Timothy Miller

Either fight or surf

2026-06-30T09:34:20.576-05:00

“You either fight or surf!” is, of course, the famous choice posed by Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. In the madness of battle, Kilgore gives his soldiers a blank choice between two missions—take it to the waves or take it to the enemy.

Screenwriter John Milius later revealed that the scene was inspired by a comment made by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during the Six-Day War of 1967.

After winning a battle at Aqaba, Sharon went spear diving, as one does, shot some fish, and ate them with his staff, saying, “We’re eating their fish,” as if to say, “We came, we saw, we conquered, we fished a little.”

I’m not recommending either spear-fishing or surfing in the midst of battle. They’re both madness. But battle in and of itself is madness. In both cases, real and fictional, the pursuit of joy, of mastery, in such a mess is presented as a tunnel through the madness.

We are all in our own private wars with the future, because the future (spoilers!) inevitably brings death to each of us. But in this era of rapidly-advancing technology, it first brings obsolescence: the death of permanence.

I was thinking a while back that the (seeming) growing number of people lacking empathy are mutants of a sort (see my post Mutants), but now I’m thinking maybe we, who have been able to hold on to that estimable quality, are the real mutants. That the division is not between the caring and the uncaring, but between those who fight change and those who welcome it. The recessive human gene for living comfortably in the whirlwind may be coming to the fore now that we’ve sown the wind.

For most of our existence, change was rare and incremental. Things started accelerating with the Industrial Age, and now in the Computer Age change is cascading so rapidly that many of us are frozen in the headlights of the future, desperate to find refuge, which inevitably comes across as a lack of empathy. for others similarly trapped.

And if speed was the invention of the Industrial Age, isolation seems to be the offspring of the post-industrial. This is especially true in America, which has always prided itself on isolationsm, both external and internal; the internal it calls “individualism” and tags it with the adjective “rugged” to make it seem more manly, and therefore more virtuous.

Now we have loneliness influencers. Yes, you heard that right. Apparently the latest TikTok trend is people on a Friday night with nothing to do but watch tv and eat pizza are filming themselves doing just that, and extolling the advantages of being alone on a Friday night, and millions of viewers who have nothing better to do on a Friday night are watching them rather than tv, and feeling better about themselves. Whether the influencer viewers are recording themselves watching the influencers watching tv in the hope of also becoming influencers I don’t know, but it’s a prospect that puts me in mind of pod people.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Ever hear of Future Shock? It was a seminal book written by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in 1970. Everyone was reading it, everyone was debating it. We were still debating it two years later, when I was a sophomore in high school reading it. I was 15.

Toffler coined a term: the death of permanence. It posited a post-industrial society that would be marked by a transient culture where everything ranging from goods (think lighters, pens, minor kitchen appliances, major kitchen appliances, major major appliances) to human relationships would be temporary. Where the mantra of an earlier generation was:

Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, Or do without

The mantra of Generation KonMari is: If it doesn’t “spark joy”—toss it.

The Tofflers’ prediction was dead on.

It wasn’t always that way. There’s the Centennial Light, a light bulb that just celebrated its 125th birthday. It was first switched on in 1901. It’s still going.

What’s the result of the death of permanence? Future shock. People are distressed, disoriented, disconnected.

I think your response to our ever-accelerating future dictates in large part your political stance. Conservatism and liberalism aren’t simply political stances, after all; they’re philosophical, cultural, personal frameworks. They’re red or blue tinted glasses.

Conservatives look to the past for succor. After all, this is the famous quote from arch-conservative William F. Buckley:

"A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it."

Conservatives want to fight the future, This may lead to some anxiety, since the future has won every bout it’s ever fought.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

―L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

How do we respond to the rising tide of change? For conservatives, it’s fight or flight. But—we no longer live in the present; we live in the future. Every step we take, every move we make, is into the future. What can you do?

There’s a third way: float. You can fight change or you can surf it.

Liberals look to the future—with something between confidence and trepidation. Those of us who have expressed the latent genetic tolerance to (or delight in) change learn to surf the future.

The future doesn’t yet exist, of course. But the past never existed, at least not as we remember it. The past has too many moving parts for us to keep them all straight, much less keep a tight grip on. Instead, we conjure up a past that excises the bad (or the merely messy), depositing us in Leave-It-To-Beaver Land. Memory is not a tape recorder, it’s a creative act, a collaboration between what we can actually dredge up and what we fill in the gaps and shape the memory into. Cognitive neuroscientist Christian Jarrett sums it up:

“So it’s quite likely that you’ve read or heard rose-tinted accounts of historical periods or places. Based on those accounts, your mind creates a simulation of what those places or times would have been like and you then feel a yearning to experience them for yourself.”

What’s this nostalgia for an America that never existed called?

Anemoia—nostalgia for a time we’ve never known. It doesn’t have to be based in any fact at all—it can be nostalgia for Oz, or Narnia, or Middle-Earth.

Of course, there’s nostalgia for the future, too, whether it’s the future of Utopia, or Star Trek, or, say, November 8, 2028. The word for that?

Anemoia.

This door swings both ways.

You’ll say at least memory has some basis in fact, but so do our visions of the future. Our predictions are inferences, extrapolations from the facts on the ground. Prediction markets are based on our memories of the future. That is to say, on our predictions that turned out correctly. We can graph the wave.

Can liberals become so enamored of their visions of the future that they become unmoored from reality, inventing pie-in-the-sky Pollyanna scenarios that have no grounding in reality? It’s a risk, certainly, as anyone who follows the AI boomer/doomer debates can attest to.

Is there a nostalgia for the present? Possibly. Some scientists theorize that the brain is actually an inference engine, creating hypotheses about the world around us and then using the senses to correct the model thus predicated. I don’t want to go too deeply into this right now, mainly because I haven’t yet investigated it enough to do it justice, but basically the active inference theory is that the brain first consults its internal map of the world, and only then depends on the senses to check the territory—updating the map. Which makes sense when you consider that our senses are keyed to registering change in our environment. Or, as neuroscientist Karl Friston, a key architect of the theory, puts it:

“…each organism represents a hypothesis or model that contains a different set of prior expectations about the environment it inhabits. Interactions with the environment can be seen as hypothesis testing or model optimisation…”

So…the present is just as much a construction as the past and future. In effect, we are making predictions about the present.

Now suppose there’s a type of nostalgia specifically for the good times, the special moments, whether past, present, or future, burned into the memory, or anticipated with goosebumps. I don’t know if it’s got a formal name, but I’d like to give it one: Tralfamadorianism.

From Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-house Five:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.

And this suns up the Tralfamadorian philosophy:

“Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones - to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.”

My manifestation of anemoia is Tralfamadorian nostalgia. The 4th dimension viewed as a plenum, rather than a vector. Time as a wave. And what is a wave? An expression of pure kinetic energy.

“What every surfer dreams of is a small wave with a perfect shape—what we call a perfect wave. The odds against finding that are ten million to one,” says Bruce Brown in the 1966 surf documentary The Endless Summer.

Yes. Something that propels you into the future without friction, a force that you master not by domination, nor by supplication, but by the tension between the two—the perfect wave.

The Perfect Wave

This is the goal of the new mutants in the Tralfamadore Party, not to bury oneself in the past or fling oneself headlong into the future, but to find the still point between, the perfect wave, and ride it.

I’m by no means assured of my new party’s perspective, but I suspect viewing things from multiple perspectives may be part of our mutant power, inferring new timelines and paring old ones in the blink of an eye.

So my banner is the Tralfamadore Party. It’s not a middle of the road Solomonic “slice the baby in two” strategy. It’s not lukewarm water. It’s looking forward, rapidly assimilating the best of the future while carrying the best of the past on our backs, keeping in mind the old line, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”

Review: The Heiress of Northanger Abbey

2026-06-13T10:43:01.556-05:00

I’m a sucker for meta-fiction, which reflects back on itself like a mirror within a mirror. So when someone comes along with a sequel to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey which, rather than satirizing the gothic novel, embraces it, validating all Catherine Morland’s forbidding fantasies—I’m all in.

(If you haven’t read the original, Wikipedia sums it up as a coming-of-age story and a satire of the Gothic novel, and that’s all you need to know going forward, except that it’s my second favorite Austen novel, with Emma leading by a nose.)

So: it takes an enormous amount of chutzpah to attempt a sequel to a Jane Austen novel. It takes skill to capture an echo of Austen’s strait-laced prose style while retaining one’s own authorial voice. And it takes an enormous amount of sensitivity, research, and sheer talent to pull it off convincingly.

Nancy Bilyeau is more than up to the task.

The main cast is the same, heroes and villains both—with one important addition: the heiress of the title, Phoebe, Catherine and Henry’s eldest daughter. While Catherine is still the protagonist, it’s Phoebe’s fate she--and we--are consumed by.

Oh, and there’s also a shadowy figure who may or may not be a vampire, but is definitely a bloodsucker. Don’t turn your back on him.

As the story opens, Phoebe is at Bath, “taking the waters” (read: mingling with society) as Catherine did all those years ago when she was a slip of a girl, and just as Catherine did, she has met Isabella Thorpe, the false friend and author of all her mother’s woes. Hearing of this, nothing will do but for Catherine to fly to Bath to protect her daughter from Isabella’s wiles.

But times change. Isabella seems no threat at all. She’s reformed, wants to bury the past, and Phoebe has become fast friends with Isabella’s daughter. All Catherine’s worries were unfounded, just as her down-to-earth husband Henry has predicted.

There’s even talk of Phoebe making a visit to the Thorpe home on the wild moors of Devonshire. Catherine has not has all her fears allayed, but Phoebe has a stubborn streak, and at last, despite her misgivings, Catherine gives in—as long as she can accompany her daughter on the trip.

And that, as they might have said in Regency days, is when the fewmets hit the windmill. Is Phoebe in danger from the Thorpes, or is it all Catherine’s fantasy? This is the hinge the story swings on.

A fixer-upper in Devonshire

A constant theme in Austen is the flowering of self-knowledge in her naïve young heroines. So how to deal with the over-imaginative tendencies of Catherine Tilney nee Morland as a forty-year-old wife and mother? Twenty-two years of marriage, two daughters, and the cares of a clergyman’s wife, the absolutely corseted requirements of society and especially great houses such as the Abbey, have sobered her, but she still wears her heart on her sleeve, and still has a galloping imagination that she has learned to keep a tight rein on. The child is mother to the woman.

Where the original Northanger Abbey plays on the edge of the Gothic, The Heiress of Northanger Abbey dives right in the deep end, replete with a crumbling estate vastly more haunted than the Abbey, and it even features a putative vampire. If you’ve often wished, as I have, that Catherine’s dark forebodings in Austen’s novel might prove out, Bilyeau’s novel will be catnip for you. Call it Gothic wish fulfillment. Yet it’s firmly grounded in the realities of 18th century English society.

There’s a thin line between life and literature in Northanger Abbey, walking side by side, sometimes dissolving into one another, always subtly reminding the reader of its own artifice. The Heiress assays that same tightrope with daring and grace. “For an instant it felt like a cruel twist on a Gothic novel,” our heroine says at one point. Just so.

Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland

What some will be asking is this: can the book stand on its own, without ever having read a word of Jane Austen? Yes, as a modern romp through the gothic novel, full of finely chiseled characters and a plot threatening to burst its stays, I’d recommend it to any fan of the historical novel. The prose is as strait-laced as Austen’s own; the matter more daring.

If it tempts you to dig into the original Northanger Abbey (it will), all the better.

The Heiress of Northanger Abbey is available for pre-order now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org.

(Audio version of this post avaiable HERE at Youtube.)

So? true?

2026-06-05T14:37:25.649-05:00

Proteus

One expression that really irritates me?

“So true.”

I’‘m reminded of what my high school English teacher used to say:

“You can’t be very unique or a little bit pregnant.”

some terms by their nature are binary. They either are or aren’t. There are no degrees of truth. You can approach truth, as you can approach the summit of a mountain, but you can’t plant your flag on Everest until you’ve reached the top. There are no Mostly True and Slightly False tests.

“It oughta be true.”

Many things that ought to be true unfortunately are not. The Lord of the Rings, in my opinion, oughta be true. But you’ll always find it in the fantasy section, never the non-fiction.

If you’re a writer, you’re familiar with this quote from Hemingway:

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

In true Hemingwayesque fashion, he does not elaborate. How does one arrive at that true sentence? Must all your writing be true, or can you fudge a little, skirt the truth if it’s too painful, or controversial?

I’ll say this: it’s as hard to write truthfully as it is to climb a glass mountain, because lies come in as many forms as Triton: withholding, misdirection, obfuscation, projection, just to name a few. (And outright whoppers, of course.)

It’s not so much a question of subject matter, but of manner.

Some writers think it’s their job to manipulate the emotions of the readers, or to convince them of the writer’s point of view (sometimes using lies, damn lies, or statistics, to paraphrase Twain).

This attitude infuriates me.

We aren’t here to fool the readers, to pull the wool over their eyes, to make them dance to our tune. They aren’t abstractions, they’re flesh and blood humans, deserving of our respect. The only way to keep respecting ourselves is to afford them that respect. I, for one, do not wish to have to submit to the walk of shame.

I believe instead we’re here to invoke emotion, or lay out argument. We invite the reader in to examine our wares, but not to play the shell game. The reader is not only a free agent, but a full collaborator in creation, “the indispensable collaborator” as Kurt Vonnegut calls them. For that magic to occur, they must be clear-headed and clear-eyed.

So if you’re a fiction writer specifically, the question is: what is the nexus between truth and fiction?

Your plots won’t be true, obviously, unless you’re writing a roman a clef. Even then, the voltage is usually amped up, so that the thinnest of filaments will glow with heat. That’s what good fiction is: unsafe current. But it’s illuminating.

Writer at work

.Your themes must be true, in that they are the things that truly gnaw at you when you lie awake at three in the morning. You wrestle with them like Jacob with the angel. You have to push all your chips to the middle of the table.

When Pope Leo, in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas quoted these lines from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King--

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

I said earlier The Lord of the Rings was fantasy, but the pope recognized his theme as true.

Your characters must be true, truly human, with all the human strivings, limitations, dog-eared corners and quirks. This holds true even if your characters are an invading army of squids from the planet Xyllyx or talking animals.

… or … talking animals from space.

Because what we seek in novels is the ability to look another human in the eye without shame. And those characters have to be willing to put it all on the line to reach their goals. Even Bartleby the Scrivener and Walter Mitty have consuming goals—one to be left alone with his daydreams, the other to be left alone entirely.

What else needs to be true? The rules of the game must be adhered to. This is where fiction diverges from reality. Humans are finally unpredictable in their behavior. Characters cannot be. Does this seem contradictory?

As Walt Whitman said:

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

—which is exactly what your characters cannot do. You must remember that they’re in a stage set made of pages. If characters lean too heavily against the walls or slam the door going out, the whole set can come down around you. Your characters should be multidimensional. They cannot be omnidimensional. This doesn’t mean you can’t blend colors, but you’ve got to set up your palette beforehand, and stick to it.

Lastly, you’ve got to be true to the work. You’ve got to make the commitment to the hardscrabble road in front of you. You’ve got to see it through to the end, with all the detours and disappointments, all the compromises between your first flash of inspiration and your finished work.

I keep using the pronoun you, but the person I’m really admonishing is, as Hemingway was, myself.

(Audio version available HERE on Youtube.)

Tall Summer Girls

2026-05-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

Delta Morning Empty Swing, Milly L. Moorhead

Here’s what it’s like to be on the cusp of life. It’s a Louisiana summer evening, suspended between twilight and night, suspended between 6th and 7th grades. Your hands are touching the shoulder blades of a tall girl who’s sitting on the swing in front of you. The swing must have been moving before, but now is still. You were talking before, you must have been, but now there is silence, not even insects buzzing, empty and full of meaning at the same time.

Is the swing part of a swing set, in a playground? Sounds logical, but you don’t remember. This is an intimate, close-up shot. There is only the swing, held up by the chains she has her hands wrapped around. They stretch forever into the sky.

For you, there’s only the shoulder blades of a tall girl, the swing, the curve of her neck, tantalizingly close to your lips. Her hair is cut violently short, and she’s wearing a scoop-neck blouse, so that the entire length of her nape is exposed. You feel a kind of sweet, liquid lethargy running like mercury through your marrow. You have no name for it, but you’ll recognize it years later as languor.

You’re sure, surer than you’ve ever been of anything in your life, that she wants you to kiss her neck. You don’t dare. She’s too tall.

(A lot of girls that age are taller than boys. They walk like giraffes stalking the African veldt. They are breathtakingly beautiful in their awkwardness. They’re waiting for boys to catch up—in oh so many ways.)

Why hold back? God knows. The furthest you’ve ever gotten with a girl is holding hands at the class picnic on the last day of school. You’d wandered off into the trees at the edge of the park. She’d slipped her hand in yours. That was only a month ago. You hadn’t even considered kissing her. In the late 60s, at that age, holding hands was practically considered going all the way. You anticipated all that summer rekindling that brief flame once 7th grade started.

When you see her again, on the first day of school, she greets two of your best friends joyfully. Then she notices you and says:

“Oh. You’re here, too?”

And you die.

You should have kissed the tall girl’s neck.

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." —Karl Marx

A summer night in Lincoln, Nebraska in the early 80s. The kind of scene that can be called bucolic without a hint of irony. I was with a close friend and his wild-child wife, and the 6’1” half-Indian stage manager of the show I was working lights for (The Marriage of Figaro). The stage manager happens to be very female, the absolute queen of tall summer girls. I had vastly more experience with women then, but they were still a book I’d only skimmed. Whether the hill above the reservoir was a simple college hangout or a designated makeout spot was unclear to me.

I was sitting next to her, our flanks touching. She wanted me to kiss her, I was sure of that. The midnight breezes were playing Voi, che sapete. I wanted to kiss her. I was desperately trying to work out the logistics.

(Were my buddy and his wife kissing? I don’t remember and it didn’t matter. A married couple is a different species entirely from two singles on the make. They could have been juggling flaming batons for all I knew. It wouldn’t have been out of character.)

Anyway, I was playing the kiss over and over in my mind, trying to imagine the mechanics of the thing. There was no swing.

Normally the man will swoop down on the woman, gathering her in his arms. But she was a good two inches taller than I was (fed on that sweet Nebraska corn). Even seated as we were, she towered over me. There’s no such thing as swooping up in the playbook. If she had lain down in the grass, it might have leveled the playing field. I think I laid back on my elbows a couple of times, but she didn’t take the hint. I came away with grass-stained elbows.

Surely she was aware of the problem? A girl as tall as she was must have faced the problem before, and conquered Everest—herself being Everest. The only thing for it, as far as I could see, was for her to swoop down on me and gather me in her arms. Some men might have felt emasculated by the maneuver, but I was game.

She did not swoop.

Some of my readers will no doubt say that neither girl wanted a kiss. If they had, they would have found a way, you’ll say. I can accept that possibility. But it doesn’t change the way I felt at the time, nor the languor that approaches whenever my mind flits like a dragon-fly back to those days of tall summer girls.

The Boss knows what I’m talking about:

Well the street lights shine
Down on Blessing Avenue
Lovers they walk by
Holdin’ hands two by two

A breeze crosses the porch
Bicycle spokes spin ‘round
Jacket’s on, I’m out the door
Tonight I’m gonna burn this town down

And the girls in their summer clothes
In the cool of the evening light
The girls in their summer clothes
Pass me by

From the Springsteen video Girls in Their Summer Clothes

You’d think with my record for tall summer girls, I’d be none too fond of them. I keep approaching the unapproachable; it keeps receding into the distance. But each one I meet still fills me with the crackling hum of anticipation, anticipation that is meat and drink for the soul, the one companion that accompanies me till the end of time.

It’s a mitzvah, a benediction. I’m eternally grateful.

(Available in audio HERE on Youtube.)

Review: The Samurai's Octopus

2026-05-14T17:07:39.411-05:00

What if … Charles Dickens were not a name synonymous with Victorian London, but were transplanted instead to 18^th century Edo (Tokyo)? You might wind up with something like Jonelle Patrick’s triumphant new novel, The Samurai’s Octopus.

It’s not written in Dickens’s style of course. Patrick’s style is all her own, lucid and sharp-edged as Japanese calligraphy. But it’s Dickensian in subject matter, and in two of its central elements: the scope of character and passion, and the way each character’s fate is ruled by the dead hand of the past.

The past is centered upon one event: murder. The opening presents us with the four classic elements of the murder mystery: the murderer, the victim, the motive for which the murder committed—and the witness. We see the crime through the eyes of the witness, Takahisa Takeda, the impecunious samurai of the title. But he doesn’t know the murderer, the victim, or the motivation. He’ll spend the next sixteen years of his life trying to fill in the blanks. His fortune depends upon the answers.

The story is set in Yoshiwara, the prostitute’s quarter of Edo, only a few square blocks in area. But in Patrick’s hands it’s a self-contained world, as fully realized as Arrakis or Middle Earth, a world of pageantry and petty jealousies, intrigue and illusion, peopled by an entire society, from high to low, samurais to shipbuilders to officialdom, courtesans, fortunetellers, and the ragtag of children, the by-blows of chance encounters and forbidden loves. If you’re thinking of Fagin’s band of pickpockets, you’re on the right track.

And our Oliver Twist is Birdie, an orphan girl on the cusp of adulthood, attendant to the star courtesan of the quarter. She’s in line to become her successor. But she has blanks of her own to fill in: who are her parents? Why was she abandoned to a brothel? She’ll move heaven and earth to find the answers.

She does exactly that.

The stories of Birdie and Takeda move around one another in a dance as formal yet vigorous as a galliard at an Elizabethan court, coming ever closer till they close and intertwine. When the music stops, you’ll want a breather. But you’ll be looking forward to the next dance.

And how does the titular octopus fit in? It’s the very heart of the novel. But I’ll leave it to you to discover how. Get this book. Now.

Available on Amazon or wherever books are sold.

An audio version of this post is available HERE on Youtube.

Hive Mind

2026-05-13T12:58:40.934-05:00

I’ve been bingeing on Hercule Poirot on PBS lately.

Poirot, if anyone in the English-speaking world is unaware, is Agatha Christie’s funny little Belgian detective, the most celebrated fictional detective this side of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve read all the books and seen all the shows already, more than once. So now I suppose you could say I’m luxuriating in nostalgia. Poirot is always talking about the necessity of order and method in detection. One fact leads to another, forging a chain of causation.

Bien sur

(I don’t know whether Mrs. Christie wrote with order and method. Perhaps Poirot forced her to adopt method, or perhaps she looked to him for these qualities, which she lacked. I myself have written three Sherlock Holmes novels. I wrote them because questions arose in my mind ((Why did van Gogh cut off his ear and give it to a prostitute? If he wanted to make a real sacrifice, why not cut out an eye?)), so I chose Holmes to find the solutions I could never have discovered on my own. True story.)

As you may have glommed* onto if you’ve read a few of my posts here, there’s no order or method in the way I think or write. Jeez, I don’t even have my books organized on the shelves. And since I’ve shed books every time I’ve moved to a different city (eight, so far) I’m not even sure which books I actually own. Some books I treasure may be in the Phantom Zone. like lost children.

When I think, it’s more like working on a jigsaw puzzle, picking out the brightest, most colorful pieces, the most interesting shapes, to put together first. I’m aware of edges, but comfortable not seeing the forest for the trees until I’m lost in the heart of it.

And when I write, I’m blowing up a balloon. I’ve joked before that when I start a novel, I write the first sentence and follow it with—

The End

—and the rest is just filling out the middle part. Only it’s not really a joke.

So—in my mystery in progress, The Detectives Downstairs, there is no order and method. On purpose.

There’s detection by committee, a committee which doesn’t even have all the facts at its disposal. And has no more detection skills than you or I.

Y’see, I got the idea of making a detective story, a murder mystery, that would read like a social media argument thread, full of misapprehension, lies, fantasies, conjecture, asides, non sequiturs, and outright quarrels.

It was to be a comedy of murder and mayhem.

But as soon as I started writing, I came up against a wall—genre expectations. A murder mystery needs a solution. That’s a compact between author and reader. Inviolable. A whodunnit needs a who.

Also, I became fatally interested in my characters. They said many foolish things, but people who say foolish things are not always fools. And even fools are not one-dimensional. They are often foolish because they dream big dreams, think outsize thoughts, have inordinate fears. Even the smallest people will cast long shadows under the spotlight.

So I had to be honest and ask myself: could the group I’d assembled arrive at a solution by themselves? Would it really be possible to present it believably?

There’s a name for this, of course: hive mind. People appeal to the hive mind online every day: should I wear this sweater? Will the Cubs go all the way? Am I right to be pissed at my boyfriend/my boss/the world?

Survey says: the term hive mind has several colors of meaning, but what I want to drill down to is this definition:

[The attempt] to solve problems, make decisions, or generate knowledge more effectively than individuals alone, through either cooperation or by aggregation of diverse information, perspectives, and behaviors.

(That definition is from wikipedia, by the way, which is an example of hive mind in in action, so we have hive mind defining hive mind, which either answers my question before it’s asked, or suborns the answer.)

What’s most important for my purposes is the last part: “aggregation of diverse information, perspectives, and behaviors.” That distills it down to its essence. (These characters are not going to cooperate.)

The question I’m asking is not: Can two wrongs make a right?— but rather can twenty wrongs yield up something in the neighborhood of right? There’s another term often invoked: the wisdom of crowds. Or as one strip club on Bourbon St. in the New Orleans of my youth proudly proclaimed out front:

50 Million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.

Basically, the hive mind works as a human recommendation algorithm.

Of course, the other more pernicious side of the coin is groupthink. The tendency of a group to agree on an answer for the sake of agreement, casting logic and principle to the wind, to go along with the crowd. At its extreme, groupthink leads to cult behavior.

There’s a game called Negative Twenty Questions which illustrates the parameters of the problem, both its benefits and risks. It was devised by physicist John Wheeler as a way of understand ingquantum mechanics. I came across it in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Murch saw it as a way to explain the mechanics of film production: what either goes right or terribly wrong.

It works just like twenty questions, except—

… unbeknownst to the guesser, everyone privately picks their own object, resulting in a game where both the guesser and the object choosers are required to narrow their choice in object with each round.

When returning Joe (let’s call him) asks the standard bigger-than-a-breadbox question, if the first person says no, then the other players, who may have selected objects that are bigger, now have to look around the room for something that fits the definition. And if “Is it Hollow?” is Joe’s next question, then any of the players who chose new and unfortunately solid objects now have to search around for a new appropriate object. As Murch says, “a complex vortex of decision making is set up, a logical but unpredictable chain of ifs and thens.” Yet somehow this steady improvisation finally leads — though not always, there’s the tension — to a final answer everyone can agree with, despite the odds.

So: can the hive mind solve a murder?

I think I may have stumbled across an answer when I wrote this line:

“It slowly came to Philip that it didn’t matter who asked the question. It didn’t matter whether the question was answered satisfactorily. What mattered were the further questions spawned. The map was never a straight line. The map could only be filled in by getting lost, over and over. The group could not possibly find the answer, nor even agree upon an answer, right or wrong. But they could exhaust every possibility, lay out every path for a mapmaker to trace.”

Is Philip that mapmaker? Or someone else? Sherlock Holmes, perhaps?

One of the classic images of a sea monster on a map: a giant sea-serpent attacks a ship off the coast of Norway on Olaus Magnus’s Carta marina of 1539, this image from the 1572 edition.

And if it works in fiction, can it also work in real life? Could those interminable, annoying online disputes that waste all of our time have some hidden virtue?

A writer has to listen. Listen to every conspiracy, every lunacy, not because they’re true, but because they fill in the map, show us the undiscovered countries, the terrae incognitae, the alchemical alloys that people hunger desperately for. Call it fool’s gold, call it trump’s gold, it still glitters. Distilled down to their essence, the artist’s tools are the same as the mountebank’s: desire and fear. The only difference is whether we use them to sell illusion or expose the truth.

Exposure to misinformation and lies will help build antibodies in the form of crystallized opinion, which is argument.

But it’s not for the faint of heart.

It's a classic case of glomming: Americans seized on glaum (a term from Scots dialect that basically means “to grab”) and appropriated it as their own, changing it to glom in the process. Glom first meant “to steal” (as in the purse-snatching, robber kind of stealing), but over time that meaning got stretched to include figurative uses. Today the term is most familiar in the phrase “glom on to,” or “glom onto,” which can mean “to appropriate for one's own use,” as in “glomming on to another's idea”; “to grab hold of,” as in “glommed onto the last cookie”; “to latch on to,” as in “glom on to an opinion” or “glom onto an influential friend”; or “to become aware of,” as in “glomming onto the potential of this new technology.”

I’ll leave it to you to decide how I meant it above.

Audio version available HERE on Youtube.

Gravity and Me

2026-05-04T10:30:00.000-05:00

There are a few years in your childhood when you can positively fly. It’s a natural progression, when you think about it. We’re born nailed to the earth. Then we learn to sit up, to crawl, to stand, to run, to dance. I know this program intimately. When I had my stroke seven years ago, I had to repeat the program, every step of the way. And every night in my bed I dreamed of running.

After you learn to run, you know you can fly. You just need to learn the trick of it. Build up momentum. Flap your arms. Fly. You’re small and light. Gravity might take its eyes off you for just a second. That’s all the time you need to break free.

Or maybe you need an equalizer.

When I was in third grade, my sister’s high school put on a production of Peter Pan. She smuggled home the Peter Pan hat. Mind you, it was made of folded-up newspaper, painted green. But it had obviously been sprayed with pixie dust.

That was the edge we needed. We’d take turns mounting the porch railing with the hat on, myself, my brother, and the Burns boys. There was an oleander bush standing guard in the yard between our apartment and the neighbor’s. We figured if we could clear the oleander bush, we could officially fly.

That bush took a lot of punishment. We’d fling ourselves toward it, hoping to catch an updraft. Gravity usually grabbed us by the ankle just before we took off. None of us actually flew, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

When I was in college at Loyola, I spent a lot of time crossing the quadrangle between Marquette Hall (where the theatre was) and Bobet Hall, where the department offices were located (yes, I was a theatre kid). There were hedges, waist-high, lining the sidewalks, which were shaped as a diamond within a square. In imitation of one of my heroes, the Scarecrow of Oz (the lightest of Dorothy’s companions), I’d often make the trip hopping back and forth over the hedges (inflicting minor damage on both them and myself).

I hadn’t yet come to terms with gravity. Mass was not yet the boss of me. I knew I could fly.

Yet as we grow older, most of us seek ways to anchor ourselves to the earth. With relationships, lovers, family, with familiar objects, furniture, households, mementos, knick knacks, souvenirs, scrapbooks, kitsch, junk. Maybe we put on a few pounds, too. Adulthood is a weighty matter. People respect solid citizens. We make allowances for gravity. Excuses.

At the same time, there’s still an ambivalence toward gravity. How many of you, as you get older, have been downsizing: smaller houses, less clutter—bring on the garage sales!—even as the garage fills up with things you bought at your neighobors’ garage sales? How many have heard the siren call of KonMari to unload everything that doesn’t “spark joy?”

But what if clutter sparks joy in you?

Roger Babson, an economist and businessman, felt so offended by gravity that he founded the Gravity Research Foundation in 1948 up in New Hampshire, challenging scientists to figure out a way to shield us from its harmful effects. He had backing from heavyweights like Clarence Birdseye and Igor Sikorsky. They’d hold conferences at which attendees would sit in chairs with their feet higher than their heads in order to counterbalance gravity, The foundation still exists, though it now has a truncated mandate: they study gravity, trying to understand it. To make peace with it?

It do take some studyin’. We have to learn how to balance our desires for gravity and lightness, love and freedom. We have to weigh them in the scales. We often put our thumbs upon those scales.

Lightness and gravity are as important in literature as in science. Don Quixote fights windmills, the perfect metaphor for a man who seeks grounding but has none. Sancho, who is earthbound, tries to warn him:

“Look, your worship,” said Sancho; “what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.”

Quixote does not listen, even when vanquished by the giants magically transformed into windmills by an evil magician.

Mr. Dick, the wise fool of David Copperfield, is always trying to fly a kite—

“I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies.”

—while Jacob Marley, seven years after his death, is still held to earth by the weight of his cashboxes.

There are characters in literature who by their very nature buoy the action. Comic relief we call them. Relief from gravity, I call it. Romeo and Juliet is a comedy until the death of Mercutio, who dies with a pun on his lips:

“Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.”

Even his name is mercurial.

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being addresses the problem directly: physical desire is lightness; love weighs you down. To quote:

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Buddhahood is lightness of being, the abrogation of the physical; so are the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business, so buoyant that they can all pass customs by the outrageous tactic of imitating Maurice Chevalier. So is Bugs Bunny in High Diving Hare, where it’s Yosemite Sam that is always punished by gravity.

Just after Sam saws through the plank and he goes crashing down, while Bugs remains in mid-air, the wascally wabbit explains:

“I know this defies the law of gravity, but y’see, I never studied law.”

Absurdity is lightness. Desirelessness is pixie dust.

There’s a point in our lives at which gravity gains the upper hand. Once that happens, it becomes a battle even to stay upright. We need canes and walkers. I remember a day walking with my college room-mate and his father down the street in New Orleans. He fell straight on his face on the sidewalk, a forty-year old man. It was as if someone had taken an axe to a tree. He wasn’t a likable man, the kind of stuffed shirt you’d love to see slip on a banana peel, but still it was frightening. He wasn’t hurt, but he was mightily embarrassed. Grown-ups don’t fall. Not till they get get old.

It’s different from when you fall as a kid. It’s part of the job. I and a friend would play at stuntmen when we were little, constantly throwing ourselves down hills. Our mothers had to deal with a lot of grass stains.

Every year gravity establishes a firmer hold. It settles on our shoulders, bows our heads. When I started taking walks over a year ago, I used a cane. (My balance has been suspect since my stroke.) I don’t use the cane any more, but I carry it with me, just to show gravity the proper respect. (Besides, it was my brother’s cane, so I know it shields me from gravity’s effects.)

Our lives are a constant adjustment to, an accommodation with gravity, ever since we decided to become bipeds, to live with our feet on the ground and our heads in the sky. We neither want to get in a rut nor have our heads in the clouds. But as a consequence of our decision to bifurcate from the quadrupeds, we need to hold our heads high and place our feet firmly on the path.

It’s a balancing act.

An audio version of this post is available HERE on Youtube.

Rex Stout on character

2026-04-18T16:01:00.001-05:00

Rex Stout was prolific--he claimed it took between 35 and 41 days to write a novel, as long as he wasn't drinking. He wrote 33 novels and I won't get into the number of stories. His best-known as the creator of Nero Wolfe--the genius detective with the too too solid flesh.

"A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat."

I won't pretend to have read more than about a dozen of his books so far, but these are three of my favorites so far:

The Silent Speaker

The Golden Spiders

Not Quite Dead Enough

Here's a bonus quote:

"There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living cook books and detective stories."

Not to Diss Gruntle

2026-04-15T14:28:00.001-05:00

Gruntled to the dis-

Would you like to be gruntled? On the face of it, probably not. It doesn't sound like much fun.

But we know for sure that no one likes to be disgruntled.

So what's our option?

It turns out, "gruntle" is a very old English word (1682) that means to grumble or complain. But "disgruntled," rather than the opposite, means even more gruntled, a real complainy-face, and probably comes from an Old English word meaning "grunt.".

Because the English language has no actual rules.

"Gruntled" went out of style for a few centuries, till it was revived by some nameless writer (according to Merriam-Webster) back in the Twenties to mean, humorously, very pleased indeed.

(I'm betting it was Damon Runyon or Ogden Nash, although I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of Dorothy Parker.)

Our gruntled suspects

Anyway, supposedly the word spread like wildfire and is now used to mean "pleased", even without tongue planted in cheek.

I've never heard or seen it used at all, but I guess I'll give Merriam-Webster the benefit of the doubt.

(No, I won't.)

After further research, the OED's first citation is this, from 1938:

"He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."

P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of Woosters

Since I've read the novel in question (and thoroughly enjoyed it), I guess I have seen it used.

As to whether Wodehouse was the originator or copped it from one of my three suspects, OED is silent. I shall now follow their example.

I hope you're gruntled with this report.

(Find this on Youtube HERE.)

The Cookie or the Ciggie?

2026-04-11T12:55:00.001-05:00

Marcel Proust ate a cookie one day which transported him back to his childhood and affected him so profoundly that he was compelled to write a seven-volume semi-autobiographical novel about it.

Then he died.

The lesson for writers is clear: lay off the sweets.

Marcel Proust

That’s my take on it, anyway. These are his actual words:

She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.

This is why I so enjoy going down the rabbit hole of research.

Y’see, in my work in progress, one of my characters, Lawrence, the third footman at Auldslea Hall—a consequential character in spite of his job title— started out as a Welshman with a lilting voice, in his mid-20s.

A problem came up. I had set my story in Sussex, England, in the year 1917.
England was smack dab in the middle of World War 1. Every able-bodied man between 18 and 41 was being drafted. So why wasn’t Lawrence off in the trenches fighting?

(Or why didn’t I just change my story to before or after the war? Because, in spite of the impression given by Downtown Abbey, great country houses didn’t have just a dozen or so servants—more like fifty. Since most of the action takes place with the servants all gathered in their dining hall, I had sent a good number of them off to war. I had to raise or lower the ages of several other male characters, as well.)

I chose asthma as his get-out-of-war free card. That was one of the few ailments that would keep him out of the war and in my story.
So much for the lilt. But I could work with the shortness of breath, wheezing and coughing of an asthmatic. He’s an excitable boy, prone to conspiracy theories. His thoughts tend to come out in a rush anyway.

But then there was another consideration: how did people treat asthma in 1917, well before modern inhalers?
I researched, and found a surprising answer: CIGARETTES.

Yes, cigarettes. Marcel Proust used them for his asthma, as a matter of fact. From a letter to his mother (August, 1901):
“Yesterday after I wrote to you I had an attack of asthma and incessant running at the nose [hayfever], which obliged me to walk all doubled up and light anti-asthma cigarettes at every tobacconist’s I passed, etc. And what’s worse, I haven’t been able to go to bed till midnight, after endless fumigations, and it’s three or four hours after a real summer attack, an unheard of thing for me.”

Now, these were not nicotine delivery devices. They were medicine delivery devices. of a sort, mainly stramonium cigarettes. Datura stramonium (also known as jimsonweed), a type of flower akin to deadly nightshade, has anti-spasmodic properties and relaxes the air passages.

Jimsonweed, also called “devil’s trumpet”

Mark Jackson, Professor of the History of Medicine, University of Exeter, has this to say about Proust’s struggles:

“Over the years, he had been prescribed opium, caffeine, iodine, and morphine (which had once been injected by his father, Dr Adrien Proust), his nose had been cauterized numerous times, he had adopted a milk diet, and he had occasionally attempted to relieve both his asthma and his hay fever by visiting health resorts, such as Evian-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Geneva.”

The ciggies were apparently his preferred method of self-medication.

One brand which first came on the market in the 1880’s (and remained there until the 1950s) was Page’s Inhaler Cigarettes:

“Users were instructed to ‘exhale the lungs of air, then after taking a mouthful of smoke, inhale the air into the lungs through the mouth allowing the smoke to go down with the air filling the lungs.’
Users were warned to “discontinue use if rapid pulse or blurring of vision appears.” The label also warns that the inhalers are ‘not to be taken by elderly people except on competent advice.’”

So I thought I’d show him smoking Page’s, but then I learned that datura was often cultivated in English gardens expressly for the treatment of asthma.
This clued me in that I should make the relationship between the footman Lawrence and the head gardener Lessie stronger. The former depends upon the latter for his drugs, after all.
Of course, there were side effects. Datura stramonium is a narcotic, among whose possible side effects are delirium and hallucination. (Don’t try this at home.)

Perfect for a young man with a tenuous grasp on reality. I now had all the grounding I needed to shape the character. I had spent a couple of hours at it—nothing compared to the days I spent trying to reconstruct Dr. Jekyll’s Hyde formula for my first book, The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle.
But I am left wondering: was that little madeleine cookie really responsible for Remembrance of Things Past, or was it the jimsonweed cigarette?

I’d avoid both, just in case.

Memory is Iago

2026-04-10T10:27:00.002-05:00

“I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.”—Othello

I’ve been feeling my bones lately. No, not as in “I can feel my achy old bones,” but literally, beneath the skin. It’s partly because I’ve lost a great deal of weight this past year, due to the good offices of GLP-1 and long daily walks. (It’s also because, as we age, our skin loses collagen, literally becomes thinner. Yes, old folks really are “thin-skinned.” Don’t mess with us.)

And it feels … strange. I don’t remember my bones being right beneath the skin, in such intimate contact. Specifically, I’ve been feeling my rib cage. I’ve come to think of it as a cage—not metaphorically, but literally. It’s a cage that holds the heart and lungs not only for protection, but as a prison, the beating and the breath. Think about that for a minute. Your heart is actually in a cage, like a wild animal, pacing back and forth, unable to roam free. Think of the mighty breaths we could take if our lungs were not knocking against the breastbone! Metaphor is destiny.

What about the mind?

I’ve never bought into the ghost in the machine theory. The mind is not separate from the body, like an air traffic controller directing traffic from the tower. Duality is a myth meant for little kids. Every part of the body is essential. I am my body.

The brain doesn’t sit on a throne, signing executive orders. It goes out to visit every cell in the body through its neural network, like the caliph Harun al-Rashid in The Thousaand and One Nights, going out among his people under cover of the night.

Or, more aptly, the body is a democracy.

Every part of the body is in communication with every other part through the exercise of bioelectricity, electrical potentials and currents generated by every living cell. The brain only makes these messages conscious, clothing them in words. When Walt Whitman sang the body electric, he knew what he was talking about.

As Michael Pollan puts it in A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, “the brain exists to keep the body alive.” It’s servant, not king. Trust your gut. Follow your heart. Vote with your feet. These aren’t just sayings. They’re directions.

The brain is literally reformed, rewired with every experience. You’ve got a contractor working in your head who never finishes the job.

And yet the brain is caged, moreso even than the heart and lungs. The brain floats in cerebrospinal fluid, completely isolated within the skull, armed not with perceptors, but interpreters. It translates sound vibrations, odor molecules, light waves, pressure points, and temperature. We don’t see color, we see different wavelengths of light bouncing off of objects. And our eyes cannot see, our ears cannot hear, we can’t smell all the immense range of stimuli the world greets us with every second of our lives. Our senses act as filters, or transformers, stepping down the voltage to avoid the massive overload of experience which would fry our brains like an omelette. Aldous Huxley makes this clear in The Doors of Perception:

“Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”

What stands between us and the wilderness of the world? Who is the governor of our invention?

Memory.

Memory is not simply a data storage and retrieval process. Memory is the story we create about ourselves. It wishes us into existence, grants us selfhood, distorts, elaborates, appends, creates collages. Memory is the editor-in-chief of existence, which molds experience into a coherent story.

Once bitten, twice shy. Why not just once shy? Because memory enlarges or shrinks or twists experience, knots it into a pretzel, assigning meaning according to the pain or pleasure invoked. Memory is a jigsaw puzzle, fitting the pieces of our perceptions into a pretty picture with straight edges.

Actually there are about 86 billion neurons in the brain

.Memory is the story we tell ourselves. It’s constantly revising, updating, but we’re always the main character, the hero of the story. When we act unheroically, memory tends to edit heavily. Memory does not write for a sophisticated reader. It falls back on well-shopped, dependable tropes: heroes, villains, love interests, sidekicks, hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate, happy endings or tragic downfalls.

Moonlight and love songs, never out of date

But let’s face it: our lives are not stories. There’s no rising action, building toward a crescendo: there’s only the steady hum of life, the quotidian regime. Yet memory would have us think so, because story is how how organize our lives, give meaning to them.

Memory is Iago, constantly betraying lived experience. It has its own agenda: to protect story. This is why the term “eyewitness account” is a misnomer. According to the Innocence Project in 2010, eyewitness misidentification played a significant role in over 75% of the more than 230 exonerations that had occurred to date based on DNA evidence.

Interestingly, UC San Diego psychologist John Wixted fights against conventional wisdom. He says that the first eyewitness account can be trusted. He believes the problem is not memory, but contaminated memory. Here’s his take:

“The key thing for testing a witness’s memory correctly is to test it only once for a given suspect, because even that first test changes the witness’s memory for that person.”

This is less than convincing, at least to me. I’m no psychologist, but I am a novelist, and I would argue that memory is contaminated as soon as it’s put into the straitjacket of words.

Why? Because as soon as we are called upon to give an account, we enter memory’s domain, where it mills the event into story, with beginning, middle and end, to make sense of the event to ourselves and others. Plus, all the other stories in our memory help to shape that story, to anthologize it, to slot it into a consistent theme or rubric. Stories within stories within the story of our lives. It has to all cohere.

How can we get out of the cages? I don’t have answers, but I do have suggestions (although no five-point plan, sorry). We can breathe deeper, run faster, expanding the limits of our hearts and lungs.

We can throw out the old stories, the stock answers. Expose yourselves to new stories through new books, new travel, new people. Question everything, especially our memories, which means questioning ourselves. Make it a reflex. We can rewire our brains. We can reshuffle the Rubik’s cube that is the cerebral cortex. We can live closer to the truth.

I feel it in my bones.

(Audio version available here on Youtube.)

The Case of the Editor's Error

2026-03-22T16:09:23.777-05:00

So I should mention that I have a new (self-published) short story available now on Amazon as an ebook.

Ta da!

"Dr. Watson discovers a problem in The Final Problem, and unveils the real murderer of Sherlock Holmes."

It's 99¢, which is highway robbery for a 19-page story, but I'm still test-driving KDP and they wouldn't allow me to price it any cheaper.

Eventually I'll probably be able to price it at a nickel-ninety-five, but for now, if you'd like to fill my coffers and read a fun little story that pits Dr. Watson against Arthur Conan Doyle, now's your chance.

Armistice Day

2026-03-16T10:46:00.000-05:00

I want to let you in on a gold-plated investment. And you don't have to pay a dime. It's my own private holiday, scheduled for March 17. That's right, tomorrow. No, not St. Paddy's Day, though I've got nothing against the wearin' of the green.

It's Armistice Day.

It's got nothing to do with the war in Iran, or any war, except my personal wars, your personal wars.

It's the day I forgive anyone any wrong they''ve done me in the past year. I lay down my sword and shield. I shed the weight of all those grudges.
Does this mean forgive and forget? No. To forget can be dangerous. You can let yourself in for further wrongs, further hurts.
But it does mean giving up playing those hurts over and over in your mind, indulging in revenge fantasies, crossing the street when you see them coming toward you.
It means shirking the work. Doesn’t that sound nice?
And you'll find it harder to form those grudges in the first place, knowing they've got an expiration date.

And here's a bonus: while you're forgiving that person who's hurt you, or forgiving the world that's wounded you, you can forgive yourself, too. Give yourself a break. Don't forget what you've done to hurt other people, you have to learn from your wrongs, so you don’t repeat them. But forgive. It doesn't help to beat yourself up.

Set down all that baggage. Straighten your back and move on down the road with your load lightened.
Armistice Day. Yeah, it's a thing.

Character as algorithm

2026-03-09T21:23:00.000-05:00

If you’re a writer, you’re familiar with this phenomenon: a character takes on a life of their own, dictating to you what they will and won’t say, will and won’t do. What the hell, you say. I brought you into this novel world, and I can take you out of it.

Well, yes—but that’s your only choice if a character gets uppity. Kill off the character, or delete them. You cannot discipline them.

Why is that? Why can’t you do whatever you want with a character?

Because a character is essentially a set of rules you’ve created. An algorithm, to use a despised word. A series of nested if…then statements that guide the character’s actions.

Take my old friend Sherlock Holmes, for instance. Here is rule number one of the Holmesian canon: Holmes solves puzzles.

Corollary: he solves them with his mind, not his fists.

(This is indeed the wall between Holmes and hard-boiled detectives like Philip Marlowe, whose number one directive as outlined by his creator, Raymond Chandler is “when in doubt, have somebody pull a gun.”)

This is not to say that Holmes never gets physical, never carries a gun. We all know that he’s lethal at single stick and baritsu. But in the canon, fisticuffs rarely come into play. It’s significant that the only person killed at Holmes’s hands is Moriarty.

So when we see a pastiche like Guy Ritchie’s Young Sherlock series, the question is “Yes, it may be entertaining, but is it Holmes?”

And we judge it not by whether Sherlock sprouts a whole family or adopts James Moriarty as his (far more charismatic) sidekick, but “is this a story about solving puzzles with his mind or his fists?” And since Guy Ritchie is a master at action scenes but woefully deficient at understatement, most Holmes purists are inclined to give this series a pass.

I’ll give you another, more personal example. I’m working on a novel that might be called a locked room mystery in reverse. It concerns a group of servants in an English country manor trying to solve a series of murders that are taking place upstairs. But the servant’s are confined to their own dining hall downstairs—which is only one of the obstacles they face.

Since the action is largely confined to one room (in one night), I felt the need to add a dash of excitement somewhere by having a fight break out between two of the characters. I didn’t know exactly when, but it would be after their animosity had simmered and heated to a boiling point.

So I gave a stab at writing it. And: couldn’t do it. The characters wouldn’t allow it. They would not fight, not physically.

Why?

I had established early on that these were English manor house servants: bland, self-effacing, efficient, striving to be invisible. Think Stevens in The Remains of the Day. There simply was no way on earth that these two would lower themselves to a physical altercation, especially in front of their fellow servants who operated by the same algorithm.

So if I wanted to spice things up for the reader, I was going to have to take an alternate route. I was going to have pick the lock, to travel inside my character’s heads:

Oh, in Charles’s imagination it played out very differently. Philip had tried to lay hands on him. Charles had tossed him off, giving him a single slap across the face for good measure. He hadn’t put all his strength into it, but the mark would burn for days. But Philip, in a fit of madness, had come at him again. He had to be taught a lesson. Charles had smashed his stupid face with his fists—right, left, left right. Perhaps he had lost his self-control, just a bit. That’s what happened when the red mist came over his eyes. By the time had finished, Philip’s face was like a slab of raw meat. That was an exercise in discipline that he had no choice but to effect.

He was exhausted just thinking about it.

As for Philip? He was more saturnine than sanguinary. His blood was up, yes, but he wasn’t one to indulge in romantic fantasy. His pulse was singing, his breath shallow, but his mind was a clear-running stream. He would not be baited. For a moment, he conjured a world without Charles, without any Charleses, and he found it good.

Every character is a series of nested choices which define them. Not your choices, their choices. Sure as searing a steak seals in the juices, a character is sealed by the way they react to outside pressure. If you follow the algorithm, the character will be tasty when you slice into them.

(Audio version available HERE on Youtube.)

Tom Stoppard on words

2026-02-23T21:47:00.000-06:00

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”

― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

The fiction of despair

2026-02-10T09:30:00.009-06:00

No, this is not about Kafka … except in that some days a lot of Americans are feeling like a giant cockroach when they wake up in the morning. But let’s not get off track right from the start. It’s about another kind of fiction born from despair … or at least desperation.

Let’s start again. I’ve been peeved lately at some of my friends on Facebook for posting “news items” which are obviously thunderingly false. No kidding, right? False stories on the internet? Breaking news: water is wet.

Let me back up yet again. Confession time: politically (and culturally) I’m a leftie. I mean, way left. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool bleeding heart snowflake woke antifa democratic socialist. If you’re Maga, you may want to leave the room. (Or maybe not. Y’see, I’ve had a semi-epiphany about the Maga movement which might interest you. I’ll get to that later.) So as I’ve said, I’ve been, well, disappointed lately, at my leftie friends (which are about 99% of my friends).

It started with the news that Stephen Colbert and Rachel Maddow and Jimmy Kimmel were teaming up for a talk/news show, or an entire channel, one that would be a mighty bulwark against the shadow of Trump reaching forth its hand from Mordor.

“After years of frustration with network pressures and watered-down stories, the trio is reshaping how news is delivered. Maddow’s sharp analysis, Colbert’s fearless satire, and Kimmel’s late-night humor create a dynamic fusion aimed at shaking the media world to its core.”

Or maybe it was Jon Stewart and AOC teaming up, or Paul McCartney and Dan Rather and Bonnie Raitt. The lineup was fluid as Marvel’s Avengers, but they were all left-wing heroes, coming to the rescue. It was all over Facebook. All untrue. All AI-generated slop. Colbert is not teaming up with Rachel and Jimmy. Taylor Swift and Pope Leo are not on board. Stephen King is staying home. Oprah has no comment.

That trend has finally died down, only to be replaced by a new narrative: St. George and the dragon. In our story, a hero of the left (Colbert again, or Tiger Woods, or Dolly Parton or Prince William, et al.) would battle, sometimes face-to-face, but always on tv or at a public event (often studded with billionaire oligarchs), a villain from the right (Karoline Leavitt, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, even Trump himself). The hero never engages in histrionics, but calmly and quietly proceeds to carve the villain a new anus.

The crowd always listens in a hush, mesmerized or ashamed. And then afterwards, the internet always erupts at the news. The hero often promises either to raise, or contribute, or sue the villain for vast sums of money to right some egregious wrong.

Here’s a snippet of a sample, a supposed interview between Rachel Maddow and Pam Bondi, on the subject of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir on Jeffrey Epstein:

“If the truth scares you that much… then you are exactly the reason I have to stand up. I will raise fifty million dollars to open every file and fight for justice for Virginia.” “The moment those words left her mouth, the entire NBC studio fell silent. Rachel Maddow — known for her cold clarity and refusal to let emotion lead — appeared in a version of herself the audience had never witnessed. After finishing Virginia Giuffre’s explosive memoir, she looked straight into the camera, eyes blazing, and delivered a direct strike that sent the internet into chaos.”

“Within seconds, the online world erupted. Powerful figures tied to the scandal slipped into a suspicious silence, as if they knew the storm had only just begun. For the first time, Maddow wasn’t just reporting — she was confronting the darkness. In a tense 14-minute segment, Maddow described the memoir as “the indictment America chose to ignore.”

In another, every single Daily Show host lines up against the hapless Bondi:

“Last night, The Daily Show was no longer a comedy show. It turned into a live courtroom on television. Jon Stewart slammed a thick stack of files onto the desk, the 8 most powerful hosts of the show stood behind him, and the entire studio fell into silence. And they all said, in unison, the sentence that blew up social media: “If you yourself have never opened that book… then don’t fool yourself into thinking you have the courage to speak about the truth.”

In yet another, the improbable duo of Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger tag-team against Bondi:

“SHOCKING NEWS: Two legends, Bob Dylan & Mick Jagger, have stunned the nation by publicly criticizing Pam Bondi — and then shocking everyone again with their announcement of a one-night-only comeback concert to raise funds. America was left frozen when Bob Dylan spoke with quiet intensity: “Turning your back on a woman seeking the truth isn’t silence — it’s indifference.” Moments later, Mick Jagger appeared unexpectedly and continued: “No one can call that neutrality. It’s a lack of compassion.” The entire room went silent before erupting into thunderous applause. Then came the second shockwave: Bob Dylan: “I will return to the stage. Just one night.” Mick Jagger: “And I’ll join him.” Both: “We will raise 50 million dollars to defend truth and protect the vulnerable.”

You get the picture. Here’s an odd one: Neil Diamond sues Pete Hegseth:

“Neil Diamond Files $60 Million Lawsuit Against Pete Hegseth and Network Following Explosive On-Air Showdown. What began as a routine interview about songwriting, legacy, and resilience quickly erupted into chaos when Pete Hegseth turned the discussion hostile, publicly criticizing Neil Diamond’s continued performances and accusing him of being a “retired singer trying to stay relevant by milking his past hits.”

(What tv show would ever feature Neil Diamond and Pete Hegseth conversing?)

“Diamond, however, remained calm and composed, his trademark poise shining through. He spoke gently but firmly, defending his decades-long career, his commitment to his fans, and the deeper meaning behind his music — songs that have comforted and united generations. His words, steady and full of quiet conviction, left the studio in stunned silence, cutting through the tension like a lyric from Sweet Caroline sung straight from the heart. Now, the situation has escalated dramatically. Neil Diamond has filed a $60 million lawsuit against Hegseth and the network, citing defamation and emotional distress over what many viewers have described as “one of the most unprofessional live broadcast outbursts in recent memory.”

In another, Jagger (Or, in some versions, Phil Collins or Mickey Dolenz) goes head to head with Trump over immigration:

“You’re tearin’ families apart like a damn coward in a red tie, son.” The studio froze for 17 seconds of pure, stunned silence. The network had billed it as “A Conversation on the Border with President Trump and special guest Mick Jagger.” They expected a few sharp suits, maybe a witty quip, perhaps a little “Satisfaction” charm. They got the wrath of the Rolling Stones’ frontman instead.”

This is just a taste. When I see them, I normally let the poster know they’ve been fooled by AI. Sometimes they thank me. Sometimes they ignore me. Sometimes they lash out at me, daring me to prove it to them. Their skepticism is a bit late.

Why then do I bother? And why am I bothering to bring this to your attention, faithful reader? Because I keep asking myself why these obvious manufactures keep getting shared by intelligent people. People who don’t ordinarily take wooden nickels.

For years, I held it as truth that only the right wing indulged in fantasies like these, that the left prized facts. That they could smell a fake, at least well enough to perform a quick fact check. Naive of me, you’ll say. Maybe. But this epidemic of untruths is recent. Why have my leftie friends turned to these myths just lately? Why now?

Here’s the answer I came up with: desperation. I don’t need to tell you that there are a lot of alarming events occurring in our country and our world today—which the left blames squarely on Donald Trump and his minions (your own mileage may vary). And they don’t know what to do about them. They’ve voted, they’ve petitioned their Congresspeople, they’ve taken to the streets protesting. It doesn’t seem to move the needle at all, or at least not enough. They think our democracy, and everything they’ve worked for, is unraveling. They’re desperate, though not desperate enough to engage in violence, not yet. Their government, all three branches, seems to have been co-opted by oligarchs. Where can they turn? They need a hero. Strike that: they need heroes.

So when they happen upon these tales of right beating might, they seize on them. A measure of hope is restored. So much so that they refuse the question the legitimacy of the tales. They let down the guardrails of skepticism. They turn a blind eye, let themselves be suckered. Just as the right has done for years. Which leads to the inevitable question: why does the right accept these fantasies? And the inevitable answer: desperation. The right just got desperate first.

It’s perhaps a different kind of desperation. A desperation best exemplified by the Appalachia of both JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. The reality described in both both the memoir and the novel is the same, though the reasons ascribed are vastly different. They portray an America mired in economic depression, social disintegration, and drug dependency. Appalachia writ large, due to NAFTA and globalization.

The right needed heroes. In their desperation they chose men like reality star Donald Trump, broadcaster Tucker Carlson, and political organizer Charlie Kirk. In case you don’t believe the right is just as susceptible when it comes to these fevered fantasies, here’s one for you:

AOC BULLIES A TRUMP ON SENATE FLOOR – THEN KENNEDY STEPS IN AND MAKES HER FACE TURN GHOST-WHITE IN 35 SECONDS FLAT …...which goes on to depict AOC bullying young Prince Barron on the senate floor, until folksy Louisiana senator Kennedy steps in and de-fangs her, telling home truths, sending her crying from the chamber. It ends with:

Try picking on someone who can fight back next time.” Thirty-five seconds of pure, marble-cracking silence. AOC’s face turned ghost-white—mouth open, no sound. Her manifesto slipped to the floor. Schumer’s gavel froze mid-air. Barron just nodded—quiet respect. Kennedy closed the red folder. It hit the desk like a tombstone. “The adults are talking now, darlin’. Class dismissed.”

The right has long had a term for this: “owning the libs.” Now the left dreams of owning the ‘pubs. The fictions of the extreme right, Q-Anon, were darker. Pizzagate was the old blood libel, reformulated to envision an enemy of unspeakable evil, the ancient scapegoat reimagined as the first female major party candidate for president, Hilary Clinton.

Raised up against her were an unlikely duo of heroes, the television hero Trump, and the once and future king, John-John Kennedy, who somehow had not died, but was merely waiting in the wings. It ‘s in the wild concoction of this fantasy that we can measure the desperation of its adherents.

These aren’t just comforting fantasies, they’re runaway dangerous. Which means the right and the left are both desperate in varying degrees. A nation full of desperate people is not a good look. It’s apt to crumble because it’s got no foundation in reality.

So stay sharp. Question everything you read or see. Be aware of your own tendencies toward confirmation bias. Don’t be taken in by comforting fantasies. The real world needs you.

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

2026-01-20T10:25:00.000-06:00

Good news!

As I've mentioned before I'm a member of the scion society Crew of the Barque Lone Star, and a contributor to their 2024 collection of pastiches, Mr. Holmes's Neighborhood, which has been available at Barnes&Noble ...

... and is now available on the Crew's website, in a selection of digital formats, for the very reasonable price of FREE. Which is a deal not to be missed.

Especially if you'd like to read my latest Holmesian effort, titled The Sherlock Holmes Appreciation Society, the tale of the first ever Sherlock Holmes fan club, founded by none other than Colonel Sebastian Moran, and headquartered directly across the street from 221B Baker.

Here's a taste:

My dear Inspector Lestrade,

You will not know me, though I feel as if I know you from my friend Dr.

Watson’s stories in The Strand. My name is…well, perhaps it would be wiser to

leave my name out of the affair. Think of me as Mr. Anonymous, although I

suppose you could hunt down my identity if you and it necessary, since for you to

understand my story at all, I must provide you with my address, or rather my

former address—Camden House, London. Which I’m sure you’ll recognize as the

address opposite 221B Baker St.—the establishment of the consulting detective,

Sherlock Holmes. Which, I assume, is why it was chosen as headquarters for the

Sherlock Holmes Appreciation Society.

I have vital information for you. Sherlock Holmes has been murdered. I realize

that seems an impossible statement. But—

This is no good. I’ll have to go back, back to the very beginning. If I don’t

explain fully and in order, you’ll think me mad. I am not a native Londoner. I’m a

Hampshire man, son of a country squire. But the birthright belonged to my elder

brother, so it was the army for me. I joined the Royal Artillery, was commissioned a second lieutenant, and in 1879 I found myself in Afghanistan taking part in the

Battle of Charasiab. On 6 October we were advancing on Kabul when we engaged

a force of Afghan Regulars. It was my baptism by fire...

Plus there's a plethora (say that five times fast) of delicious stories by the other stalwart sailors who comprise the Crew. Dip in!

John Crowley on books

2026-01-04T23:15:00.000-06:00

“Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.”
--John Crowley

Book Review: Red Snow in Winter

2025-12-11T18:34:00.002-06:00

I’m going to set aside my own giant ego today to shine the light on another writer more than worthy of your attention: Max Eastern.

Max and his wife Nancy Bilyeau are both historical novelists (and friends of mine) in New York. The exciting news is that they’ve started their own publishing company, Admiral Road, and the even more exciting news is that they launch their first novel today, Red Snow in Winter. This means you’re in at the beginning. (The beginning is always the finest place to be, because you hold every strand of possibility in your hand, before the Fates start to prune them.)

And yet more exciting is that I got to read it early, and can recommend it to you with bells on.

Max is a lawyer who’s written about history for several magazines, with subjects ranging from Ulysses Grant and Benedict Arnold to Attila the Hun. But the ace up his sleeve for this World War II spy thriller is that his dad was actually an intelligence officer in the war, and passed along his stories. So, although the book is fiction, it has the ring of authenticity.

Without further ado, my review:

Julius Orlinsky thought his war was over, stuck behind a desk at the Pentagon, near the end of of World War II and on the cusp of the Cold War. He’s dead wrong. On his way home from a party, someone takes a shot at him, and suddenly he’s an intelligence man in the dark—and on the run, but whether it’s from Nazis, Reds, Uncle Sam, or a secret society that holds the secrets of all three, he can’t tell, and he’s running out of time to put the pieces of the puzzle together. His war is far from over.

D.C. is a small town getting smaller every moment. Every shadow holds a threat or revelation, but the wartime past is a vast world of lies, half-truths, and misunderstandings in every shade. That’s the world he’ll be forced to revisit if he’s going to survive.

Max Eastern attacks his story with dry aplomb and a stripped-down journalistic surety, yet it’s got more switchbacks than San Francisco’s Lombard Street, and every curve is taken with his foot on the gas. There’s a certain Hitchcockian lunacy to all the twists and turns in this one. It’ll keep you guessing till the last page.

D.C. had to grow up fast during the war years

But don’t take it from me, take it from these fine folks:

“This is a fast-moving, page-turning espionage thriller set just before the end of the war. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to be kept up at night!”

--Deborah Swift, author of The Shadow Network

“Red Snow is a well-paced thriller capturing the paranoia and moral complexity of WWII’s twilight hours. This is spy fiction that respects its readers’ intelligence, offering a nuanced exploration of loyalty, betrayal, and a little romance.”

--Emilya Naymark, author of ‘Behind the Lie’

“I found a great new-to-me author in Max Eastern. I love how he brought his characters to life and made the situations in this novel seem as though they were happening in front of me.”
— Terrie Farley Moran, national bestselling co-author of the Jessica Fletcher ‘Murder She Wrote’ mystery series.

Trust no one

This is one is for lovers of historical novels, thrillers, spy tales, and, yes, romance. It covers all the bases and stuffs all the stockings. You can find it here.

(Audio version of this post available HERE on Youtube.)

You’re still here? Go buy the book.

Don't Have a Cow

2025-11-18T14:28:00.000-06:00

How do we define story?

Some people (too many people) define a story as anything with a beginning, middle, and end. Therefore I declare this cow is a story.

Butchery for Dummies

Maybe that definition is a wee bit simplistic. After all, any phenomenon that is neither a single point nor infinite, that has terminal duration in space or time, can be divided into beginning, middle and end. So you when you’ve said that achingly obvious truism, you’ve said nothing.

Another hoary chestnut is that all art is self-expression. But this is small potatoes for an artist’s goal. A month-old baby can express itself perfectly well in order to have all its needs supplied, both material and emotional. As Teddy, the preternaturally enlightened little boy in Salinger’s eponymous story, says:

“Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”

He goes on to illustrate how emotions are unnecessary, even in poetry:

“‘Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,’ “ Teddy said suddenly. “’Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve….Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff.”’

Art is not about feeling; it’s about seeing. Specifically, it’s about allowing the viewer to see the world through the artist’s eyes, from the artist’s vantage point.

So how to define story?

Let’s take a page from Aristotle’s Poetics, his deconstruction of tragedy. I’m going to redefine, maybe enlarge on some of his key terms, while still trying to stay faithful to their essence.

All tragedy (and I would argue, all art) can be divided into three movements:

cognition, reversal, and recognition.

Or it can even be reduced to two: tension (engendered by reversal) and resolution (due to recognition).

This is what art decants to: how far can you stretch a rubber band? Will it snap, retain its original form, or take a new permanent shape? Tension arises not only from the act of stretching itself, but from the uncertainty of the outcome.

If you have a nodding acquaintance with the Poetics, you’re familiar with the terms reversal and recognition. And you’ll know that I slipped the first movement, cognition, into the mix myself. I think Aristotle neglects to mention it because he takes it for granted. I don’t. What do I mean?

Imagine the curtain coming up on Act One, to reveal the stage setting. The audience applauds. There are as yet no actors on stage, no movement. This is the static moment, the moment a priori, the settling in. This is cognition in its original meaning of seeing, orientation. It’s the audience’s moment.

If it’s Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, there’s the thrill of anticipation. We’ve seen murder mysteries before, and enjoyed them. If it’s an exhibition of Monet’s Haystacks, we bring our platonic ideal of what a haystack looks like. If it’s Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, we carry in our minds every rhapsody we’ve ever heard, or perhaps we’ve never heard a rhapsody of any kind, and begin with an amorphous amalgam of every piece of music we’ve ever heard. The unengaged audience, not the artist, is always the starting point.

But then the artist steps into the picture, and executes the reversal: they invite the audience into the unfamiliar, the unknown, the chaotic. They cause us to question our assumptions. Whether it’s a change of key in music, the abandonment of realism in painting, or the first-act twist in drama, it’s the dissolving of safeguards, it’s Gilbert and Sullivan’s short sharp shock, or Vonnegut’s boku maru, Dorothy’s sudden disorientation on landing in Oz. It is the artist’s duty to disturb the audience.

Houston, we have a problem

Épater la bourgeoisie became a rallying cry for the French decadent poets in the 19th century: shock the middle class. For “middle class” read “the comfortable. Discomfort the comfortable.

Sometimes that process is virtually instantaneous, as in the viewing of a picture (though the more time spent viewing, the deeper the discovery). In music, or in story, the process is circumscribed by time, and by structure, whether in the form of a sonnet, a short story, or a symphony.

But the tension must be released in recognition. Re-cognition: re-seeing, a re-shuffling of the cards, with a new knowledge, a new, unimagined viewpoint:

Through the artist’s eyes.

This is an extraordinary transformation, an out-of-body experience that occurs every day through the medium of art. This is the artist-magician’s greatest trick: not simply capturing the object at hand, not simply assigning and communicating its meaning, but seizing the perceptions of the audience. This is the immense power of story. It’s invasive, disruptive, yet welcomed by the audience. Expected. This is where artist and audience mind-meld. It’s a dangerous act of symbiosis. It’s exciting.

So stick these words from Impressionist Edgar Degas on the side of your desktop (does anyone still own a desktop?):

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

Dancer Adjusting Her Slipper, Edgar Degas

All art is a collaboration, a conspiracy between artist and audience. Storytellers sacrifice part of themselves, their privacy, their thoughts, their soul to listeners as surely as Odin sacrificed his eye at Mimir’s well for a draught of wisdom. And we receive a part of every listener’s wisdom. A fair exchange, wouldn’t you say?

Stephen Millhauser on writing

2025-11-17T16:10:00.000-06:00

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams. –Steven Millhauser

Nothing to know...

2025-10-11T23:16:00.000-05:00

According to Elmore Leonard and Scott Frank, by way of Bo Catlett, Delroy Londo, at least.

Historical fiction or conspiracy theory?

2025-10-04T14:06:00.000-05:00

Vincent van Gogh did not commit suicide. He was murdered.

And I can prove it.
How? By fudging the facts. Creating doubt. Promulgating  conspiracy theories.
Historical fiction writers do it every day.
Let’s face it, we’re deep in conspiracy theories these days, and more and more people are latching on to conspiracies to explain the world around them. Conspiracy theories are a growth industry. Unless the market is being manipulated by the Russians, or lizard people, which would explain a lt.
A good conspiracy theory does explain a lot, the more phenomena the better, no matter how disparate they may be.  5G causes Covid is good; 5G causes Covid and chemtrails and weight gain is even better. It’s more complete and tidy than reality, which has a lot of ragged edges. Truth is always stranger than fiction.
When I was growing up, there was just one conspiracy theory, the mother of them all, the Kennedy assassination theory. It had it all: the Mafia, the CIA, Cuba, and LBJ. Then came the faked moonshot theory. Then it snowballed, so nowadays we’re wondering what’s going on in the basement of our favorite pizza parlors. As faith in our institutions, the state, the church, the school, the military has waned, conspiracy theories have rushed in to fill the vacuum.
But how do these even get started? I’ll tell you. At least I’ll tell you my theory, and it’s a pretty good one, because I’m a professional conspiracy theorist. I write historical fiction.
Now don’t get your hopes up. I can’t explain the really loony theories. Those are just loony. But a lot of theories are built around a kernel of truth. The truth is the bait. What’s needed is a selective eye. Science takes a set of facts and tries to build a theory around it. Conspiracy theorists start with the theory and tries to fit the facts to it. Maybe the facts need to be bent some. Maybe they need to be twisted all out of shape. Hey, they’re still facts.
I didn’t start my journey with a theory, actually. I started with a question, something that didn’t seem right. Why, I thought to myself, if he wanted to make a sacrifice to his lady love, did Van Gogh cut off an ear? An artist would cut out an eye. That would make a real sacrifice.
And there I was, off to the races. Because that’s all you need: doubt about the accepted story. And it doesn’t have to be informed doubt. Just as long as it’s plausible. What if he didn’t cut off his own ear? He was living with Gauguin at the time, they had just had an argument, and Gauguin had been trying to teach him saber dueling. And as soon as it happened, Gauguin got the hell out of town.
Gauguin did it!
What about him shooting himself? From the evidence, he was shot from several feet away, from above—and the gun was never found.
Is it possible then that van Gogh was not mad? That there was a conspiracy to make him think he was mad? Why?
He must have known something. Something criminal. Something big, involving most if not all of his friends. Most of his friends were fellow artists.
A giant forgery ring! Easy peasey. Then I ignore or soft-pedal facts that don’t agree. Van Gogh had himself committed to the madhouse for a year. While there, he often had fits of violence toward his attendant, or he tried to swallow his paints. He lived for three days after he shot himself, and never accused anyone else. Of course, I do explain these away in my book (which you might like to read). And I don’t need to disprove facts. Only create doubt about their veracity.
And the biggest stretch of all, that there was a giant forgery ring. There’s no evidence for that at all. Of course not. That would have been hushed up by the state.
Now the question you’ll ask is: what do I believe? I first began this story (as a screenplay) some twenty years ago. Since then, scholars have questioned Gauguin’s role in the ear incident. A new biography asserts that he was killed (although manslaughter might be a more apt description than murder, and their killer and motive differ from mine.)
So my questions aren’t crazy. But I did make up the answers. I would say more than likely Van Gogh was bipolar, and possibly epileptic as well, although whether his conditions led to his purported actions, I can’t decide. It would be a fascinating study to try to match his letters and paintings with manic and depressive periods.
But that’s not my task. My task is to create conspiracy theories. I hope you read them and spread them among the general population. It’s better than “Paul is dead”, if not quite so juicy as Roswell.

Originally published in Lesa's Book Critiques

Edward Albee on reading

2025-09-25T03:22:00.000-05:00

Was Edward Albee the greatest American playwright of the 20th century? Well, there's Eugene O'Neil and Arthur Miller, of course. But I like danger in the theatr, and there's no one mote dangerous than Albee.

“Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.”

Favorites:

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A Zoo Story

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?

Bonus quote:

“I don’t have ideas. I have people. They meet. Things happen. They are changed. Find out why these people are in your head. Eventually they’ll say: ‘Write me.’”

Pastiches

2025-09-20T21:42:00.000-05:00

I'm going to share a secret with you: I don’t read Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Or at least, very few. And the better they promise to be, the leerier I am of them. Not that I’m saying you shouldn’t read pastiches. What do you, think I’m crazy? No, remember I’m a writer, not a reader. Not that writers shouldn’t read pastiches. Far from it. I’m pointing the finger squarely at myself. You see, I’m a sponge. I’m a mimic. I’m very strongly affected by the last thing I’ve read. If I had been reading Dylan Thomas while I was writing The Strange Curse of Eliza Doolittle, I’d have had to name it Eliza’s Christmas in Wales.

So I didn’t. I stuck to a steady diet of John Watson, M.D., with Pygmalion for dessert. A little taste:

Toby, of course, had long since joined his lop-eared dewlapped ancestors in the next life. Rather amazingly, Mr. Sherman, Toby’s owner, was still rattling along this mortal coil, still stuffing animals, still manning the shop in Pinchin Lane. We hung on his bell till we heard the window on the second floor being wrenched open above us.

“Stand back, Watson,” said Holmes, pulling me aside. Glad I was that he did so; the first thing that came out of the window was a bucket of dirty water, which splashed to the pavement at our feet. The second thing was Sherman’s head in a nightcap.

“Go away!” he yelled. “I’ll have the law on you!”

Well, you say, everybody strives to sound like John Watson. And to that I say, some do, and some don’t. It’s not a matter of good or bad writing, it’s largely a matter of intention. For me, the music is of paramount importance.

And then there’s the matter of edges. The territory a pastiche inhabits is the edges of the Canon. Luckily, Doyle left wide edges to work in. The stories are chock-full of detailed facts, but those facts are always about the case, and almost never about Holmes—or Watson. It’s all those details that a pastiche fills in. For instance, I know that Holmes kicked his

cocaine addiction with the help of Sigmund Freud, because long ago I read the Seven-Per -Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyers. This was long before I had any intention of writing a Holmes pastiche, before I even heard the word pastiche; as a matter of fact, it was my original inspiration (I’m probably not alone in that).

But the point is, I can’t have that idea, because someone already had it, and executed it brilliantly. The more pastiches, especially good pastiches I read, the narrower the edges become.

So, enjoy the pastiches. Hell, enjoy my pastiches. And I promise, when I move on from writing Sherlock Holmes stories, I’ll catch up on my reading.