because of your adventurous spirit.”

Me: “No, but I am thrilled that you think I have an adventurous spirit. Wonder if I agree.”

A sister-in-law: “Are you kidding?”

Adventurous? Moi? I wish! I do like to try new things but I generally fall short of earning the honor of that adjective.

I can be a big chicken, but that’s not what prevents me. It’s my tendency to dwell in the past and on the future. I know I’m not the only one with this problem. It afflicts most adults of our species.

Adventure can only be had right now, in the present. Kids are good at living in the present tense. So are critters. It’s a skill I’m trying to re-acquire.

When you first learn to walk, every moment is an adventure:

A few years later, adventure is as close as your next idea, such as this tandem go-cart constructed of cardboard boxes, plywood, and skateboard wheels:

 

Red and Luna would head out each morning to patrol the yard and explore anything that might be new since yesterday.

And of course, when you’re a dog, like Shadow, adventure is always in the air – especially through a car window:

Shadow and I go for walks twice a day. I vary the route but we’ve lived here for years. No matter which way we go, we’ve done it before. Many times. Yet, each time we step out the door, Shadow’s enthusiasm is as fresh as ever, and she’s always in a hurry to get going. It’s not that she needs to go – she’s got a backyard, she’s not cooped up inside. She’s eager because you just never know what might happen next.

That’s the attitude I aspire to. Except without the affinity for cat poop.

Nica, the main character of my latest novel, is completely comfortable with adventure. I’ve never written another character that I want so much to be like!

Tagged: cats, Cheryl Strayed, dogs, novels, personal philosophy, photography, postaweek, Weekly Photo Challenge, writing

Publication Celebration Deal: Nica of Los Angeles!

Nica is here at last and for the next 3 days, just one thin dollar ($1)!

Nica of Los Angeles is a speculative fantasy with detective and dystopian elements. You’ve never read anything quite like it!

When rookie private eye Nica takes on a mysterious case, she enters a world of multiple dimensions called Frames, where buildings and lawn chairs can be sentient, where a stray cat has great powers, where books can be killers, and clouds can be spies. At home, Nica tackles missing persons cases, while in the larger reality of the Frames she is swept into an escalating battle between good and evil.

This is the first of four novels in the FRAMES series.

Cover art by Lars Huston.

P.S. Disgruntlement guarantee: if you already bought it at a higher price, let me know and I will make it up to you.

 

Read (rave!) reviews at Goodreads.

Read chapters on-line: Here on this blog  or at Wattpad

Download sample chapters from: Smashwords or Noisetrade.

or… take the plunge!

Here’s how to buy it for just $1 (through Sep 7, 2014):

Step 1: Go to Nica‘s page at Smashwords.

Step 2: Click the “Buy” button and follow checkout procedure.

Step 3: To get the discount, use coupon code DQ24S.

Tagged: detective fiction, ebook sale, ebooks, fantasy, female sleuth, Nica of Los Angeles, speculative fiction, writing

Perhaps I Bore Them

Do people yawn when we are bored, or does that only happen in fiction?

Do cats yawn when they are bored? Do cats get bored? How could we tell?

My cats yawn at me pretty frequently. Should I take it personally?

(The WP Weekly Photo Challenge said to juxtapose two photos to engage them in dialogue. I remain clueless about what that means even after it sparked several posts!)

Tagged: cats, musings, photography, postaweek, Weekly Photo Challenge