The Unending Money Chase

            In the past week my email inbox has been brimming with correspondence from a number of old friends.

            I’ve heard from Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Kristen Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Chelsea Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Wendy Davis, James Carville, Barney Frank, Barbara Mikulski, Barbara Boxer, and Congressman Pete Aguilar.

            And those are just the individuals staying in touch. I’m also hearing from organizations like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, End Citizens United and EMILY’s List.

            What can I tell you? I’m a popular guy with a lot of famous friends who all love me for one thing.

            They want my money.

The Mother’s Milk of Politics

            It’s getting to be tiresome. I understand that it takes money to run a political campaign, and that, as former California Assembly Speaker Jess Unruh used to say, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” Thus has it always been and always will be.

            But if my experience is any indication, it has been accelerating out of control lately.

            It seems as if almost every day, there’s a deadline of some sort for raising X number of dollars to keep Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, or some other Republican villain du jour from destroying America as we know it. All I have to do to stop that is give a dollar or two or three.

            Of course, no sooner have the funds been raised to stave off the crisis at hand than there’s a new crisis and a new deadline the following week. It never ends.

            It’s a technological problem, in some ways. In the old days, they’d have had to send a letter and pay for paper, envelopes and postage. That had the effect of imposing some restraint. A blast email costs nothing but the expense of having some hack write it, so there’s no reason to hold back from sending as many as possible — to the point of ridiculousness.

Can’t Smell the Ordure

Now I realize Democrats feel they have to target smaller donors to offset some of the bigger contributors the Republicans get. But even so: Do the people who send all these emails have any idea how obnoxious and offensive the ordinary citizen finds them? How truly sickened most people are that our political system has become an endless pursuit of dollars?

Probably not. I think today’s political operatives have been living in the outhouse for so long it smells like a rose to them. I’m reminded of the story of former California Governor Gray Davis, who was asked by Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters what politician he most admired and why?

            I forget who the politician was, but I’ll never forget the why. Davis said he admired the individual he named because no matter how busy a day he’d had, the man always found time to make 100 fund-raising calls each night.

            That’s not exactly what you’d call a profile in courage.

            Years ago, I saw Louis Malle’s film Phantom India, and a scene that has stuck with me ever since was the image of a swarm of beggars approaching the camera with their hands out. These days I feel as if I’m revisiting that image every time I check my inbox. Our politics has become a beggar’s opera, and we’re all worse off for it.

Easing Out of the Fast Lane

            For the past year, I’ve been phasing out my business. In February, I turned 66, and while my health is pretty good and I enjoy what I’ve done for a living the past quarter century, I want to spend more time on my mystery novels and do more traveling with Linda, now that she’s retired.

            At the same time, I don’t want to give it up entirely. Not yet, anyway. So I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how to cut back while keeping a hand in it. My recent experience with emergency surgery only served to remind me of the uncertainty of life and the importance of taking steps to make sure I’m doing what I want to for the rest of it.

            In retiring, but not really, I have one advantage. I’ve been a consultant with a number of clients, which gives me some leeway in terms of cutting back to just a few and working for them until they or I decide not to do it anymore.

50 Ways to Leave Your Business

            The scaling-down process began at the end of 2014, when I decided to stop looking for new clients. If someone specifically sought me out (and, to my surprise, that actually happened a few times), I’d consider it, but I wasn’t going to do any more selling and would concentrate on existing clients.

            Within that group, there were a few who were probably on the way out, whether from change in personnel, selling a business, or simply moving in a direction where my services weren’t going to be that important anymore. In a few instances like that, I decided to take the initiative and break it off myself, letting them know I was moving into retirement. I sense that a couple of them seemed relieved that I’d spared them an impending awkwardness.

            Finally, I gave some thought to the question of the qualities of a client I’d still like to work for, given that I don’t really need the money, but still want to do a little bit of what I think I’ve done well for a number of years. I came up with three qualities for a retirement, or semi-retirement client.

It Has to Be Interesting

            The first is that the work has to be interesting and not unduly stressful. Being of a curious disposition anyway, I’ve found all my work interesting to one degree or another, but clients who have long-term need for someone available at the drop of a hat, who have jobs with short deadlines and a lot of people to work with, are clients I can do without these days.

            Second, the people have to be good to work with. I’ve never had clients who were total jerks because I don’t put up with that. But people who can’t make up their minds, who don’t reply to emails or return phone calls, who make a job too cumbersome are people I can do without these days.

            And finally, they have to be clients who pay on time. Chasing down unpaid bills is probably the number one drawback of having your own business, and I’m over it. If you can’t get me a check within three weeks of my sending an invoice, find someone else to do your work.

            And looking over those last three paragraphs, it just dawned on me. This is how it should have been all along.

Taking a Detour from the Story

            In the recent Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies there’s an early scene in which Tom Hanks talks about insurance. He’s having a civil debate over drinks with another attorney about whether an accident that kills several people should be counted as several occurrences, with the insurance company liable for each one, or as one occurrence, with the insurance for the accident covering the maximum amount per occurrence, regardless of the number of deaths and injuries.

            I’m assuming the scene was put in to show — prior to Hanks defending a Soviet spy and later negotiating the release of an American spy pilot — that the character had a keen legal mind, which would come into play as the drama progressed.

            But even so: Talking about insurance law? That’s a pretty gutsy thing to do in a big-budget movie aimed at a wide popular audience. After all, what if the insurance debate put people to sleep?

He Believed in Himself

            Now I’m guessing again, but I suspect Spielberg had enough faith in himself, Hanks, and the Coen brothers (who wrote the dialogue) to feel that he could put that scene in the movie and not lose his audience. In fact, by developing the character, he might have pulled at least some viewers deeper into the film. It certainly made a positive impression on me.

            Spielberg is a master story teller, and job one for a story teller is to make it interesting. An awful lot of terrific story ideas have never become good books or movies because the artists couldn’t get the details of story telling right. It has a lot to do with pacing, weaving together the threads of the story, and imparting information at the right time in an effective way. Not many people can do it.

            Adding detailed information that doesn’t immediately move the story forward is even harder. It can be worth doing because character development and creating a sense of mood or place can make a story richer and more memorable. Think, for example, of Dickens taking two pages to describe the howling storm that rages on the night Magwitch returns to London to see Pip again in Great Expectations.

I’ll Take the Details

            It’s hard to say how typical I am, but I’m one of the readers who wants a bit of detail. If a murder takes place during a bird-watching expedition, I want the author to tell me something about bird watching and why it exerts a spell on its followers. If characters are regularly meeting in their favorite bar, I want the author to tell me a bit about the bar, because in doing so, the author is telling me more about the characters.

            These days I read a lot of books where detail of that sort is missing. And at one level I can understand the reasons. An author or filmmaker understandably wants to keep the story going and the pace as fast as possible, and, let’s face it, a lot of times the extra details are laid out in a way that doesn’t work. So why pause to admire the scenery when it’s so easy to have more action?

            A good story teller, and one with a sense of depth and breadth, is more likely, however, to say something along these lines: I find it interesting, and if it’s interesting to me, I think I can make it interesting for everybody else.  And then does just that. Is it a skill that can be taught? I rather doubt it.

Get Me Rewrite

            They still had a functioning linotype machine in the composing room when I started work at the newspaper in 1972. It was gradually being overtaken by early versions of computerized typesetting (CompuGraphic was the brand name), and eventually the linotype machine was painted over and put by the front door as a sort of freestanding sculpture that would have scared the entrails out of any competent liability attorney.

            We didn’t have computers in the newsroom. What we had were typewriters, and some pretty ancient ones at that. Most were Underwoods, with a couple of Royals thrown in. We used them to type our stories on cheap paper that still had chunks of wood floating in it.

            When the stories were complete, we didn’t hit a “send” button, we took the paper out of the typewriter, arranged the pages in order, and pushed the corners of them over a sharp metal spike on the managing editor’s desk. A couple of people perforated their thumbs trying to do that.

Composing a Story on the Fly

            There were reporters at the county seat in Santa Cruz, and there were other times when reporters were out in the field and had to get a story in under deadline. Today, they’d write them on a laptop and email them in. Back then, the stories had to be dictated.

            What that meant was that the reporter would call in to the office, sometimes from a pay phone, and dictate a story to another reporter, who was cradling a phone receiver on one shoulder and typing the story. I’ve always felt that the ability to dictate a story cleanly was one of the great journalistic skills of the time. Not many people could do it well back then, and I suspect hardly anyone could do it now if forced to.

            It’s hard enough to keep a story straight when you have it in front of you and can check it. When you can’t see the story and have to remember exactly what you said — well, let’s just say that takes an awful lot of concentration. An almost inhuman amount, really.

One of the Best There Was

            I got to thinking about dictation recently when I saw one of our former reporters, Lee Quarnstrom, a couple of months back. He was in Santa Cruz, plugging When I Was a Dynamiter, his memoir, which had a large focus on the time he spent with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s.

            That’s not the sort of background you’d expect to produce a mind so clear and focused that its owner could almost seamlessly dictate a 750-word story, on a tight deadline, complete with paragraphing and punctuation. Lee did it all the time. Other reporters needed a lot of help from the news staffer typing the story, but with Lee, you could just type what he was saying and make only the slightest of changes later.

            Years later, when he was working for the San Jose Mercury, Lee described how a computer guru came to the Santa Cruz news office and explained the benefits of the new computer system, especially how it allowed you to move paragraphs and rewrite things easily. Lee said he didn’t need all that because he just sat down and wrote the story from beginning to end.

            “Oh,” sniffed the computer guru condescendingly. “You must have learned to write on a typewriter.”

            Damn straight, and he and the rest of us who did were better writers for the experience. It’s one clear case of how an improvement in technology isn’t entirely an improvement.

When Book Clubs Read Your Book

            In the past couple of months I’ve had the pleasure of being invited to two book club meetings that were discussing one of my mystery novels. It was a great experience, and one that gave me a bit of an insight into how the books are being read by typical readers.

            The first book club met on January 10 and was discussing my second novel, Wash Her Guilt Away. The meeting began with the playing of the video trailer for the book, and, since he had a cameo role in the trailer, the retired local police chief was also invited to the event.

            About a dozen people were on hand, and it turned out a couple of them were fly fishermen. As the book is set during a fly-fishing vacation, that gave something to talk about, and they showed pictures of fish they had caught. They were bigger fish than I usually catch, but let’s skip the sour grapes.

The Question I Didn’t Expect

            A certain amount of the discussion at this meeting (and at the other, as well) had to do with questions about how I write the books and where I get my ideas. My general answer to that question is that as a writer I’m always stockpiling material and ideas and that once I start to map out a story line, things begin to fuse together into a semi-coherent whole.

            Even so, there were questions I wasn’t expecting. One that threw me for a loop came from a man in the group who said he didn’t understand why a successful 55-year-old businessman would be attracted to a 27-year-old woman. (They were already married when the story began and were two of the key characters.)

            Of all the things in the book that I never expected to have to explain, that would top the list. As I sat there trying to formulate a tactful response, one of the women in the group came to my rescue.

            “Oh, come on,” she said, and made a hand gesture with an unmistakable meaning. I thanked her under my breath.

Just Among Rotarians

            Last week, I went to the second book club. It was formed by members of a nearby Rotary Club (not the one I belong to) and was discussing my first novel, The McHenry Inheritance.

            The club has ten members, but on that blustery, rainy winter night only four showed up. I knew them all, and it was a convivial experience. They had some good questions and comments.

            The lone man in the group analyzed the ending of the book, using the Rotary Four-Way Test: Is it the truth; is it fair to all concerned; will it build goodwill and better friendships; and is it beneficial to all concerned. It was a way of looking at the ending that hadn’t occurred to me, but at the same time showed that he had been considering the moral complexity of it.

            And there was a make my day moment, too. One of the women in the group said that when I published the book three and a half years earlier, and sent out emails to everyone I knew, she decided to buy it, even though she’d never bought an e-book before. It took her a while to get it on her iPad and be able to read it, but she persevered and said she loved the book.

            Now that’s what I call a loyal customer.

When a Major Organ Lets You Down

            There’s been a long period of radio silence in this location, for which I apologize. Unexpected medical emergencies can do that to a blogger. It’s all good now, but if I could offer one bit of advice before moving forward, it would be this: If anyone offers you a collapsed lung, don’t take it.

            On the positive side, there’s nothing like a serious malfunction of a major organ to clarify a man’s thinking about what’s important in life. I haven’t figured that out yet, but I’d like to believe I’m contemplating it more, and more clearly.

            It began innocently with a trip to the heartland. On Monday Jan. 11, Linda and I flew out to Nashville, and from there drove north to Ft. Campbell on the Tennessee-Kentucky border. The occasion was our son’s return from an overseas deployment, during which he was almost daily flying over hostile territory in a Blackhawk helicopter.

Cabin Pressure Decreasing

            The homecoming was great. The troops flew in on a chartered 767, marched into a hangar, and had to stand at attention for about 10 minutes of speeches and band music. After that, everyone was dismissed to spend the rest of the day with family.

            We spent pretty much a day and a half with Nick, catching up on what his deployment had been like and helping him get set up in his new quarters (nicer than before). We also took him shopping at the PX, the commissary and WalMart. We had dinner at a burrito joint he favors and at Blackhorse Pub in downtown Clarksville, TN, which was a bit more posh.

            Thursday, we flew home, little knowing what would happen when we arrived. As I’ve subsequently learned, the sharp decrease in cabin pressure as a plane descends for landing is one of the leading triggers for a collapsed lung. The descent into San Jose is apparently what pushed mine over the edge.

But It Doesn’t Hurt

            When we got off the plane in San Jose, I suddenly found I couldn’t walk more than 150 feet without feeling as out of breath as if I’d just finished a marathon. With no training. I’d had some shortness of breath in Tennessee, but had attributed it to the cold weather constricting breathing passages. And there was no pain; I’d always heard that a collapsed lung is intensely painful.

            So I talked Linda into going home, with a promise that I’d call the doctor first thing in the morning. The doctor was not as copacetic about the situation as I’d been and ordered me to the ER, where I was a) quickly diagnosed with a collapsed lung, and b) informed that in a small percentage of cases, there’s no pain. Just lucky, I guess.

            On the other hand, the lung had collapsed in an area where I had some damaged tissue from a previously diagnosed and treated pulmonary ailment. A look at the cat scan convinced the doctors it needed to be cleaned out, and the sooner the better, so at 7 p.m. on Friday night of a three-day weekend, I was wheeled into surgery and remained in the hospital until Monday night.

            No fun, but a month later, I’m nearly 100 percent again, and there were two positive side effects. One was that the surgery knocked me out for 13 hours and wiped out my sleep debt from the trip. The other is that the surgery means there’s a fair chance the repaired lung will be good for the duration, and I won’t have to go through this again. I sure hope so.

Opening Remarks to the Book Club

            First of all, thank you for choosing my mystery novel Wash Her Guilt Away as your book to be discussed this month. I hope, most of all, that it entertained you and would like to say a few words, before the discussion begins, about how it came to be written.

            When I wrote the first Quill Gordon mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, in the late 1990s, I drew up a list of stories for additional novels in the series in the event an agent or publisher asked. Unable to publish conventionally, I put the book aside for more than a decade until Amazon and Kindle came along to make self-publishing a viable alternative.

            Gratified by the response to the first book, I decided to proceed with the second on the list, which had already been titled Wash Her Guilt Away, after the Oliver Goldsmith poem at the front of the book. I began writing it in early 2013, and it was published April 30, 2014.

Borrowed Elements

            Wash Her Guilt Away is an attempt to put a modern spin on two tropes of the classic murder mystery — classic referring to those mysteries generally written between the two world wars. It’s a variation on the British country-house mystery, in which a group of diverse guests are thrown together and tensions arise; and of the locked-room mystery, in which someone is found murdered in a hermetically sealed chamber, or locked room, from which the killer should not have been able to depart yet somehow did.

            The book also borrows elements from certain American authors. Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, who wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” widely considered to be the first locked-room mystery.

            Because the novel is set in the wilds of the Northern California mountains, I also drew on the work of early American writers and their depictions of a vast, untamed landscape. The discovery of the witches in the forest and their role in the community owes something to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown,” and the headless boatman at Indian Hollow is direct idea-theft from Washington Irving’s headless horseman in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Trying to Be Better

            With each book I write, I try to improve as a writer and try to work specifically on a couple of issues. I felt that The McHenry Inheritance was a respectable debut novel that introduced a character, a premise, a style, and that demonstrated a level of fundamental storytelling competence.

            That said, I felt that parts of it were underdeveloped and decided to work harder at developing character and creating crisp dialogue. The story line of Wash Her Guilt Away lent itself very well to this consideration, dealing, as it does, with a group of people forced together by circumstance and bad weather. More so than my other two novels, Wash Her Guilt Away attempts to build tension through atmosphere and the development of characters and situations. Each of you must, of course, judge for yourselves whether or not that effort succeeded.

            Finally, in an attempt to cut to the chase, let me answer the most-frequently asked question: Where do you get your ideas? I never have any shortage of ideas; the problem is pulling several of them together to create a coherent and satisfying story that allows me to develop character and atmosphere. It takes time for the right ideas to align into a workable story, which is why I probably spend as much time outlining my books as writing them.

            Any questions?

            (I will be appearing at a book club discussing Wash Her Guilt Away in January, and a follow-up post will likely ensue.)