Jangling Jargon

Whilst searching for a displacement activity yesterday (to postpone writing this blog), I was driven to read my University of Washington alumni bulletin.  Most of the time it lets me know what the football team is doing, but lo, this issue featured an article about the English department.

I nearly derailed at the headline: “Composition Research Team Collaborates to Better Understand Student Writing,” and, no doubt, to boldly go where no man has gone before.  But who among us has not split an infinitive?  I plunged in.  It seems a team of graduate students has decided to study freshman comp inmates to see whether they are applying what they learn about writing to other classes–a logical if depressing subject for research.  Their first chore was “to determine a methodology for finding themes and patterns in the data to better understand how … conversations were preparing students to make connections that lead to knowledge transfer.”  Apparently “the nature of the collaborative exchange … plays an important role in getting students to a point where they are comfortable making connections that are nuanced and complex.”  I gave up.  Why does the jargon of writing teachers have to be as ugly and bloodless as a five-day-old corpse?

My thoughts drifted to jargon–that is, to professional dialects like the one I had just sampled.  Fiction writers make a decision early on as to how they’re going to present spoken language.  Very few these days spell regional dialects phonetically, but most find a way to suggest the patterns of local speech.  Margaret Maron, for instance, has a great ear and conveys the speakers’ North Carolina usage unobtrusively and effectively.  Professional jargon is a more difficult problem.

Cops should sound like cops and doctors like doctors, but all of us dread writing the scene in which the medical examiner tells the detective what killed the victim.  The reader wallows in the gabble of two difference professions.  Since most readers aren’t fluent in either coptalk or medicalese, how much jargon should a writer use?  The logical answer is as much as it takes.  I enjoy Kathy Reichs’s novels when I’m feeling bloodthirsty, but there’s a point in almost all of them where the eager reader bogs down in a swamp of pathology.  Sometimes the swamp is two pages deep.  At the end of it, the reader says, “Oh, she didn’t drown.  He whopped her upside the head,” and either forges on or throws the book at the wall.

Police jargon and medical jargon aren’t the only professional dialects to show up in mysteries.  Legalese looms large in courtroom dramas for obvious reasons.  Dick Francis, whom I read compulsively, used the lingo associated with horse racing, but a great many of his books also use the language of other professions effectively–pilot talk, the jargon of banking, even wine selling.

What are the justifications for using jargon at all?  It exists so the pros can exchange precise information economically.  It’s a badge of membership, proof that the speaker is a doctor or a cop.  It also adds an illusion of realism to the story.  It says “this could really happen.”  Less respectably, it’s a slap in the face to non-professionals, in this case readers, to keep them from asking embarrassing questions like “isn’t that a gross coincidence?”

As a mystery reader, I prefer writers who keep the jargon to a minimum.  As a mystery writer, I envy science fiction writers their subversive inventiveness.  A recent article in Yahoo News pointed out that the term “space shuttle” was first used in an episode of Star Trek and that NASA as well as the media then adopted it to describe the vehicle that carries crew and supplies to the orbital space station.  Nor is “shuttle” the only example of professionals mining science fiction for new jargon.  What a pity we can’t invent our own technobabble for mysteries.

My Life With Horses

by Laura Crum

My first memory is of riding a horse at the family ranch. I believe I was about three. I am sitting in front of my uncle Todd on a dark horse, I remember the black mane. We are loping alongside a dirt road that led from the main ranch to the lower barn. My parents are driving in their two tone gold and white sedan (this would have been 1960) along the bumpy road. From my seat on the horse they appear small, far beneath my lordly height. They wave to me.
I remember the wind and the flying dark mane and the rhythm of the lope, the sense of power and speed and freedom. I remember feeling both literally and symbolically above my parents in the car. We were going FASTER than the car. I was on a horse. I do not know if I was obsessed with horses before this moment, but I certainly was afterwards. I can chronicle my life through horses from this point forward.
I don’t have a photo of that early ride; I do have a photo of a moment that I don’t remember. My uncle was selling a pony named Tarbaby, and apparently I was placed on the pony to show how gentle he was. The notation below the photo indicates that I was two years, three months. I certainly look happy. The back of the photo reads, “Pony For Sale.”

After this my horse memories become random. I remember once being at the lower barn with my father (who was no horseman). Again, I would have been three or four. My uncle had a sorrel horse tied to a hitching rail. I must have begged to sit on the horse, though I don’t remember this. I do remember my father asking my uncle if he could put me on the horse. And all these many years later, I remember the hesitant tone in my uncle’s voice as he said, “Sure.” And I remember him quickly stepping up to untie the horse (good move). I sat happily on that horse for a few moments and then was put down again. End of story. But I wonder if that horse was all that gentle.

My uncle only occasionally made time to put me up on his horses. But I helped him feed, if I was allowed to, and I just plain followed him around whenever I could. By the time I was six or seven, I knew all his “regular” horses by name. Since my uncle was something of a horse trader, there were horses that came and went. But Lad, the gentle brown gelding with the blaze face, was a good rope horse and a permanent resident. I was sometimes allowed to ride Lad, when my uncle had time to supervise. There was Dutch, who had to be put down due to a broken leg. And when I was about eight years old, my uncle bought a wonderful horse named Mr Softime.
I don’t have any photos of Mr Softime, but I remember him perfectly. A bright bay with no white and a big kind eye. Softime was an ex-racehorse, an appendix bred QH, which means half TB and bred to run. In short, he was a hot horse, and only four years old. I was not allowed to ride him—for many years. But I hung around his corral and fed him grass all day, if nobody ran me off. Many years later I bought Burt, pictured below, because he reminded me of Softime.

As I got older, I learned to ride—because I insisted on it. My parents had no interest in horses, but I pestered my uncle, and I begged my parents for riding lessons, which they somewhat grudgingly agreed to. I rode English at a local riding school and learned to jump. But my heart was always with the cowboys.
Once I could ride tolerably well (at about eleven or twelve), my uncle let me ride his rope horses and his trading horses. And thus I grew up riding a wide selection of horses, some of whom were quite willing to buck and bolt and rear, let alone spook and be what English riders call “very forward.” I rode them all. But Lad, with his big white blaze, and a sorrel horse named Tovy were the two steady Eddies who stayed until they died and carried me on many of my childhood horseback adventures.
And I had my share of adventures. We used to slide the horses down the fifty foot sawdust piles at the old ranch and jump them over handmade jumps created out of pallets and crates, and when I was fourteen I regularly rode Lad solo through the hills and down the suburban streets—usually bareback. At fifteen I was allowed to buy my own horse (with my hard earned money) and for $175 (cheap even then) I bought a recalcitrant bay gelding named Jackson.
Jackson had many faults and few virtues. The virtues were that he was sound and cheap and an OK trail horse. The faults were that he was ill broke and stubborn, willing to kick and rear and not particularly cooperative about anything. But I was fifteen and I thought I was tough and I rode this critter solo through the hills and down busy roads and often swam him across the San Lorenzo River (again solo—I have no idea what my parents were thinking or if perhaps they secretly wished to be rid of me). Once when I was saddling Jackson by myself at the small shack of a barn behind our neighbor’s house where I kept him, he kicked me in the head and knocked me out. When I came to, I finished saddling him and went riding. I never told my parents.
Eventually I figured out that Jackson was not much of a deal and I sold him to the local riding school. I was all of nineteen and I had an even BETTER idea than buying another ill-broke backyard horse. I would buy an unbroken colt and train it myself(!)
Never mind that I had never actually trained a horse myself. I had ridden plenty of green horses and I had survived Jackson—what could go wrong?
So did I buy a gentle colt, carefully chosen for me by my experienced uncle? Well, no. I bought a completely untouched four-year-old mare with very hot bloodlines, and this choice was Ok’d by my experienced uncle. In retrospect I’m pretty sure he must have wanted to be rid of me, too.
Honey, the mare, was a handful. She was also a very “marish” mare. Pretty much put me off mares for life. And really, she would have been a difficult project for an experienced horseman. She barely knew how to lead when I got her and she was in the fall of her four-year-old year and as full of herself as a horse can get.
I got her broke. I didn’t die. But by the time she was five and was reasonably safe to ride, I had learned that she did not love me and I did not love her. So I sold her and bought a very cute 5 year old green broke gelding who was for sale cheap. I was in college by then and I took this horse, Hobby, off to school with me.
Hobby was cute, but stubborn. I found out very soon why I had been able to afford this horse. He bolted whenever he felt like it, and nothing, including pulling his nose around and dallying the rein to the saddle horn, would stop him. He just ran until he fell down.
A year of this and I had him cured of most of his bad habits, but once again, I was sick of him. I sold him to a woman who kept him the rest of his life and taught her kids to ride on him (and they won a bunch on him in the show ring), so I guess I did an OK job with his training. But I wanted a forever horse. One that I really liked. And then came Burt.

(to be continued)

PS—For those who may wonder what the heck horses might have to do with this blog, my mystery series has an equine vet for a protagonist and is very horse-themed. I like to let readers know that I come by my knowledge of horses quite honestly. No internet research involved here (!)

Deja Whew

I’ve avoided reading my old books. I prefer being delusional—not that I imagine them to be better than they were. No,  I love being sure that the last one I wrote was better than the others and proves I’ve grown as a writer.

And then there’s the smaller consideration: how many typos did I miss and how many clunky sentences did I fail to fix?

But now I’m trapped in my own past. My new ebook publisher—BooksBNimble—is doing the Jake Samson books as well as Blackjack and I’ve been proofing. This week I’m reading through Samson’s Deal, the first one in the series. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I had a memory that it wasn’t very good. My first effort in the genre. Almost my first book. How embarrassed would I have to be if my students read it?

Cringing, which is very hard to do when you’re sitting at a keyboard, I peeked inside.

Would the characters be ridiculous? Would the plot be weak? My questions were beginning to sound like someone singing “My Funny Valentine.” When you open it to speak, are you smart?

Only one thing I found embarrassing. Over and over again I committed the crime I warn my students about. Word repetition. The old “I guess that’s your favorite word, huh?” problem. So if you read it, or reread it, forgive me for that.  

But still, I began to enjoy myself. Literally. The self of quite a few years ago. And Jake the alter ego. And Rosie. His cats Tigris and Euphrates and her standard poodle Alice B. Toklas. The house and cottage where they lived, my old house and cottage in Oakland. A time machine that took me back to there and then. And the book was pretty good, too, much to my relief. Not to toot my own horn. Isn’t that a wonderful expression? Must go back to medieval trumpeters.

I digress. The book doesn’t go back that far. Quite. But it was a world without cell phones, personal computers, supermarket chains selling organic food. A world where long-hairs and commie-baiters faced off and you had to stop at a pay phone to make a call and you couldn’t Google anything.

Maybe I should think of it as a historical mystery.

 

Gardening and Dreams

Lea Wait, here. When I think of my grandparents, especially my grandmother, I think of her gardens. In her home in

My Grandmother, when she was 22

Roslindale, Massachusetts, where I spent some of my earliest years, she had a wonderful large rectangular rose garden, with a circular brick path in the middle that I loved to run around. I also loved to fill jars with the Japanese beetles that ravaged those roses – and pull off their legs.

So — her garden wasn’t entirely a romantic experience. At least for the Japanese beetles. 

After my grandfather retired, my grandparents shared a home with my parents in New Jersey in the winter months, but, in the summer, they all shared the home in Maine where I live now. My grandparents would head for Edgecomb as soon as they deemed it warm enough — usually in early April — so they could start gardening. They installed a kidney-shaped iris garden near the porch, and a large garden near the barn which included raspberry bushes, vegetables, and flowers. The raspberries were especially important to them since during the hard days of the Depression when they’d lived in New York City they’d dreamed of being able to grow and eat raspberries.

My grandmother would get up early to “beat the birds to the berries,” and lay the damp, ripe red raspberries she’d picked on cookie sheets to dry on card tables at one end of our kitchen. Later in the day they’d be turned into raspberry pies or shortcakes — or, if not perfect, jams, jellies, or syrups for the winter months. Tomatoes were canned. Mint became mint jelly for winter lamb. And, of course, we had fresh flowers all summer, and fresh salads, and vegetables for the table. I helped to some extent by weeding and picking berries and vegetables and stirring sauces and straining jellies, but my mother and grandmother did most of the work. By the time I was old enough to make a major contribution I was assigned to lawn mowing, and by fourteen I had a summer job as well.  But the garden, and its products, were all part of our summers in Maine.

When I had my first home in New Jersey I, too, had a garden. I planted daffodil bulbs in the fall because I loved spring flowers, and I grew vegetables and a few annuals in the summer. I was a single parent, and the vegetables helped with my budget as well as being fun to grow.  The snow peas seldom made it to my stir fries: my daughters ate them off the vines.  I loved that.  Somehow, despite working full-time and studying for my doctoral comps, I remember canning tomatoes until the wee hours of the night (or morning,) and being proud of the line of canned tomatoes and tomato sauce on the shelves lining the steps to our basement.

One year a lot of tomatoes ripened just as we were to leave for our Maine vacation. Not wanting to lose that fruit, I packed two grocery bags full of ripe or near-ripe tomatoes, put them on the passenger seat next to me, the children in the back seat, and headed north. I figured I’d make tomato sauce in Maine. 

It was a hot July day. As we drove through New Jersey and New York traffic, the tomatoes kept ripening. And, as I took a sharp right exit  turn onto the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut … both bags of tomatoes fell.  Sideways.  Onto me. 

To shrieks of delight from my daughters, I found myself driving the remaining six hours to Maine covered with smashed, ripe tomatoes. In our family, that turn will forever be known as “the tomato turn.”

It turned out that was my last garden. I moved again, to a larger house, when my family grew, but although I started a garden there, nothing grew. We were on a hill, and there was little topsoil. 

Daffodils in Lea’s Yard Today

 The lawn was mostly moss, and even my daffodils didn’t grow, although every year I persistently planted more bulbs. 

So when I finally was able to move to Maine full-time, I knew one thing I wanted to do was bring back the gardens. They had long since disappeared; there’d been no one to take care of them since my grandparents died so, gradually, they’d been taken over by lawn. I hired someone with a tractor and started again. I planted vegetables, and flowers. That first year I was busy, writing, and taking care of my mother, and didn’t give the garden the care it needed. The flowers survived to some extent. The vegetables provided fodder for various types of insects and the local woodchuck. But I discovered, to my delight, that the violets and johnny jump-ups that my grandmother had loved appeared, as though by magic, in the places she had planted them, so many years before.  

And in the fall I planted daffodils.

And they bloomed in the spring.

Violets Along the Path

I soon realized my writing and my family were more important to me than my garden so it, too, is now gone; all that is left now is the slate path I laid that first year. The daffodils delight me every spring, and I add to them regularly. 

But every year, near that slate path in the grass, the violets come back, reminding me that my grandmother lived her dream here, in this house; in this yard. She wanted a garden, with raspberries. And she made that happen.

I, too, had a dream. I wanted to write. And I’m making that happen. Her violets are here as witnesses. I don’t think she’d be disappointed that I haven’t continued her garden. I think she’d like that this house is still a place where dreams come true.

Hungry Authors

Frank Bruni recently wrote a fascinating New York Times column about politicians desperate for attention. One of them was former Congressman Anthony Weiner, now famous for tweeting pictures of his privates to someone other than his wife, and then denying it.

Weiner explained his reckless behavior by saying he craved adulation, friends,  attention, and relentlessly sought them all via Facebook and Twitter. It was a sobering story and I think it has some lessons for us as authors.

When I published my first book, there was no Internet that we could search to see how our books were doing and where our careers might be headed.  There were reviews in print, and that was it.  By a certain point after a book was published, there wasn’t much to read anymore about yourself or your book, unless you were touring and there were interviews or features along the way.

Today, we’re drowning in information.  Maureen Dowd put it cleverly in the Times: “Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.”

And we authors now have endless opportunities to make ourselves miserable by insatiably reading every last Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads review; checking whether our Facebook author page is getting likes; worrying about whether our tweets will get re-tweeted; obsessing over comments on our blogs; setting up Google alerts for every mention of our names and books; worrying that our web sites aren’t getting enough traffic.  Some authors, begging for attention, even go overboard and live too much of their lives in social media, recording every twitch of consciousness as if the fate of publishing depended on it.  Their neediness–however disguised–is epic and sometimes pathetic.

What we do as authors is so very different from politicians, and we spend so much more time alone.  But that’s exactly what makes the Internet as seductive  for us as it is for them.  It’s a drug we should all worry about relying too heavily on, at the expense of our work.  Increasing how many followers we have on Twitter or friends on Facebook shouldn’t be more important than making ourselves better writers.

Where have all the letters gone? Or…why I love men who can write.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a real letter. I write novels so one would think that letter-writing would be embedded in my DNA.  I’m dating myself but I actually remember having a class called Penmanship. When I was in elementary school book reports and themes were written long-hand in cursive. Communication with family or friends who lived in a different city or state was done mostly by writing letters. Only occasionally, even when I was in college, did I make a long distance phone call. That was reserved for emergencies.

Like almost everyone in today’s busy world, however, I‘m part of the problem. I type my novels on a computer and I e-mail. I do write thank-you notes when appropriate, and I send cards for various occasions often including a sentence or two if the person is special to me and I haven’t found the right card. More often than not, I just sign my name. But I have saved letters or rather, my mother saved letters and cards and I inherited them.

Prior to my selling my New Jersey home several years ago, I had to go through the mountain of boxes and paraphernalia that had accumulated in our attic over the many years that we had lived there. In a little black suitcase that I’d taken from my mother’s apartment after her death, I discovered a treasure trove of letters, photographs, and cards for all occasions. Some were letters my siblings and I had written to her from wherever we found ourselves—camp, college, or in later years, Europe. A few were from my children. But the most poignant for me were the letters and cards that my father had sent or given my mother both before and after they were married. Theirs was a love story that ended far too soon.

My father died when I was fourteen so my memory of him has dimmed. I do recall that after his death, people referred to him not only as a gentleman, but as a gentle man. These letters have given me insight into the father that I, as an adult, never had the chance to know, but I now know where my love of writing came from. They say that one person in a relationship always loves a little more than the other which may or may not be true. But in the case of my parents I believe it was my father, or at least he had the greater ability to put his feelings into words. Every card to my mother had a loving note or poem appended and this was true until the day he died.

In one letter in their “courting” days he wrote of his attempt to give up smoking, an inconsequential example perhaps, but I’m sure he was doing it to please my mother because in those years the public had not been made aware of the dangers of smoking. (I know how she felt about the habit, though, because she brainwashed my sister and me into believing that women who smoked look like dragons!) Sadly, as disciplined as my dad was, he never succeeded in quitting. He smoked all of his life which undoubtedly contributed to his early death of a heart attack.

And I may be wrong about who loved who more. My mother was a beautiful woman but she never remarried. She wasn’t an easy person to please and that may have been a factor, but I believe the bar had been set too high. No man was ever going to fill my father’s shoes.

We are all individuals but there’s much, along with our physical appearance and talents that I believe we inherit from our parents. In the process of my cleaning out closets, I found a small box on the top shelf of the closet in my bedroom. I’m rather embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t looked on that shelf (or attempted to dust it) since we had bought the house when my children were small. To my surprise, it contained photos and letters from my high school days. In it were twenty very moving letters from a young man I’d met at a house party at Cornell where my sister went to college. We’d dated on and off for several months before I went off to college in Pittsburgh and he went into the military.

Life is funny. Was I destined to find those letters after so many years? What unseen hand had led me to that box? Why didn’t I just toss it? All I can tell you is that today I am living in California and I’m living with this man. I also plan to write letters again. Not often and not to just anyone but I’m sure I must have something memorable to say that’s worth my children getting teary over when I’m gone in the way far off distant future. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just write something wonderful on their birthday cards.

Here’s an Idea for You

How many times have we heard that? Almost every time I do a book event, someone offers me an idea for a story. A historical tidbit, or a true confession that only I can write for him.

Often “it’s the best story anyone has ever heard;” it’s so sensational, she’s going to have to hide while you write it. It will be on the bestseller list quicker than you can say Ghost Writer in the Sky.

Recently a man approached me in a library as our panel of authors was getting ready.

“I’m a political prisoner,” he said, “and I know things that I really can’t tell anyone.” He then told me everything he could in the few minutes before show time. “I’m going to let you write this story,” he said. Apparently I’m the only one in the world he can trust. Or maybe I look like I’m desperate for ideas.

Sometimes I feel guilty not jumping on these proffered projects, but it’s all I can do to manage my own ideas. Maybe there should be software that takes random ideas and works them into a book. Maybe there already is.

What few people seem to realize is that writers have more ideas than anything else. More ideas than time, more ideas than computer paper, certainly more ideas than money. We have ideas in our file cabinets, in notebooks all over the house, and on the notepads by our beds. Some of the ideas take up many pages in an old file; others fit on post-its in the bathroom. We see story possibilities everywhere, especially when things go wrong.

I found a story in a particularly frustrating period in my town. What was supposed to be a 9-month beautification project of our downtown, turned into a 2+-year traffic and torn up nightmare. It became impossible to drive down the main street and to park anywhere near the shops. One of my favorite shops, a crafts store where I’d bought supplies and held book launches and take-away parties, closed.  I miss it, but I used my disappointment as the stuff of my latest novel for PP: “Madness in Miniature,” due spring 2014. In the book, small shops are put out of business by a SuperStore. Details are fictional, but the story is true!

A photo I saw in passing is my latest inspiration: This 1922 photo shows “cow shoes,” used by Moonshiners in the Prohibition days to disguise their footprints.

I’m on it.

I think I have the creds to write this story: my grandfather was arrested for moonshining (the practice went on long after Prohibition ended). At the time I was in high school and utterly embarrassed when Marco Minichino’s name appeared in the newspaper. Now, it’s just a story idea.