You have to learn to let go

BODY FOUND PACKED IN DRY ICE AT HOTEL

A little weird? What would be really weird?

I also like the way the hotel tries to dissociate itself from the whole thing.

Senior initiative

I love this:

MAN IN WHEELCHAIR ROBS BANK

There’s a lot to like here, but one of the best is the cop’s theory that the driver of the van might not have known what the wheelchair guy was up to.

Back

In the second week of March Jane and I jumped on the California Zephyr in Oakland (Emeryville, actually) and rolled to Denver Colorado for Left Coast Crime.

I love trains. These days train travel makes an environmental statement, since it is a much more efficient way of moving human beings long distances, and contributes less carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than driving or flying. And I’m glad about that. It can’t hurt to be a little less destructive than usual.

But I do it because I love it.

Train tracks follow the path of least resistance when possible, and often end up tracing the path of older transportation–rivers, wagon trails, mountain passes.

And rails are usually laid in the marginal areas now, back behind the scenes, cutting through rundown neighborhoods, right into the heart of the countryside. There is a strong sense of passing through the country you travel, rather than over it as you do in a jet or even blasting by on a freeway. In a train it’s always backroads travel, and all you have to do is watch.

Most beautiful part of trip: going over the Sierra, long views over wooded mountains, vertiginous glimpses of deep canyons right under us, the long descent past Emigrant Gap, Donner Lake, Truckee and down into the long alkali flats of Nevada.

Equally beautiful part of trip: Nosing into steep narrow canyonlands in Colorado, where past Glenwood Springs the train follows the Colorado River up into Glenwood Canyon. Steep, craggy, rock walls, close enough to reach out and touch. The river always there. And wildlife: literal hundreds of deer, big herds of elk, dozens of bald eagles, one moose.

The rest of the trip was merely fascinating.

Left Coast Crime was fun, smaller than Bouchercon or Thrillerfest, my two previous experiences with crime get-togethers. Perhaps because there were fewer people there, I talked to more of them.

I’ll write more about LCC when I recover from the parting gift Denver gave us–a nasty bout with an evil flu-like illness which after a week of coughing that sounded like the death rattle of a sick elk, and fever, and other ingenious miseries, morphed into a really ugly upper respiratory infection. Over the last two days I’ve noticed that the last-gasp wheezing has finally stopped. So maybe I’m getting better.

The Proof Dance

The final pages of the new novel arrived last month. They weren’t due back until the end of February, my editor told me–an unusually generous deadline.

So I fucked off for a while, putting off the engagement. Until anxiety outweighed terror and I forced myself to dig into the page pile.

Because proofing the final pages always destroys me. Maybe it’s the finality of it–once you finish this pass, the book is gone, out of your hands. It’s not going to get any better.

And there’s something about the kind of attention you have to pay when proofreading that seems to turn formerly good, readable prose into loose, empty babble, childish and awkward. Bad, bad, bad.

It utterly fills me with despair. My career is over, I think as my head sinks toward the paperstrewn desktop. Why did I ever think I could do this?

And that’s just the first pass, the one where you discover how many truly stupid mistakes have gotten this far and need to be corrected. Typos, okay, I can live with typos, though that I missed them so many times before finally catching them at the last possible moment makes me doubt all judgment and ability.

But it’s the bad writing, the awkward turns of phrase, the unnecessary puffed-out words that really eat into me. The things I’m not supposed to change at this late stage in the process.

But they are unquestionably mistakes, so I change them, as much as I feel I can get away with.

The second pass is less grisly overall, but has its high points of anxiety and indecision. This is the pass I take to decide whether or not to actually make the changes I’d noted down during the first reading. It’s supposed to be just reading the changes, but always ends up as a second word for word proofing. It just does.

But the level of attention is different from a close proofreading, a step back from the pure nuts and bolts of it, and I start to see my own words as somewhat readable again. Maybe it’s not so bad after all. Some parts of it seem kind of well written, if you squint.

Then, finally, the third pass, in which I see if the decisions I’d made in the second pass hold up. Again, for reasons of efficiency, I mean only to read the changes. But always get hooked into reading long sections, basically all of it again, though not necessarily in order.

And a great thing happens. It reads! It seems good to me!

I’m in love again.

Ready to ship.

The end is near the beginning

I usually start my day by contemplating the various catastrophes–global warming, peak oil, systemic financial collapse–that are galloping toward us, and wishing I’d bought that 20 acres in the mountains while I had the chance. Everyone should have a few acres of their own, a place to plant a few potatoes and erect a defensible perimeter.

I find it curiously stimulating and consoling to think that Western Civ might be scraped down to the bare dirt and need to be rebuilt from scratch. I’m a child of the sixties, after all, still Visualizing Industrial Collapse. Peak Oil is the Rapture of the crypto-agrarian left (a political tendency made up of myself and my friend Bob Schildgen [aka "Mr. Green."]). I like feeling all millennial and apocalyptic.

But after terrorizing myself for an hour or two by reading all the bad news on the blogs, I need to restore some mental tone before sitting down to write. I do this by reading poetry, another bad habit of mine.

This morning I found the perfect poem for this time of impending disaster and TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World As We Know It). It’s “The Horses” by Scottish poet Edwin Muir:

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days’ war that put the world in sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us, into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms,
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
“They’ll moulder away and be like other loam.”
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our father’s land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming: it stopped, went on again
And at the corner, changed to hollow thunder,
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us.
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield;
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited.
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Better late

New Year’s Resolution: I will stop procrastinating so goddamn much.

Also: blog more.

Vinnie on the beach

A friend sent me this Vinnie’s Head sighting on an unnamed beach in Hawaii (the Big Island). He swears it is a genuine sighting, and not a set-up shot. The reader is Debbie Halfpenny of Salinas, California. (Full disclosure: I met Debbie several times at this friend’s house. Knowing him as I do, he probably sold her the copy I gave him.)

If you take Vinnie on vacation, or carry it along as something to read in the holding cell as you await resolution of that unfortunate DUI bust, or anywhere at all, send me photographic documentation, and I’ll put it up.

Really. Anywhere at all.

Blogger naps, Killer debuts hit stores

While I’ve been bad and lazy and not posting, three of my Killer Year compadres have released their debut novels.

First up was Dave White, notorious short-story writer and Rutgers football fan. Some people just can’t help themselves, I guess. His When One Man Dies should do for the PI novel what Yuen Wo Ping did for fight choreography.

“When Gerry Figuroa is killed in a hit and run, his pal, Jersey P.I. Jackson Donne, is hired to investigate. Donne soon discovers that Figuroa may not have been quite the innocent he seemed. A second case leads Donne to a dead body on the steps of Drew University. As he digs deeper, Donne uncovers a drugs connection, and it quickly becomes clear that certain people would rather he dropped his investigation. Soon his ex-cop partner shows up bent on shattering everything, and Donne finds his past hurtling towards him with a vengeance.”

Then came the awesome Derek Nikitas, chronicler of upstate New York smalltown life. (About which I know something, for my sins. My first wife was from a small town on the Niagara Frontier. I have eaten the Friday night fish fry and drunk the Genny Cream Ale of these towns.) His novel Pyres hit the bookstores while I was away somewheres, probably sleeping on the couch. But don’t you miss it.

“When a folklore professor is shot dead in his car, the crime smashes together the lives of three disparate women: his anguished teenage daughter, a detective facing her own family’s collapse, and the pregnant former-junkie girlfriend of the killer. These three women must choose where to aim their last shots at redemption, even as they face a gang of barbaric thugs who torch homes and lives for a thrill.”

Last but very far from least, Nashvillienne J.T. Ellison’s All the Pretty Girls is now in a bookstore near you. This is the coolest cover I have seen in all my fucking life. Well, right up there, anyway.

“A vicious, highly mobile killer is terrorizing the Southeast. Showing no mercy to his victims, he leaves a trail of mutilated bodies faster than investigators can process the crime scenes. Nashville Homicide Detective Taylor Jackson, working with FBI profiler John Baldwin, must follow the killer along his devious path. How many will die if they don’t succeed?”

Lots of reading to do. Get these guys now. Just read them.

Copyedits

The copyedits on my second book are here.

The manuscript looks like it’s had a hard journey, stained and dirty, the corners worn off, bristling with little yellow Post-it notes.

A lot of little yellow notes. Really, a whole fucking mass of Post-its. And these urgently scribbled little notes are not trivial questions of grammar and punctuation, but probe deep into word choice, consistency, even the motivation for certain scenes.

It’s not going to be a walk in the park answering this stuff. Unless that park is in a bad neighborhood, after dark, with a mugger behind every clump of shrubbery.

I’ve talked to a few writers who deeply resent the questions copyeditors lard their manuscripts with. No one likes having their grammar corrected. Having your mistakes pointed out is annoying, even if you agree they are mistakes.

But having worked a lot as a copyeditor myself I’m more sympathetic.

And as a writer concerned with making my stuff better, I’m commited to the process. You’re not going to enjoy this. This may hurt a little. But it can make your writing stronger if you engage.

Remember: no one is ever going to read your manuscript this closely again.

A good copyedit should hurt. If in the course of answering queries you don’t swear out loud or at least feel your blood pressure float your eyeballs, at least once, then the copyeditor probably hasn’t done a very good job.

Because very few writers are so good and perfect that they never make mistakes. Most manuscripts will contain soft spots, places where you were not sure you got it across, but patched it together as best you could. Places where maybe you negotiated with yourself, supported a weak or dubious passage with spurious argument, straight-up denial.

And sometimes, you just miss shit. It’s always a slap in the face with a wet flounder when you come across some boneheaded error glaring up at you from your own manuscript. I didn’t know that was in there! you say. Holy fuck. How did that get there? I think my next door neighbor must have been breaking into the house and editing my manuscript at night while I was asleep!

No, uh-uh.

You put it there.

Now fix it.

READING MATERIEL

I’m going to have to quit my day job, go on disability, and do nothing from now on but read.

Let’s face it, it’s what I was born to do, the only thing I do really well. Aside from napping on the couch, that is.

The two activities complement each other nicely.

Thursday I took off from work and went to the opening day of the Friends of the San Francisco Library annual booksale at Fort Mason. I try to go every year now, tho I had to miss last year’s sale, which happened while I was in Madison, Wisconsin for Bouchercon.

It was a tough decision to go to Madison.

The San Francisco weather gods are kind to books. Unlike the Fourth of July or the Chinese New Year’s parade, which are traditionally shrouded in fog and cold as fuck, the first day of the Friends of the SF Library booksale is always bright, sunny, and clear, with a brisk cool breeze blowing from the ocean and into the hangar-like waterfront building almost completely filled with tables of books and dazed, intent book people.

Many browsing the tables are stereotypical book folks, tweedy, bespectacled, etc. Many are not: A long-haired, bearded man in a studded black leather jacket and leather motorcycle pants, hovering with his empty shopping cart before jumping in, watching the crowd and talking loudly to himself: “That’s my book! My book! Mine, mine!” and laughing sardonically.

I know how he feels. When I wheeled my shopping cart up to the first book-covered table, I was almost hyperventilating from indecision–start here? Move left or right? Go through the boxes under the table now, or later? Systematic read, or random? And meanwhile the conviction that everyone else is slyly picking out the very books I’m looking for, the prize my heart is set on. Whatever that is. I’ll know it when I see it.

Eventually I settled down and began reading the spines. I settled on systematic, and would block out a dozen books or so, choosing a prominent or easily recognizable book as a boundary, speed-reading the titles, then back up to the beginning and read the second row, and then the third if there was one. I didn’t want to miss anything. I meant to read every goddamn bookspine in the place.

Two years ago my booksale experience was magical. It seemed that as soon as I thought of a book I wanted, it appeared under my hand, or at most a few books away.

This year was different. The rows of bookspines remained inert, closed to me. I wasn’t finding anything I wanted. Hundreds and hundreds of books, and not one of them I wanted to read!

I decided I was pushing it, trying too hard and driving away the delicate relationship between desire and its manifestation. I cleared my mind, opened my heart to all possibilities.

Then I started to score.

Crime novels: Eddie Muller, Kevin Wignall, Chantal Pelletier. It makes me happy just to type the names. Charlie Stella. Joe R. Lansdale.

Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd.

Crime books: Crooked, the confessions of a twenties criminal. Mostly Murder by Sir Sydney Smith, memoir of a Brit forensics specialist in the first half of the 20th century. Bloody Murder by Julian Symons, the revised edition that goes up to the 90s.

Fantasy novels: The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly; Zamora’s The Shadow of the Wind.

Bio: Sewell’s big Emily Dickinson.

Reverdy, trans. Mary Ann Caws. The Collected Poems of Edwin Muir.

Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse, Haitian voodoo explorations.

Sketches of a Tour to the Lakes, journal of a trip around the Great Lakes from New York to Michigan in 1826. Hardcover, in slip: four bucks! Watercolor illustrations by the author!

A tattered, battered copy of Ocean Shore Railroad, local California history of the San Mateo Coastside (I used to live there, have spent a lot of time there.)

A nice old hardcover with handcut pages, illustrated, of RL Stevenson’s later stories, including “The Bottle Imp.”

A Tale of Brittany, Pierre Loti. Ambivalent about this for a couple seconds–Loti is a lightweight, a fake exotic–but it’s a nice hardcover in great condition, and I’m a sucker for anything about Brittany. It goes in the shopping cart.

Oh, and some cool lps: a set of the first Leadbelly recordings for the Library of Congress by the Lomaxes–I’d never heard these. The recordings document a wider range of Leadbelly’s considerable repertoire than I’d heard before. Way cool stuff.

A boxed set of early music by Brit musicians, demonstrating a range of period instruments. Shawms! Bagpipes! Bladderpipes! The tromba marina! I am happy.

A folk orchestra from Romania. More bagpipes, fiddles, one of those fearsome Hungarian hammer dulcimers, wild singing and playing.

Freilachs by clarinetist Dave Tarras. Yiddische musics. Tarras one of those musicians with a direct pipeline to the endless flow of music going on always underneath everything.

A two lp set to teach yourself Irish Gaelic, on Gael Linn. I’ll get around to this someday, I swear.

Were there more? It feels as if there were more. There are always more books.

Ah! Fuck! Books, books!

I am happy.