Favorite Things 2017

As I sit here, waiting for the new year to arrive, I'm thinking about a few of my favorite things of 2017. Here is a smattering, all done off the top of my head.


PODCASTS
Pod of Thunder (KISS podcast)
Fat Man on Batman
Hollywood Babble On
TechnoRetro Dads
70s Trek
The Art of Manliness
I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere
Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson


MOVIES
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Wonder Woman
Guardians 2
Thor: Ragnarok
Spider-Man: Homecoming
The Man Who Invented Christmas
Justice League
Blade runner 2049
IT
(There's probably more, but those are the ones that come to mind.)


TV SHOWS
The Killing (season 1)
Broadchurch (tune in to Do Some Damage on Saturday, 6 Jan, for my full review)
The Flash
Stranger Things 2
Longmire
Bloodline (Season 1 specifically, but 2 and 3 are okay)


BOOKS
Four Must Die by Bradford Scott
Longarm and the Bank Robber's Daughter (James Reasoner)
The Pulp Jungle by Frank Gruber
Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
All Systems Red by Martha Wells


ALBUMS
The Nashville Sound by Jason Isbell (probably my favorite new album of the year)
La La Land soundtrack
The Last Jedi soundtrack
Christmas in Tahoe by Train (This one took me completely by surprise. My son discovered Train this year so this was a no-brainier. As much as I enjoy Christmas songs with jingle bells and cold-weather themes, this is a great CD for a warm weather Christmas.)


SONGS
Another Day of Sun ( La La Land)
Planetarium (La La Land)
Play That Song by Train
One Night Only by The Struts
Tank! By Seatbelts (from Cowbow Bebop)
Cumberland Gap by Jason Isbell
Drinkin' Problem by Midland


BEERS AND WINES

Bulletproof Picasso Sauvignon blanc (Speaking of Train, this is one of their wines)

This was the year I discovered rose. Hey, it ain't all sweet.

Saint Arnold's (favorite Houston brewer): 5 o'clock pills, Pub crawl, and Summer pills

Real ale brewing company (my favorite new brewer I discovered this year. They are out of Blanco, Texas). They make great beers, but my favorites are Firemans blonde ale, Full moon rise IPA, Devils backbone Belgian – style triple, Lost gold India pale ale, and Rio Blanco pale Ale.

Karbach: Love Street Coelsch style

Buffalo Bayou brewing company: Great White Buffalo Belgian – style withier

Subverting Expectations aka A Writer's Defense of The Last Jedi

While Star Wars: The Last Jedi might not be a mystery or crime film, there is something we storytellers can learn from the kerfuffle that has arisen since the film’s release last week.

No matter the medium—books, TV, movies, comics—we consumers enjoy stories. And if the stories are serial in nature, many of us enjoy dissecting every detail to discern some greater meaning. One of my favorite things about watching the TV show “Lost” in real time was the water cooler chats the day after each episode aired. Me and my office pals discussed in great length every shred of evidence from the episode, crafting in our minds what a shot of a book might mean. Then, the following week or later in the series, we might get answers. Sometimes those answers matched our expectations; other times the answer were not what we had crafted in our minds.

But we were not the storytellers. We were the consumers. We read or watch what the creators create.

When it comes to genre, certain tropes come along for the ride. If you’re reading an Agatha Christie mystery, you know you’ll get interesting characters, all the clues, all the evidence, and a chance to solve the mystery before or alongside her detective, be it Poirot or Marple. If you are reading an Elmore Leonard novel, you know you’ll get snappy dialogue and criminals who are self-aware. If you’re reading a western, you’re going to get a gunslinger, a corrupt cattle baron, a beautiful woman, and a horse with some character. If you’re watching a rom-com, you know you’ll get the charming leads, their funny fiends, and a situation that’ll put them together.

Creators of these kinds of stories know this and plan accordingly. As a beginning writer, we are all instructed to know the genre in which we’re writing and put in the tropes readers expect. We call them obligatory scenes. Take romance. Here are the must-have scenes in any romance: the leads are introduced separately, the leads meet, the leads solve a problem together, a situation arises in which one lead questions the relationship, the break-up scene, the realization scene, and the getting-back-together scene. It’s a roadmap readers and viewers come to expect, but it’s a gifted creator who can play with those tropes and present them in a fresh way, maybe even subverting audience expectations along the way.

Star Wars is not only a science fiction series (with all of those tropes) but it brings in its own set of tropes unique to the franchise. All those tropes were in the first movie, now forty years old. You know them because you’ve absorbed them for four decades. Farm boy with dreams of adventure has adventure land in his lap. Evil galactic empire after a small band of rebels personified in a princess. Lovable rogues who help the farm boy. Wise mentor who sacrifices himself so farm boy can escape. The plucky band of rebels attacks the “small moon” of the Empire’s base and destroys it. And, taking a cue from the second film, a big revelation that the bad guy is actually the farm boy’s dad.

What?!

Back in the early 80s, we spent three years wondering if Vader spoke the truth. Some of my friends didn’t think it was possible; others thought it was the truth. Either way, when Return of the Jedi debuted, we got our answers directly from George Lucas’s movie. I suspect there was some grousing from a certain sector of fandom, but there it was, out in the open.

Up until 2017, we had seven numbered Star Wars movies and one off-shoot. All but one (Empire) arguably played from the exact same playbook. Every movie showed a big thing to destroy, a lightsaber battle, lovable rogues, earnest heroes, bad villains, and robots that made us laugh. Like almost every Perry Mason TV show episode, the Star Wars movies all but lulled us into a routine. As good as Erle Stanley Gardner was as a writer, when you picked up a Perry Mason novel or tuned in to the TV show, you knew exactly what was going to happen. There is a certain comfort in that knowledge. I understand it, but every now and then, isn’t it more interesting to have a creator take a left turn when you were convinced, through repetition and constant reinforcement, the creator was going to take a right turn?

Now comes Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Viewers have had two years to ruminate over all the details of The Force Awakens. I think most of us did exactly the same thing when we saw that 2015 film: put the new characters into the positions of the legacy characters. Rey was the new Luke, Poe was the new Han, Finn was the new Leia (more or less), Snoke was the new Emperor, and Ren was the new Vader. After watching that movie, we were convinced we knew exactly how The Last Jedi was going to play out because we had seen it all before.

But writer/director Rian Johnson did something we writer/creators should have the guts to do every now and then: show us something different.

(Spoilers start here, by the way.)

If Johnson had simply remade The Empire Strikes Back with The Last Jedi, complete with a bunch of shots we fans had been conditioned to expect, most of us might have been happy, or at least comforted. Oh, there’s Luke’s X-Wing under water? Well, then, we expect to see Luke lift the craft out of the water just like he couldn’t do in Empire. Johnson likely considered it and then made a different choice and likely for a specific reason: Luke’s a Jedi Master. Of course he can lift an X-Wing. Why do we need to see it? Much speculation was made about Rey’s parentage. Based on the past movies and the internal Star Wars tropes, she just had to be Luke’s daughter or Kenobi’s granddaughter or something like that. Johnson likely thought long and hard and realized there was a better choice to be made. He made it.

And, lest we forget, Disney signed off on it. Disney: one of the biggest trope machines on the planet, but a company who is willing to change things up every now and then (Wall-E, Up, Inside Out, Ratatouille).

So Star Wars fans are up in arms that the latest movie didn’t go along with the established Star Wars pattern. What did they get instead?

Well, they got a story that did not conform to established patterns. Isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t you have liked to have seen Perry Mason lose, at least once? We got a movie from a gifted writer who made the conscious choice to go against expectations and not service every whim of the fans. We got a refreshing film from a director with a certain point of view. Arguably, we got the most unique Star Wars film since Empire.

In short, Rian Johnson subverted viewers’ expectations.

And I loved it.

I have always contended that the best time to be a Star Wars fan was from 1977-1980. You see, up until Vader revealed himself to be Luke’s father, the Star Wars galaxy was wide open with thousands of stories to tell. Afterwards, it’s merely a family saga. The galaxy got very, very small.

Luke Skywalker goes to great lengths to liken the Force as not belonging to just the Jedi but to everyone in the galaxy. I think the negative reactions to the film are largely from a cadre of fans who think Star Wars is theirs and theirs alone. Every movie since the original trilogy has been made for the die-hard Star Wars fan, complete with callbacks that only we’d know.

The Last Jedi, with writer/director Rian Johnson, has gone to great lengths to shed the franchise from many of the shackles it has carried through the decades. It was a brave choice he made to write a movie that went against almost all the audience expectations, but how neat is it to leave the theater not really knowing how Episode IX will play out.

It’s refreshing.

The galaxy is, once again, wide open.

Subverting Expectations AKA A Writer's Defense of The Last Jedi

By
Scott D. Parker

While Star Wars: The Last Jedi might not be a mystery or crime film, there is something we storytellers can learn from the kerfuffle that has arisen since the film’s release last week.

No matter the medium—books, TV, movies, comics—we consumers enjoy stories. And if the stories are serial in nature, many of us enjoy dissecting every detail to discern some greater meaning. One of my favorite things about watching the TV show “Lost” in real time was the water cooler chats the day after each episode aired. Me and my office pals discussed in great length every shred of evidence from the episode, crafting in our minds what a shot of a book might mean. Then, the following week or later in the series, we might get answers. Sometimes those answers matched our expectations; other times the answer were not what we had crafted in our minds.

But we were not the storytellers. We were the consumers. We read or watch what the creators create.
When it comes to genre, certain tropes come along for the ride. If you’re reading an Agatha Christie mystery, you know you’ll get interesting characters, all the clues, all the evidence, and a chance to solve the mystery before or alongside her detective, be it Poirot or Marple. If you are reading an Elmore Leonard novel, you know you’ll get snappy dialogue and criminals who are self-aware. If you’re reading a western, you’re going to get a gunslinger, a corrupt cattle baron, a beautiful woman, and a horse with some character. If you’re watching a rom-com, you know you’ll get the charming leads, their funny fiends, and a situation that’ll put them together.

Creators of these kinds of stories know this and plan accordingly. As a beginning writer, we are all instructed to know the genre in which we’re writing and put in the tropes readers expect. We call them obligatory scenes. Take romance. Here are the must-have scenes in any romance: the leads are introduced separately, the leads meet, the leads solve a problem together, a situation arises in which one lead questions the relationship, the break-up scene, the realization scene, and the getting-back-together scene. It’s a roadmap readers and viewers come to expect, but it’s a gifted creator who can play with those tropes and present them in a fresh way, maybe even subverting audience expectations along the way.

Star Wars is not only a science fiction series (with all of those tropes) but it brings in its own set of tropes unique to the franchise. All those tropes were in the first movie, now forty years old. You know them because you’ve absorbed them for four decades. Farm boy with dreams of adventure has adventure land in his lap. Evil galactic empire after a small band of rebels personified in a princess. Lovable rogues who help the farm boy. Wise mentor who sacrifices himself so farm boy can escape. The plucky band of rebels attacks the “small moon” of the Empire’s base and destroys it. And, taking a cue from the second film, a big revelation that the bad guy is actually the farm boy’s dad.

What?!

Back in the early 80s, we spent three years wondering if Vader spoke the truth. Some of my friends didn’t think it was possible; others thought it was the truth. Either way, when Return of the Jedi debuted, we got our answers directly from George Lucas’s movie. I suspect there was some grousing from a certain sector of fandom, but there it was, out in the open.

Up until 2017, we had seven numbered Star Wars movies and one off-shoot. All but one (Empire) arguably played from the exact playbook. Every movie showed a big thing to destroy, a lightsaber battle, lovable rogues, earnest heroes, bad villains, and robots that made us laugh. Like almost every Perry Mason TV show episode, the Star Wars movies all but lulled us into a routine. As good as Erle Stanley Gardner was as a writer, when you picked up a Perry Mason novel or tuned in to the TV show, you knew exactly what was going to happen. There is a certain comfort in that knowledge. I understand it, but every now and then, isn’t it more interesting to have a creator take a left turn when you were convinced, through repetition and constant reinforcement, the creator was going to take a right turn?

Now comes Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Viewers have had two years to ruminate over all the details of The Force Awakens. I think most of us did exactly the same thing when we saw that 2015 film: put the new characters into the positions of the legacy characters. Rey was the new Luke, Poe was the new Han, Finn was the new Leia (more or less), Snoke was the new Emperor, and Ren was the new Vader. After watching that movie, we were convinced we knew exactly how The Last Jedi was going to play out because we had seen it all before.

But writer/director Rian Johnson did something we writer/creators should have the guts to do every now and then: show us something different.

(Spoilers start here, by the way.)

If Johnson had simply remade The Empire Strikes Back with The Last Jedi, complete with a bunch of shots we fans had been conditioned to expect, most of us might have been happy, or at least comforted. Oh, there’s Luke’s X-Wing under water? Well, then, we expect to see Luke lift the craft out of the water just like he couldn’t do in Empire. Johnson likely considered it and then made a different choice and likely for a specific reason: Luke’s a Jedi Master. Of course he can lift an X-Wing. Why do we need to see it? Much speculation was made about Rey’s parentage. Based on the past movies and the internal Star Wars tropes, she just had to be Luke’s daughter or Kenobi’s granddaughter or something like that. Johnson likely thought long and hard and realized there was a better choice to be made. He made it.

And, lest we forget, Disney signed off on it. Disney: one of the biggest trope machines on the planet, but a company who is willing to change things up every now and then (Wall-E, Up, Inside Out, Ratatouille).

So Star Wars fans are up in arms that the latest movie didn’t go along with the established Star Wars pattern. What did they get instead?

Well, they got a story that did not conform to established patterns. Isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t you have liked to have seen Perry Mason lose, at least once? We got a movie from a gifted writer who made the conscious choice to go against expectations and not service every whim of the fans. We got a refreshing film from a director with a certain point of view. Arguably, we got the most unique Star Wars film since Empire.

In short, Rian Johnson subverted viewers’ expectations.

And I loved it.

I have always contended that the best time to be a Star Wars fan was from 1977-1980. You see, up until Vader revealed himself to be Luke’s father, the Star Wars galaxy was wide open with thousands of stories to tell. Afterwards, it’s merely a family saga. The galaxy got very, very small.

Luke Skywalker goes to great lengths to liken the Force as not belonging to just the Jedi but to everyone in the galaxy. I think the negative reactions to the film are largely from a cadre of fans who think Star Wars is theirs and theirs alone. Every movie since the original trilogy has been made for the die-hard Star Wars fan, complete with callbacks that only we’d know.

The Last Jedi, with writer/director Rian Johnson, has gone to great lengths to shed the franchise from many of the shackles it has carried through the decades. It was a brave choice he made to write a movie that went against almost all the audience expectations, but how neat is it to leave the theater not really knowing how Episode IX will play out.

It’s refreshing.

The galaxy is, once again, wide open.


As is our tradition here at Do Some Damage, we are taking some time off. New posts resume on 2 January 2018. Thank y’all for coming back day after day and reading what we have to say, and have a fantastic holiday season!

The Kind of Person Bill Crider Is

By the time I stuck my toe into the ocean that is blogging, Bill Crider was a veteran sea captain.

His was one of the first names I kept seeing pop up over and over again in comments. Slowly but surely, in reading his comments on other blogs and especially on his own blog, I got a sense of who Bill is and the kinds of stories he enjoys. I can tell you that the day he wrote his first comment on one of my own blogs was a great day. When he namedropped my blog on his “Blog Bytes” column in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, I knew I had stepped onto the stage. For so many of us writers who “came of age” in the first decade and a half of the 21st Century, I honestly think it’s a rite of passage for Bill to have read your blog and commented on it.

He has a kind, jovial face that radiates warmth and charm and a personal demeanor to match. Nevertheless, the first time in which I saw him in person, at Houston’s Murder by the Book, I grew nervous. I’m a fanboy in that I love seeing writers in person but, back then, reserved enough not to want to bother them. It was Bill’s easy-going personality that immediately put all those fears to rest. He greeted me like an old friend, smiled, and asked me about my writing. I found it odd that an accomplished writer would care about a newbie, but that’s Bill’s way. He cares about the genre, the writing, and the people behind the writing. At one meeting, right after hello, his first comment was to congratulate me on a new story. He was nice enough to respond to emails when I would send a few cover concepts to him, encouraging me all the way. He made me feel welcome, and I pass it on all the time to every writer I meet.

The Man Who Invented Christmas (Movie), or So That's What It's Like to Live With Your Imaginary Characters

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a writer wrestling with a story? Well, have I got a movie for you.
When I first learned there was a movie based on the non-fiction book The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford (my review), I wondered if it wasn’t merely a documentary. To some degree, it is, seeing as how the movie is based on the actual events of how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol in only six weeks and publish it on his own. But the movie is more. It is a visual representation of how writers create their characters, how said characters can take over an author’s imagination, and end up becoming something more.

The movie opens in October 1843. Dickens’s finances are not what they once were, with Martin Chuzzlewit not performing as well as Oliver Twist. Add to that the author’s blank-page syndrome: he doesn’t know what next to write. When he happens upon the idea of a Christmas story, his publisher scoffs at the idea. The production time alone makes the notion a non-starter to say nothing of the fact that Dickens had not written a single word. Nevertheless, the thirty-one-year-old author charges ahead.

Anyone familiar with the novel or any of the screen adaptations will enjoy witnessing Dickens encountering various bits of dialogue in his everyday life. The famous line about the poor houses is uttered by a rich patron who dislikes Dickens populating his stories with “them,” the poor. He sees a jolly couple dancing in the dirty streets and envisions Fezziwig and his wife. And, at a funeral, he sees a man, played by Christopher Plummer, who becomes the physical embodiment of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Seeing Dickens struggle with crafting the name for his main character is fun, particularly when Dickens, as played wonderfully by Dan Stevens, zeroes in on the name itself. “Scrooge.” The look on Stevens’s face is like “Of course that’s the name.” I don’t know about you writers out there, but coming up with a name for main characters can be difficult.

But the movie really takes off when Dickens begins interacting with his creations. Plummer’s Scrooge has multiple dialogues with Dickens, and the two actors play off each other well. Stevens possesses a certain manic quality not present in his role on Downton Abbey. I could easily see him starring in screwball comedies the likes of which that made Cary Grant a star.

As any writer will tell you, when you are deep in a novel, the moments are few when you are not thinking about the story. Sitting in traffic? Check. Shopping at the grocery store? Check. Watching a TV where you’re suppose to care about that story? Check. It happens all the time. So it was utterly charming when the movie portrays Dickens’s characters actually showing up in places he least expected it.

Credit the movie also with some genuine tension. The mere fact there’s a movie devoted to this book’s creation means you know Dickens completed the book. However, the movie effectively showed his struggle with the ending just well enough that you might start to wonder if Boz would get it done.

I’m not enough of a Dickensian to know if the author truly had a different ending to his Carol or not, but the movie plays with that concept. Dickens wondered if someone like Scrooge could really turn around his life in only one night. I’d like to think that almost anyone—be it Scrooge, the Grinch, Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day” (and “Scrooge”), or even Nicholas Cage in “Family Man” to name a few—would change.

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a charming, magnificent movie about a remarkable author and a timeless story. I can’t help but wonder if this movie will, in the course of time, became a classic.

The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford (2017)

(In honor of the new movie that is currently showing in theaters and in honor of my birthday  today, I'm posting the following review that first was published in 2012. I've updated the first sentence to account for this being 2017 and not 2012. And. to make matters even more topical, I'm taking the day off today...and seeing the movie!

But in the five years since I wrote this review, I, too, have become like Dickens: a self-published author. The leaps of faith he took are not unlike the ones we independent writers take in 2017. It makes Dickens' accomplishments even more remarkable.)

One hundred and seventy-four years ago this month, Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol. A few years ago (2008), Les Standiford published The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits. Standiford, a novelist and popular historian, fully acknowledges that much of what he has compiled in The Man Who Invented Christmas is available in other works and biographies. The beauty of this little book is the prism with which Standiford examines Dickens. It’s only about the Carol and how Dickens came to write it, the influences, where Dickens was in his life when the inspiration for Scrooge, Marley, and Tiny Tim struck his imagination, the immediate aftermath of the book’s publication, and its influence on western culture.

The book opens on 5 October 1843. Dickens, aged thirty-one, is on a Manchester stage, part of a fundraiser for the Manchester Athenaeum. He is to speak but he is distracted. His current novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, was not finding the dazzling sales figures of earlier novels like The Pickwick Papers or The Old Curiosity Shop. Not a Dickens scholar I, this fact surprised me. I just assumed Dickens’s stardom, once attained, didn’t wane during his lifetime. It was up and down for Dickens and in October 1843, Dickens was down. With sales figures dropping, his own debt rising—including his parents’ debt which he took pains to absolve—and a new child, his fifth, due early in 1844, Dickens needed to do something extraordinary in order to get back on the financial horse.

After he gave his part of the fundraiser, Dickens walked the dark streets of Manchester and the germ of an idea planted itself in his mind. With the memories of a recent trip to a “ragged school”—a school for poor kids—fresh in his mind, Dickens did something fascinating: he examined himself, as an artist, a man, a husband, and found that he could improve his position. According to Standiford, “Perhaps he [Dickens] had let his disappointment with America in particular and with human nature in general overwhelm his powers of storytelling and characterization in his recent work—perhaps he had simply taken it for granted that an adoring public would sit still for whatever he offered it.” The Chuzzlewit sales and themes proved this to be true. He tried to beat his readers over the head with his earnestness and the readers let him know they didn’t like it. He needed a different method to convey what he wanted to convey. And he needed it to be entertaining.

A Christmas Carol was the result. We all know the story so I don’t need to retell it here. But what is utterly compelling when you stop to think about it is that Dickens went through a transformation not unlike Scrooge, just without the ghosts. At a time when he could have moved to Europe, contented himself with travel writing, and cleared his debts, he chose to challenge himself. To do so, he needed to change. So he changed how he approached this book and its publication. I wonder how many of us have the courage to do that in our own lives to say nothing of something as public as a novel.

With numerous quotes from Dickens’ own writings and those of his contemporaries, Standiford shows us how excited Dickens became at his “little Carol,” how it cheered him, made his cry, and, presumably, warmed his heart as the book has done these past 174 years for the rest of us. The haggling, the negotiations, the business of writing, producing, securing the artwork, and all the other minutia needed to publish a book in 1843 is captivating. You realize that, in many ways, it’s the same then as it is now. The most paradoxical thing I learned was Dickens’ decision to publish A Christmas Carol on his own. You what that means, don’t you? A Christmas Carol was a vanity book. A self-published book.

As far as the claim that Dickens “invented” Christmas (Prince Albert also had a hand with his Christmas trees), Standiford goes into some good detail on how the celebration of Christmas had devolved to a holiday that was barely celebrated. He needs to do this and lay out for the reader where Christmas was in 1843 in order for the reader to understand the profound impact the Carol had on society. Christmas, for Dickens had the same enchanting power over him that his story has over us. That’s ironic considering the humiliation of his childhood—of having a father in debtors’ prison and being forced to leave school and work in a factory to help the family—made Christmas for Dickens not the overabundant thing it is today. The season of Christmas “accounts in large part for his development as an artist.” As Dickens himself wrote, “Any iron ring let into stone is the entrance to a cave which only waits for the magician, and the little fire, and the necromancy, that will make the earth shake.” There is a certain magic during this time of year and Dickens captured it between pages. It’s no wonder the story has thrived.

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a charming book, uncluttered with footnotes so it’s easy to read. (Standiford cites his sources at the back of the book.) The book contains just over 200 pages so it won’t take you many hours to read it. I recommend it for anyone with a little curiosity about how a great work of literature came about. It’ll remove the gauzy trappings that can sometimes surround a book—you know, the awe we writers and readers impose on great works of literature, how the author must’ve been touched by a literary god and the work just fell from the pen—and reveal a real man who experienced real worries but also created something special by means of his own imagination, sweat, determination, and perseverance. It’s a good lesson for all of us.

For all you writers out there, think about this. Where we you this year on 5 October? Imagine not having a word written in a new work. Imagine, now, getting that idea and you burn the midnight oil—you still have a day job, don’t forget—and finish a manuscript by the end of November and the book you just wrote is published today. Think you could do it?

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@Barrie Summy

Writing Within the Guardrails

Do you like driving inside the guardrails?
Earlier this week, I watched The Terry Kath Experience. It’s a documentary about one of the founders of the band Chicago. Kath was the only guitar player and he sang lead. I’ve long zeroed in on Kath as my favorite member of the original group of seven guys who made up the band with Robert Lamm a close second. This despite me, a kid who ‘discovered’ Chicago in 1985 and wondered why their ‘newest’ album was named ‘17.’ Anyway, when I learned Kath’s daughter, Michelle Kath Sinclair, was making this documentary to learn more about her father, I couldn’t wait to watch it. I thought I was going to have to purchase the DVD, but the channel AXS aired it. Lo and behold I actually get that channel and viola! I got to watch this wonderful film.

When you trace Terry Kath’s life, you see a truly remarkable musical genius. If you listen to any studio album, you can hear Kath’s intricate soloing. His talent for lead guitar playing was even more on display on any of the live albums featuring the original seven. With the advent of YouTube, I have been able to see live footage from the 1970s and the manic energy Kath brought to the fore as the only guitar player in the band. One of the all-time best shows available is the 1970 concert from Tanglewood. They open with my all-time favorite song, “Introduction,” and the group rarely slows down.

Speaking of “Introduction,” one of the reasons I love it so much is that it is track 1 of side 1 of Chicago’s first album. It’s the ‘mission statement song,’ the one song that encapsulated what Chicago was back then. In the documentary, there’s a segment that I hadn’t heard before. You see, Kath couldn’t read music, at least back then. He enlisted trombonist James Pankow—the third member who helped shape the sound of the band in the beginning(s)—to write down the chart for everyone. When Pankow complied, he was astounded that a song as intricate and complex as “Introduction” was all there…in Kath’s mind.

Many folks might chalk Chicago up to a band who excelled in mid-tempo hits in the 70s and ballads in the 80s. That’s true, but that isn’t how they started. For the time, they were a progressive band, their song often involving intricate arrangements and constantly shifting time signatures. Guys like Lamm and Kath loved that part of the early tenure of the band. But fame and fortune did the same thing it did to many artists: it began to suffocate them. The more hits the band produced, the more audiences expected to hear certain songs. Where Kath was able to put “Free Form Guitar” on the first album (a 6-minute track with just Kath, his guitar, and the amp) and the band opened side 1 of Chicago VII with a bunch of experimental instrumentals, gradually the pressure to play “Saturday in the Park,” “Just You n’ Me,” and “If You Me Now,” every single night began to weigh on him.

As the documentary relates, by the last tour, Kath was all but ready to bolt. He missed playing whatever he felt like playing. You get the impression that Kath’s mindset was akin to “Look, I’m gonna play what I’m gonna play, the audience be damned.” In that spirit, he’s in the same boat as Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix to name just two. Chicago did that for the Chicago VII tour…and they’ve never done it since. They saw the audience reactions to their long solos and instrumentals. It wasn’t why audiences came to their shows. They wanted the hits and little else.

Thus, we have the age-old conflict between artistic vision and commercial expectations. Sure, you can play whatever you want on an album, but if you don’t give the listeners what they want, then you’re albums sales will fall and your concerts will be less attended.

The very same thing applies to us writers (and artists and other creative types), too. We can be perfectly happy to write some genre title that no one has ever seen, but you have to put yourself out there and suffer the consequences. Sometimes, you can strike gold and be an outlier. For the majority of us, however, it seems like we need to drive within the guardrails already laid out by writers before us. Some days, you might chaff at the guardrails, but they’ve been laid by not only writers but readers. They are there to help steer you straight.

I count myself in this latter group. And I’m perfectly happy to be there. Are you?

Get ON With It

Twenty two chapters.

What does that mean for us this morning? That’s the number of chapters it took for the action to get started in Dan Brown’s latest novel, ORIGIN. Heck, I’m not even sure that’s the exact answer—it might have been twenty three or twenty one, but I just don’t care enough to toggle back in my Audible file to find the answer because it’s beside the point.

What happened for all that time up until Chapter Twenty Two? Talking. Lots and lots of talking. And even after the action gets started, there is more talking. Lots of talking. Mini lectures, actually. It’s almost like a Michael Crichton novel. I have a distinct memory of reading RISING SUN and, every now and then, I’d turn the page and there’s be wall-to-wall text and I knew I was in for a mini lecture. Heck, Crichton even had footnotes. At least Brown mostly put his lectures—but not all—in the form of dialogue.

I never disliked Dan Brown. I was one of those millions of readers who jumped on the THE DA VINCI CODE bandwagon. That was a thrilling book. Think about it. In that book, chapter one showed a murder and introduced the bad guy, chapter two introduced hero Robert Langdon, and we were off and running. I even diagrammed the first 100 pages of DA VINCI CODE to see how Brown made it work. It was an “aha” moment.

From there, I happily jumped back to ANGELS AND DEMONS and enjoyed it. In some ways, it was better than DA VINCI CODE. I read THE LOST SYMBOL (AKA, “Da Vinci Code in America”), but something must have happened because I completely bypassed INFERNO. For whatever reason, I felt the tug of ORIGIN and, with a new, long commute, I thought “why not?” With the audiobook clocking in at eighteen hours, it would certainly get me through a week or two.

I lasted for about twelve hours before I bumped up the speaking speed to 1.25.  At least then I’d be able to get through the novel in a shorter amount of time. I’m not even done (about three hours until the end) and I’m more or less still listening because I at least want to know the big reveal at the end.

But come on! If the book is supposed to be a thrill ride of a story, put some thrills in it. And speed up the pace. I’m not advocating Brown write a pulp fiction novel. He’s got something to say and has clearly done a lot of research—most likely, it all found its way into the text. But at least Crichton put lots of chases and escapes in his stories. They were exciting to read. Heck, DA VINCI CODE was an exciting and thrilling read. ORIGIN is simply dull.

Maybe the ending will be worth it. We’ll find out.

Coincidentally, in my science fiction book club, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight III: Master Race was selected. This is yet another sequel to his seminal 1986 work, The Dark Knight Returns, a fantastic graphic novel. I intentionally bypassed DKIII because I so loathed The Dark Knight Strikes Again (or whatever the second book was called). With that book, I got the distinct impression the good folks at DC Comics didn’t care what Miller produced as long as he gave them something they could sell. One might argue he didn’t really have an editor, because if he did, some of the stuff he threw in would have been chopped.

Same with Dan Brown, at least with ORIGIN. There’s a story here, but it is one that should have been tightened up, trimmed down, and streamlined. Maybe he’s of a particular stature now that he can pretty much write whatever he wants and it’ll get published. Maybe not, but if  you’re an author who writes a chase book, please start the action way before chapter twenty two.

*UPDATE*

I finished the book on Sunday. I'm not one to write a full review of a book I didn't like and I'm not gonna start now. But of the four Dan Brown books I've read, this is fourth on the list. I suppose there was a reason I skipped INFERNO. Now I know. 

Unfurl Your Writing Banner

Never shrink away from proudly letting the world know you are a writer. Sometimes it might open a door for you.

I started a new job this week and, yet again, it isn’t Full-Time Fiction Writer. Someday. In the meantime, however, I am a…well, it’s a funny thing. You see, the job description used the title “Technical Writer IV” (I love the way that looks; like the fourth movie in a kick-ass movie franchise) but the internal job description uses “IT Content Advisor.” That latter title reads like a high-powered government job or something out of Silicon Valley. Actually, it’s neither. I now work at the main campus of ExxonMobil in Spring, Texas. The project is part of the unified IT initiative where I’m part of a team that consolidates scores of content sources and brings it all under one umbrella. Daunting and challenging, but very interesting. The commute is pretty long—45 minutes in the mornings and 65 in the afternoons; I’ve already adjusted to mental mindset of there’s no quick route—but I started listening to Dan Brown’s ORIGIN so I’m getting by.

What does this have to do with flying that writing banner proudly? It comes down to my resume. When I updated my day-job resume, I debated whether or not to include my writing credentials. By that, I mean my mystery and western novels and stories. I opted for inclusion. In my interview, after all the day-job-type questions were asked, my interviewers asked me about my fiction. It enabled the three of us to have a few moments of informality and ended the interview on a jovial note. I found out this week that the fiction was one of the things that differentiated me above other candidates. My history degrees were also a factor. The clients were looking for something a little different and my liberal arts degree* and creative fiction writing set me apart. Another writer started the same day and she has a behavioral science degree, so we both are not your typical technical writer types.

When I decided to include my fiction, I did so with little regret. My fiction is a part of who I am, and I’m damned proud of the accomplishments. And it helped me get my foot in the door. The pride is just a little bit more now.

So, fellow writers like me who have a day job, I recommend you always put your fiction on your resumes if you don’t already do so. In fact, that’s my question for the week. Do y’all include y’all’s fiction on your day-job resumes?


*The Art of Manliness podcast—one of my favorites; the main website is awesome, too—had an excellent episode entitled “The Surprising Power of a ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Education.” Host Brett McKay interviews author George Anders, author of You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education. In the episode, they discuss how creative people often possess skills that can be used in various fields and businesses. I had to smile because it came true for me.

Proofing Hardcopies is Essential

When you are an independent author, it means you have control over all aspects of the writing. It also means you are an independent publisher and, When it comes to hardcopies, you have to match what the traditional publishers do all the time.

For my four mystery novels, I created new Second Edition ebook covers. Those came out back in May. All four now have a unified look and feel and, moving forward, future books in this growing series featuring three characters will all sport similar covers.

But I hadn’t updated the paperbacks. I removed them from CreateSpace back in May with the intention of focusing on ebooks. But now, in the fall, I’m revising the paperbacks. I updated the covers with Adobe Illustrator and revamped the interior layouts with InDesign. Those files looked very good on the screen in those two programs and they even looked good on CreateSpace’s online viewer. Nevertheless, I ordered hardcopy proofs. I still get a charge when I open a box from the mail and see my books inside.

Despite how good they looked initially, I dove into their pages. I wanted to verify all the minute details were perfect before I approved them for the public.

Boy am I glad I did.

Little things that my eyes and brain easily missed when looking at a computer screen were easily spotted on the printed page. No, it wasn’t with the novels themselves; it was with all the extra material I included within the two covers. For example, in the back of each book, I include some excerpts of other novels. Well, the fonts for the titles of those stories were slightly different across all four books. Easy to miss when you examine each individual file but glaringly obvious when you have all four hardcopies on a table in front of you each turned to the same respective page. Ditto for the “About the Author” sections. One cover’s image was off by a couple of millimeters. Again: it was something I only would have noticed with a hardcopy.

The end result—after some tweaking to the files and re-uploading them—will be better, more cohesive books that will equal those from traditional publishers.

Now, I suspect some of y’all reading this will have the same obvious conclusion: of course this is what you’re supposed to do. I know it and have done it time and time again. But when it comes to a series of books that have a unified look-and-feel, I advise all authors out there to place all the books in front of you, laid out on a table. It will only be then that discrepancies show themselves, discrepancies you might have missed upon reviewing each book separately.

Have y’all ever had an issue like this?

What Batman: The Animated Series Got Right

I think most folks here know Batman is my favorite superhero, and, by general consensus, Batman: The Animated Series is arguably the best on-screen rendition of the character. This year is the 25th Anniversary of the series. All four seasons are available on Amazon Prime so I’ve been watching an episode or two most every day.

Boy, does this show hold up well.

By 1992, we were about six years into the Dark Era of Batman, birthed by Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Batman: Year One (1987). Throw in Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum (1989) and you had the character shift from a man who was a detective (and who had a life) to the brooding, unhumorous character we got for the next twenty years. As cool as it was in the late 80s to see Batman portrayed like that, when it became the *only* way he was written, it grew tedious and tiresome.

Which was why Batman: The Animated Series (TAS) was such a surprise at the time and such a breath of fresh air twenty-five years on. Back in 1992, seeing a TV version of Batman that reflected the current trend in the comics as well as the two Burton movies was fantastic. Batman was born a creature of the night, and TAS remembered his Depression-era origins. But TAS was a kids’ cartoon so the violence you started to see in the comics could not be shown on TV. That, to me, kept the focus on the character and his interactions rather than gratuitous violence for the sake of shock value.

We got our darker episodes where various facets of Batman’s character were examined. The violence was present, but it was often just off camera. It had the dual effect of allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks and to pass the censors. “Robin’s Reckoning” and “A Bullet for Bullock” come to mind. “I am the Night” is also a good example because Bruce Wayne doubts whether or not his crusade against crime is worth it. But there were also the lighter, funnier episodes like “Almost Got’em” where a cadre of villains talk about how they almost killed Batman, almost always with a big trap.

TAS also never forgot Batman was actually Bruce Wayne in two key aspects. One, Bruce was human. He needed to sleep and eat, something Alfred constantly harped on in almost every episode. Two, and most important, Bruce/Batman reached waged war against crime each in their own venue. Sometimes, it was Batman punching out bad guys. Other times it was Bruce using his wealth to buy out a bad company. Too often in the past quarter century, we only get Broody Batman and rarely Bruce Wayne. It was such a great thing to see TAS touch on both aspects of the man.

And it is, to date, the only version where Bruce offers the wink to the audience that we know his secret identity. Superman did this all the time in the 1950s series and the 1970s comics, but Batman rarely did.

Among my favorites (and likely yours, too) are: Heart of Ice; Beware the Gray Ghost (Adam West guest-starring!); Joker’s Favor; Perchance to Dream; The Laughing Fish; If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich? to name but a very few. Even a ‘bad’ episode isn’t really that bad.*

Oh, and the opening of each episode is a mini movie, sans any words…but you don’t need any.


So, do y’all have any favorite TAS episodes?

*For my book club, one of the members picked Frank Miller’s Dark Knight III: The Master Race. I loathed the second volume, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, but I am re-reading it before reading DKIII. I am reminded of why I disliked TDKSA so much…while watching TAS’s greatness. Sigh.

Heat Storm by Richard Castle

I fell in love with the TV show “Castle” from the moment I saw the trailer.

As a refresher, the character of Richard Castle, as played superbly by Nathan Fillion, is a rock star author famous for his thriller series featuring the character Derek Storm. In the series premiere, Castle is celebrating his latest novel, the book in which he killed off Storm. And he’s suffering from writer’s block. Cut to a killer who is using scenes from Castle’s novels and the New York City police, in the person of Detective Kate Beckett, come and question Castle. He ends up helping solve the case, complete with delicious sexual tension, and pulls some strings with the mayor to get a favor: allow Castle to tag along with Beckett as an observer while he does “research” for a new series of novels featuring his new character, Detective Nikki Heat, as inspired by Beckett.

Got that?

Yeah, it’s a mind twist when you write it all out, but what was even more twisty was when Season 2 premiered in the fall of 2009…and an actual Castle book landed on actual store shelves. It had Fillion’s face on the back and HEAT WAVE was the first Nikki Heat book. Every fall, a new season would start and a new Nikki Heat novel would be published. Heck, even Derek Storm himself was revived (he faked his death!) and new Storm novels were published. Graphic novels, too. It was heady days for fans of the show.

Ultimately, the TV show was cancelled, but the books kept going. HIGH HEAT arrived last fall and, with HEAT STORM, the series comes to an end. HIGH HEAT actually was published back in May, but with other books on my TBR pile, I decided to wait until September to read (actually listen) to this last novel. Even Nikki Heat novel has “Heat” in the title and every Derek Storm novel has “Storm” in the title, so you know exactly what happens with HEAT STORM: Nikki Heat and Derek Storm team up.

In a series of alternating POV chapters, HEAT STORM picks up right after the cliffhanger of HIGH HEAT. Storm has been tracking down Chinese counterfeiters and his trail has led him back to Heat, but not Nikki. Her mother, Cynthia. In yet another mind-bendy twist, the life events of the TV show character Beckett (who’s mother was killed and that prompted Beckett to become a cop) are also the same for Nikki Heat (her mother also was killed). But in the course of HIGH HEAT, someone who looks remarkably like Cynthia Heat is roaming around NYC. And the secret is revealed here in HEAT STORM.

I have loved every single novel as published by “Richard Castle” and have read some more than once. Oddly, NAKED HEAT, the second novel, is one I’ve read about 3-4 times, the latter two was when I deconstructed the novel to determine how the writer crafted such an easy going page turner. I’ve used that information on my own books.

HEAT STORM serves as a greatest hits. You’ve got Storm doing super-spy stuff and Heat doing her best detective work. She’s a great character who, over the course of the entire series, was given a chance to grow and breathe. Surprisingly, the character of Jameson Rook (the counterpart of “Richard Castle”) doesn’t feature too prominently so you certainly have to take that into account. But the author (you can likely find the answer if you search the internet) ends the book series in a satisfying manner.

The entire series is well worth your time. As both the TV series and the book series went on, what I loved was how the books reflected the TV show. It took Castle and Beckett something like four seasons to get together. In the books, their counterparts got together in book 1. It was a model of how to keep the romantic chemistry going even though the “will they or won’t they” aspect had already been revealed.

The entire Castle phenomenon was one-of-a-kind. I still miss the TV show and now, with the publication of HEAT STORM, the book series is also at a end. As melancholy as that realization is , the Nikki Heat series remains one of my favorite book series of all time.

(This is the October 2017 edition of Barrie Summy’s book review club. For the complete list, click the icon below.)

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Into Uncharted Territory

Come Monday morning, I will be unemployed for the first time in my life.

I started working a day job back in February 1999. Of course, back then, it was the only job. I have worked steadily ever since. As 2017 rolled around, everyone at my company knew the project for which we were hired to work would end. For many of my co-workers, that end arrived back on 30 June. For me and two other technical writers, we got an extra three months. That time ran out on Friday. Actually it was Thursday since my boss decided we three didn’t have to come to work yesterday. T’was a nice gesture and we thanked him for it. Actually, yesterday just seemed like one of my bi-weekly days off. Come Monday, things will be different.

I don’t know about y’all but I love to work. Sure, the paychecks are nice and necessary, but I crave the structure and routine of work. I enjoy working through problems, developing content, and delivering products. I enjoy using my skills to help my company and my clients. I have no problem with getting up in the pre-dawn darkness, knocking out a thousand words, and getting the boy out to school and me to the office. I was fortunate enough to work close to my house, enabling me to come home for lunch with the wife.

Come Monday, all of that remains in place except the office part. Everyone I speak with tells me I’ll find something. I know I will, but it’s the uncertainty that’s new to me. I’m the type of person who is ready to establish a new work/life routine as of yesterday. I’m ready for the next day job challenge and I’m eager to dive into a new set of assignments and delivery high-quality documentation.

But until that next day job arrives, it’ll be time for a new routine. And I think everyone here knows exactly what it will entail. For the longest time, I’ve always referred to my day job as the primary job and the fiction writing job as the other one. Come Monday, that routine will be flipped. I’ll be here, writing most of the day, every day. The early morning part will remain the same: wake, get the boy off to school by 6:25 a.m., and then, instead of hopping into the car to head off to work, I’ll come back here and start my new novel. I purposefully didn’t work on it yesterday or today and I won’t do anything tomorrow. For the near future, my fiction writing job is my day job. I’ll be living (admittedly not of my own choosing) the life of a full-time fiction writer.

It is what I ultimately want, but I’m not ready yet. I’ll make the most of it, but come Monday, I’ll be looking forward to the day in which I can be a full-time technical writer again.

Son of Houston-con: An Old-School Comic Convention

It’s not everyday you get to meet a man who helped open your eyes to a larger world.

About a month or so ago, I was in my local Bedrock City Comics store to see if they had any of the old western pulp magazines featuring Texas Ranger Walt Slade as written by Bradford Scott. They did and I bought one. On the checkout counter was a flyer for something called “The Return of Son on Houston-con.”

Now, longtime comic readers will note the checkerboard along the top edge

reminiscent of DC Comics from the 1960s. That alone caught my attention and intrigued me. Other than Comicpalooza back in May, all the other comic conventions were cancelled or postponed this year, so I was more than happy to see what this con was about. And for $5 for two days? It was almost like theft.

The other thing that lodged in my brain was the venue. It was a hotel. The first conventions I attended here in Houston back in the late 70s and early 80s were in hotels. Nothing against the way cons have evolved over the decades—with the expansion of what’s on sale to the cosplaying—but there was something cool about a small con. As I walked into the hotel last Saturday, I held hope that the con would be a throwback to the cons of old.

And I was rewarded.

Son of Houston-con was entirely held in two, non-contiguous rooms. One room featured toys. I bypassed that room when I first got there because I want to see the comics. They were there, all in one not-too-large room. Bedrock was there and much to my happiness, owner Richard Evans brought all his pulps! Naturally, I snatched up the remaining Thrilling Western titles featuring the adventures of Walt Slade. (I discovered an interesting story, “The Sun Rises West,” and read it first; here is my take.) I also gravitated to the dollar boxes of another vendor. Slowly, I made my around the entire room, reveling in all the vintage material, including this, a program from Houstoncon ’71. What the cover doesn’t reveal is that Kirk Alyn, the first live-action Superman from the 1940s serials, was the featured guest.

After a walkaround of the toy room—which had an original Six Million Dollar Man 12-inch action figure and the Evel Knievel scramble van—I was just about to leave when a man asked if I had enjoyed myself. I said yes, very much. He wore a name tag so I started asking him questions about the folks who organized the event. Turned out the name on the tag was the same name on the original flyer: Don Price. Very graciously, he told me a bit about the history of the original Houston-con back in the day—he attended that 1971 show; turned out the program was his—and the comic book collecting community here in Houston.

And then he dropped the name Roy.

Immediately my mind reacted. “You don’t mean the guy who owned Roy’s comic shop on Bissonnet?” [Right near Murder by the Book for folks who know where that shop is located.] Price said yes and offered to introduce me to him.

Now, for the younger folks who read these posts, y’all know there is such a thing as a comic book store. Throw in digital and there’s a myriad of ways to get every comic you want. But back in the day (gosh I sound old) the only place to get comics were spinner racks at grocery stores, drug stores, and convenience stores like U-Totem, 7-Eleven, or Stop n Go. And if you missed an issue, especially one with a cliffhanger, well you simply missed an issue.*

My grandfather who lived near Roy’s Memory Shop (that was the official name) would always drive me around to the various convenience stores in his neck of the woods. One day, I saw a shop with spinner racks near the front window. Not only that, his painted sign featured the Human Torch. What must this store be?

I walked in and it was nirvana. This was a store whose sole purpose was to sell comics and memorabilia.

 For a kid who devoured comics, this was heaven. Every time I visited my grandfather—probably once a week—he would take me there. It was in Roy’s Memory Shop I learned what day comics were released and was able to ensure I didn’t miss an issue. Once I learned stores like Roy’s Memory Shop existed, I never had to worry about comics again. I found one in Austin when I was in school there, another in Dallas, and again back in Houston with Bedrock City and The Pop Culture Company.

All of that is background and prelude. Mr. Price introduced me to Roy Bonario last week. I am an adult now, but some of my childlike wonder at discovering his store returned when meeting the man himself. I was able to tell him how much his store meant for a young kid like me and thousands of other kids over the years. He began talking about past Houston-cons, the business of collecting, and how much fun he had in talking with fans over the years. It was quite a moment.

Have y’all ever had a chance to meet your “Roy” and tell them how much what they did meant to you? I’ve had one other moment like this. It was up in Denton, Texas, and I was attending The University of North Texas for grad school. It was an evening class in the history building and we were all hustling to get to our lectures. A man, older than me, was walking in the lobby and his face was instantly recognizable to me. It was George King, my 10th grade world history teacher. He was the one responsible for igniting the fire of history within me. I had the opportunity to remind him who I was (he said he recognized me), why I was there, and that he was the one who flipped on that history switch.


*World’s Finest Comics #246 was one of the comics I bought from a spinner rack at a Stop n Go near my grandfather’s house. The lead Batman/Superman story was a cliffhanger. I scoured all those convenience stores for #247 but never found it. Many years later, guess where I found #247?

You don’t really need me to answer that, do I?

The Sun Rises West by Oscar J. Friend

Last week, I attended a small comic convention here in Houston that served as a throwback to the early days of comic book fandom. It was hosted in two rooms in a hotel. One room was devoted to toys; the other to comics. But, happily for me, the owner of Bedrock City Comics brought his pulp magazines.

I had been to his shop last month after I discovered Bradford Scott and his pulp hero, Texas Ranger Walt Slade, in paperback. After reading my first Slade novel, I wanted to read one of his old pulp exploits. I bought one issue of Thrilling Western and reviewed the Slade story. Naturally, I beelined to that section of the pulp magazines on sale last week, but I’m not here to talk about my next Slade story.

No, what I’m here to talk about is the odd mash-up of a western in a World War II setting.

The cover date for Thrilling Western volume 29, #1 is May 1942. I’m not sure how much lead time editor G. B. Farnum gave to writers, but Oscar J. Friend’s story was definitely written after December 7, 1941.

 “The Sun Rises West” features cowboy Chuck Hardin. He’s been hired to work a cattle ranch out on Hawaii. With just the description of Hardin, you know you’re in for a treat: other than battered suitcases and his typical cowboy attire (you know what I’m talking about), he brings his Winchester and two double-action .45 six-shooters. The other character comment on Hardin’s attire more than once.

There’s a girl here, but she doesn’t figure too much into the story other than the typical rivalry between Hardin and Montague Townley, the ranch’s manager. With a name like that, you also know what kind of man he is. Well, there’s also a native Hawaiian co-star in Hamelaki George who fills the role perfectly.

And you already know who the bad guys are just from reading the story’s title and sub-title: A Novelete [sic] of Texas Guns in Hawaii. Yup, the Japanese, specifically the houseboy Mikimatu. The old pulps were filled with descriptions and terms we in the 21st Century cringe at, and that’s all there. But Friend piles it on. After being introduced to Mikimatu, cowboy Hardin never pronounces his name correctly for the rest of the story, instead using terms like “Mikiblotto.” The physical
descriptions are worse. But that was a different time, and when Friend wrote the story and the readers consumed this story six months after Pearl Harbor, I don’t suspect many minded.

Speaking of Pearl Harbor, it doesn’t take a genius to know that’s when this story takes place. The day is lost for America, but Hardin, naturally, wins the day at the Robinson Ranch.

The story is good and about what you’d expect. Not much to write home about, but it’s a fantastic snapshot at a particular time and place.

Stories from Harvey, Part 4

Ever since last week’s column discussing my experience during Hurricane Harvey, I created an impromptu series of posts focusing on my little stretch of west Houston. Here is Part 2 and Part 3.

What characterized this week was plain and simple normalcy.

My boy went back to school on Tuesday. His school is out in Katy so the commute was interesting considering the carpool dad (not me) would have to find a way to cross the flooded Buffalo Bayou. The answer was the same for most folks in west Houston: go out to Grand Parkway 99. I heard some insane stories of multi-hour commutes. Houston’s traffic is already legendary. The post-Harvey traffic will likely be the award winners for years to come. A friend on Facebook lives only 2 miles from her hair salon, but those two miles involve crossing the bayou. This week, it took her 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to work.

I have the luxury of living close enough to my office that I could walk or bike, but I’ve not even had to bother. My company has been closed since 28 August, so it’s been an unexpected two-week holiday. I was able to complete a western novel, install a new window A/C unit in my wife’s studio, and continue my bicycling around the area.

By Thursday, much of my stretch of west Houston was all but normal. The water was receding at a glacial pace, but by Thursday, you could see the line of debris along most streets and curbs. I rode to a shopping center on Eldridge, ground zero for the Cajun Navy’s efforts in west Houston, and was able to ride onto the sidewalks directly in front of the stores for the first time in over ten days. A car had emerged from the water since the day previous. Sure, it was a small one, but to think it had literally been underwater for ten days was amazing.

Around behind the center, an open trash dumpster showed the water line. And you don’t have to imagine the smell. It wasn’t pleasant.

Neither was the line of …stuff floating in this water. That plastic toolkit was floating this way and that. Behind that fence, down Enclave, an alarm bell clanged. I wasn’t sure how long it had been ringing but no one seemed bothered to answer its call.

I stuck my phone up to a beauty salon’s front door. The floor looks pretty gross, but the chairs and supplies up on the shelves appeared undamaged. At first I thought there would be salvageable items in there, but after talking to a man who owned a nail salon, he said all the chairs would have to be replaced. Too contaminated. Likely this beauty salon will have a similar fate.

A little way up the street is the St. Basil the Great Greek Orthodox Church. When I got there, they were closed up for the day, but I noted a few things. There was a forklift and platt full of water bottles. Children had taken the time to draw on the sidewalk with chalk. My mind wondered if they were victims of the storm or cheerleaders helping to boost the spirits of the first responders.

I suspect by Monday, when I join my fellow Houstonians and return to work, most of my daily activities will be all but back to normal. In driving out to Katy yesterday, nearly the entire commute went by without seeing any physical examples of the hurricane. Now, half the commute was along the Barker Reservoir so I knew the other side was still full, but little-to-no damage could be seen. It was a shocking revelation considering I hadn’t had the need to travel far from my neighborhood for over ten days. I expected to see more destruction. I know it’s there; all I’ll have to do is go north once I’m able to drive that way. Highway 6 opened its north/south lanes late yesterday so the commute times should be reduced. When it’s fully clear, I’ll make a trek and see some more of my city and offer assistance.

LESSON LEARNED

Speaking of assistance, if there’s one Lesson Learned from this entire experience, it is this:

Form a Social Media group with members of your neighborhood. The information we passed along to each other during the storm was invaluable. It pooled the brains of more than the people in my own house. But as the storm abated and the sun came out, we continued to share information about water conservation, which families were taking food up to the fire and constable and police stations, and any other storm-related news. So, if you don’t already have a social media group—we use Facebook—with your neighbors, make one.

When a storm like Harvey comes ashore, you discover your neighbors aren’t necessarily just the ones living next to your house. You don’t meet a stranger after an event like this. You have to expand your definition of “neighbor” to include your entire subdivision, city, state, and, of course, the nation. We have been blessed with so many people coming to Houston to offer help because the need is here.

And the need is about to be felt in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. As I’ve been following the news about Hurricane Irma, its wind speed, and its sheer size, I’m gobsmacked. That thing is larger than the state! Where the hell do you go? Houston got a mind boggling amount of water dumped on it, but we didn’t get the wind. That’s the one thing that always freaks me out when it comes to hurricanes. So as things get back to the New Normal here in Houston—and we’re not without our own challenges, of which I’ll still write—my thoughts and prayers go to Florida today.

Stories from Harvey: Part 3

(This is part 3 of an impromptu series looking at the impact of Hurricane Harvey on a small stretch of west Houston. Here is Part 1, and here is Part 2.)

Late yesterday afternoon, what struck me most was the quiet.

As I have done for over a week now, I rode my bike to various points near my neighborhood. The first stop was the Dairy Ashford/Ashford Parkway intersection. What was once a flowing river is now calm and dry. The water had drained enough so that there were three distinct pools of water: on Dairy Ashford north to the bayou and the two subdivisions that flank the intersection. Where the water was gone, the cement and surrounding dirt was a dry as you’d expect in early September.

The two policemen stationed at this crossing were new to me, but they still enjoyed and appreciated the baked goods I delivered on behalf of my wife. “What, are you trying to make me fat?” Officer Hightower said with a smile. When I mentioned we had dropped off a couple of pies at the west Houston substation, Hightower stopped me. “The cherry and the apple?” I said yes. “I only had the cherry, but it was one of the best cherry pies I’d ever had.” It made my wife’s day to hear that feedback.

Hightower was working with another officer from El Paso. When I mentioned he was now the third officer from El Paso I had met, he grinned and said, “Well, you have only thirty-three more to go.” I’d love to meet them all and thank them.


The Stonehenge neighborhood still had water in the back of the neighborhood. Two law enforcement men guarded the area, one at the entrance and one at the water line. When I got to the water line, a lady and three men milled about. They meandered around a pickup with the tailgate open. Inside were waders, all with camouflage. The price tags still hung on the zippers.

The woman walked over and talked with one of the men operating a boat. Even now, a full week after Harvey finally hightailed it out of town, people were still boating back to their homes to salvage what they could. The woman wore a purple LSU t-shirt and she hustled back and told the men to suit up in the waders. She got into a pair and I asked if it was her house they were trying for. No, it was her mother’s house. She lived back in a cul de sac. I told her I knew exactly the cul de sac because there was a nice big corner house that decorated big for Halloween and Christmas. For Halloween, the owners put giant spiders all over the outside of the house. It had always been a destination location during the holidays. The woman smiled wanly. That was her mother’s house. It had sustained two to three feet of water. Most of the important things had been moved upstairs, but the ground floor was all but lost.


I rode past my office building—open for business, but my company was still out until Thursday—and noted the water had receded some. The smell was what hit me most. Couple sewage backwash with 90-degree heat and humidity and you can pretty much imagine the stench wafting through the air. It made me ride just a bit faster because the wind kept the odor out of my nose. The only other office building with folks working had their parking garage still under water. Well, the first floor. They parked their cars up and down the side street. The woman I spoke with said her company was on a skeleton staff until the water receded further and opened up the garage. That’ll likely be next week. Her home was fine.


A middle-aged couple stopped me and asked for directions to get to Highway 290, the northwest road out of Houston to Austin. I sighed and told them they were in for a long commute seeing as how it was after four. They were undaunted. They were also smiling. They were house hunting. Their home was inundated with water. It was a total loss.


After more than a week of not being able to get close to the intersection of Eldridge and Enclave—the site of many a rescue by the Cajun Navy—I threaded my way on dry land, through parking lots, and over medians to reach the shopping center that housed Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen, arguably one of the best Mexican restaurants in Houston. Their mole enchiladas are THE best I have ever tasted. The restaurant was located the closest to Eldridge so I suspected substantial water damage. Surprisingly the debris line was only about eight inches.

When I looked inside, I noted people inside working to clean up the interior. With a pantomime of me talking on a phone (not sure what I was thinking there), Daniel Ruiz, the general manager, opened the door and talked with me. He showed me around the inside, pointed out how they were cleaning up, and noted that they didn’t have any carpet. With a sense of pride, he said he planned on reopening on Monday. My family had already had a hankering for Mexican food—our favorite restaurants are either flooded or inaccessible—and I’m already looking forward to Monday.

 Not sure of the science behind this, but on the curb there appeared to be leaf impressions. Granted, It’s likely just mud, but they certainly appear to be hurricane fossils.

Speaking of odd images, the detritus of the area told its own stories. With traffic nonexistent at that intersection, the only sound yesterday was of rushing water, not a sound I expected so I searched for the source. It was across the street in the other shopping center. The water had broken through a wooden fence and now gushed downward. If there was one thing Harvey taught all Houstonians it was topography. We may be a city on a flat land, but we all know where the slopes and rises are now.

Not sure why someone abandoned their suitcase in front of the Holiday Inn—closed until further notice—but there it sat, baking in the sun. Note the car across the street, its front end dipping into the ditch.

The residents and workers of the Holiday Inn went to extraordinary measures to safeguard their cars. Not sure I would have thought to do this, but this person did. See the water line on the tire.

When the water rescues were in full swing, many people swarmed the area. I found this little makeshift path fascinating. The rescuers used what was on hand to avoid vehicles and people languishing in the mud.

The Residence Inn by Marriott was still open. This being the Energy Corridor, we have many folks from other countries. I spoke with David Snow, the manager of the Residence Inn and he explained what they did to help the foreign visitors who had nowhere else to go. They evacuated the first floor and put people in any other room up to the top floor (I think it was six). They also brought all the food to the second floor, including the beer and wine to make his guests comfortable. Finally, they were able to isolate the electricity from the first floor to prevent a short circuit.

I complimented him on the effort he and his staff took. He was stuck at the Inn for the duration of the storm, unable to get back to his northwest Houston home. Thankfully, his home sustained very minor leaking. I said it must have been something to watch the Cajun Navy from his front row seat. He shook his head in admiration for the effort they put forth. He mentioned he would walk the perimeter of his hotel at one, two in the morning. He’d see some of those guys jump on their boats and motor off into the darkness. He wouldn’t see them again until morning when they’d be brining back survivors.

Right as I was leaving the Residence Inn, I ran into two soldiers, Aldridge and Cantu from the National Guard. These young men said they were staying at the Inn and it was the first real bed they’d had in a week. They had been deployed out in Orange, Texas, on search and rescue and had returned to Houston for additional duty.


When I got away from the water line and kept going south on Eldridge, signs of life reemerged. The cars thundered along the street, joggers ran their routes, and parents pushed babies in strollers. Much like the residents of some neighborhoods who put signs on their front yards pleading for the power company not to turn off their lights, businesses along Eldridge were eager to let the public know they were open for business.

Yes, that is a Japanese restaurant right next to a French restaurant and bakery. On the other side of the bakery is a Thai restaurant followed by an Indian one. If you love food, west Houston is a fantastic place to live.

Actually, no matter what, west Houston is a great place to live. We’ve sustained terrible damage and it’ll take weeks, months, and years to get back to where we were before Harvey, but we’ll get back.

Stories of Harvey: The Protectors

I received some nice compliments from folks who read the initial post regarding my personal experiences with Hurricane Harvey here in Houston. As I wrote in some of the responses, I’m a writer. My story is one among millions.  The process of writing the piece was emotional yet cathartic. I document my life, usually by writing about books, music, and films, but the hell that Harvey wrought was too large to ignore.

One thing about an experience like this: you rarely meet a stranger. If you are a person who doesn’t like to chat with other folks, a common experience like this is the perfect ice breaker. More than once this week during my daily bike rides around my area, I would stop, look at where the water is, and just start talking with folks.

Yesterday, I paid specific attention to the policemen. They had the unenviable job to protect the mayor’s order of a mandatory evacuation in the flooded Buffalo Bayou zone. My house is a few hundred feet south of the southern border line. It is on various north/south streets that I have visited every day to check on the water lines.

Dairy Ashford / Ashford Parkway Intersection

Of all the places I visited regularly, it was the most devastating. It is a split road with a median. By Sunday, 27 August, just the first day, it was impassable north to the bridge over Buffalo Bayou. It only got worse as the week progressed.

But by yesterday, 3 September, much of the water that had been rushing east across Dairy Ashford was now gone. The neighborhood to the east still suffered and the one to the west was worse, but you could see the road.

There’s a Super K convenience store where members of the Texas State Park police and other first responders had stationed themselves. It was their job to get back in the neighborhoods, assess if there were folks still living in their homes, and get them out. Some people probably feared for their belongings, but the police were there for protection.

I met two HPD officers standing guard. In the late afternoon sun, I was in my t-shirt and shorts. They were in full uniform, Kevlar included, sweating up a storm. But they were in good spirits and happy to talk with me. The first thing I noticed were their badges. With the death of Officer Steve Perez in the hurricane, one of their own was down. They wore the mourning badge ribbon with the Latin inscription Nemo Me Impune Lacessit, which translates to “No one provokes me with impunity.” They mentioned it, but I told them I knew all about Officer Perez. I think the entire city knows about him.

The homes of these two officers, Officers Horowitz and Gonzalez, were spared although Officer Horowitz, who lives farther west of me in Katy, said the waters were rising up his driveway when the rains stopped. While I was there, the telephone lines into the affected neighborhood were reestablished. Seeing my son, the telephone worker proudly announced the Internet was back on. “And that’s the most important thing, right?” My son agreed. Heck, I did, too. Late on Friday afternoon, we had the hat trick: our power went out, our cable went out, and our cell phone went out. At least all three worked through the storm.

Officer Horowitz commented that the toughest part of policing this particular stretch of Houston was that the bayou had flooded all the north/south streets, but the boundaries of this district included the area north of the bayou. If a call came in and they needed to go north, they would have to drive all the way to Voss Road, about seven miles to our east just to get up to Interstate 10 and then come back. He mentioned that HPD may have to create a temporary solution until the roads are again passable.
He and his partner had to stop one driver from approaching, but when they all started talking and laughing, I knew it wasn’t a bad situation. A few minutes later, they were called away. I thanked them for talking with me and making sure the area was safe.

The Neighborhood

There are two neighborhoods directly to my north that were affected by the flooding. In both cases, the backs of the neighborhoods were flooded while the fronts were not. I monitored the water lines all week long. Yesterday was the first day I did not. It felt weird. By yesterday, the water levels in the two reservoirs was down enough that the Army Corps of Engineers was lessening some of the drainage at the spillway.

The mayor’s evacuation notice was only for folks still living in homes with water inside. When the announcement was made, the city drew a large rectangle. To help people make up their minds, he was going to have Counterpoint Energy turn off the power to the affected houses. What about the homes in the affected area but without water damage? They were fine, said the mayor, but that didn’t stop more than one family to erect signs like this.

Yesterday afternoon after five, I rode into Shepherd Trace. A police suburban was parked at the water line, about thirteen houses inside the subdivision, a far cry from the previous water line about three homes in. One officer was inside, the other was outside having a cigarette. I stopped and started talking with the officer inside. He was HPD Officer Vu. He told me much the same as Horowitz in terms of what they were required to do. I asked when he was off the clock and he said six. The only provision was that he and his partner couldn’t leave until another team showed up. Sometimes that could take an extra hour or so.

His partner turned out to be Officer Rodriquez from El Paso. His uniform was different that HPD’s—he wore his gun belt with a leather strap crossing his chest—but the different shade of blue gave away his identity. I thanked him for coming all the way out here to help us. (For you non-Texans, El Paso is 744 miles away, about a ten-hour drive.) He was very deferential, stating that he and all the other officers from other municipalities were here to help their fellows in HPD. That kind of camaraderie is certainly what permeates the men and women who wear a badge and swear to protect civilians like me. But it was when I asked him if he was getting paid by FEMA that he revealed his character. He said he hoped so, but if not, it would be volunteer time and he was happy to do it.

The Office Buildings

I live in the Energy Corridor and some of the buildings are close enough for me to bike to work or walk if need be. Enclave Parkway is a short road that houses a few companies like Schlumberger, Dow, and Sysco. You can drive north up Enclave to the first stoplight, but then you can’t go any further. That first stoplight is where the Sysco building is located and I wheeled up to their visitor parking lot where I met a security officer with “S. Connor” on her name badge. Her jurisdiction was up and down Enclave. When she saw Harvey approaching, she made arrangements for her dog and camped out in the Sysco building all during the storm until this past week. After the rain stopped, she patrolled all over the flooded area, sometimes in the truck, other times in the golf cart. She marked water line locations and which cars were stranded and flooded and reported back to her security company.

It was with frustration that she pulled out her phone and showed me a photo of a car. Its driver had, within the past hour, driven it into the water, perhaps as an attempt to get some insurance but perhaps not. Ms. Connor was inclined to think the former. It was a fancy sports cars and she lamented that the driver might have an easier time getting some money than she would. You see, when she finally went home, she arrived at her apartment and someone offered to take her to her place by boat. She said the comment stunned her and it took her a few moments to process. When she got to her house, it had flooded. She had prepared and stashed important papers and special things up “just in case a little water got inside,” but many things were ruined. The apartment company offered to move her and other residents to a different complex within its organization, but she would have to pay the higher rent. She couldn’t afford the extra $200, so today, in addition to filling out the paperwork for her ruined property, she’ll have to find a new place to live.

The Mobile Communications Station

There’s a school near me and it’s not everyday you see a tall antenna with a generator churning, giving it power. When I rolled up to the one man sitting there, I learned he was from Williamson County, Tennessee. He and his team of ninety folks from the Emergency Management Agency had driven seventeen hours to get down here. They were assisting the Houston Fire Department in getting people out of the evacuation zone. They were stationed at a nearby mall the previous day and he didn’t know where they’d sleep last night or where they would be stationed today. But he was happy to be here. “Houston and Texas would be there for us, so we’re here for y’all.”


Ours is a stretch of Houston where, if you didn’t know about Harvey, there were no visible signs of devastation or flooding. We are so, so fortunate. As the old hymn says, count your blessings and name them one by one. Those of us just beyond the flood line know exactly what the first thing on that list of blessings would be: a home.

I’m not the only one who knows that. Among the sounds of passing cars and distant helicopters still patrolling the area last night came the sound of Mexican music. One family was having a party in their back yard, the talking and laughter so welcome after the week we’ve had. It’s going to take a long time before true normalcy returns to Houston—we will likely have a new definition—but it was nice to know that on this holiday weekend, some bit of normal is already here.