Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 107
April 21, 2020
Does bashing the country help fix it?
People are talking about COVID-19 these days, how to fight it, how to stay away from it, whether or not the lockdown approach will end up being more harmful than the disease, and when–if ever–the country will get back to normal.
[image error]Reasonably, we’re debating the nature of the country’s response and whether we could have done something better or something sooner, and where do we go from here?
But now another ingredient has been added to the mix, often stated about like this: Why would we want to get back to normal when normal was pretty much all bad?
So here we have people using the pandemic as a springboard for steering the discussion back to the same political agenda they were pushing before the pandemic began. Sure, there’s an election on the horizon and people want us to remember the issues that separate their platforms from other platforms.
But we go a step too far when we say that the normal we had was 100% terrible and that, in fact, nothing about it is worth celebrating. I want to say, “If you think this country is totally rotten, why don’t you move to a country that either is less rotten or is still fresh as cherries just plucked from the tree?”
I would like to challenge the people who say everything about the pre-pandemic normal was horrible, to try and come up with a list of things that we not horrible. I don’t trust a person who is 100% negative to ever put together a vision for what this country should be moving toward as we fix the known ills. I want them to begin by saying, “I love this country in spite of its flaws–and here’s why.”
If they can do that, then we have hope for the future as they see it. If not, they look like the kind of people who don’t know beating a dead horse won’t get them anywhere, much less charm the people who owned the horse.
April 19, 2020
‘Tom Clancy Enemy Contact’ by Mike Maden
I read the Tom Clancy franchise books to escape whatever I need to escape. Now it’s probably the pandemic and everything related to it.
Enemy Contact is another instalment in the series featuring Jack Ryan, Jr. and the Ops Center. Ops Center handles black ops interventions that the government can’t or won’t handle. The stories are action oriented and involve a cast of operatives that has evolved throughout the series.
This book is missing about everything that has made the series worth reading, though the stories have become less interesting after Mark Greaney’s True Faith and Allegiance came out in 2016.
What is this book is missing:
[image error]Most of the primary Op Center characters from the best of the previous books.
The black-ops action which has been the series’ true focus. Jack Ryan, Jr.’s cover story with the organization is that he’s a financial analyst, though those duties don’t usually play heavily into the plots. In this story, he spends most of the novel traveling in Poland looking for potential financial irregularities and/or treasonous associations in the investments of a U.S. Senator who ticked on the President of the U.S. President (Ryan’s dad).
Ryan travels from one contact/company to another with Lilianna, a Polish agent who serves as a chauffeur/driver. He’s attracted to her but keeps the relationship professional. Since he’s working/posing only as a financial analyst, she has no idea he has black-ops skills. The meetings are rather routine, so the agent’s police skills are wasted, and we end up with more pages of Polish history and food information than anything else. Meanwhile, a more pressing IT security mess is developing that could impact U. S. security agencies, but we only hear snippets about it–and Ryan isn’t focused on that.
With about ten percent of the book left, we finally get some black-ops action. Ryan is blind sided by it probably because he has been rather cavalier about the potential dangers of going around asking questions of bad people. He escapes one another group of bad guys only to get pulled into another group of bad guys while he’s off work. The action here is handled well.
Then, suddenly all the other minor plot lines get resolved, most in a long epilogue, and the book ends. Formally, there is closure (though minimal) for the national security issues, but none for Ryan’s personal losses.
What a mess.
–Malcolm
[image error]Malcolm R. Campbell’s short story collection Widely Scattered Ghosts is currently free on Smashwords. (epub or mobi format).
April 17, 2020
The 10 most inspiring, enjoyable books about how to write
Most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one,” the great short story writer Flannery O’Connor once wrote. When it comes to good writing, we can tend towards a romantic vision of it being an unexplainable, inimitable act of divine intervention. It can be inspiring – and often unpalatable – to be reminded that the best writing is more often the result of hard and constant work.
Even if the last thing you are planning on doing in lockdown is writing a novel, here are some of the best guides on writing: how to do it, how it works and how to be inspired to start.
At my age, I seldom read how-to-write books any more because I tend to improve my output by just doing it.
Those who are younger than me–and that’s mostly everyone–might find both practical help and inspiration from the books on this list. Consider starting your quest with On Writing by Stephen King. It has a lot of fans–and for good reason.
One book I’d add to this list is Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass. As an agent, Maass knows what sells as well as what writers are doing to submit manuscripts he and other agents will spend time reading.
Enjoy the books.
–Malcolm
April 16, 2020
The NSA probably thinks I’m a women’s clothing designer
When I was a child, I was told that women wore dresses, skirts, and various kinds of things that I called trousers but that women called by magical names depending on the styles and fabrics. From snippets of conversation, I learned that dresses and skirts are not generic, that they had names/uses/purposes, that they came from different designers, factories, stores, were either last year’s fashion (no longer in use) or current fashion (in use).
The bottom line is this: I know that the women in my novels have to wear something, but I don’t know what it is. That is, I can’t just say, “Alice wore a dress.” If it’s a high-scale dress, then I’ll need to know a designer. I’ll need to know what kind of dress it is and under what circumstances it’s worn. I always assume that the kind of dress suitable for a PTA meeting isn’t suitable for a New Year’s Eve party aboard a royal yacht.
The NSA comes into play because not knowing anything about anything, dress-wise, I’m online a lot. Multiple clothing searches. The plot thickens, dress-wise, when I’m working on a novel (as I am now) set in the 1950s. Unless some kind of a retro fad is going on, dresses from the 1950s aren’t being worn today, even to a PTA meeting.
The good thing about searching on, say, women’s clothing of the 1950s, you not only come across articles discussing how fabrics/styles changed from the war years (if you’re young, I should tell you World War II on the homefront meant utilitarian clothes, rationing, etc.) to the 1950s. (For example, the Vintage Dancer site was a nice place to start. So was Fashion History Timeline.)
This gives me a general picture–including what the clothing was called. Moving on, I can then search on the names of the clothing, finding vintage ads, catalogue pictures, and even Etsy shops that specialize in retro clothing from certain eras. So, while Brad Thor, James Patterson, Tom Clancy, and other black ops novels are keeping up with weapons and tactics, I’m desperately trying to find out what my characters should wear and when.
People always ask why research takes longer than writing. It all comes down to the fact that I learned only the difference between a dress and a skirt, but none of the thousand styles or accessories. It was, I suppose, a lapse in my education and/or upbringing.
[image error]P. S. – My older woman character named Sparrow wears a Kitty Foyle dress that was popular in the 1940s. If you’re not sure what the dress looks like, you can watch Ginger Rogers in the film “Kitty Foyle.” Rogers won an academy award and the dress she wore in the film endured.
April 15, 2020
Author’s error: violating your point of view choice
Very few authors these days use an omniscient point of view, so I find it quite jarring when an author writing in third person restricted suddenly tacks an omniscient sentence onto the end of a scene or chapter as a cheap way of creating suspense.
[image error] If the reader thinks your writing process looks like this, s/he might not finish the book.
When you’re writing in third person restricted, the reader only knows what the character knows. That said, it’s a foul to have the main character step out of a house, get in his car and drive off, and then follow that with Bob didn’t see the man in the woods across from his house taking pictures.
If Bob didn’t see it, it can’t be in the book.
I’m reading a black ops book by a name author who writes a lot of these novels, and he’s been cheating on his point of view with these kinds of sloppy POV deviations throughout the book. I’m used to them, but I don’t like them. And I wonder why the line editor at his publishing house let them get into the published copy.
April 14, 2020
Developing a Writing Practice
The world is full of people who “want to write a book someday,” but few are those who manage to find the time to do so amid the myriad other commitments in their lives.
A lot of the people who genuinely want to write a book never do so, because they never find a reason to prioritize their writing practice. That was the case with one of my book-coaching clients—until one of his sons died from cancer.
Source: Developing a Writing Practice, Part 3: Important | Jane Friedman
Without a strong passion and/or a pragmatic approach to giving your writing the time it needs, those dreams of poems, novels, and plays will probably never come true. Passion might arise out of a tragedy in your life that subsequently sends you to the keyboard day after day until you’ve said what you want to say about it.
Yet, as the author says, “There’s no need to wait until life reminds you of your mortality. You can make writing a priority right now.” The suggestions in this article just might help you, I think because they don’t smack of discipline, like being forced to do fifty pushups a day or run ten miles, approaches that might create good soldiers by don’t allow much for a fresh breath of creativity as part of your prioritizing time and effort.
Worth a look–and even more, worth a try.
–Malcolm
April 13, 2020
A thousand characters: give me a break
I’m reading a novel–that shall remain unnamed for now–that has a lot of chapters, each with multiple subchapters, and all with thousands of characters with multiple names and aliases and Internet handles.
I have a vague idea most of the time about what’s happening–cyber warfare–and a feeling that there are multiple good guys in multiple alphabet soup federal agencies as well as multiple bad guys in a slough of nasty groups all of who are either trying to steal secrets and/or plant bombs OR who are trying to keep people from stealing secrets and/or plant bombs.
[image error]What I seldom know is which character is doing what. Sometimes characters are referred to by the first name, last name only, or code name. Often, all in the same paragraph, as in “Johnson stopped his car in a no-parking zone and hung his FBI creds around his neck. As Bob edged closer to the barricades he noted a police helo hovering overhead, then, and incoming call, ‘Cyber 1,’ he answered.”
Ack. Are Bob and Johnson the same person? Yes, but it’s often hard to tell.
I looked up the reviews for this book on Amazon and the most common complaint was too many characters and the fact that new characters kept being introduced throughout the book.
No offense to the names in other countries, but a large number of foreign names, (first/last/pet/title only) doesn’t help the reader keep track of everyone, especially when some of these people are bad guys and are using phoney names.
I’m losing my patience with this and am surprised by the reader reviews on Amazon where people said, “Best book since sliced bread” and “Well written with a lot of character depth.”
Some people read the book while drunk or stoned and that probably accounted for the glowing, five-star reviews. Other people read the book because it was the only new book in the house (my situation) and just decided at some point it didn’t matter who was going what as long as what they were doing was really cool.
If you wrote this book, shame on you for an anal amount of complexity.
–Malcolm
April 11, 2020
Would you live your life over again if you could?
When people ask this question, they usually want to know if you’d make the same career choices, marry the person you married, go to the same colleges, live in the same places, and become involved with the same hobbies and avocations. Of course, the only way you could live your life over and make changes would be having knowledge of what happened the first time through and then not doing any of the things that turned out badly.
I regret many of the decisions I’ve made, but when it comes to those that turned out badly, I know that even though the decision hurt me and/or others at the time, if I had done something differently, many of the good things in my life since then would disappear.
[image error]So many things over the course of one’s life often happen due to small and seemingly innocuous decisions. A man drives home from work a different way and gets t-boned in an intersection and ends up in the hospital. How do you predict that? Maybe he marries his nurse and lives happily ever after. Okay, the car wreck was bad but the marriage was good. What if he’d driven home the normal way without a car wreck. Would fate/luck/God made sure he met that nurse some other way?
When asked about living one’s life over in a different way, it’s easy to say “I wouldn’t have driven to work drunk and run over all those people” or “I would have told my friends I wouldn’t help them rob the bank which ended up with me in jail for twenty years.” Those things seem so obvious, it’s easy to see why somebody would leap at the chance to do things differently.
But how would you know which tiny choices would end up having wonderful or horrible consequences? That is, when a person goes out to eat at Restaurant A rather than Restaurant B, s/he doesn’t really see that choice as a defining moment. usually, it isn’t. But it could be.
When it comes down to it, I always say I’d live my life the same way that I have because it’s the devil I know. It might not have been all Champagne and roses and millions of dollars in the bank, but those things don’t guarantee happiness or that some cruel catcher in the rye might jump out of the shadows if I were to change the smallest thing.
The question of would you or wouldn’t you becomes more tangled than quantum theory with so many variables and connections, I don’t think our brains could handle living our lives over to make them come out better.
The big, bad decisions are easy to focus on and think about changing. But I believe our character and our chosen destiny for this life come out thousands of “smaller” decisions that don’t seem world-changing when we make them.
–Malcolm
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Conjure Woman’s Cat”
April 10, 2020
For those who get too close
Nightbeat Column, by Jock Stewart, Star-Gazer News Service
In addition to a robber’s red bandana face mask, my grocery store costume includes a carpenter’s utility belt with a sign in 18-point Bodoni Bold type that says For Those Who Get Too Close.
COVID-19 oriented, my utilities do not include a hammer, screwdriver, vise grips, pliers, tape measure or T-square because handy as those tools are, they don’t scare huggers, hand shakers, coughers, and sneezers away.
Instead, I have these very practical items:
[image error]Wikipedia Photo
TASER: For lone family members at the far end of the aisle who start running toward me sh0uting, “Jock, give me some sugar,” in the belief that being close at home (in some cases) means being close in the store is okay.
WASP Spray: Since this comes in long-range spray cans, it keeps White Anglo-Saxon Protestants on their side of the store without having to accept any tracts or lists of Bible verses.
Pepper Spray: Keeps hookers from coming up and whispering, “Jock, baby, I need $100 for a roll of toilet paper.”
Bowling Ball: If a bevvy of grannies from the neighborhood runs toward me for help carrying their Polident, Fig Newtons, and snuff back home, this can be rolled down the aisle for an easy strike. (I have two balls in case I come up with a dreaded 7-10 split on the first roll.)
Smith & Wesson 642 .38 Special Revolver: Keeps the cashiers on their side of the new sneeze screens.
Emergency Poster: Printed in 72-Point Bodoni Bold type, this sign says: I ALREADY GOT IT: HOW ABOUT YOU.
Shop only for essentials, be safe, and mainstain social distancing (or else).
“Nightbeat” appears on the Junction City Star-Gazer editorial page as needed
April 9, 2020
John Hart delays release of new novel ‘The Unwilling’
John Hart announced on Facebook yesterday that The Unwilling, originally scheduled for release in this June, will be delayed until February of next year. Many fans, including me, are disappointed by this news since we had been looking forward to some wonderful summer reading material.
[image error]
Unlike many of us who promote our books primarily online with an occasional bricks-and-mortar reading and signing, Hart schedules a book tour for each of his books. The pandemic makes tours impossible now.
Calling the planned book tour for The Unwilling collateral damage to coronavirus, he said, “This was not an easy decision for any of us, but book tour is a huge part of my life – that includes meeting fans and booksellers, raising funds for important charities and doing what I can to support all of the stores that writers and readers value so highly (talk about an essential business!). It is also a necessary part of my life. Writing novels is such a lonesome, isolating affair that I have long considered tour as a needed reinsertion into the human race, a once-in-a-while reminder that life exists beyond the farm and keyboard, the family and close friends.”
His novels are so intense, I can understand his need to get out into the real world every time one is finished and ready for release. We’ll be waiting, Mr. Hart.
