Sep 15
Sep 7
He’s a medical doctor, an ophthalmologist. Take away his license to practice medicine. The only target is Bashar, and the shot cannot miss. It goes to the man himself, to his understanding of who he is. It would sting more than anything cruise missles could do (unless he is, oops, incinerated accidentally).
Aug 26
As a rule, you get only what you go after. But sometimes visitors come to you, uninvited, but not unwelcome.
Fawn.
Some visitors are anticipated, but land early.
Maple rag.
And there are visits, not uncommon, but remarkable in the details.
Stored sunshine.
Paradise with mildew and stinging insects, is paradise, all the same. Which you can prove simply by seeing who comes along to share it with you.
The final edit of a novel is a long long slog, if only because final never ends. You cannot enter a paragraph without making a change, for the better, you hope, or fixing an error. The tenth pass is the charm. Ghost Walk will be published in the next few weeks. Until then, I welcome visitors who are beautiful and silent and arrive when my eyes are screen sore.
Aug 19
You kill back the grass and till the soil. Add compost, manure, phosphate, lime, and till again. Plant the seeds and plant the seedlings, mulch and weed and water and spray. Then the flow flips, and the yield comes inside, comes for dinner.
Weeks later, months later, the pay-back exceeds expectation. Excellent fruit.
Like a novel growing in the mind, only a much quicker yield, and edible, suculent in fact beyond belief.
Aug 4
Really? Just one day? Does it concentrate wonderfully the mind of the swallowtail? One day in the air, in the sun, then eggs under a leaf, your death, then a cocoon and a pupa and a larva, an interval of destructive dining. Eventually, there’s another day, but not yours. You gotta really be hoping it doesn’t rain. On your day.
Flower Power
A day in the life. The life in a day.
Aug 4
Whenever I’ve gotten seriously stuck in a story, almost always it is a character who takes my hand and leads me through. Generally it’s a character already established in the story, with all the attributes necessary to solve the problem already attributed. An author has to trust the characters, and sometimes get out of their way.
We make up the stories, to begin with. But once underway a true story (true fiction) will be found to contain what its telling takes. The characters, once set in motion, in a context, live out their tale. Authors are not stenographers for a muse. But that’s often not a terrible metaphor for the first draft of a story. Nor are we editors who clean up the wordy mess the muse has spewed, unreadalbe until tightened and focused, or who flesh out the telegraphic hints the muse has tapped onto the wire. But sometimes it feels that way.
There’s never any help, taking the first to the finished draft. That’s all on us. And it is a long, long grind: letter by letter, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. You don’t do it once. You do it relentlessly, over and over. Ten times, end to end, is probably a good average number of passes.
By the time all that’s done, we have no doubt our names belong on the cover. But sometimes, during that wild giddy wondorous first phase, we’re sure we should be sharing the credit with … well, somebody or something not entirely of our making.
But then we think how dumb it would sound, to share with our own characters. Dumb, except maybe to another author.
Jul 28
When Zimmerman stopped his car, Martin was walking away. He got out, against the advice of the 911 operator and Neighborhood Watch protocol, because he thought he would lose sight of Martin. His testimony. Every second that passed, Martin was one step farther away. If Zimmerman walked in the same direction, but more slowly, Martin would probably not have seen him, and the distance between them would have grown. If he had walked at the same speed as Martin, the distance between would have remained the same, and there would have been little chance of an altercation.
Thus it is demonstrated: Zimmerman closed the distance, he walked faster, he pursued, he initiated.
And Martin became aware of someone closing on him, alone in the rainy dark. Who? Not a cop. Why?
How did Martin respond? He could have have run away. He could have stopped, turned, and waited, or even moved towards Zimmerman. What did Zimmerman say? What did Martin say? Who touched or pushed or punched first? Who was more afraid? Why wasn’t a brief conversation enough to resolve things?
All unknowable, unless you are Zimmerman. My guess is Martin declined to accept the authority Zimmerman asserted. Lacking command presence, a badge, a uniform, or any actual authority, Zimmerman pulled what he had, his gun. In terror, Martin lunged, Zimmerman fired. Or Martin punched him first, not liking the guy who chased him down, fearing a mugging.
Point is Zimmerman didn’t get the submission he was seeking, so he killed the kid. And there isn’t a narrative to excuse that.
Quod Erat Demonstratum
Tighter still: didn’t like the look of that boy, so he killed him. He was frightened, of course he was. Repeat.
I missed a crucial part of the Florida law, and it is a part of most of the stand-your-ground laws around the country. I feel bad that I missed it, but so did most commentators, and so did the judge (in so far as jury instructions went).
There’s an instigator exception: if you picked the fight, if you initiated the altercation, you cannot claim the stand-your-ground defense. You can still claim common-law self-defence: you thought your life was in danger, so you did what you had to do. But you might have to prove, or at least argue convincingly, that you had no chance to retreat or descalate. Could you have pulled your gun, and backed away? For instance. And you might be challenged about exactly how and why you got into the situation. You can’t just play the get-out-of-jail-free card.
There is no real first-hand testimony about the sequence of events, who did or said what first, except Zimmerman’s version (via interviews and videos and statements — he didn’t testify in court). So he might still have won the case. But the dubious jurors might have hung on a little longer, and persuaded some of the others.
The judge did it.
George Zimmerman is not guilty. Probably the correct verdict. There has to be doubt about exactly what happened. And under the Florida law, regardless of how he got there, even if fully culpable for creating the situation, how can it be proved he was not afraid for his life? Had Martin killed him, having grabbed the gun, say, Martin’s verdict should also have been not guilty, under Florida’s stand-your-ground standards.
There is ascribable guilt. The state of Florida made the law that allows the survivor of any deadly altercation to be judged not guilty: I tried to rob the guy, your honor, but he pulled a gun, so I had to stab him. The state of Florida allowed a person with a history of violence to own and legally to carry a gun. The shill of the gun manufacturers, aka the NRA, and all the second amendment hysterics who have pushed carry laws through in Florida, and in all states (now Illinois has fallen), their culpability is clear.
Don Quixotie’s lance goes snicker-snack against these, the craven and the cynical and the delusional, but they are unhurt, nor a scratch, nor a tinge of remorse.
Or course, none of it is about race. Unless you find that almost all of those who are pleased with the verdict are white, and all but a vanishing whisper of black persons are displeased or saddened by the verdict. Then, oops, we’re hip-deep in race. Doggone, that’s not behind us yet? Yes, it is behind us, still, and alongside, and in-our-face.
The edges have blurred. But white people increaslingly desparate to keep power and priviledge incarcerate as many not-white as they can (the war on drugs), and ward off the dilution of immigration with deportations and ‘border security.’ The white persons who repudiate these motivations and tactics often as not allow the policiies to continue, holding their noses, passively accepting the prolongation of their privileges.
Zimerman’s attorney is probably correct that, had the races been reversed, there would have been no trial. There would have been a quick plea deal and a very long incarceration. Some of our contradictions may yet shake out: a pot-smoker black president and a black attorney-general enforcing pot laws, a black supreme court justice voting against the kind of affirmative action that powered his elevation. It’s fabuoulsly entertaining, for those of us not dead or in jail.
Jul 20
My service provider wouldn’t say how many of their clients were affected. Several hundred at least. Their servers were entered and compromised by an entity calling itself Islamic Ghosts TeaM. What you saw if you came here yesterday was an all black screen with this logo at the top:
What purpose or motive may have been engaged is unknown. No injury beyond interruption, no content damaged or removed.
Weird, no?
The page header tab above will take you to the first chapter of the book I’m currently working on. Geoff and Ellen get to stay home for this one, it takes place in Roanoke. They are supernumeraries in the Roanoke Festival Ballet production of the Nutcracker. Events unfold. Comments welcome (text riddled with typos, I know, it’s rough).
Jun 9
Jun 9
Jun 9
This was my answer, probably too much of one.
Hi, Sadie:
Thanks for your comment. I’m glad you liked Fit to Curve and I hope you will like Heart Attack, too. The third book (Ghost Walk) is just about ready to publish, the forth (Little Fishes) is finished, first draft, but needs cleaning. I’m currently working on the fifth (Drosselymeyer Chronicles).
The twin/triplet subplot sort of grew by itself. The sisters engage in lots of coming and going, often concealed, and they see (and can comment on) the comings and goings of the other characters. They helped to uncover and connect. They came from a woman I met who talked about her “twin sister” and got me truly confused because there seemed, from her stories, to be more than one. I asked if she had two sisters, who were twins (not including her), thinking I had figured out the only explanation. No, she said, they were all twins, also her fourth sister, but whenever they said triplet or quadruplet people pulled away, because it made them freaks. So they all just said “twin,” because it was true, and kept people from having weird reactions. One of those filed away things.
English is funny with second person plurals. You/your/yours used to be plural, with thee/thy/thine for singular. When you became both, 4-500 years ago, it could be confusing whether somebody meant one person or more than one. Now we use a bunch of plural versions: youse, you guys, you all, you-all, y’all, ya’ll, yawl, all y’all. They tend to be regional, but move around over time. What I like about you-all is that the meaning is clear. A yawl is also a little boat, ya’ll sometimes means “you will” (ya’ll have to buy some new tires). The pronunciation I intend is yawl. You’re right that anybody who sounds out the you in you-all is a non-southerner being condescending or trying to sound chummy. There’s always a tiny bit of another vowel sound in y’all: yi’all, ye’all, yu’all but it’s so tiny a catch sound it gets weird and wrong if you try to spell it out. I think it varies from place to place around the south, but I couldn’t begin to say which goes where. You’ve lived in more southern places than I have. Does this last make any sense?
My wife agrees with you, and tried to get me to use y’all several years ago. I think, between her arguments (she’s an Atlanta girl) and now you, that I was wrong. There’s still the sticky business of y’all versus ya’ll. The second one has strong champions, even though it’s clearly the underdog. The argument is that it comes from ya or ye for you, joined to all. Besides which, it was favored by Faulkner and Hemingway and McCullers. I think I’ll stick with y’all unless I mean to mark someone as not southern (neither of my main characters is, by birth; Ellen’s ear is good, Geoff’s not so much, he could get it wrong).
All of this is moot, in the part of the south my wife and I moved to thirty-five years ago, from Massatusets. Up here, in the hills, it’s not y’all at all, but yu-uns and yur-uns and (my favorite) yursensus. This is the land of chimleys and bullnozers and bob-war, where visitors told it’s time to go home hear “yu-uns stay with us now.” and people “kindly like” things and other people.
On “couple things” versus “couple of things,” I’ll have think about that. I say and write both. I think “couple of” is more correct expository writing, not necessarily so in conversation. “Couple things I need to know: is the gun loaded, are you left-handed?” But if you’re right about “a lot of ‘couple things,’” that’s a tic, and that’s lazy, and not good. Thanks for noticing. And thanks again for taking the trouble to write.
Bud
Jun 9
Sadie said it would be okay to use her email as a post.
Mr. Crawford–
I just completed reading Fit to Curve I have never contacted an author before, but I was compelled to write you as soon as I finished the book. Two things—the first is that I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It was well written, the plot was intricate but believable, and the characters came to life on the pages. I did wonder about the inclusion of the little side mystery of the twins who turned out to be triplets, but of course that is your prerogative as the author and did not make my enjoyment of the book any more or any less. There was something that bothered me throughout the book, though, and that is what prompted me to write to you. Before contacting you, I looked up your background to verify that you are not a native southerner. I see that you are presently living in North Carolina, but I have to tell you I was really put off throughout the book by your use of the term “you-all”. If you have lived in North Carolina any length of time, you have to have noticed that in that state as well as most, if not all, southeastern states, the form of address for a group of two or more people is “y’all”, pronounced “yawl”. While my home state is Alabama, I have lived in Georgia and Virginia and have spent considerable lengths of time in every other southeastern state over the last 65+ years. The only time I have heard the term “you-all” is from non-southerners who just do not hear the distinction between the two terms. I am aware that the contraction “y’all” is a shortening of the term “you-all”, but it is still a shortened version that is used extensively, and it just bothers me to see it written incorrectly. One other thing, there is also a colloquialism that I’m thinking is a southern thing. I really don’t know what the correct grammatical version is, but we generally speak of “two things” but a “couple of things” rather than a “couple things”. I only bring this up because there were a lot of “couple things” in the book.
Thank you for providing me with enjoyment and entertainment, sans an obvious agenda, political or otherwise, other than entertainment. I am assuming Fit to Curve was your first book, and I look forward to reading the remaining ones. When I read a new author who has more than one publication, I try to read the books in order of publication. Please think about a possible correction concerning the “you-all” term, though.
Sadie K. Osburn
Jun 7
There’s hundreds of these maps, made by Joshua Katz at North Carolina State University. Many follow the westward-sinking Mason-Dixon line here, but many, in fascinating ways, do not. Here’s a link to the project: https://www4.ncsu.edu/~jakatz2/project-dialect.html. Worth many long looks.
The immediate interest for me was the continuation of the discussion started by Sadie K. Osborne about correct southern usage. From the map it looks like the form I picked is only common along the west-facing coast of Maryland and a big chunk of central Kentucky. Clearly in the green, where my stories have been set, “it’s y’all, all y’all, dammit!” Or “ya’ll.”
plural you
May 19
This site gets 20-30 spam comments each day from something that calls itself: roogmaralty. Several hundred per month.
Here’s a sample:
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The salad is fresh but without charm or sense or interest of any kind. The sole purpose is dissemination of the embedded urls.
More ugly, or more stupid? Provocative? Vapid, viscous, vacant.
Has anyone ever encountered this entity?
Spam-bot obviously, but behind it, some human impulse or purpose. Or, maybe not. Which would be worse?
Sigh.
Apr 10
Mar 10
demi smile
Ghost Walk is very near release, a week or two. Just finishing the final review of the text, zeroing in on the cover art. So close.
Little Fishes is finished, cooling off, probably will have a summer release.
The fifth title in the series, tentative title Drosselmeyer Chronicles, is well underway.
Writing coninues to come easier than posting. Or: with time limited, the writing wins.
Sep 29
Sep 23
Thanks to Andrew Campbell there are new covers for both published books, already uploaded to Amazon KDP. My original and very amateur versions are officially flushed. Anyone interested in covers for ebooks should check him out:
https://www.andrewcampbell.weebly.com
I think they’re handsome. Next job is to get him working on Ghost Walk and Little Fishes.
New Cover for Fit to Curve.
New Cover for Heart Attack.
Here’s a link to the story in the Washington Post, from September first:
By Michael Birnbaum
SIENA, Italy — Tucked away in this Tuscan city, the oldest bank in the world has survived the Borgias, pestilence and too many wars to count. Now, a mundane foe has proved far more dangerous: Italian government debt (follow the link for the rest of the article).
So what? The world teems with teetering banks. It’s a little arcane, a Poundian thing. If you ever fought through the economic crankpot parts of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, you’ll remember the Monte dei Paschi. It’s the good bank, founded on natural increase (sheep breeding as they manure the ground that grows the grass they eat). Distinguished from the downright iniquity of the banks of discount, collecting interest on self-created funds. A rock, an icon, an ideogram. So, it would be sad, that’s all.
Sep 9
You can’t judge a book by its cover. But you do. And you have to, even though you can’t. There is a dense immensity of titles in the Amazonian cosmos. To catch the eyes of browsers and scrollers, a cover has to read, nor repel, and engage. Fit To Curve and Heart Attack will soon have new e-covers. They’re in the pipe.
Aug 25
I’ve been fortunate in the reviews I’ve had on Amazon for Fit To Curve, far more positive than negative overall. But one failing struck everyone: a vast abundance of spelling mistakes and typos. One of the reviewers made an extraordinary offer, and then made good on it: she sent me a list of errata, somewhere between dozens and hundreds, depending on how you score recurrent violations, both for Fit To Curve and for Heart Attack. I entered the corrections and uploaded cleaned versions of both titles. All new purchasers (since a couple weeks ago) have got the improved text.
So: thank you, Sibyl. It was a wonderful gift.
Meanwhile, it is apparently becoming possible for Kindle readers to receive revised versions of previously purchased titles. It’s a new thing. I’m going to try to get that feature turned on for my books.
Aug 9
Most of the spam that comes to blogs is blatant. It shouts. It wants you to do something or buy something, with no connection to the context it has landed in. When comments are moderated, as they are here, it’s a simple chore to delete them. Annoying, but easy.
The new stuff is creepy and insidious. It masquerades as a comment (bland generic usually positive). But ends in a URL. And it’s standard with WordPress to show name, email, and url for anyone making a comment, both as an identifier and as a way to make contact with an individual. So that’s two URLs.
And that’s the purpose. I can’t see any other. Let me know if anyone’s aware of a different motivation. Sprinkle your urls around the web, randomly, maybe every hundredth or thousandth gets a click. You don’t care about the inefficiency or waste of bandwidth, it’s free to you. It’s weirdly organic, like maple seedpods spinning as far as the wind will take them, maybe one in a million makes a tree.
Fake name, fake email, fake comment. Real URL. It took me a while to figure out what was going on and delete them. I haven’t heard any discussion elsewhere about them, but I haven’t really looked. So planting my ignorance as my flag, I’ll claim the discovery and naming rights: it’s SpermSpam. And it hopes you will be its egg.
I’ve left a few scattered here, with the URLs stripped. Can you spot them?
Jun 26
Some reviewers know how hard their words can hit, or how high their words can lift. Some don’t. Some know that their audience includes one human person with a particularly focused attention, some seem not to know. Or don’t care. The empathy that can imagine your self as your target is not automatic or available to all.
Feb 28
old Heart Attack cover
Special introductory price: $0.99
Ellen’s trip to Colonial Williamsburg gets complicated. She’s researching an article about the people who work there. But somebody is making things difficult for those people. At first just puzzling, then malicious, then seriously nasty. The local police and the administrators of the Historical Area can’t agree whether all these events are connected, or what they should do.
Ellen’s daily updates alarm Geoff, and he rides down for consultation and company. During the two days it takes him to bicycle from Roanoke to Williamsburg, things take an even nastier turn. He’s almost too late.
old cover for FTC
Ellen is on assignment to Asheville, North Carolina, to do a followup on a story she wrote a year before. Geoff is reluctant to come until he learns his college girlfriend and new husband will be staying at the same bed-and-breakfast.
Their trip turns deadly, but the police see only accidents. They’re on their own if they want to solve the killings before there are more vicitms, before they become victims themselves. Fortunately their fellow guests pitch in.
Geoff visits an old friend’s low-country plantation to attend the wedding of the daughter of the house. Carrie’s twenty-two now, she had been just six when Geoff abducted her from an abusive father. But in Charleston the secrets have secrets and there is more going on than just the wedding preparations. When Charleston’s Ichabod killler strikes after a two year lapse just before the bridal shower, and again just after, somebody had better begin thinking quickly. Maybe Ellen can help.
