Writer Learns Hard Lesson

By Paul (Gimpy) Levine

I am in pain, so if this is more incoherent than usual, cut me some slack. If you stick with this post to the end, I promise to pass along a key lesson of life.

Many years ago, I was a regular weekend volleyball player on the beach in Key Biscayne, Florida. That's where I tore up my right knee the first time. But not the last time.

I loved to play. Sometimes, crowds would gather and watch in astonishment at the fiercely competitive games.
I ripped cartilage a second time playing tennis with my son, Mike.

NOT ME PLAYING TENNIS

I had surgery; years went by; other injuries dogged that damned right knee. Finally, thirteen months ago, I was the recipient of a brand new mechanical knee. That knee works just fine. But Sunday, in a futile effort to re-live my lost youth, I did something stupid. Usually, Sunday mornings are reserved for buying fresh fruit at the Studio City Farmer's Market.
Then, perhaps a healthy snack at Porto's, a Cuban bakery in Burbank. But last Sunday, I played pick-up volleyball on the beach in Santa Monica.

NOT ME PLAYING VOLLEYBALL
DEFINITELY NOT ME PLAYING VOLLEYBALL

This time, I tore up my left knee, requiring a trip to the E.R.

NOT MY NURSE

MY NURSE
You may ask what I have learned from this episode. Simply this. You may take Vicodin...

Or you may drink vodka...
But you may not do both.


Paul

Thoughts from a nickname rebel

Patty here…

I've been given a lot of nicknames over the years. Here are a few:

Smiley
Smilers
Grin
Patty
P
P.G.
P-smile
Pattikins
Little Pitter Patter
Runt (Don’t ask)
Punkie
Cookie
Termite

Some people don’t like nicknames but I love mine, because a friend or family member has crafted each one with loving care. Nicknames seem to be popular in a lot of families.



However, there’s one nickname I don’t like. It’s Pat. Dunno why, but there it is. I have nothing against the name. I have several family members named Patricia who prefer to be called Pat. Fine by me. Just don’t call me that if you value your kneecaps.

In the small town where I grew up, tradition dictated that a woman could no longer wear her hair long or be called Patty when she reached a certain age. Patty was a child’s name not something you called an adult. Maybe I was just a nickname rebel, but I rejected those stodgy notions.

When I sold my first book, I worried about using the name Patricia on the cover because I feared people would be tempted to call me Pat. Sure enough, during one of my first convention panels the moderator started calling me Pat in the Green Room before the event began. I politely asked her to either call me Patricia or Patty. She ignored my request and continued calling me Pat throughout the entire panel discussion. I finally corrected her in front of the audience, which was bad form on my part, but I was mad as hell and couldn’t take it any more.



Just so you know, you have my permission to call me any nickname on the above list or make up one of your own. Just don’t call me Pat.

What are your feelings about nicknames? Got any good ones you want to reveal?

ON ANOTHER NOTE: Once again, congrats to nude dude Miss C!!! A Field of Darkness has been nominated for an Anthony award for Best First Novel by attendees of the Bouchercon mystery-fan convention. I'll be in the audience cheering her on. Yaaaaaaaay!

To forward this post to nickname rebels or people named Pat, click on the envelope icon below.

Weathering The Weather

from Jacqueline

I come from a country where someone once said, “We don’t have climate here in Britain – we have weather.” Personally, I think weather is what makes for a close-knit community. When I was a kid just about every conversation between two adults began with a comment on the weather.

“Mornin’, George.”
“Morning, Fred.”
“Nice one, innit?”
“Long as it lasts. Got to get the beans in before it comes down again.”
“Farmers need the rain though, don’t they?”

A conversation like that could go on for hours, and anyone who came along would join in and add their two penn'orth of weathered wisdom.

Without weather, writers wouldn’t have a key compoment with which to communicate time and place – a low rain-filled cloud over ink-black hills, or mist rising from just-washed Parisian sidewalks on a summer’s morning. So, being British and a writer, I rather like weather. I pay attention to it, watch for its nuances, after all, rain is pretty boring when it’s just rain, and snow can become slush when you least expect it.



Speaking of rain - I’m off to the land of the Great Deluge next week. This time last year, I arrived in sweltering London, hovering above the 100 degree mark with a humidity you could cut with a knife. But this year Britain has floods of almost Katrina-like proportions, complete with a government who received early warnings of the inclement interlude from meteorologists some months ago.



And while Britain is flooded – the worst rain in over 200 years – southern Europe is ablaze, with searing temperatures throughout Greece, Spain, Portugal, France, Slovakia, Romania, Kosovo and other countries in that broad region. This photo shows firefighters just outside Athens – there are blazes igniting all across Europe.



The scientists are coming down on the side of global warning as an explanation, with movement of the jet-stream in a southerly direction being blamed for the British floods. As a member of parliament said today, if we don’t all do something now, then the British Isles will be under water in 500 years. I’m concerned about the 500 years, but am just heartsick when I think of all those people and animals losing their habitats to rain and fire.



So, I’m packing my bag with rain in mind, though I would really love a miracle over the next week or so. My wonderful God-daughter is getting married on August 4th, and though she is being her usual down-to-earth pragmatic self about the state of the weather this year (Can’t do much about it, can I, Jack?), I would love to have the powers of a real fairy God-mother, to be able to make the sun break through and shine on her big day. Apart from anything else, I’m traveling 6000 miles to see her walk down the aisle, which I think it a pretty good reason to want the very best day for Charlotte. In the meantime, here’s a photo of the lovely Charlie the last time I saw her – in March, when we went into Bath on a fine spring day to buy her wedding jewellery and stopped for a decidedly unposh lunch. Isn’t she lovely? I’ve seen her in her wedding dress already, and I can tell you now, she looks stunning and I’ll be wearing waterproof mascara on the day.



Going back to the issue of time and place, here’s my question to you this week: Do you have a favorite passage from a work of non-fiction or fiction that uses weather to describe a place in a way that makes you feel as if you were there? There’s one that has remained with me for over three decades. I was reading a collection of Hemingway’s letters and in one – to Max Perkins, probably – he described visiting the Scott-Fitzgeralds on a sticky hot day in Paris. Zelda had laundered handkerchiefs, then set each wet handkerchief against a pane of glass in the window. The handkerchief dried fast as sun beat against the glass, so that when she pulled the cloth away, it was as if the cloth had been starched and pressed and needed only to be folded. When I think of it, little was said about the actual weather, but the descriptions of the fast-drying handkerchiefs said so much about the city in summer. And here's another thing, when I was a kid we were taught that the plural of handkerchief was handkerchieves. Is that just a British thing, or have we moved away from doing more than adding an "s" to make a plural? Same with roof and rooves, hoof and hooves. Just wondered.

And as a disclaimer, because I read this letter so many years ago, I may have mixed up the characters. It might have been Scott-Fitzgerald who was transfixed by the first Mrs.Hemingway’s laundering of handkerchiefs.

So, what passages come back to you when you think of weather? And what about those plurals?

Guns, guns, guns !!!!

I was going to blog about an often over-looked aspect of writing: Work space. I had a couple of ideas and questions to ask other writers but two things happened.

First, I discovered I was too lazy to take the photos of my chair on my porch for the post. Then I got a memo at work that the end of an era was approaching. It had meaning to me, if not many others. It also gave me a chance to show you guys a little, odd thing that can cause feelings of loss in police or military personnel. My agency is retiring the Beretta.

Beretta 92F

It sounds like an administrative, minor decision but to those of us that use firearms and appreciate the artistry of their design, it marks a sad day.

That's me, second in line, with my Beretta 92 F during a training seesion at Turkey Point power plant.




I’m no gun nut, or we call is here in Florida, a “Fred Rea”. Sorry that’s an inside joke to both gun nuts and Florida writers. But the Beretta holds a special place in my heart. I carried a model 92 F compact while an agent with the DEA and then a full-size Beretta model 92F for the majority of my career with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. That included the years I was on our Special Operations Team. Just like a mechanic gets used to a certain wrench or a writer likes a particular computer, a cop becomes attached to his duty weapon. I had it every day, except when I let my son use it for “show and tell” one day. Man, that was a poor decision. Well, live and learn.

In my first book, Walking Money, the main character, Bill Tasker, carried a Beretta. By the time I wrote the second novel, Shock Wave, I had started carrying a Glock and inadvertently had Tasker carrying a Glock. I corrected it before publication. It seems

minor but cops would never let me hear the end of it.

I also have characters use the Sig Sauer P 230 which I carried off-duty for years. I converted to a small model Glock, the model 27, as an off-duty weapon. I have a

Glock model 27

SIG P-230
tendency to put them in my books as well. There are real, tactical

reasons for the switch that gun guys would find interesting but everyone else would find wildly boring.

Of all the questions writers ask me about police work, questions about guns are the most frequent. Many authors say that they hear the most comments when they make a mistake with a gun in a book. They can write that Peru is in Africa and no one will say “boo”. But put a safety on a revolver and you’ll know you screwed up. You can gloss over it by using the nebulous “pistol” or “gun”. But in the effort to be realistic most writers are being more specific in their books.

I fully understand some people’s reluctance to firearms. I also, less frequently, understand gun collectors. I don’t get spending all the money to build a collection, but I appreciate guns. C’mon, I’m a guy from the south; the two biggest factors affecting a love of guns. I’m tolerant of both types of people but I’ve noticed they don’t seem to show much insight into each other. I’ll stop now before a vicious debate breaks out. No one ever seems to argue gun control calmly.

Back to my original post. I bought my Beretta from the state when I was issued a Glock several years ago. But now the department has decided to require all agents to convert to the use of Glocks. I’m not saying it’s a bad decision. They think these things out very carefully. There are considerations from legal to financial that I never worry about. I just liked the idea that if I wanted to, I could carry my trusty Beretta on duty. At least for another few weeks.

It’s the end of an era. Like when Chevy made the Impala so small. Or when Clinton left office.

On an unrelated note

Yesterday I read this post from my friend Wallace Stroby. It's an essay he wrote for the Newark Star-Ledger in 2005. It reinforces my belief that he is a fine writer. A personal story told in such a vivid manner that I read it twice. http://www.wallacestroby.com/writings_abyss.html

Next week I’ll get back to writing posts instead of gun posts. Just thought I do a change up.

See you next week.

Jim B

Fleming. Ian Fleming.

By Cornelia

I was happy to discover that British author Sebastian Faulks had been tapped to write the next James Bond novel. At first.

He's the author of Charlotte Gray and On Green Dolphin Street, so it seemed like a good choice.



And then I read the following quote, which put me in rather a bad mood about the whole the whole enterprise:

"My commission was from the [Fleming] family, and they strongly believe in Ian Fleming’s value as a writer. And that’s one of the reasons they went to someone like me rather than a genre thriller [writer]."

--Sebastian Faulks, interviewed on Entertainment Weekly's Popwatch blog

I mean, there are just so MANY things which annoy me about that comment, I barely know where to begin.

Thankfully, I read a quote from another author earlier this week about the genre/literary divide which I thought was a much better comeback than anything I could say.

Here it is:

TNI: What about the issue of comparing thrillers and commercial fiction with so-called literary fiction?

Child: It’s an issue that doesn’t come from our side. We’re happy to let those guys do whatever it is they want to do. The issue always comes from their side, because they’re jealous about our sales. They get all stirred up about it, and quite rightly. I probably have more books shoplifted out of every title than they sell in their entire lives. They start to feel troubled over it, and they want a bit of our action; so they go slumming and try to write a thriller. And it’s always an embarrassing failure. Whereas any one of us—I know this for a fact, having talked to my writer friends, and we are not idiots—have read all the great books in the world, and we could write a literary novel easily. Michael Connelly, anybody like that, could invent a different name, write a literary book. Him or me, it would probably take three weeks to write that kind of book. It would sell three thousand copies like theirs do, and it would probably be well-respected. We can do what they can do, but they can’t do what we do; and that’s where the friction comes from.

--Lee Child, interviewed by Robert Bidinotto for The New Individualist

My response to that is: Lee Shoots, He Scores!



So what say all of you?

Writing Tips, Touring Quips & Blogging Blips

From the schizophrenic mind of Paul Levine...

How's this for a concise writing tip?

Character—objective—obstacle—conflict--emotion

A character seeks to achieve an objective but encounters obstacles, which gives rise to conflict and leads to emotion, not just for the character but also for the spectator....The action that a character adopts when faced with a conflict, either to prevent it or to overcome it, is one of the best indicators of the kind of person he is.

That's from "Writing Drama" by French screenwriter Yves Lavandier. While the book is primarily about screenwriting, the same character/conflict message is equally applicable to novels. This is echoed by Lee Goldberg who reviews the book on his blog:

Those may seem like obvious points, but it's surprising how many rookie screenwriters and novelists fail to realize how important conflict is, thinking instead that witty description in the action and expository dialogue are the best ways to reveal character.

What happens without sufficient conflict? Thud. Here's San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle on "Ladder 49," the John Travolta/Joaquin Phoenix film intended as a tribute to firefighters:

The movie's reverence gradually works to undermine it. "Ladder 49" is a movie almost entirely without conflict, at least of the human variety. A firefighter's family life is presented as next-door to idyllic. Firehouse high jinks are nothing but jolly and delightful. A comrade's death is sad, but not ultimately unsettling. In its determination to create a tribute, the filmmakers smooth too many edges and simplify too many complex emotions.

So, create conflict, dammit!
**********************************************
BOOK TOUR TIP FROM A WILY OLD EXPERT

As Patty Smiley tours the land with "Short Change," her third Tucker Sinclair mystery, I pass on this tip that may ease her days.

Years ago, Edna Buchanan was about to go on the road with "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face," so she asked Charles Willeford (right), the father of Florida crime fiction ("Miami Blues," etc.) if he had any book tour advice.

"Whenever you have a chance," Charlie said, "take a piss."
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SUN-SENTINEL KICKS MIAMI HERALD RIGHT IN THE COJONES.

It pains me to say this, but the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel is now far superior to The Miami Herald (a/k/a "Honey, Who Shrunk My Newspaper?").

I was a Miami Herald reporter a long time ago. How long? During the Nixon Administration. The first one. Vietnam, Woodstock, the moon landing. The Herald was, by far, the bigger and better newspaper then, and perhaps for the next 25 years. (No thanks to me, I might add).

Today, the Sun-Sentinel is sharper journalistically in practically every section of the paper. Shall we talk about books? If you log onto the Herald's Entertainment page, you'll find sections on Movies, Music, Restaurants, TV, Nightlife, Theater, Visual Arts, People, and Video Games. But no books.

Let me repeat them. Video Games, Sí. Books, No.

Fort Lauderdale readers are blessed to have two outstanding critics, Books Editor Chauncey Mabe and Mystery Reviewer Oline Cogdill. In addition to their regular reviews, they've just started a blog called "Off the Page."
Check it out here.
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A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED CONTEST

Larry Austin, an insurance agent, won the Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Contest in Key West last weekend.

An insurance agent! Wouldn't Papa be proud?

Shouldn't the contestants have to do something besides grow a beard? Write a short story, maybe? That's Larry, at the far right of the photo, apparently celebrating a policyholder's unsuccessful attempt to gain coverage for windstorms.
*************************************************

COLONOSCOPY REPORT

Neither WMD's nor hamsters were found up the President's butt. However, Sean Hannity was discovered lurking near W's pyloric sphincter.
********************************************
SHARE NAKED AUTHORS WITH A FRIEND

Please click on the envelope below to share today's blog with a friend, creditor, or the Department of Homeland Security.

Happy reading,

Paul

Armchair detectives

Patty here...

First of all I want to congratulate our very own Cornelia Read whose novel A Field of Darkness, starring amateur sleuth Madeline Dare, was just nominated for a "Best First" Barry Award by the readers of "Mystery News" and "Deadly Pleasures" magazines. The awards will be presented at Bouchercon in Anchorage the last week of September. Congratulations to all of the nominees but especially to the lovely and talented Ms. C!



I’ve been thinking a lot about amateur sleuths lately because I’m organizing a panel on that topic for the Southern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America in September. I’m also presenting a workshop on the same subject at a writer’s conference later in the year.

At a recent book event someone asked me if after writing four crime novels I thought I could crack a case on my own. Without hesitating, I said yes. (What was she smoking you ask) The Internet has changed everything but I had no idea how deeply one could delve into another’s personal life until I took a course taught by a former cop turned private investigator. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The first mystery novel I ever read featured ten year-old amateur detective, Trixie Belden. After that I was hooked.



I love to read about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. It’s not at all hard for me to believe that Joe Sixpack would become obsessed with solving a crime that no one else can crack. Look at Patricia Cornwall's Jack the Ripper investigation.

With rare exception, the only professionals whose job it is to investigate homicides are members of law enforcement. All of us NakedAuthors write about amateur sleuths except for James O. Paulie’s character is a lawyer. At least Steve Solomon has a reason to be around bad guys. He represents them. But the rest of our protags have to join the caper without challenging the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” It's not as easy as it sounds.

Maybe I chose to write about an amusing amateur sleuth who owns a terrier from watching the “The Thin Man” movie on TV. You can't beat William Powell and Myrna Loy solving crimes with the help of their wire-haired terrier, Asta.



I was also a sucker for Miss Marple, Mrs. Polifax, and TV's Jessica Fletcher, but I understand not everybody shares my tastes in mystery fiction. For the sake of research for my upcoming presentations, I’d like to take an informal survey. Do you read books featuring amateur sleuths? If so, why? If not, why not? What do you love about them? What do you hate about them? Who are your favorites? Here’s your chance to dish. Have at it.

Happy Monday!

Nature's Way

from Jacqueline

My mother grew up in Britain before the National Health Service, so like many of her generation, she's a fix-it-yourself kind of person, when it comes to the ills of her family. She also does not trust drug companies, so will always try to take the natural method of healing any medical problem over the pills prescribed by her doctors. As you probably know if you’ve read some of my posts in the past, about 18 months ago, Mum had to start taking pills for just about the first time in her life (she’s almost 80) following a minor stroke, and took it as a personal affront. This post isn’t exactly about my mother, it’s about me and those like me – those of us who look at the plant world to cure our ills, or turn to traditional healing methods that have stood the test of time. I guess that when it comes to medicine, I am my mother’s daughter.



That’s not to say I hold with some of her cures. I remember when I was about seven years old being stung by a wasp (a yellowjacket) on my derriere. My mother brought out that time-honored antidote to wasp sting – an onion. All I will say is that it is very hard to ride a bike with half an onion in your underwear.



Those early years of the National Health Service, which followed hot on the heels of a massive advertising campaign that lastest through much of the 1930’s and 40’s to get people out into the country and “hiking” (it’s an old word used by a British ad exec at the time, to describe a very brisk walk across the countryside. It’s a joining of “hill” and “walking”), saw a rise in vitamin supplements for children, especially following the dark years of rationing when kids suffered from all sorts of ills as a result of poor nutrition. My mother was determined to ensure that her children would not want for their vitamins, as she had throughout the war. Before I went to bed at night I was dosed up with a tablespoon of Virol, a thick, sweet malty goo that was, I think, loaded with Vitamin B. On top of that I had to glug down a tablespoon of rosehip syrup, and a halibut oil capsule. Actually, the Virol came last, because Mum gave us each our spoonful to suck on – and that brown treacly stuff always stuck to the top of your mouth and you spent the next hour trying to pry it away with your tongue, then it sat on your chest all night.



Despite the Virol and the onion, I have always been open to supplementing my diet with weird and wonderful things. Not that my mother’s healing methods necessarily did the trick. When my brother was six he had a dreadful stomach upset, so Mum brought out the old-fashioned ginger beer (if you’ve never had it, it’s like a frothier, more gingery version of ginger ale) known for diminishing the symptoms of gastric distress. The poor kid was chugging back glass upon glass of ginger beer, wondering when the pain would go away. In the meantime, the doctor thought he had a bug that was going round, and said that ginger beer would be just the thing. Of course it wasn’t a bug, it was peritonitis as a result of a ruptured appendix, and it’s a wonder he made it alive to the operating room.



Nevertheless, I have continued to try alternative or complimentary methods of healing or illness prevention before taking something with “Glaxo-Klein-Beecham” stamped on the side, or “Merck” across the top of the bottle. My husband suffers from a type of rheumatoid arthritis, so I went through a phase of researching everything I could on the disease, because it really is a nasty thing to have. I discovered that celery juice was found to be quite efficacious in the natural treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. For his birthday that year, I bought him a juicer and half a dozen head of celery to get him started. He just looked at me as if I had landed from another world, let alone another country. Of course. I should have guessed – his dad was a doctor and his mother was a nurse, so there’s no way my Cleveland lad was going to entertain the thought of ramming celery into a juicer every morning and – heaven forbid – drinking the stuff.



All this brings me to my latest ... what would you call it? Experiment? Yes, experiment.

About a week ago, I read an article on oil-pulling. What, may you ask, is oil-pulling (not to be confused with pulling someone who happens to be rich from work in oil)? Oil-pulling is, frankly, a really quite off-putting regime of ridding the body of bacteria and toxins using either sunflower oil or sesame oil. And the oils must be cold-pressed, not just refined through any old process. Basically, first thing in the morning, you take one tablespoon of the oil and use it like a mouthwash, swishing it around your mouth and through your teeth, but definitely not swallowing it. You do this for fifteen minutes. Each and every morning. Apparently, in certain cultures (in the Ukraine, in parts of India), this practice has been going on for aeons. Recently it has been the subject of much interest from the scientific and medical commuities, as it has been linked to success in healing conditions from arthritis to cancer, from high blood-pressure to behaviour issues. The theory is that the oil “pulls” all the nasty gremlins from the body, which is why, when you are done, you have to make sure you send all the spent oil down the sink and wash it away – because it’s chock-full of cooties.



I thought a photo of sunflowers would be more palatable than a sink draining.

I must confess, the thought of oil in my mouth just makes me heave. Yuk! However, I told another friend, who after several days of doing this (she just had to try it), reports that her teeth are whiter and that her skin has begun to clear up – she had some sort of excema. And, surprise, surprise – my mother tried it straightaway, which really amazed me as my Mum can’t even brush her teeth without gagging, she’s as sensitive about textures in her mouth as me. On the first day out with her sunflower oil, she managed to swish for twenty minutes (yeah, I know, five more minutes than the article said – I come from a competitve family).

So, the gauntlet has been thrown down. Just about everyone I have told about oil-pulling has tried it and continued on with the regime – it’s just me that’s completely turned off. I tried it yesterday and spent twenty minutes cleaning the bathroom mirror because the oil went everywhere when I nearly choked on the stuff.

I can hear you thinking, “Oh, this is what writers get up to when they’ve just sent back the final draft of their latest book and they’re sitting there, twiddling their thumbs.” But after watching Michael Moore’s Sicko last week, I think I’ve got to try everything I can to remain in the peak of physical condition. This is a country in which you cannot afford to get sick, whether you have insurance or not.



So, I’m curious – does anyone know what colonic irrigation actually is? It’s always sounded too weird to me, sort of Paris Hilton meets Deepak Chopra. And have you ever done something really strange and unusual in the name of good health?



PS: Do you know, that in British hospitals, they would always serve patients a half a pint of Guinness or another stout ale in the afternoons, because it’s loaded with health-inducing vitamins. When I was seven, I had to go into the hosptial for eye-surgery, and because I wasn’t allowed to play, they put me in a room between the men's surgical ward, and the womens’ surgical ward. To keep me occupied, the nurses would take me around with them when they were giving out the stout ration – the nurse would pour each beer and I would take the glass over to the patient. Needless to say, I was a very popular child. And I’d never seen so many grown-ups happy to see me.

Thrillerfest

Posted by James O. Born

Last week I attended Thrillerfest in New York. I had a great time at Thrillerfest in Scottsdale, Arizona, so I looked forward to this year’s event. One of the advantages to the New York local was that I got to meet with my publishers and agent. In fact, one of the highlights of the trip was a party at the Jane Rotrosen agency where my family and I wolfed down sushi with other clients. The office and weather were both beautiful and I felt lucky to have an agent like Meg Ruley. She rocks.

I had my camera and ended up taking three photos. All of my daughter or me and her. This is us in front of the famous Flatiron building. Sorry I don’t have any of the conference.

I was on two panels Saturday morning. I was the “Panel Master” of the first one dealing with villains. Being the moderator is a lot of pressure. You have to keep things moving and take the blame if the panel sucks. I was lucky and got a good group which included the fabulous Robin Burcell, Robert Fate and J.D. Rhoades.

Now, Dusty Rhoades is a friend of mine and I knew to expect the unexpected but this is the bio he sent me to read as an introduction:

J.D. Rhoades never knew his parents; he was found abandoned on the steps of a cut-rate Filipino tax preparation service in Slidell, La. As a child, he was bounced around between a series of orphanages, reformatories and opium dens. His first brush with the law came when he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. He was seven years old at the time.

He first turned to drugs at the age of five, when he discovered you could get high by snorting Nestle’s Quik through a rolled up copy of Highlights magazine. Since then, he claims to have ingested marijuana, peyote, heroin, psilocybin, uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, dried banana peels, glue, paste, mucilage, LSD, DMT, STP, ABC, CNN, TLC, Sterno, Drano, Bondo, Ketamine, Dopamine, glucosamine, Ovaltine, and Krispy Kreme.

He decided to turn his life around after he did all of the above in the same night. He woke up two weeks later, hanging upside down by his knees from a tree limb in Duluth, Minn., singing an Aria from “Die Fledermaus.” In German. And he doesn’t even speak German. That’s how JD rolls, baby.

He once killed a stripper with a fondue fork and disposed of the body using an electric pencil sharpener. It took 14 hours.

He knows Tom DeLay personally.

You can guess how the panel went.


The very next hour, I was a member of the panel on Tracking Serial Killers. This is where the photo of me and Michelle Gagnon was shot which appeared on Paul’s post Tuesday. Her debut novel, The Tunnels sold out at the conference and is excellent!

Jeffery Deaver was also on the panel. I had never met him before and he proved to be a very nice guy. He is also a gun collector and seemed to know his stuff.

It was a fun weekend and I got a lot of dad points for the effort.

Ken Bruen on CBS Late Late Show!!!

I saw the show, which aired on 7/10, on my DVR. I've heard it was on You Tube, but I haven't been able to find it.

Ken was his usual, charming self and I liked that Craig Ferguson appreciated his work.

Give Ken a pat on the back for a job well done.

See you next week,

Jim

Time and Place

By Cornelia

I recently taught a writing intensive with the wonderful Kathryn Wall at the Book Passage mystery writers' conference. Our topic was the use of time and place in mysteries, and it was a fun thing to prep for, since we both picked out some passages from our favorite books to illustrate how it can be done most effectively.

I chose passages that were mostly to do with time--ways that different decades and centuries can be indicated on the page without necessarily stating a date.

I thought it would be cool to post some of them here, along with a few more favorites (click on the red text, below, for more information about the books and authors cited).

Istanbul. Three-thirty in the afternoon, the violet hour. Serebin stared out the window of the taxi as it rattled along the wharves of the Golden Horn. The Castle of Indolence. He'd always thought of it that way--melon rinds with clouds of flies, a thousant cats, rust stains on porphyry columns, strange light, strange shadows in a haze of smoke and dust, a street where blind men sold nightingales.

--Alan Furst, Blood of Victory

I looked around at the pilot. He was a short little man, his cap backwards on his head, wearing an oil stained sheep-skin coat and big gloves. Then the plane began to move along the ground, bumping like a motorcycle, and then slowly rose into the air.

We headed almost straight east out of Paris, rising in the air as though we were sitting inside a boat that was being lifted slowly by some giant, and the ground began to flatten beneath us. It looked cut into brown squares, yellow squares, green squares, and big flat blotches of green where there was a forest. I began to understand cubist painting.

--Ernest Hemingway, “A Paris-to-Strasbourg Flight,” The Toronto Daily Star, 1922
from By-line Ernest Hemingway, edited by William White

Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the road under our sneakers was only a two-track road. The middle track was missing, the one with the marks of the hooves and the splotches of dried, flaky manure. There had always been three tracks to choose from in choosing which track to walk in; now the choice was narrowed down to two. For a moment I missed terribly the middle alternative. But the way led past the tennis court, and something about the way it lay there in the sun reassured me; the tape had loosened along the backline, the alleys were green with plantains and other weeds, and the net (installed in June and removed in September) sagged in the dry noon, and the whole place steamed with midday heat and hunger and emptiness.

There was a choice of pie for dessert, and one was blueberry and one was apple, and the waitresses were the same country girls, there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain—the waitresses were still fifteen; their hair had been washed, that was the only difference—they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with the clean hair.

--E.B. White, “Once More to the Lake,” 1941

Then, bumping each other with our hips to make room, the three of us would press together in front of Mrs. Silver’s full-length mirror to comb our hair and practice looking cool. We wore our hair long at the sides, swept back into a ducktail. The hair on top we combed toward the center and then forward, with spit curls breaking over our foreheads. My mother detested this hairdo and forbade me to wear it, which meant that I wore it everywhere but at home, sustaining the distinctness of two different styles with gobs of Butch Wax that left my hair glossy and hard and my forehead ringed with little pimples.

Unlit cigarettes dangling from the corners of our mouths, eyelids at half mast, we studied ourselves in the mirror. Spit curls. Pants pulled down low around our hips, thin white belts buckled on the side. Shirts with three-quarter length sleeves. Collars raised behind our necks. We should have looked cool, but we didn’t.

--Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life 1989

There is a more prominent accent around here, which is known (nationally as I've discovered) as Locust Valley Lockjaw. This condition usually afflicts women, but men often display strong symptoms. With Locust Valley Lockjaw, one has the ability to speak in complete and mostly understandable sentences--including words with lots of broad vowels--and do so without opening one's mouth, sort of like a ventriloquist. It's quite a trick, and Susan can do it really well when she's with her bitchy friends. I mean, you can be having a drink on the club patio, for instance, and watch four of them sitting around a nearby table, and it looks like they're silently sneering at each other, but then you hear words, whole sentences. I never get over it.

--Nelson DeMille, Gold Coast, 1990

It was never a question of if one of the Crabtrees' Dobermans would get loose and go after Genny. It was when. Those animals were just this side of wild and mean straight through. They had been trained as guard dogs by Ona's oldest boy, Lobe. He'd employed some half-assed Crabtree methodology, probably a booklet found among the impulse items they kept by the register at the Loganville Piggly Wiggly: 30 Days to Deadly Dogs. Add in general Crabtree carelessness, and apply these factors to a swinging gate held closed by a long chain that had to be wrapped three times around the posts before it was padlocked. It was the algebraic formula for doom.

--Joshilyn Jackson, Between, Georgia 2006

Lindsey lived in one of the Palisades' alphabet streets. Highly prized real estate, each street in the residential grid started with a successive letter of the alphabet beginning with Albright and ending with Kagawa. The Ramseys lived on Galloway, between Fiske and Hartzell. Total yuppie land.

Practically every driveway sported a BMW or one of those four-wheel drive vehicles that ate through brakes like candy. Munch worked on a lot of those at her shop in Brentwood and had even invested in the special tools necessary to remove the hubs. She didn't understand the attraction of Chevy Blazers. Jeep Cherokees, Land Rovers, and those monstrous ten-passenger Suburbans that the sushi-eaters drove. It wasn't like they ever went off-road, and trucks were much more expensive to keep up. Maybe that was the point.

--Barbara Seranella, No Man Standing, 2002

There were victim walls like this every few miles in the city now. They sprouted up in parks and at hospitals, on schools and on subway platforms—anywhere people could think to tape up pictures. As soon as one photo went up, people rushed from their apartments and houses to fill the entire wall with pictures. There could be no single photograph of the missing; every wall had to be covered, every space filled. And as a survivor, you had to stop and look at the pictures because that was what was required of you.



Of course, these people weren’t missing people anymore; they were dead people now. Everyone knew they were dead. There were no stories of people from these walls being found alive (and still: the dream of amnesiacs wandering suburban hospitals) and yet Remy stopped and looked anyway, and as the walls made this quiet shift from the missing to the dead, he looked at them differently, mentally riffling the faces and pausing on the familiar—a glimmer of recognition and hope—until he remembered that he’d just seen that face on the wall in Washington Square, or at St. Vincent’s, and eventually Remy came to wonder if maybe he hadn’t known them all, every one of these people….

--Jess Walter, The Zero 2006

I'd love to hear back from you guys about passages and settings you're particularly fond of. If you could visit a time and place from one particular book, what would it be?

p.s. If anyone's in the vicinity of Burlingame, California, tonight Cara Black and I will be having a talk at the library at 480 Primrose Road at 7:30, and would love to see you there.

Of Bulls & Bullshit

By Paul "Farmboy" Levine


I'm not a member of PETA. I'm not an animal rights activist. But some actions toward animals are so patently offensive as to shock the conscience of any civilized society. I speak of bullfighting and the annual "running of the bulls" in Pamplona. If you're like me, you root for the bulls. (Nearly all these animals will shortly be executed in so-called bullfights.)

I cheer when some macho jerk gets gored. Or, when a clever bull takes out three guys at once, including kicking one cabron in the cojones.


The Spanish newspaper "Diario de Navarra" reports that two American brothers, Lawrence and Michael Lenahan, were gored simultaneously in the buttocks by the same bull! This overhead photo captures the moment quite nicely.


ARE THESE BROTHERS ASSHOLE BUDDIES, OR WHAT?

The injuries weren't serious. Here's Lawrence Lenahan, enjoying his celebrity in a Spanish hospital.


"YOU THINK THEY'LL PUT ME ON LARRY KING?" (Okay, I wrote that line of mock dialogue before learning that both brothers were interviewed live yesterday on NBC's TODAY show. Ah, celebrity in America now includes getting a bull's horn rammed up your ass).

I also cheer for the anti-bullfight group that holds its own event, the Running of the Nudes. (How could "Naked Authors" not like these folks?)



This animal-rights group is signing up runners for next year's event. I believe Jim Born has already booked his reservations.
**********************************************

LITERARY NEWS


JIM BORN CHECKS OUT MICHELE GAGNON'S DECOLLETAGE AT THRILLERFEST

Also, big congrats to the winners of the 2007 Thriller Awards. Best Novel: Joseph Finder's "Killer Instinct." Best First Novel: Nick Stone's "Mr. Clarinet." And a special hug for my pals Kris Montee and her sister Kelly Nichols, writing as P.J. Parrish. Their novel, "An Unquiet Grave," won Best Paperback Original, besting "The Deep Blue Alibi" and three others. "Grave" is also up for this year's Shamus award.

**********************************************
PAUL CAVORTS WITH FARM ANIMALS (IN A DECENT WAY)

While Jim was frolicking at Thrillerfest and Patty was flogging "Short Change," which is on my short list to read, I attended the Kings County Fair in Hanford, CA. That's way up in the San Joaquin Valley (Slogan: "It's Hot & Dusty & There's Nothing To Do.")

I wanted to see the livestock exhibition and auction. Why? Can't tell you. Trade secret, for now.

But, to paraphrase Robert Duvall in "Apocalypse Now," I love the smell of manure in the morning.

No, not the bullshit coming from Washington. Not, We've got to fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here.

I'm talking about real cow manure, folks. I grew up in a little dairy farming town in central Pennsylvania, and during planting season, when the wind was right, the earthy smell would permeate the burg, from Main Street to the creek (pronounced "crick") at the end of town.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE KINGS COUNTY FAIR


Can you distinguish a Holstein cow...



From a Brown Swiss cow...?



President Bush and Vice President Cheyney made surprise visits to the Fair...



More barnyard fun, later. Finally...

*************************************************
MORE WIT & WISDOM FROM THE CHEERLEADER-IN-CHIEF


"I've heard he's been called Bush's poodle. He's bigger than that."
--June 27, 2007, regarding outgoing British P.M. Tony Blair

"I'm honored to be here with the eternal general of the United States, mi amigo Alberto Gonzales."
--May 4, 2007

"Suiciders are willing to kill innocent life in order to send the projection that this is an impossible mission."
--April 3, 2007

PLUS THESE ALL-TIME FAVORITES

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
--August 5, 2004

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."
--June 18, 2002

"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."
--September 6, 2004

AND A STUNNING EXAMPLE OF CLEAR, CONSISTENT, INCISIVE THINKING

"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him."
--September 13, 2001

Precisely six months later...

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
--March 12, 2002

By Paul

On the road again, Part III

Patty here…

The Book Tour

I love that Willie Nelson song. I’m on the road again for the third time, peddling my new book, SHORT CHANGE. I’m following the trail of NakedAuthor bookmarks left at venues across the land by our very own Paul Levine whose latest Solomon-Lord novel—TRIAL & ERROR—is now on bookstore shelves and in my To Be Read pile.



Maybe someday we NakedAuthors can coordinate a same-day release for all our books. We can rent a bus and go on the road together. Want to come along?



I can almost hear Willie in my head…

On the road again
Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway
We're the best of friends
Insisting that the world be turnin' our way
And our way
Is on the road again
Just can't wait to get on the road again
The life I love is makin' music with my friends
And I can't wait to get on the road again

Alas, until that happens we travel alone, hawking our wares, pausing with trepidation at the door of each bookstore, wondering if anybody will be inside waiting for us.

I had two book signings on Saturday. My first stop was Mysteries To Die For in Thousand Oaks, a great independent mystery bookstore run by The Fabulous Threesome. I missed seeing Groupie there. He was at Thrillerfest hobnobbing with the literati, but I signed a book for him, nonetheless.

Later that afternoon I made my way to The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles, located in Westwood just adjacent to the UCLA campus. The extraordinary Bobby, Linda, Richard, and the rest of the crew welcomed me with their usual elan.



A group of friends, relatives, and die-hard supporters were there, too, personal cheerleaders who have been with me from the beginning. At both signings I saw familiar faces in the audience. Repeat offenders. Two of my favorite words. I also saw new faces. Two more of my favorite words.

And then there was Elisa. She didn’t start out as a fan of my books. She became one through a shared adventure. About a year ago I was leaving the West Hollywood Book Fair, heading to the parking structure at the Pacific Design Center, which we Angelenos affectionately call “The Blue Whale.”



I retraced my steps to the door from which I’d exited the building, arriving at the same time as Elisa did. The door was locked. There was nothing to do but walk to an alternate entrance. The building is huge. It was going to be a long hike. We had just rounded the first corner when Elisa came to a dead stop. Looming ahead of her was a wall topped with a fence strung with metal wires. On the other side was the coveted parking garage. She eyed it for a moment.

“I’m going over.”

"Um, seriously," I said. "Are you nuts?"

Despite my skepticism and our attire (She was wearing a dress. I was wearing a pair of "Sex and the City" strappy sandals.), she began scaling the wall and then vaulted over the top. Not to be outdone, I followed her. It was a Tucker-worthy escapade.

Later as we climbed the stairs to our respective cars, we chatted and I gave her a copy of my first book, FALSE PROFITS. Much to my surprise, she emailed me a few days later to tell me she loved the book and had already bought COVER YOUR ASSETS.

I always remember this story as a rollicking good adventure but on Saturday I felt truly touched when Elisa and her main squeeze came to my signing in Westwood. She bought a copy of SHORT CHANGE and told me she loved how I handled the Southern California setting in my books. Said it made her feel as if she was right there with Tucker on her travels. She also told me she had taken up rock climbing. Somehow I’m not surprised.

Okay, I don’t want to get maudlin here, but I have to tell you. The support of old friends and new friends like Elisa, people who take the time to send fan mail, and my wonderful NakedAuthors family is what makes those dark days at my computer worthwhile. So thanks. Really.

Here are some of my upcoming book events in case you're in the neighborhood:

Saturday, July 21 at 1:00 p.m.
Book Carnival
348 S. Tustin Avenue
Orange, CA
(714) 538-3210
Website

Monday, July 23 at 7:00 p.m.

Redondo Beach Public Library
303 N. Pacific Coast Highway
Redondo Beach, CA
with Harley Jane Kozak and Linda O. Johnston

Saturday, July 28 from 2-4 p.m
Beale Memorial Library
701 Truxtun Avenue
Bakersfield CA
with Naomi Hirahara and Denise Hamilton

Miscellany

#1 Whether you’re nine or ninety, I highly recommend the film “Ratatouille.” The animation is truly amazing. The music is wonderful. The writing is topnotch. And seriously, how can you resist a guy who looks like this?



#2 The following Web site features authors expounding on the significance of page 69 in their novels. It’s a clever idea. Here’s my contribution for SHORT CHANGE.

#3 And in case you’re not yet sick of hearing me talk about me, here’s an online interview featuring—what else?—ME!!!

I'll stop now. Happy Monday!

What's It All About?

from Jacqueline

I promise, there is more to my life than lingering on the politics of the day, but sometimes I just can’t help it, I have to say what’s in my head (my family, at this point, are collectively cringing in their homes. Uh-oh, here she goes again). But sometimes, events and reflections in one’s personal life intersect with the news of the day.

My Uncle Jim died a few weeks ago, the first of my mother’s brothers to pass away. He was eighty three, and the oldest son in a family of ten kids – there are eight of them still living. When I was a child, my uncles were larger than life characters, men who drove a motley assortment of cars – or in Uncle Jim’s case a green van – and came down to our house in the country with most of the family on board because only a few of them could afford cars. My uncles were, to the utter delight of my cousins and I (about thirty of us, perhaps more), practical jokers and more than a little crazy. We’d be driving to the beach, hardly able to move because someone else’s elbow was in your side, and the convoy would stop at a junction, or pedestrian crossing. Without warning, Uncle Jim would leap out of his car and pretend to pick an argument with Uncle Charlie. Uncle Joe would come running up to join in, and before you knew it, there would be a crowd watching, with all us cousins giggling, our mothers sliding down in their seats. Then they would all get back in their cars and off we’d go, until the next game, whatever it might be. I loved those days when my quiet childhood was thrown asunder by the boisterous visitors.

As we all grew older, my cousins and I, those days became fewer until they ended. When I was at college in London, one of my cousins would occasionally turn up to see me, or I’d go to see them. We were all making our independent way in the world, but I still saw Uncle Jim throughout the course of my college years. I was walking across campus one day when, in the distance I saw a man waving to me. I squinted, stopped, looked again, and a cold shiver went down my spine. I looked around to see if anyone else was close by. If this was Uncle Jim, then anything could happen – he might pretend, in a loud voice, to be a bodyguard sent by my parents to take me home for staying out all night. But instead he said that he’d had some work in the area, and thought he’d drop by to see how I was doing. I thought my London family was perhaps wondering how the country kid was faring in the city. So we sat on a bench and began talking of matters of the world, of the things that didn’t make sense. “What’s it all about?” he asked, a question that was his hallmark and that often peppered his conversation. “What’s it all about?” And in my naiveté, I tried to answer him, until, realizing I couldn’t, we just sat together, each with our thoughts, trying to figure out the answers.

Uncle Jim came to see me quite a few times, and we’d sit and talk in that way, and I never did try to answer that question again. The problems of the world were beyond my ken.

My mother says that Jim was never quite the same after he went ashore on D-day and his best friend was shot to pieces before his eyes. He had to keep on running through the dead and dying, as he was part of a platoon with a mission to move into the villages and overcome the enemy.

I thought of Uncle Jim and his question this week, when I read news of a report has yet to be published in the United States, regarding a study of US military personnel at war in Iraq, and the comments they’ve made about some of the things they’ve done and the people they’ve become. It’s a confession, of sorts. Here are a few of them:

Sgt John Bruhns, 29, of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Armoured Division, described a typical raid. "You want to catch them off guard," he explained. "You want to catch them in their sleep ... You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall... Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds. You'll ask 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda?'

Sgt Dougherty described her squad leader shooting an Iraqi civilian in the back in 2003. "The mentality of my squad leader was like, 'Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don't have to kill them back in Colorado'," she said. "He just seemed to view every Iraqi as a potential terrorist."

'It would always happen. We always got the wrong house... people would make jokes about it, even before we'd go into a raid, like, 'Oh fuck, we're gonna get the wrong house'. Cause it would always happen. We always got the wrong house."

Here are some more:

"I had to go tell this woman that her husband was actually dead. We gave her money, we gave her, like, 10 crates of water, we gave the kids, I remember, maybe it was soccer balls and toys. We just didn't really know what else to do." (Lieutenant Jonathan Morgenstein, 35, of Arlington, Virginia, Marine Corps civil affairs unit. In Ramadi from August 2004 to March 2005)

"We were approaching this one house... and we're approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, cause it's doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it... So I see this dog - I'm a huge animal lover... this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, what the hell is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words." (Specialist Philip Chrystal, 23, of Reno, 3rd Battalion, 116th Cavalry Brigade. In Kirkuk and Hawija on 11-month tour beginning November 2004)

"The car was approaching what was in my opinion a very poorly marked checkpoint... and probably didn't even see the soldiers... The guys got spooked and decided it was a possible threat, so they shot up the car. And they [the bodies] literally sat in the car for the next three days while we drove by them. (Sergeant Dustin Flatt, 33, of Denver, 18th Infantry Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. One-year from February 2004)

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned... [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little two-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs and she has a bullet through her leg... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me... like asking me why. You know, 'Why do I have a bullet in my leg?'... I was just like, 'This is, this is it. This is ridiculous'." (Specialist Michael Harmon, 24, of Brooklyn, 167th Armour Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. In Al-Rashidiya on 13-month tour beginning in April 2003)

"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want." (Specialist Josh Middleton, 23, of New York City, 2nd Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division. Four-month tour in Baghdad and Mosul beginning December 2004)

And here is a story my Uncle Jim told my mother, when he came home from France, after spending time in a hospital for men with shell-shock. Some of the details may be wrong, you know how stories can change over time. Uncle Jim and his platoon made it through enemy fire to a town that was thought to be evacuated. Running from building to building, with enemy snipers looking for them, their task was to move the enemy back, obviously, so that other troops could move further inland. They were crouching in doorways, trying not to be seen by the snipers, when a small boy came running down the street – having seen them, he was calling out to them, giving away their position. Someone shot the little boy right in front of my uncle, and it marked him for life. So, when I read the article – which will be published in full in The Nation at the end of the month – I felt every ounce of energy leave my body. I am so sick of all this killing. I’m sick that young men and women are put in a position where they take actions that will haunt them forever. I'm not excusing them, just achingly sad that it has come to this. And I am so sick that our voices are not heard, whether we are here in the USA, in Europe, or whether we are the 90% of Muslims who have had our religion snatched from us and rebundled by fundamentalists (and why hasn’t that 90% come out to raise a voice yet?).

I remember once, when I was in my mid-teens, hearing Uncle Jim talking to my mum. “I miss those days when they were all little kids, all of us playing around in the sea, having a lark.” I think he missed what I miss, those times of innocence.

I know I could turn my back on the news. I could shrug until it’s all over. But that would make me complicit. As the saying goes, “If you aren’t outraged, then you aren’t paying attention." Yet I cannot help but think of my Uncle Jim when I think of the scars on the soul left by this war. I think of sitting on a bench with him and that question lingering in the air.

What’s it all about?





FYI: The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness, by Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian, appears in the 30 July issue of The Nation

Annoying Celebrities

from James

I’ve written a few columns on what good people writers are. How much I like most people in the publishing industry. I have even written, and I believe, that most people are basically good. But there are a few who annoy me. Usually for no real reason. Certainly for nothing they’ve ever done to me personally because I’ve never met anyone on this list. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to smack them. Not hard, just enough to get them to shut up. Maybe knock out a tooth or two. Break a nose or an orbital socket. You know, mar their looks and ego more than anything else.

Let’s see, who would make this list in no particular order, to go with the no particular reason they’re on this list.

John Mayer. Maybe it’s his lyrics. Maybe it’s his easy-going style and good looks. More likely it’s the rumor that he hooked up with Jessica Simpson. But this guy’s voice causes me to have convulsions. And the words to his hit about daughters growing up to be lovers and mothers kinda gives me the creeps.

Keith Olbermann. This pseudo-journalist, he is too opinionated to be a journalist, seems to have forgotten that he was an ESPN sportscaster. He was a sports guy! Who gives a damn what he thinks about anything other than baseball or basketball. Has he ever been to Iraq? The other anchors all have. He was sports guy. (This was written before I knew he had so many fans on this blog. I'm sorry, he still annoys me.)

Courtney Love. I don’t know why she’s famous other than marrying well. I’ve heard her band, Hole, and think she’s lucky she has back-up income. But the reason she annoys me is that she seems to be always on some sort of narcotic. That doesn’t bother me as much as she appears to be proud of it and most important: She has children. Where is the state on this issue?

Bill O’Reilly. I get it, you hate spin. How about talk? You don’t seem to let others do much of it on your show. Now one reason I’m not over blustery on Mr. O’Reilly is that he’s like 6’5” and I’m a little scared. Other than that he’s an ass. I guess you can tell I boycott a lot of 8:00 pm TV.

Bryant Gumble. See Keith Olbermann.

Arrianna Huffington. Is she conservative? Liberal? Who cares? She’s rich and thinks people should listen to her. She gives me a headache. What has she done to deserve that kind of attention?

Nick Nolte. He’s mainly on the list because of the cool booking photo from a drunk driving arrest. But he also turned his back in protest when Elia Kazan received his lifetime achievement award. I understand the resentment people feel for someone who identified communists during the McCarthy era but this jerk actually thinks he would’ve been tough enough to stand up to the pressure of the federal government. I doubt it. Now, fifty odd years later, he thinks he looks cool protesting a 94 year old man. This obnoxious hypocrite can kiss my ass. Excuse me, that’s rude.

Paris Hilton. Too easy.

I want to hear from people who have done something. Been in the military. Lived in Arab countries. Risked their lives for others. I don’t want to hear from people because they have money or are attractive. (Insert your favorite Jeff Shelby joke here)

The idea that the model, Petra Nemcova, who happened to be caught in the tsunami of 2005, feels she should write about her experience upsets me. There were hundreds of thousands of people caught in that tragedy. Are you telling me because she’s cute she should be the one that documents the event?

You get the drift. What celebrity annoys you?

NOW TO COUNTER THIS NEGATIVE KARMA

I honestly don't like writing somethingg negative like this. But I do like mentioning good books.

This Saturday, in New York, our own Paul Levine's fabulous Deep Blue Alibi will be considered as the best paperback thriller of the year. He has my heartiest good wishes.

Good luck Paul!!!