A penny saved...

Today a grocery store clerk owed me a penny in change. "Which would you rather have," she asked me, "$10,000 today (not that she was offering), or a penny today, two cents tomorrow and so forth, doubling every day for the rest of your life?" I quickly said I'd go for the pennies. But is there enough copper in the world, or space to put it? Of course not. After a month or two, humanity would be crushed under avalanches of Honest Abe. And forget about inflation. There wouldn't be anything left to buy, because it would all be smothered in coins.

I'd get:
Day 1:  $0.01
Day 2:    0.02
Day 3:    0.04
Day 4:    0.08
Day 5:    0.16

Day 6:    0.32

Day 7:    0.64

Day 8:    1.28

Day 9:    2.56

Day 10:   5.12
Looks like chump change, huh?
But it gets better:
Day 20:  5242.88 (and don't forget we're accumulating the previous days, if we don't spend it)
Day 30: $5,368,709.12
Day 31 my calculator can't handle without using exponents. In a few days, we're zooming past Bill Gates and Carlos Slim. By two months we'll be storing extra coins on a distant moon--and probably not our own moon, which would be already full.

Random childhood memories

In fourth grade, pupils are in line between classes. I have a pocket dictionary and announce in a too-loud voice to a classmate, "See, 'bitch' isn't swearing. It means a female dog." An angry teacher confiscates my dictionary, and I never see it again.

Mickey Mantle

Dad takes me to a July 4 doubleheader at Fenway Park, Yankees vs. Red Sox. I love the Sox because they're the home team, but I worship the Yankees because they win so often. Mantle hits a single, and in the blink of an eye he's on first base. Later he belts one far, far over the left-field wall, up around the lights. I have never seen anything like it. The teams split the doubleheader. My Red Sox heroes are Ted Williams, of course, and lesser gods like Harry Agganis and Jimmy Piersall. Agganis is a local kid from Lynn who graduates from college in 1953, joins the Sox in 1954, and dies of pneumonia in 1955, an awful loss. Piersall is a flashy right fielder who suffers from mental illness. There's a movie about him, Fear Strikes Out. I listen to Curt Gowdy announcing a lot of games on the radio.

In fifth grade, our teacher warns the class that there's a strange man in the area who is asking children to go for a walk with him. Warning: Do not go with him. Shortly after, that man approaches me, and I run away in terror.

Our first car is an emerald green 1953 Chevy, complete with an AM radio. We take it on a three-week trip to Texas to see Mom's relatives, and we make a side trip to Monterey in Mexico. We make lots of stops at watermelon stands on rural roads, and I become thoroughly sick of watermelon. We decide to stop for lunch at a family restaurant in the South, but Dad sees a sign in the window saying they don't serve blacks, and he says we aren't going to eat at that kind of place. There are no interstate highways. We enjoy seeing the Burma Shave signs along the country roads, one sign for each line:

IF YOU DON'T KNOW
WHOSE SIGNS THESE ARE
YOU CAN'T HAVE
DRIVEN VERY FAR

We see lots of them, because Dad drives relentlessly, 500 miles per day at 55 miles per hour or slower. My brothers and I come to look on family road trips as ordeals. In cities, he routinely runs red lights if he thinks it's safe. We kids keep count and treat it as a joke. Oh, and he's a spitter. Spits out the car window when he's driving. One day I'm in the seat behind him with my window open. I complain that he's just spit in my face. Close your window, he says.

We get our first TV when I'm 12 or 13. It's a used console, and Dad examines it in the store. The thing is huge. Dad finds a dead mouse in the case behind the picture tube, but we bring it home anyway. Probably all he and Mom can afford. We watch lots of Jack Benny, The $64,000 Question, Playhouse 90, and the Friday Night Fights. No station broadcasts 24/7, so we also see plenty of test patterns.

Audie Murphy

Movies at Loew's Theater in Beverly are as little 16 cents for matinees, usually including cartoons and a pair of movies. In the evening, a newsreel replaces the cartoons. We're Catholics, so we pay attention to the Legion of Decency ratings. The bad movies are labeled "Morally objectionable in part for all," or at the worst, "Condemned." I'm too young to understand the immoral stuff anyway. My favorites are the Disney and war movies. World War II hero Audie Murphy stars himself in To Hell and Back and thrills me to no end.

Dad has an unpredictable temper, often arguing with neighbors or our family. Sometimes the police show up. At his best, he reads to the family on Friday evenings from Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I love that, especially when he reads The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant. But his anger can flare with no notice, and he can get physical with all of us. There are times when he threatens to kill us all, but in time I learn that he's just letting off steam. He doesn't like other people swearing, but in his rages he tells Mom and us boys that we can all "go take a flying fuck at the moon." I only understand the moon part, and I can't picture it but I know it's vile. The most memorable physical hurt I remember is a Christmas morning when I quarrel with my older brother and Dad breaks it up by hitting me in the face with his leather belt. Mainly, his weapons are words.

And you know what? I still love him, at least when I'm not busy hating him. Life frustrates him, and when his moods sour I just try to stay out of his way. The storms usually pass quickly. Mom, though, never forgets. Decades after his death, she still complains about him.

Mom buys me comic books at ten cents each: Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, whenever a new one comes out. After a few months when we've all read them, Mom bundles them up and mails them to Dad's relatives in British Honduras. In the Sunday paper, I love to read Pogo and Dick Tracy, with his cool two-way wrist radio. Pogo the possum gives me an early taste of political satire, though I'm too young to recognize it. Pogo's artist Walt Kelley is taking potshots at government officials like Senator Joe McCarthy. Dad thinks McCarthy is a little extreme, but at least he hates those commies.

Is Writing a Journey, or Just a Pit-Stop Along The Way?

 Today I'm pleased to host Jeannette de Beauvoir, a seasoned pro in the writing business.

Jeannette de Beauvoir

So I’m a writer.

We don’t say that in the same way that bankers do, or hair stylists, or store managers. We’re different, in that we really are what we do. Writers are never not writing, even when they’re not actually sitting in front of the keyboard.

So you have to be careful around us. We listen for a turn of phrase we may love, we hear your stories of family conflicts and dreams deferred and reactions to news stories, and we tuck everything away. We use you.

I’m a shameless example. I carry a notebook with me. I eavesdrop on conversations, I peer into lighted rooms at night, I ask seemingly innocent questions of strangers. All of my experiences are ultimately about words: how I’m going to render what I’m seeing or hearing or doing into words, which character can best use this situation or that conversation and make the words their own … well, you get my drift. I’m never not thinking about writing.

So if you meet me, beware. You’ve been warned.

Does it mean that I live vicariously through others’ experiences? Perhaps; but I rather think not. I live, if anything, in the liminality between reality and fiction, in the margins of stories, in the truths that can only be absorbed through novels. Toni Morrison once said in an interview, “I’m just trying to look at something without blinking.”

Jeannette's latest mystery. Click here to buy the book.

And maybe that describes best who I am. My work is dark, because I need to look at the world

without blinking. I explore what it might mean to a woman to learn that her beloved father may also be a war criminal. I write about a war hero’s deteriorating mental health and his family’s impatience with his narrowed world. I think about how far a person may be pushed when her husband abuses her and her child is murdered. I bring to light the hundreds of orphans misclassified as insane by a heartless system, and the CIA experiments that benefited from it. I fill a chapbook with poetry trying to get at the experience of domestic violence.

People talk about writing as a journey. As a metaphor. As a way of making sense of the senseless. For me, though, it’s always simply been an identifier. I’m not very good at much else in life besides writing, and I’ve never really wanted to do anything besides write. Does that make my writing a vehicle; does it mean that I’m a seasoned and savvy traveler of the interior? Or is it just who I am?

I don’t know, and I suspect that the answer is different for everyone. I’d be interested in hearing what your answer is … is your writing a journey? Or is it something that you do on the way somewhere else?

Or am I just asking the question as a way of peering into your soul for more material? When you’re talking with a writer, you’ll never really know.

Jeannette de Beauvoir is an award-winning novelist, poet, and playwright, who divides her life between Cape Cod and Montréal and spends far too much time thinking about all these things. Read more about her at www.JeannetteAuthor.com.

Fodder for Fiction: An Interview with Morgan St. James

Today I'm pleased to host author Morgan St. James, author of Who's Got the Money?It's a book that sounds like fun. So take it away, Morgan!

Drawing from Life Experiences for Fiction

Morgan St. James

I’ve been following Bob Sanchez’s blog for quite a while so it is my pleasure to add “my two cents” today. Life experiences are a wonderful resource for authors, whether used in fiction, non-fiction or creative non-fiction.

Most of us have stories about how we met our spouse or significant other, things that happened at the office, or an experience where a misunderstanding turned into something hilarious or violent. Others have amazing or astounding life experiences, but whatever the situation those incidents can easily find their way into fiction. Think about this—when recounting these tales we often embellish the facts for the shock or humor value. Sometimes it is exaggeration, and other times we add little things that really didn’t happen or eliminate embarrassing details. What we actually create in these stories is known as creative non-fiction, or facts mixed with fictional details.

This leads us to how authors can best use experiences to jump-start fictional plots or scenes in a book. I’m going to do a bit of blatant self promotion at this point, to illustrate what I mean by using my latest novel from the Dark Oak Mysteries imprint of Oak Tree Press.

REALITY FEEDS FICTION

“Who’s Got the Money?” is pure fiction, but was inspired by true experiences. Most people associate prison manufacturing with license plates, but real prison factories produce close to a billion dollars worth of products every year! My co-author, Meredith Holland, and I both worked for the real private sector company that was under contract to the Federal Bureau of Prisons to market furniture manufactured in Federal prisons. By a mandate from Roosevelt’s time that created the program, we could only sell to the Federal government. This wasn’t a desk here and a chair there. We were part of a team that covered the whole United States, each of us writing millions of dollars of business a year. I personally covered Southern California, Southern Nevada and Utah. Meredith worked in the Pacific Northwest including Alaska.

The subcontractor we worked for did bilk the government out of millions before going bankrupt and got away with it. Once we left the company, we thought “New government embezzlement plots are in the news every day, so why not write a funny crime caper, using what we know?”

We wanted something like Nine to Five meets The First Wives Club, and that’s what we wrote. A story centered on three down-on-their-luck female executives who go to work for the fictional Federal Association of Correctional Reform. When they turn into undercover bumbling Charlie’s Angels types, that’s when our experiences and knowledge kick in and the fun begins.

MAKE IT SEEM LIKE IT COULD HAVE HAPPENED

Many of the situations we used were not what actually happened, but rather gave us inspiration and allowed us to create a very clever plot. NYT Best Selling author, former undercover FBI Agent Joaquin “Jack” Garcia called Who’s Got the Money? “a witty, well thought-out embezzlement scheme.” He added it was a good thing we weren’t crooks. How’s that for reality?

USING THE PROVERBIAL “WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW”

 Experiences and professional or industrial knowledge may just be resting at the back of your mind. Think about giving your characters professions and put that knowledge to work in a thrilling, funny or over-the top way, depending upon your genre.

For example, we could not have conceived of the unique scheme in our book without our using what we knew, nor would we have had any idea what big business prison manufacturing is! Once we had a direction, what we learned over a four-year period entered into devising a scam that could have worked in real life. We drew upon every bit of knowledge, from working in the system, being inside of massive military warehouses and supply depots, and having toured actual prison factories and spoken with the inmates and supervisors.

Incidentally, before being inside these factories, I’d envisioned something like a “garage-type” manufacturing space surrounded by cell blocks. Hardly the case. These factories are like any regular factory except that they are inside the prison gates and instead returning to comfy homes in the suburbs when the day is done, the workers go to cells at night that are located in a different part of the prison grounds.

We plucked the details we wanted, exaggerated many and created a fictional prison system with an on-staff marketing team. Then we cooked up our extremely clever and diabolical plot to embezzle millions.

WHAT KNOWLEDGE CAN YOU USE IN FICTION?

Whether thrilling or funny, it’s your story and is populated by versions of things you’ve experienced and characters of your creation. Composite characters that blend two or three people you know are fun to work with. Grab the appearance of one real person, the quirks of another and maybe special skills or knowledge from another.

La Bella Mafia, due out in late summer from Houdini Books, is Morgan St. James’ next novel co-authored with Dennis N. Griffin, as told to us by Bella Capo. The amazing true story of an incredible woman who could have died many times but survived to tell the story. Daughter of a crime boss, promoter of clubs on Hollywood’s famed Sunset Strip and a female white boss in the Crips, she now dedicates her life to helping abused women through the La Bella Mafia organization.

Z is for Zilker Botanical Gardens

We visited the beautiful Zilker Botanical Gardens in Austin, Texas a couple of years ago when our son lived in the area. It's a great take-in on a warm, sunny day. If you plan to visit, check out their website first at http://www.zilkergarden.org/.

Y is for Yellowstone

Yellowstone is the first and perhaps the greatest of the national parks in the U.S. We RV'd there in 2009 with the Old Faithful geyser in mind, but that's just one of many memorable features. A century or so ago, a geologist realized that the entire park sits inside a giant volcano that seems to be taking a breather before blowing up again. There the earth bubbles and boils, giving off sulfurous gases and a multitude of small geysers, some of them more "faithful" in their eruptions that Old Faithful. One day, Nature may assert herself and wreak total destruction over the region. I hope that will be many centuries in the future. In the meantime, it's a wondrous place.

X is for Xanadu

Xanadu is a word that has come up in popular culture, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem that used it back in 1798. The story I heard was that he wrote it under the influence of opium but was interrupted by some normal daily business, and when he tried to finish, the spell was gone. What he did complete became justifiably famous. Here is the first stanza.

Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

W is for Wordsworth

I've only recently begun to explore the poetry of William Wordsworth. This one's a beauty:

          I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

          I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
          That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
          When all at once I saw a crowd,
          A host, of golden daffodils;
          Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
          Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

          Continuous as the stars that shine
          And twinkle on the milky way,
          They stretched in never-ending line
          Along the margin of a bay:                                 Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
          Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

          The waves beside them danced; but they
          Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
          A poet could not but be gay,
          In such a jocund company:
          I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
          What wealth the show to me had brought:

          For oft, when on my couch I lie
          In vacant or in pensive mood,                               
          They flash upon that inward eye
          Which is the bliss of solitude;
          And then my heart with pleasure fills,
          And dances with the daffodils.

V is for Vacation

Ithaca, New York
September 2001

Oh good, another post where I can foist off Vacation photos! When we lived in Massachusetts and were raising our son, many of our summer trips were to Cape Cod--Truro, Marconi Beach, Orleans, Barnstable, the National Seashore--we loved it so much, but eventually we couldn't think of any part of the Cape we hadn't been to at least twice. We'd spend an entire week, maybe two, with sand between our toes and fried clams or ice cream cones on our mind.

Jeff and his Grammy on Cape Cod, 1980

In time, my wife started talking about RV travel, and I balked. Please shoot me rather than put me in one of those things, I thought. I relented once, agreeing to rent an RV in the middle of winter to take to upstate New York. My hope was that we'd be so miserable, my wife would never suggest it again. That trip wasn't great, but it wasn't the disaster I wanted, either. Still, I resisted further RV talk enough so that after a while she gave up.

Fast forward a couple of decades to about 2008. My wife and I were driving in the Southwest, enjoying a gorgeous part of the country that has elbow room galore. And I turned to her and said something like, "You know, this would be a great place to have an RV." With that offhand comment, my fate was sealed. We and our cats now travel by RV on almost all of our vacations, and neither of us would have it any other way.

What summer is all about
Cape Cod, 1980

Half Dome, Yosemite, 1999

Not quite Lewis and Clark

By the way, regarding the Ithaca picture, we had planned to fly to Arizona in mid-September 2001. After the World Trade Center attacks, we canceled and decided to drive to upstate New York. We stayed at a lovely inn where the help at the desk looked middle Eastern, and I kept thinking blankety-blank Arabs. I was not in a rational state of mind at the time.

U is for Unique

Unique means one of a kind. As my eighth-grade teacher taught, it's one of those words that doesn't lend itself to comparison. Often we'll hear that such-and-such is the "most unique" product on the market. No, it may be the most unusual, but one thing can't be more one of a kind than another. Fingerprints, DNA samples, retinal scans, and snowflakes are unique, or so we're told. People are unique in their experiences, but in their personalities I am not so sure.

On the Internet you can find lists of "unique" baby names, but it's a good bet that if the names are on a list, they're not unique. One of the names I saw was Harper, and Harper Lee came right to mind. And Quentin immediately conjured up Tarantino.

T is for Truth

Write what you know, a writing sage has admonished. If I stuck to writing what I absolutely knew to be true, my posts would be quite short--oh wait, they are short. Maybe that's why so many of my posts cover travel. Post a pretty picture or two and move on. The Truth is that I have many opinions and know little incontrovertible Truth. That goes for any possible statement regarding religion or the nature of the Universe. We choose what to believe and sort ourselves into different camps, often as a result of our personal circumstances. Some of us "know" that God exists, has a gender or doesn't, is merciful or wrathful, loves everyone or hates gays, speaks to us through the Bible, or doesn't exist at all.  We "know" that capital punishment deters murderers or is cruel and unusual. We "know" that figures don't lie or that liars do figure. We "know" these things because our parents told us (and we know they wouldn't lie) or God (if such there be) help us, we read it on the Internet.

My own opinions are based on emotion or on information I choose to trust. If the world only trafficked in absolute facts, it would be unable to function.

So I don't know much with certainty, and that's the Truth.

S is for Santee Lakes, California

Cabins on one of the Santee Lakes

Santee Lakes are a small chain of seven lakes in Santee, California and filled with recycled municipal waste water. People don't swim in it, but boating and swimming are common. We liked to stay in its RV park when our son lived in the area. It's a very clean and appealing place.

On an easy walk around a lake

Chilling out at Santee Lakes

R is for Rio Grande

The Rio Grande at normal level;
Robledo Mountains on the other side

When we moved from Massachusetts to Las Cruces, New Mexico, I was surprised to learn that the Rio Grande is right across town. Miles to the east of us, the river forms the international border between the U.S. and Mexico. It's an important source of irrigation for farmers in both countries who grow pecans, cotton, and peppers. Upriver, dams create Elephant Butte and Caballo Lakes where water is stored and periodically released. We've had a drought lasting years, though. Here is a photo I took earlier this year, standing in the river bed. This is not even normal river water. What you see is effluent from a water treatment plant a couple of miles "upstream." In some places, you can walk across the river without getting your feet wet.

Rio Grande at Bosque State Park, January 2013

Q is for QWERTY

IBM PCjr (Wikipedia)

QWERTY, of course, represents the first six letters on a standard keyboard. Exactly why, who knows? (This link provides a clue.) But it was also the name of the first word processing program I ever owned, which ran on the IBM PC Junior, the first useful computer I ever owned. It saw me through drafts of my first novel, a fair number of freelance articles, and monthly book reviews for CompuServe Magazine. This baby had a 300-baud modem, and I could imagine those bits and bytes queueing up and marching one by one over the phone lines. The QWERTY program came on a large floppy disk and was, as I recall, quite satisfactory. If I wanted to create a spreadsheet, I had to plug in a cartridge containing Lotus 1-2-3. When I finally "upgraded" to an IBM XT, the Junior had been worked pretty hard. Still, a fellow bought it from me for $600 in cash.

P is for Poetry

Poetry isn't my forte, though I try my hand at it now and then. But I enjoy reading certain poets whose work "speaks to me," as 'twere. My favorite poet seems to vary according to whose work I'm reading at the time, but here are some I like to read.

My Kindle has a poetry section, and when I go to it, I frequently visit Robert Frost to read Mending Wall or The Road Not Taken. Shelly's Ozymandias made an impression on me in college, and it still does. As long as it is, I come back to Hiawatha by Longfellow, drawn in by its rhythm and story line. Last night I re-read Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard and will no doubt read it several more times during my life. For a long time I kept coming back to his On The Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes, mainly for its clever ending. (But if Gray really observed this, why didn't he just save the poor cat?)

Some other poems I've enjoyed that come to mind:

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

Howl by Alan Ginsburg

Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay

When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d by Walt Whitman

...and pretty much anything by Emily Dickinson

Who are your favorite poets? And when you read a poem to yourself, do you ever read it aloud? I do.

O is for Oregon

Okay, I don't know that much about Oregon, having been there only once, in 2010.

Heceta Head Lighthouse, near Florence

Umpqua River

Pelican swallowing a fish,
2010 Reedsport Chainsaw
Sculpting Championship

N is for Nightfall in Las Cruces

This is really just an excuse to use a couple of photos taken in our yard. Above is Picacho Peak at sunset. Picacho is Spanish for peak, so one might call it Peak Peak. Below is the sunset reflected in our front window.

M is for Mountains

 I spent most of my life in eastern Massachusetts, where the nearest mountains were many miles away. The Berkshires are at the other end of the state, but it was easier to head north into New Hampshire. Mount Monadnock is right over the state line, and it's said to be the most-climbed mountain in the world after Mt. Fuji. The White Mountains and the Presidential Range are farther north, with some forbidding peaks like Mt. Washington, where weather conditions can change suddenly and bring tragedy to the unprepared. A road goes to the top, as does a cog railway. I've taken both, but would never consider hiking up the mountain.

Cog railway, Mount Washington

Now my wife and I are well west of the Mississippi River, New Mexico to be more specific, and mountains are all over the map. From my office window the Robledo Mountains are visible to the west; in another hour the sun will set over them and wink out for the night. Nearby are the Dona Ana Mountains, known also as the Jornadas. Closest but out of my immediate sight are the Organ Mountains, which dominate the Las Cruces skyline. The state, I think, may have more mountains than it has names for them.

Dripping Springs trail in the Organ Mountains

L is for Louise Hirschfeld

Louise Hirschfeld, circa 1931

Louise Hirschfeld was my Mom, who passed away almost ten years ago. Born and raised on a farm in a tiny central Texas town, she had a tough childhood mainly due to illness. In due time she met the man from Belize who'd become my Dad, and she gave him four sons in Texas and Louisiana. Then during World War II he sent us all to live in Massachusetts. Mom hated it, yet lived the rest of her life north of Boston. But I'd ask her to tell me stories (I was the last of the brood), and she'd tell me about farm life, about meeting up with a rattlesnake, picking cotton, coming down with diphtheria and having to drop out of school forever in the eighth grade. She talked about the sun and the heat, and how she loved bluebonnets and rain--to her dying day, she always loved an old-fashioned downpour. She talked about getting her first job as a telephone operator, where a supervisor looked down on her and challenged her to spell "Albuquerque." Mom proudly recounted spelling it perfectly. Years later as she lay dying in ICU, my wife and I inquired about her comfort. "I'm not doing that well," she said. -- Pause -- "But I can still spell Albuquerque." And then one last time, slowly, she did.

Mom, 2002