Having different strengths as individuals, we will take different writing advice, uh, differently. Put that on a t-shirt.
Thinking of my own strengths, I can point to two solid words of writing advice that have helped me maintain the level of mediocrity you’ve come to expect from my posts on this blog.
No dedicated writing space. By using this laptop and my tiny desk for many activities aside from occasional mediocre writing, I encourage distraction and my habitual multitasking. I may be a fairly gifted multitasker, actually. I get all kinds of stuff done. Not thoughtful blog posts that build an enduring readership, but tasks, man! tasks get done. With a dedicated space, one can mold physical habits to aid the dedicated task, so when I sit down to write, I actually write. Often I open the blogger, and all my thoughts sneak out the back.
No writing notebook. I’ve used writing a notebook in the past for many things, including review notes on books I read. I don’t think going back to any of that would interest me today, but notetaking helped me think and remember observations far better than my current non-method. I’ve had a few good blogging ideas recently that were nowhere to be seen later in the day. When I first thought of this post, I thought I could rattle off these other ideas, but no, I don’t have any other ideas. I am a stranger to them.
Now, I’m on the loveseat with the laptop and Splatoon on the big screen: no distractions at all, words flowing like cold butter.
Speaking of multitasking, I’ve avoided social media for a few weeks and feel somewhat liberated. I’ve fueled their accounts with too much of my attention.
On a country road near Dublin, a wealthy property developer is found dead in a crashed car. It wasn’t the crash that killed him.
Not far away, in a shed in the woods, a young man is found
naked and stabbed to death.
Detectives Aidan Burke and Fiona Moore are on the case. The
books at the older victim’s office look fishy, and his company’s labor force
seems dodgy. But his family situation was odd as well. No lack of motives here,
but lots and lots of secrets.
That’s the premise of David Pearson’sA Fatal Liaison, second in his Burke and Moore mystery series. I’ve reviewed the previous volume before, and this one completes the series to date. No doubt there will be more, because these books work pretty well.
As a Typical Male ™, I assumed at first that Aidan Burke,
the senior detective, was the main character. But he’s really not. Aidan is
smart enough and knows his job, but he has a drinking problem and has lost a
step or two. He doesn’t treat Fiona badly, according to his somewhat Neanderthal
lights, but his younger sergeant is actually smarter than he is. More than once
she suggests a line of inquiry that he barely notices, which turns out vital
once she’s followed it up.
A Fatal Liaison is a solid entry in a solid series. It’s not one of my personal favorites, but I have no cause to complain. Cautions for language and mature subject matter. Also implied criticism of traditional Christian morality.
Stan Jackson’s Ste Webster mystery series continues with its second hair color title, Brunette. Once again Ste, a professor at the University of York, has a murder to solve… for reasons of his own.
Mackenzie West was, despite her brown hair, a golden girl at
the University. Beautiful and popular, she was a good student and a star
athlete, a prospect for the British Olympic fencing team. Until one morning she
plunged down a stairwell to her death.
It could have been an accident, or suicide, but the police
suspect murder, and Inspector Allen would like nothing better than to pin it on
Ste Webster. Failing that, there’s another faculty member he has his eye on,
Matt Harper, head of the Philosophy Department. Matt’s a friend, and Ste doesn’t
believe he did it. When both Mackenzie’s parents and Matt ask him to look into
the matter, he hesitates but agrees, partly to appease his personal demons. He’ll
have to keep out of Inspector Allen’s way, but he’ll try.
It soon appears that Mackenzie had dark secrets no one guessed.
Ste finds not one but several people who had plausible reasons for killing her.
Which gives them reasons for silencing Ste as well…
As with Blonde, the previous book in the series, I enjoyed Brunette quite a lot, but had reservations. The prose is very good, and I like Ste and his supporting cast. As an added bonus, both Chesterton and C. S. Lewis get quoted (though Ste is not religious).
On the down side, I’m still annoyed by Ste’s tendency to walk
into danger without protection, and the author’s tendency to rescue him through
sheer luck. That’s a plot strategy that can’t be sustained forever. Also, the
conclusion of the book was a little bit ambivalent in moral terms.
Still, I’m going on to the next book. The pleasures outweigh my reservations. Minor cautions are in order for language and subject matter.
While still I may, I write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew. From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye
W.B. Yeats wrote fondly of his native Ireland and the pagan faerie roots he supposed it has. These lines from his poem, “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” published in 1893. Composer Thomas LaVoy arranged the last stanza into this choral piece, performed by The Same Stream.
I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them.
We have the privilege of living in a time when contemporary authors are creating quality fantasy stories that are funny and inspiring and that say true things. Adults and children need Jonathan Rogers’s feechie folk, S. D. Smith’s rabbits with swords, Jonathan Auxier’s courageous chimney sweeps, Andrew Peterson’s brave and flawed Wingfeather children, and others to incarnate truths for us. Battling the forces of evil and experiencing a “eucatastrophe,” a moment of redemption, with a character in a story gives us a glimpse of what it’s like to know goodness and love truth.
My kids and I have enjoyed some of the books Blomberg commends. I reviewed a few in posts from days on the olden internet. Good fantasy is a marvelous thing, and these are good titles, if you haven’t looked into them. Links in the original article.
The occupant of the final ensemble, the only one of the three sitting, combined wrinkles with lack of hair like a pug slightly ironed.
Years back, I read a mystery called By Frequent Anguish, by S.F.X. Dean. It was the story of an academic whose girlfriend is murdered. It moved me deeply, for personal reasons. The sequel, however, left me cold, and I didn’t read any more in the series.
Blonde, by Stan Jackson, had much the same effect on me, and shares a similar premise. Perry “Ste” Webster, who teaches philosophy at a fictional campus of the University of York in England, was in love with Anna, a local barmaid. Though her social status displeased Ste’s upper-class parents, she was beautiful and smart and full of life – until Ste found her stabbed to death in her apartment one night. The police, of course, fixed on him as their primary suspect, but he has an alibi and powerful friends.
Soon he discovers an important clue – Anna’s diary. But reading it, he finds that she wrote in it about a personal secret he confided to her. He doesn’t want the police to see that secret. So, in spite of his grief, he takes it upon himself to investigate Anna’s personal connections. Some of the people she worked with were involved in a disastrous investment scheme, and owed a lot of money. Ste uncovers some dark secrets and angers some dangerous people, but the final solution to the mystery will be a complete shock.
I enjoyed Blonde very much. Not only was the mystery fascinating and the characters appealing, but the writing sometimes rose to a very high level (though the author has a lamentable tendency to overuse exclamations marks). And though no particular deference is paid to Christianity, Ste Webster as a philosopher and reader seems to me to be mostly on the right lines.
On the other hand, Ste can be an annoying detective. His approach to dangerous situations is generally to just walk in and trust that some deus ex machina will save his bacon. That weak plot device was used a little too much in this book, imho.
However, I have proceeded to the next book in the series. Recommended.
David Pearson, an established Irish mystery writer, kicks off a new police procedural series set in Dublin with A Deadly Dividend.
In the classic model of the Anglo-Irish police story, you’ve got your grizzled male Detective Inspector, supported by a younger female detective. What makes this series somewhat different is that the older male detective is not always on top of his game, and his assistant (who does not look like a model) has to save him from himself from time to time.
In A Deadly Dividend, a young banker is stabbed to death in an alleyway. When Detectives Aidan Burke and DS Fiona Moore inquire at his bank, it becomes apparent that the victim has been fiddling with his international accounts. It turns out he has had a clandestine dealings with shady interests. When another murder follows, they need to move fast – if Fiona can keep Aidan sober long enough to get the job done.
I quite enjoyed A Deadly Dividend. It definitely leaned more to the mystery than the thriller side, and dealt realistically with the plain drudgery that police work involves. And the fact that Aidan has a drinking problem and makes serious job mistakes – which Fiona must cover for – makes them an unusual fictional team. I also liked occasional suggestions of non-PC opinions.
There’s only one more book in the series to date, but I’m
planning to read it.
Starbucks, Intelligentsia, and Peet’s Coffee have stopped accepting a personal tumbler or mug in which to put your special brew. Concerns over spreading the coronavirus have lead to changed practices and a few store closures.
If you’re thinking all the talk of coronavirus sounds fun, I encourage you to skip this one. It’s a real drag; not like the old days when you could count a popular bug or flu to get things swinging. Ahem.
Your home or office coffeemaker could be hatin’ on you with mold and bacteria. A 2011 study found 50 percent of the coffeemaker water tanks tested had mold or yeast inside. The Chicago Sun-Times has recommendations for cleaning your favorite kitchen device as well as other nasty substances people have found in coffeemakers.
Panera hopes you’ll skip a germ-ridden cup o’ joe at home and have it with them instead. They have launched a subscription plan that will provide free coffee and tea to patrons willing to part with $9/month via the MyPanera app. Mary didn’t like it enough, though it could have advantages if it ran smoothly in your area.
“By her troth,” she said, “she thought it was time to bid Mr. Mertoun gang hame and get bandages, when she had seen, with her ain twa een, Mordaunt ganging down the cliff like a wildcat….”
What you see in the passage above is an example of something I had heard of (from my friend, the scholar Dale Nelson), but had never encountered – or hadn’t noticed before. It has to do with the use of quotation marks. Turns out the rules have changed over time.
For you and me – living today and erudite as we both are – the rules of quotations are fairly simple. You’ve got direct quotations and indirect quotations (there are probably proper names for them I never learned – feel free to enlighten me). A direct quotation is supposed to recount what the character said, word for word. Direct quotations are to be set off with quotations marks:
“Lars Walker’s books,” he said, “are the best Viking novels written in Robbinsdale, Minnesota in our time.”
Then there are indirect quotations, usually indicated by the
word “that”:
He said that Lars Walker’s books are the best Viking novels written in Robbinsdale, Minnesota in our time.
The quotation way up at the top of this post comes from Walter Scott’s The Pirate, which I reviewed below. The speaker is a woman named Swertha, and the “she” who thought it was time to bid Mertoun “gang hame” was Swertha herself.
Quotation marks were a relatively new thing in those days,
and writers hadn’t yet worked out exactly how they should be used.
Our rules for direct and indirect quotations are, in fact, a
fairly recent phenomenon. They should not be applied (in my view) to older
literature, such as the Bible.
The earth is rented from its surface down to its most central mines; — the fire, and the means of feeding it, are currently bought and sold; — the wretches that sweep the boisterous ocean with their nets, pay ransom for the privilege of being drowned in it. What title has the air to be exempted from the universal course of traffic?
In early 1725, a pirate named John Gow (or Goff) returned to his birthplace of Orkney, passing himself off as a prosperous merchant. He even courted a local girl. However, he was recognized and denounced by a genuine merchant. He and his men stormed a mansion and hid there for a while, but finally fled by ship. They were captured when their vessel ran aground. Goff was tried at Newgate in London, and hanged in the customary style.
Nearly 100 years later, Sir Walter Scott took that basic story and added romantic elements, along with lore and local color he’d collected on a visit to the Northern Isles some years before, and produced the novel, The Pirate. It is this novel I’ve been reading for about a week, and have finished at length.
Most of the story is set in the Shetlands (here called Zetland). There are two main characters. The first is a handsome young man named Mordaunt Mertoun (seriously, that’s his name). He’s a “stranger” on Zetland, in the sense that his father came from England, and is not of the old Norwegian stock. Nevertheless, he’s popular with the islanders, and a favorite at the home of the island chieftain, Magnus Troil, known as the “Udaller.” Magnus has two beautiful daughters, Minna and Brenda, and people speculate as to which of them Mordaunt will choose to marry.
One day a ship is wrecked at Sumberg Head, and Mordaunt rescues (against his neighbors’ advice, see my blog post further below) the lone survivor, with the help of a local character called Norna of the Fitful Head. She is an old woman believed to have powers of prophecy and weather control. The survivor calls himself Captain Cleveland. Captain Cleveland is rich, handsome, and refined, and soon becomes a new favorite with the Udaller. Mordaunt can’t help noting that his own welcome at the Troil home grows cold after Cleveland’s arrival. Nevertheless, he attends a big house party there. There he clashes with Cleveland, there is a fight, and both men mysteriously disappear.
The action comes to a crisis somewhat later at the annual
fair at Kirkwall in Orkney, where Cleveland has to balance his chance of escape
against his desire to see his beloved, Minna, one last time. The conclusion of
the story is romantic, semi-tragic, and implausible.
I like to pose as someone who can appreciate older literature better than the average modern, but I have to admit The Pirate was a bit of a slog. The language is ornate and dense, a problem not improved by this Kindle edition, produced with OCR technology and not vetted for word mistakes. Also, footnotes are frequently not recognized as such, and so get stuck, confusingly, in the middle of sentences.
Modern writers know they’re competing with television and
movies, and make it a point to grab the reader from the first sentence and run,
to avoid distractions. Authors in Scott’s time had more latitude. They staged
their novels like salons, introducing you to each character in a leisurely way,
and leaving you with them to get acquainted, even if they’re bores. Sometimes
especially if they’re bores – bores are considered good for a laugh.
For me, the glimpses into “Zetland” lore and legend (there’s magic here, but it’s rationalized) was intriguing, and made it worth my time. You might not find it as rewarding. Even among the field of Scott’s novels, I don’t think The Pirate is in the first rank. And boy, was it long.
