Urban

Saw this photo of Sao Paolo, Brazil in an issue of New Scientist magazine.

It begs for a writer to choose a couple characters from the wildly different domiciles -- then put them together in a romance ... in a workplace ... in a courtroom.

Running of the Waiters

Tomorrow's running of the bulls ("El Encierro" -- run daily during the July 7-14 Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain) ...

has nothing ... over the procession of cruise waitstaff on Baked Alaska night!

Squirrel Lady

Forget about personifying animals with human qualities -- humans who act like animals are much more interesting!

As I walked home with a latte this morning, a woman came out of her house to get the newspaper from where it had been delivered on her lawn. Too far away to comfortably say hello, I closed my eyes and tipped my latte to take a sip; when I opened my eyes, she'd disappeared!

I glanced at the door to her house but really, there's no way she’d had enough time to hurry back inside. By then, I'd taken some more steps -- and there she was, nearby but behind the trunk of a big elm. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but in another step or two, I figured she'd be in sight again, and we could exchange niceties. Yet as I took those steps, so did she -- just like a squirrel that moves itself around a tree trunk to keep just out of sight.

I gave up, but when I turned the corner some seconds later, I did glance back. She’d emerged from around the far side of the tree and was walking toward the door to her house.

Happy 231st, USA!

And what better way to celebrate than the deletion of the American Bald Eagle from the Endangered Species List.

I snapped the photo of this snazzy, tuxedoed parent and its three, nine-week-old nestlings from my PC screen.

You can view live streaming video of the now-flying, four-month-old chicks (plus lots of archived photos) at the Norfolk Botanical Garden's Eaglet Nest-cam.

Immediately!

I've seen and heard and used the acronyms ASAP ("as soon as possible") and PDQ ("pretty damn quick"; in fact, my favorite childhood chocolate-milk mix was PDQ granules -- which did dissolve instantly).

And I've heard another phrase that means "right away," but hadn't used it myself -- (whew) -- or even seen it written until a few weeks ago, when an editor copied me on an email in which she asked that something be sent to me "tout de suite."

Ack! -- I hadn't known the phrase was French, and was intensely ashamed at whatever ignorance had led me to imagine it as "toot sweet." But I felt a little better after some research, where I learned that English-speaking soldiers had anglicized it to exactly that during WWI.

I emailed the editor and thanked her for the best thing I'd learned that week. She responded that it was nothing -- it was the writers whose emails and manuscripts included "wa-la!" (um, "voila") that surprised her.

Starboard Center

There are lots of directions to take in developing the bigger story of this picture.

But within that bigger story, what's the little story -- what's going on with the rower in the red shirt … that's gotten him or her out of sync with the other rowers?

Remote

A sizeable compound for such an inaccessible location ... what's going on there?

Psychic Distance

I saw these excerpted recently and, along the lines of show-don’t-tell, thought they did a better job of communicating differences in narrative psychic distance (“the distance the reader feels between himself and the events in the story”) than two pages of exposition would have.

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

Henry hated snowstorms.

God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

[From John Gardner’s "The Art of Fiction."]

Atomic Sombrero

The Teaching Company offers terrific college-level, home-study courses for adults -- in areas of art, history, literature, philosophy, science. They're expensive, but every course is available at an affordable sale price at least once per year.

I'm working my way through a physics series on DVD, where the professor talks from a classroom set that includes a podium and the ubiquitous image of an atom with its circulating particles. It's a fine little set, quite non-distracting -- except when the professor stands in a certain spot relative to the atom.

I finally couldn't resist snapping a picture of my TV screen.

For more about distractions, see Jerry Weinberg's post about how writers break the reader's trance.

Thriller

"You were injected with a radioactive substance … it may set off a radiation detection alarm …"

This quote is actually excerpted from a little card that hospitals now give to patients after a test or exam that involves the administration of a nuclear medicine -- for the patients to keep handy in case they accidentally set off an alarm while trying to board certain types of public transportation in the subsequent couple of days.

But taken out of this context, the quote prompts story ideas more along the lines of a thriller ...

Stun Sung

Remember in The Shawshank Redemption, when Andy Dufresne locked the prison guard in the loo and then played The Marriage of Figaro through the prison’s network of loudspeakers? Out in the yard, hundreds of hardened prisoners stood agape, stunned in the pure humanity emanating from the speakers.

That’s me -- a hardened non-fan of shows like “American Idol” -- now sitting agape at the performance of Paul Potts … a cell-phone salesman by day and interpreter of Puccini by night in the current season of Britain’s Got Talent.

Finals are Sunday, June 17.

Sound Effect

A caller to the Mr. Fix-It radio show complained that whenever she was in her extra bedroom, she heard knocking from the other side of the wall -- a common wall between her townhouse and the one next door.

Mr. Fix-It's suggestions were along the lines of mechanical (plumbing or heating lines) and canine (a Golden Retriever's thumpy wagging tail).

What suggestions might a novelist offer?

What Happened Here?

Go beyond the first answers … your mind will wander deeper ... and stumble upon a more unusual story.

In mine, smugglers have cut out interior sections from loaves of bread, creating pockets in which to hide their loot.

Then they scattered the removed bread for the birds and squirrels to eat.

Reading Room

A book-meme blog received so many answers to its question about where readers read, that it then posed an about-face: Ask Not Where But Where Not?

Most of the answers to “Where Not?” involved predictable matters of practicality and individual preference: not at work, not while riding in a car/train/plane, not in direct sunshine. But while some readers don’t read in those places, other readers do. A decade ago (even a year ago), I’d have uttered “Duh!” at someone’s answer of “not while driving.” But I’ve recently seen it happen … and not just at a stop light, but at both full speed and in stop-and-go traffic.

So, practicality and preferences aside, imagine some characters who do read in these other, less-likely places:

At the family dinner table

While grocery shopping

In the dentist’s chair

In the shower

In a movie theater

At a birthday party

While walking the dog

At a funeral/ wedding/ in church

While sleeping (great sci-fi potential here!)

Opening Prompts

A recent segment on the Kathy & Judy radio program asked listeners to imagine the memoirs they’d write, and invited them to call in with the opening sentences.

My favorites were short, punchy lines -- openings that set the stage just enough to intrigue and then set the mind adrift in story possibilities:

Let me apologize in advance.

I’m my own fault.

I lived south of I-80.

These genes don’t fit.

She hit me first.

Later, I looked through the published memoirs on my bookshelf. Most of their opening lines were long and immediately specific to the story at hand. But I found three that are general enough to serve as writing prompts:

The first day I did not think it was funny. (From Nora Ephron’s Heartburn -- reportedly such thinly disguised fiction that I’ll call it memoir.)

Here they come. (From Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man.)

Life changes fast. (From Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.)

Medieval Helpdesk

For everybody who's needed support while upgrading to a new technology.

Two Down

It took me a moment this morning to realize I recognized the sound: the year’s first two 17-year cicadas. High in a 30-foot maple I'd just walked past, one cicada buzzed a 2-second vibrato and another buzzed back in a slightly higher tone. Hooray for them, I thought, and stopped to listen.

Three mornings ago on the same route to get coffee, I’d finally seen some cicada shells scattered on the sidewalks -- a hundred maybe, over the course of a 2-mile round trip. A couple of very warm days followed, and yesterday I'd estimated a thousand shells over the same route. I’d even seen live adults and been fascinated, again, by the shiny metallic green in their coloring -- the purest gold, I’d have guessed, if gold came in green.

But this morning, not much. For all I knew, the shells I did see were leftovers from yesterday. My neighborhood is in transition, its early-20th-century houses being torn down and, along with their yards, replaced by McMansions that fill 90% of each lot. Surely, the construction had disrupted the soil and the dormant cicada nymphs. Certainly, there was less yard space to provide the cicadas with a way out. Maybe this year’s emergence of the periodic bugs would be a bust.

But no! In the tree were two who’d made it out and were home free to spend the next month mating. The noise from just those two was impressive, impossible to ignore. And some black birds didn’t ignore it; perhaps a dozen landed in the tree within moments. The cicadas continued their back-and-forth buzzing and then I heard a quick movement and one of the birds squawked.

And then silence, and the birds flew away.

Run-up to the Cicadas

Every summer, my neighborhood fills with the sound of cicadas.

Annual cicadas, I’d assumed, although now I know that few, if any, species of cicadas undergo an annual metamorphosis from egg to nymph to egg-laying adult. Instead, almost all species are periodic, having life cycles that range from 2-8 years -- most of it spent underground in the nymph stage. Only because each year brings the emergence of a combination of various species, do we hear the "annual" buzz that heralds the dog days of summer. It’s like working with fractions and lowest common denominators to predict which might be the jackpot year -- when the 2- and 3- and 4- and 5- and 6- and 7- and 8-year cicadas will all happen to emerge in the same summer.

I hope it’s not this year, because we’re just days away from the huge, synchronized emergence of a species with an ultra-long life cycle: the 17-year cicadas. I’m not surprised. I knew they were coming. I remember them from 17 years ago.

We’d bought our 80-year-old house in the fall of 1989, in an established suburb full of huge elms and maples. We happily spilled out into our yard the following spring and heard about the impending arrival of the periodic cicadas. We scoffed at neighbors who told us we wouldn't be able to hold a conversation outside amid the droning. I remember it eventually being true.

Cicadas aren’t dangerous, they’re not damaging. They’re just annoying: seriously clumsy fliers that bump straight into you instead of swerving; litterers whose shed exoskeletons form a crunchy carpet on sidewalks and patios. With estimates as high as 1.5 million cicadas per acre, that’s a lot of bumping and crunching.

Scientists predict the cicadas will return this week. I hear some have already been spotted in other suburbs. All I’ve seen so far are the signs: shed earthen casings (exit tunnels?) and emergence holes that can make a patch of bare ground look like it’s been brought to a boil overnight.

Rediscovering Science

I wrote this 15 months ago as an opening to an essay:

“The progress is remarkable,” my friend Greg, a prominent researcher, tells me over lunch at a restaurant. “We’ve … blah blah unintelligible words … the genome of … so many, many more unfamiliar words.”

I stare at him.

How long has it been since I’ve heard a sentence like that?

He spears some romaine and secures it on his fork with a ribbon of chilled sirloin. I blink.

This is Greg, I remind myself—the first person I met on our first day of pharmacy school, nearly thirty years ago.

And now in his whole sentence, I recognize only the one word.

My eyes sting and I look down at my bowl of soup.

I miss science.

Since then, I’ve subscribed to science magazines, devoured fascinating new science books and published half a dozen science articles and shorts.

And yesterday, I reconnected with an amazing source of inspiration: my college organic chem professor—an intelligent, animated man renown for the funnest classes; a creative scientist who applied forensic chemistry decades before CSI. In a 30-minute phone call, we batted so much energy back and forth that I think our cell phones gained charge.

Ain’t life grand?

Losing Science

As a kid, I figured my family could have formed a country. Dad was a college administrator, Mom a paralegal, my sister a teacher. One brother was career military, another was on his way to becoming a doctor, another planned to be a priest.

“And what do you want to be?” people would ask me.

“A researcher,” I’d answer, and they’d screw up their faces: “Why, that’s not even a word!”

Researchist, I wondered?

Forced, finally (and privately), to the family dictionary, I was crushed to find them right. Nothing existed between “research” and “re-seat.”

My New Barista ...

... does things like this.

Empty Nest

I often walk past this house.

And every time, I wonder about the long-ago teenager who lived here and shot hoops.

What's the story now?

Wake Up, Everybody

This is the first place I've admitted it: I've always had a softer spot for geriatrics than for pediatrics.

In high school and early college, I worked as a nurse's aide in a hospital, much of the time on a skilled nursing unit. During that time, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes released "Wake Up, Everybody" -- I liked this stanza best:

Wake up all the doctors, make the old people well.
They're the ones who suffer and who catch all the hell.
They don't have so very long before their judgment day
So won't you make them happy before they pass away?

I'm happy tonight, watching the Zimmers's version of "My Generation."

Rescued From Junk Mail

Woohoo!! to New Scientist ...

for recognizing that some girls like filling their brains ...

more than filling their bodies or closets.

Bad Latte!

Top 10 Ways to Ruin a Caffe Latte:

10. Steam the milk so full of air that the latte feels prepared with helium

9. Use nonfat milk by mistake

8. Use nonfat milk because there’s no whole milk ready

7. Top off with nonfat milk because there isn't enough whole milk ready

6. Top with nonfat-milk foam because there isn’t any whole

5. Top with a cappuccino-quantity of foam (see photo)

4. Top with Styrofoam rather than creamy foam

3. Use lukewarm milk

2. Omit the espresso

1. Argue with the customer about any of the above.

The barista at my new place doesn’t do any of these.

Alternative Medicine

Need a Lunesta?

Try looking at Dixie, instead.

What's in the Bag?

Our "stuff" says much about us, and it's fascinating to get a peek at (and sometimes great ideas from) other people's things: the contents of a house, a car, a drawer, a purse. (For me, a pocket: as often as I can, I leave the house with just keys, my driver's license and a credit card.)

Flickr, a photo-sharing website, gives thousands of these peeks through its cluster of “What’s in Your Bag”-tagged photos. Some people even include descriptions of their bag's individual contents -- click on a photo, then hover over it to see descriptions -- the best ones use specific details that hint at the person's "voice" and open up a backstory.

Form 1040

Sure, they've gotta cut it somewhere.

But as a fifth child, this sucks.

Twisted Dictionary

Comedy takes something expected and twists it to prompt a surprise. For example, Bill Maher's joke in March, when Cheney saw a doctor about leg pain: "Do you stretch?" the doctor asked. "Are you kidding?" Cheney said. "I linked 9/11 with Saddam Hussein!"

Beyond the smile, I love a twist's illumination of character and voice. Consider this, from an e-mailer to Suzanne Beecher's Dear Reader book club, about a time she was baking with her mother: "I asked my mom if I could have a job. She gave me some suggestions, and then I told her, 'I mean an eating job!' "

For me, the hard part is taking a sentence less literally ... learning to recognize a springboard word.

Water Taxi

All aboard for transportation to your new client.

What's the story?

Cinematographer

Take a look at Hawaii's beach cams from Starwood Hotels and Resorts.

Surf-watch or people-watch -- you decide which, because you can control the camera's direction and zoom views for 3 minutes. You can even snap pictures to save to your computer ... inspiration to write the story up later, offline.

O Happy Day

What are the four signs
of aging?

The answer is in the Comments.

[Source: Valerie Monroe in the October 2003 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. Photo source: Hawkin's Bazaar]

Chicago 2016

The Eiffel Tower stood as an engineering marvel at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. Colored text in this 2005 photo markets "Paris 2012" … from before the International Olympic Committee awarded the summer games to London instead.

Similarly, the first Ferris Wheel stood as an engineering marvel at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. And, similarly, now Chicago needs international Olympic marketing -- having been selected over the weekend as the U.S.'s applicant city to host the 2016 Summer Games!

Following Paris’s precedent (though hopefully not its outcome), how about erecting signage on Navy Pier’s Ferris Wheel?

Sand Story

I'd seen lots of places of worship but I hadn't seen one with a sand floor until this Caribbean synagogue:

The surprise made space for curiosity, and I learned the sand is likely a profound symbol: a reminder of the ancient desert sands, a reminder of the need to muffle the sounds of secret worship.

One detail opened up a whole backstory.

Pet Cemetery

Argh! -- the consequences of a badly framed snapshot:

Although … not knowing the reality does open the door to imagination.

What DID Eugenie produce??

Book Pride

Turning 180-degrees from yesterday’s acknowledgement of Book Embarrassment, here are two books whose covers I’d wear as a sandwich board:

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It was the 1960s and I was very young, on a family road trip where all I heard was my mother saying, "Yossarian." All I saw was her laughing so hard she could barely keep reading aloud to my dad as he drove. Decades later, I learned Yossarian is the protagonist in a war novel (anti-war; anti-bureaucracy, really), and more decades later I finally picked up the book. The mess of its incoherent, non-linear presentation tempted me to set it aside, and the only thing that kept me in it was the hilarity.

I’ve talked to more readers who abandoned the book than finished it, so there’s an element of pride in having persisted through a difficult read … and come out loving it. Because, counter-balancing the hilarity, Heller does things like arranging just six discrete words to haunt us about the horrors of war:

"I’m cold," Snowden said. "I’m cold."
"There, there," said Yossarian. "There, there."

If you’ve read the novel, you’ve gone now to get a tissue. We’ll wait.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. I stumbled on this book about creativity (by a former sketch artist at Hallmark) while on a lunch break during a business conference. The title annoyed me and I remember leafing through the book and thinking, "Yech!": the pages were a mess of weird fonts and weird art and scribbles. I put it back.

But then I pushed myself to take another look. It would do me good to stretch toward something eclectic, I decided. And I found the content as different from what I was accustomed to as the design: Creative. Spontaneous. Curious. Encouraging. Supportive. Fun.

Read the first chapter ("Where Have All The Geniuses Gone?") and you’ll be hooked. (Hint: the geniuses are all still here. They're us.)

Book Embarrassment

Prompted by yesterday’s post about hidden things, here are three books that I’d hide:

1. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. I hadn’t read this novel until last year, but was lucky enough then to do so as part of an online book group with a history-professor moderator. A number of readers in the group (including me) confessed to being embarrassed to carry the book in public. We’d absorbed societal messages of outrage against the novel: some of us wrongly assumed it had pro-slavery themes, others had heard anger directed at the portrayal of the title slave as docile rather than militant.

A highly recommended read. But so much controversy remains attached to Uncle Tom that, unless I were in a situation that allowed real conversation, I’d still carry the book with the title hidden.

2. Any of Mary Higgins Clark’s last ten novels. Her breakthrough book, Where Are the Children? is the best suspense story I’ve read. And her next few novels, published in my twenties, are the only books to have kept me reading late into the night -- mostly because I was too scared to pull my arm from under the safety of the covers and reach all the way over to turn off the bedside lamp. But as I grew self-sufficient, Clark’s protagonists grew frustrating. Her women-in-peril stories grew formulaic and sugary-simple. By my thirties, I’d stopped buying her novels. By 40, I’d stopped reading library copies.

Now this year’s novel was just released, and I find myself staring at it in the bookstore … still so doggone sad that it doesn't fit anymore.

3. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. First published in March 2003, Amazon tells me I purchased my copy a month later, in April. I remember not reading it immediately, preferring to savor the anticipation of a story that postulated an ancient (and continuing!) Catholic conspiracy. I’d still read just the first chapter by early June, when I sat on a folding chair in a tent at Chicago’s Printers Row Book Fair, with perhaps 200 people, and listened to Brown talk about it. The man next to me and I agreed: we looked forward to reading this “smart” thriller. Alas, although the premise was smart, Brown’s execution was so-so.

How could that have been only four years ago? Now, with a hundred million readers and film-goers yakking about it, even Dan Brown has to be sick of The Da Vinci Code. It’s gone from smart to pedestrian, and the last thing a youngest-child like me wants to be seen as is a lemming.

Tomorrow: Book Pride

Noticing

From the archives on Jerry Weinberg’s writing blog, a terrific exercise: “Pay attention and see if you can notice five things that were not meant to be noticed.”

I love this! And even stronger than "not meant to be noticed" is "meant to be not noticed." Details like these show character like a cut-away medical illustration shows anatomy.

I should be good at it -- after all, I read Harriet the Spy in fifth grade, then spent the next three or four years recording observations in my own series of spy notebooks. Instead, it turned out to be a difficult exercise. I discovered that I have strong rules against noticing these things -- outing people about what they’re trying to keep private. Heck, it took me a month to collect these five:

The wind blew open a woman’s spring jacket and she quickly pulled it closed again over her midriff bulges.

A friend saw her job -- her current job -- posted on Craigslist.

During the Consecration (the most sacred part of a Catholic Mass), a door opened at the side of the church. No one appeared and the door closed. A few seconds later, it opened again, then closed halfway. The moment the Consecration was finished, the door opened again and the associate pastor came in to assist with the distribution of Communion.

A woman sneezed with the teeniest choo! choo! Then, not having cleared the irritant, her nose proceeded to run, making her sniff! sniff! sniff! for the next 10 minutes.

Everyone renewing their driver’s license at the DMV wore dark, drab overcoats. But one woman removed her coat for her photo -- and underneath, she wore a pretty outfit.

How about you? I’m going to keep noticing, and I’ll report back when I’ve got the next 10.

Peace

These wind farms provoke plenty of tension in some people ... spoiling the landscape and all.

But for me? The horizontals and verticals ... the deep colors ... the rhythm of the blades moving in a breeze ...

Peace.

Secret Prompt

What could be a better prompt of fiction than the tension of a secret?

There are compilations of secrets, such as PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives and its two (so far) sequels. They come from a project whereby people write their secrets on homemade postcards and anonymously mail them in.

But even more accessible are the secrets posted on the project’s website. They simply beg for a backstory and a what-happens-next.

Expansion

Here's another mathematical model of my writing process (like the previous one, this image is supposedly from a student's test paper).

I conceive an idea for an article and outline its basic components (represented here by the equation and its variables). Then it's time to expand the outline by substituting real information (research data, anecdotes, quotes) for those abstract variables. And my first pass is to do essentially what Peter did -- I press the Enter key a bunch of times throughout the outline, introducing white space as a placeholder for the concrete material.

But unlike Peter, I then gradually add the material. The white space disappears and the outline's loose weave tightens. Where it remains loose is a call for attention: maybe more research, maybe a reconsideration of whether the section is necessary.

In the meantime, the smile I get from Peter's response buoys me through the hard work.

Frenemies

Sometimes, fictional antagonists seem more conceptual than real. So I was delighted to find Julianne Dalcanton’s post about nemeses over at Cosmic Variance. And one of the blog’s comments gives a nod to Chuck Klosterman’s accessible and funny 2004 Esquire article about the same.

Considering nemeses and archenemies leads to some of the juiciest musing possible ... it's fascinating to track the lightning bolt that shoots from one person to someone else’s deepest fears and motivations. And it reminds me that the best antagonists are powerful inducers of emotion and action in a protagonist.

Two Oldies (One Goody)

I’ve made my Almond Cream Puff Ring for many parties -- but never in the 20 years that I’ve been married. Until last weekend.

Baking is tricky. It’s chemistry, and while chemistry hasn’t changed in those 20 years, agriculture and eggs and dairy farming certainly have. Would those changes make the ingredients in my present-day kitchen too different from their predecessors in my 1980s recipe? Isn't that why recipes are updated -- because things change over time, and baking can have disastrous results if we ignore the changes?

Admittedly, I was still skittish from a laundry debacle a few days earlier. I’d wanted to use another object from the 1980s -- one of those luxurious Vellux blankets -- on the bed this spring until the weather was warm enough for only the light summer quilt. The blanket just needed a wash to freshen it from years of storage in a sealed bag.

But upon removing it from the bag, I’d ignored my surprise that the blanket looked tan now, instead of pink. I’d ignored having to brush away lint from wherever the blanket touched my shirt and pants. Instead, I filled the washer, added detergent, loaded the blanket and heard the deep whoosh-whoosh of the agitator. To be sure I’d chosen a cycle with enough water to cover the blanket, I lifted the lid and peeked inside. In just ten seconds, the blanket had completely disintegrated into a huge skeleton of mesh and what looked like a tub full of bean soup. I stopped the wash cycle and used a kitchen strainer to hand-empty the material into a trash basket.

So, my eyes narrowed in suspicion, I began to make the pastry. I watched the butter melt in the water and wondered about the changes in dairy farming over the past two decades -- five or ten generations of cows. The butter foamed more than I remembered and I wondered whether to proceed. But the mixture promptly came to a boil and I had no choice but to dump in the flour and hold my breath while I vigorously stirred. And magic! (chemistry!) -- it balled up perfectly. And the rest of the recipe was perfect, too, and the finished dessert -- delicious.

------------
RECIPE:
Almond Cream Puff Ring

Pastry Ring
1 cup water
½ cup butter
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
4 eggs

Heat water, butter and salt until butter melts and mixture boils. Remove from heat and vigorously stir in flour all at once until mixture forms a ball and leaves side of saucepan. Add eggs, beating after each. Cool mixture.

Preheat oven to 400°F. Grease and flour a cookie sheet. Drop mounds of batter in a 7"-diameter circle on cookie sheet. Bake 40 minutes; turn off oven and keep pastry ring in oven 15 minutes more. Cool on wire rack.

Slice pastry ring horizontally. Lift off top half and fill bottom half with Almond Cream Filling (see below). Replace top half and drizzle with Chocolate Glaze (see below). Refrigerate.

Almond Cream Filling
Prepare one 3½-ounce package instant vanilla pudding as label directs but use only 1¼ cup milk. Fold in 1 cup whipping cream (whipped) and 1 teaspoon almond extract.

Chocolate Glaze
Melt ½ cup semisweet chocolate chips with 1 tablespoon butter, 1½ teaspoon milk, and 1½ teaspoon light corn syrup. Stir until smooth.

Natal Days

In real life, my friend's first child was born on February 29th. Her second was born on Christmas Day.

In fiction, what's a good birthday for her third child?

Mirror Work

A friend who owns a restaurant franchise tells of the woman he hired last summer: a 24-year-old who'd borne three kids with three men and had lost custody of all during a period of hard drinking and drugging.

Over the summer at the restaurant, though, she cleaned up her life -- reinstating contact with her kids and earning respect from her co-workers.

Her job? A dishwasher.

Dumpster Driving

The contents of this car would have taken three days’ worth of words to describe ... and then how many more to make it believable?
It belongs to a retail employee -- a likeable guy whose personal appearance does, however, resemble the car's interior.

Words also seem inadequate for my reaction, except to write that my brain processed this mess through a night of the weirdest dreams ever.

Dialect

For a fresh perspective (or just a giggle), run a section of your prose through The Dialectizer.

The site translates your voice into your choice of dialects, with results that are 75% comic relief and 25% inspiring in new energy.

Mantra

I do my brand of sumo and I do my best. [source unknown]

All will be well, and all will be well, all manner of thing will be well. [Julian of Norwich]

Wed Cam

Want to see what details come out in a high-emotion situation? Try people-watching via streamed video from the MGM Grand wedding chapel in Las Vegas.

Approximately 15 minutes each, the wedding ceremonies tend to combine incredible nervousness with touching moments and, occasionally, the bizarre. Check the calendar to see when upcoming weddings are scheduled and watch them live. Or, easier, watch a past wedding: choose a date and click on any entry with a "View Now" button.

Fixer Upper

Little things say a lot.

What are the starched curtains telling?

Spring ...

... and the Avalon Fishing Pier in Kill Devil Hills, NC is open for the season!

I watch the piercam year ’round to get my fix of ocean and surf and sunrises. But when the pier opens for fishing in mid-March, the camera also provides for people-watching. (Well, fisherman-watching ... basically a still-life.)

The site offers options for a live, still shot that can be updated manually via a browser's Refresh button; or a Java-script feed that auto-updates every few seconds; or a feed with the sound of surf. It's a great site during hurricane season.

[Photo cropped from an old -- and timeless -- issue of Martha
Stewart Living]

cARTography

Matthew Gray, a software engineer at Google, used data from the company’s Book Search project to map the world based on how often each point on the planet is mentioned in books.

Similarly, Aaron Koblin at UCLA designed a U.S. map based on FAA air-traffic data. His 3-minute Video Documentation (sound alert) is stunning.

Most art seems created top-down from a big-picture concept.

But these developed from the details up.

Predictability and Lies

CBS-TV’s Sunday Morning is a terrific program of history, culture and art features. One of yesterday’s segments marked the 56th anniversary of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

As a kid, I’d see photos of those fugitives posted high on the wall of my small-town post office. Most of the faces had a predictable “bad guy” look, but there’d be the occasional gentle or charismatic face that fascinated me in its lie. And the whole wall chilled me: the most dangerous men in the country -- men who, according to the FBI, were likely enough to come around my town that we needed to be ready to recognize them.

Decades later, living in a metropolitan area, I heard the state police publicize its online sex-offender registry. I accessed the website, entered my zip code and discovered half a dozen convicted offenders residing in area homes and apartments. I looked at the photos of several -- predictably creepy men -- all convicted of crimes against children. Then, up popped another lie: a photo of a regular-looking guy. I read the details about him and it turned out he’d assaulted an adult woman. I looked at more photos and discovered a curious correlation between creepiness and pedophilia.

Now the FBI’s list is online, too. I think it would be helpful to look at those photos and explore the visual details that, for me, characterize “bad guy” and “creepy.” And more helpful -- toward building complex story characters -- to tease out the details that prompt surprise.

(P.S. A few of those photos go a long way. I resorted to visiting the sugariest website on the planet to clear my head.)

Thirtysomething

A woman -- the wife of a medical malpractice attorney -- becomes pregnant and seeks an obstetrician. She contacts more than 30 doctors before she finds one who accepts her as a patient.

Imagine: What is it that's different -- about what she does ... or doesn't do ... or about the doctor -- this time?

Green Eggs

I've been skittish about eating green-dyed food since my mother colored the milk one St. Patrick’s Day and my brother got sick.

Yet I felt a steely adventurousness after reading New Scientist’s article about how red-cabbage juice turns fried eggs green. The chemistry is clever, although outweighed by what seems like a lot of culinary work instead of just using a drop of food color. Then I wondered: What if I could make green hard-boiled eggs?

Hadn’t dyes on the Easter eggs of my youth sometimes migrated through the shells to the egg whites inside? Every time I’d hard-boiled eggs, hadn't I seen bubbles escape through the shells as the cold eggs acclimated to the heated water? Might the shell’s porosity work in both directions, allowing some of the cabbage juice to be taken up into the egg?

So I simmered about a cup of shredded red cabbage in a small saucepan of water until the liquid turned a deep blue-purple. Then I added two eggs … hard-boiled them … cooled them … and cracked their shells. As my thumb peeled away the first bit of shell, I saw -- snow-white egg whites.

Drat.

Should I have soaked the eggs in the colored water for a while before cooking them? If I’d taken room-temperature eggs and submerged them in ice-cold cabbage water, might they have sucked some in? Could I borrow a tiny insulin syringe and inject some cabbage water into the raw egg white? It took restraint to not pursue a way to get inside.

Then I imagined what I'd do with the eggs: the green-egg-salad-on-wheat sandwiches.

And soon enough, I felt a little like my brother.

Spineless

Ack! From a Pottery Barn catalog:

Who ever would display their books like this?

Constraint

From composer Igor Stravinsky: "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self."

It’s counter-intuitive, but true.

Consider three co-executioners, none of whom will ever know whose syringe contained the poison. But one grows sure it was his, and he makes peace with it. Another grows sure it wasn't his, and makes peace with it. The third remains unsure, and suffers for it.

Consider a writer. "What shall I write about today?" launches me into an untethered, abstract infinity. It's better to begin at ground level with constraints -- details -- and let their energies develop into a story.

Consider story characters. When mine need to move -- but instead just stare at me, frozen in indecision -- I try the “bracketing” technique from James V. Smith’s Fiction Writer's Brainstormer. It’s a method of generating options between the extremes of possibility. Take a story question, any question (“Where is she going in the car?” “What does he do when his boss hangs up on him?”), and first give the automatic answer and then the over-the-top answer. Between those extremes lie lots of interesting alternative answers: the commonplace, the odd, the opposite, the adolescent, the inventive, the romantic, the magical, the obscene, the math-related, the biblical, the amusing, the poetic, etc., etc., etc.

I remember using the technique to brainstorm occupations for a story’s accountant-type secondary character. Through bracketing, the probability emerged that he was a circus acrobat -- totally ridiculous in my serious story. Until ... constrained to resolve that ridiculousness by weaving it into the plot ... I stumbled upon the story’s central secret.

Huh.

Contrast

I've stayed at all types of lodging yet when it comes time to set a story in one, I draw a blank on all but the most obvious (yawn) details.

But. If I take a moment to imagine the setting and then imagine its opposite -- say, the Atlantis Resort and a tiny hotel -- the differences are emphasized and interesting details start popping rapid-fire.

Landmark

Forget the usual reasons for preserving old buildings amid urban development. Specifically what happened with this building that allows (perhaps even mandates) its preservation?

Contrived?

Three writerly observations about the timing between Cheney's blood clot and the Libby verdict:

1) coincidences feel finagled -- by authors in fiction, by conspiracies in real life;

2) something negative (for Cheney, a health threat) can turn positive (insulation from reporters' questions about the verdict); from other points of view, it turns in the opposite direction; and

3) God enjoys a deus ex machina even if readers don't.

Improvisation

From a widely circulated email:

After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped.

Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies.

The deception wasn't discovered for 3 days.

The story isn't a Darwin Award winner (as claimed), and it's not even true, according to Snopes. (Snopes does discuss why it's so believable, though. Hint: it's in the details.)

But it is clever, and full of motivations. Use its arc as a starting point, then riff with your own hilarious (or horrific ... pick your genre) details.

Binge Architecture

Corn products are everywhere now -- no longer just on dinner plates or the walls of the Mitchell, SD Corn Palace.

Why not give another food its lucky break? Write a story involving an item built of some surprising edible.

Mutiny

Toward the middle of a Catholic Mass, a lector leads the congregation in a series of six or eight short prayers -- intercessions for the needs of spiritual and civic leaders, people suffering around the world, the sick or troubled in the local parish, the recently deceased, and so on. The lector ends each intercession with, “We pray to the Lord,” and the congregation responds, “Lord, hear our prayer.”

Sometimes, the script changes and the congregation gets a different line. Yesterday, the lector announced the new line and then prayed the first intercession. But had no one been listening? When it came time, the congregation responded with the smallest spatter of voices, most of which were, “Lord, hear our prayer.”

Following the second intercession, the lector helpfully (and nearly solo) prayed the congregation’s response, too: “Stay with us, Lord.” Then she read the third intercession and, thoroughly prepped now, the congregation responded -- with a half-and-half mix of the two replies! After the fourth intercession, the lector brought her mouth directly to the microphone. “Stay with us, Lord,” she boomed.

And after the fifth, the congregation, as one voice, boomed back: “Lord, hear our prayer.”

In your story … what happens next?

To Do

There's The Poker Channel. And now NBC has added a poker show to its late-late-night lineup.

I simply didn't get how a card game makes for good TV. Then I heard people talking about the mannerisms (called "tells") that poker players often can't cover up -- mannerisms that communicate the information usually concealed by poker faces. They reminded me of the "telling details" that fictional characters need.

Suddenly, gathering some nervous mannerisms from a TV poker game sounds like a plan.

Irony

I'm fascinated (and horrified) by ironic extremes: physicists who develop Alzheimer's; orators who can't speak after a stroke; athletes who develop crippling disabilities.

While visiting a nursing home recently, I met a man named Gary. He'd spent his career trimming trees, navigating the canopies of the tallest elms, willows and maples. Never an accident, but he'd often noticed people watching him from the ground -- surely thinking, and sometimes even calling out, "Don't fall!"

Now, rehabbing from a stroke, he walks the hallways between his sleeping room and the dining room. He notices the nurses watching and he can almost see their lips move: "Don't fall."

What Lives Underground ...

... that is sucking in this stand of trees?

The Notebook

Like many writers, I carry a tiny notebook wherever I go, and record details that strike me.

It’s not that I’d forget such details, but more so that I’d forget to remember them. They’re recorded just fine in my brain but there’s no prompt to bring them back to mind. So the notebook entry is the prompt. (More recently, I’ve been trying to carry my tiny camera … one click captures a visual detail so much faster than writing down all those descriptive words. But cameras tend to get people’s notice; the notebook is covert.)

I once listened, for example, to two people having a one-sided conversation. After a time, it struck me how many ways a person can lob dialogue back to the other party without really participating:

Sure.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
Oh.
I see.
Ahhh.
Mm hmm.
Oh, right.
Yep.
Oh, good.
Uh huh.
Right.

I wrote them down to use, someday.

Just Add Tension

Now, this is symmetry.

Imagine introducing a tiny photographic misalignment ... feel the tension, feel the forces trying to right it.

Then, use a tiny bit of plot to misalign, and watch the story forces come alive.

Perseverance

This emailed image (presumably from a student's exam paper) made me laugh.

It reminded me of some articles I'm currently writing. One is in that early, optimistic stage where information and possibilities grow exponentially. But I'm at "Step 7" on another and I know what's coming: the condensation of ideas that strangles instead of simplifies, that threatens to implode and send me back to the beginning.

It seems impossible that any pleasing shape will emerge. But gradually, with work, it does.

Please comment or email me if you have original-source info
for this ubiquitous Internet image.

Pivot

I like any kind of twist in perspective.

And Thomasville Furniture's current print ads provide about the best visual twists I've seen ... worth collecting into this collage.

Work, Part 3

“What do you do?”

For a living, they mean. The question comes up within minutes of meeting someone.

I’ve always had an easy answer: “I’m a pharmacist.”

“Oh,” they say, smiling. They know pharmacists. They nod approvingly and I watch their minds paste my face over the one behind the counter at their local drugstore.

But that’s not me, and I hardly ever leave it alone.

“In a hospital,” I say. “I’ve never worked retail.”

The smile stays on their lips but there’s confusion in their eyes. I watch their minds run video of the only thing they know a pharmacist to do: count, pour, lick and stick. A pharmacist fills an amber vial with 30-days’ worth of pills and attaches a label. They can’t imagine how that translates to patients in a hospital. Besides, wouldn’t the doctors and nurses there do that instead?

Yet they never ask. They veer left: “Oh? Which hospital?”

I give the name and they smile and nod again. They know hospitals.

Dreaming Fiction

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler lets everyday details inspire his fiction. He not only lets them, but actively collects them, and uses bunches of details as a gimmick/ device/ conceit/ catalyst (whatever) for whole short-story collections. A group of postcards prompted the stories in Had a Good Time; a number of supermarket-rag headlines prompted Tabloid Dreams.

My friend Denise introduced me to Butler by recommending From Where You Dream, an edited transcript of his creative-writing lectures at Florida State University. He stresses creativity as a product of sense/emotion, not intellect, and shows how it’s accomplished. Even if you pursue nothing else by Butler, make it a point to stand in the aisle at a library or bookstore and read Chapter 4 (“Cinema of the Mind”) for his comparison of fiction and film techniques.

But if you do want more, read Bookslut's Interview With Robert Olen Butler.

And if you’re hooked now, FSU has archived Butler’s series of 17 webcasts that document his creation of a postcard-inspired short story … from pre-writing to final manuscript.

Who Are These Men ...

... what are they dragging … where to … and why?

Packaging

Thinking of fine chocolates again, I'm reminded how beautiful they look on their shining silver trays in a glossy display case. And how disappointed I was, one time, to watch a clerk replenish the display with fresh candies from ... ugly cardboard stock boxes!!

Let's go the other way.

Compare the people and the work at this fish intake point in a restaurant kitchen -- the clothing, the speech, the sounds and smells, the equipment -- with the waiter who places a $24 plate of hazelnut-crusted trout on the white tablecloth in front of a customer in the dining room.

Carbonation

Wanna feel seltzer in your veins? Try transporting a large amount of cash.

I'm not a person who peels $100 bills from a wad to pay the big check at a restaurant. I'm not one who vacations with lots of cash or even Traveler's Cheques. No, I'm 90% plastic.

My big-cash experience is limited to decades ago, when I'd help my parents count the collection at church. Afterward, our drive to the bank's depository would be unnaturally silent -- and that was with three of us in broad daylight, in a small town, on a Sunday noon.

Cash is a terrific paranoic: everyone watches you; everyone notices the bulge in your chest pocket or how tightly you're gripping your purse; cars pull out to follow you; the bank teller steps on the silent alarm when you ask if you can take a photo of her counting the money.

Cash is so universally loaded with hope and fear and motivation that a writer can feel some seltzer just by imagining this exercise. But even better details come by carrying it out. Method writing, anyone?

Every Day

Much chocolate is being consumed today. Special chocolate. But just as my mom was my first Valentine, she was also my introduction to special chocolate as an everyday treat.

Her favorite has long been Moritz Ice Cubes, which melt in your mouth to release a velvety chocolate hazelnut. Decades ago, she’d also surprise me with Russell Stover French Mints -- a chocolate smudge from one is still evident on page 14 of “Fifty Famous Fairy Tales,” the first book I ever bought.

Today, if the sky were the limit, I suppose I’d choose Godiva or Leonidas or Cova over most anything else I’ve tried. (Though I’ve lately been hearing about Mexican chocolates…) But I do have limits, both financial and caloric, so, with a nod to Mom, I’ve been on a mission to find a delicious everyday chocolate.

It seems like wine. A white wine is easy to drink and it’s quenching -- like a milk chocolate. But if you’re willing to try a little harder, to pay closer attention, there’s -- as with red wine -- a deeper and more satisfying payoff from dark chocolate. And it pays after a piece or two, not a handful. I’ve always preferred Mounds to Almond Joy, and thought (like their commercial said) that it was about the nuts. But now I think it’s about the dark chocolate. So I focused my mission to finding an everyday dark chocolate.

For a year, I sampled bags and bars of plain, high-quality product: Dove/Mars (too sweet), Hershey (too bitter), Starbucks (too pricey), others that were literally forgettable. My favorite? Ghirardelli 60% Cocoa – rich and smooth and 4 bites per 55-calorie, 25¢ square.

I know science is still out on exactly where the “health benefits” from chocolate’s flavonoids kick in -- at a product that’s 60% cocoa? 70%? 90%? Let me just add a caution that cocoa has a surprising amount of fiber -- enough in those higher-% products to, um, startle an unsuspecting colon.

Besides, I learned to love chocolate as a treat, not a medicine.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Mom.

A Million Penguins

There’s a creative train wreck going on over at Penguin Books UK: a wiki novel.

You’ve heard of National Novel Writing Month, where 80,000 writers each try to draft the full arc of a novel in one month. But what if that many novelists were to collaborate on a single story?

That’s precisely the 6-week experiment of A Million Penguins, underway since February 1. Structured on a wiki (specifically, the type underlying Wikipedia), the project’s question, “Can a million penguins sitting at a million keyboards together write a novel?” is reminiscent of the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

Although deciphering the novel itself requires some determination at this point, the editor’s blog gives an accessible, big-picture view of the process and some of its most creative aspects.

Grotto

I wonder what prayers are represented by the votives these ladies are lighting ...

... but I'm more curious about what's become of some of the other intentions -- like those embodied in the candles that have tipped or fallen.

Prompt Yourself

Once in awhile, I collect writing prompts by running through the TV channels and writing down the very first sentence I hear on each channel. I sit with my back to the TV so I won’t be influenced by any context other than the words.

Here are ten from my latest round. Pick one -- or two or five, together -- and see what story emerges.

The following week, they were too big.

They’re looking for who bought a rare tool that was found at the murder scene.

If you ask an employee to move something like this, well you’re taking a risk.

I’ve already packed our “go” bag.

C’mere, I want to show you something.

You’ve nothing to lose, the phone call is free. This could change your entire life.

I had to wear this mask for the ammonia. All the jocks called me “Phantom of the Mop-era.”

Tomorrow morning at 11 …

Would you stop bugging me, Dad? I mean, it’s my hair.

I’ll put that in my karma jar.

Show Don't Tell

Want to convey how cold it feels in the middle of a week of below-zero temps?

Write about the layer of salt that accumulates on the road -- how it dusts the black asphalt until the street looks as snow-covered as the grass.

Rear Window

Maybe this picture isn't pretty, but it's beautiful. ("Interesting" can be beautiful!)

There's plenty interesting here:

the penthouse;
the striped curtain;
the pink-themed laundry (including nightshirts?);
all the antennae;
the flower pots and open door;
the disrepair (imagine it faces a gentrified section).

You probably notice six different things.

Outer Limits

Begin with something happening at this perfectly ordinary intersection. Then load it up with unbelievable details to develop your own bizarre plot.

Writer to Critique Group: "But It Really Happened!"

I've been up for a couple of hours. Wanted to make sure I was really, truly awake before I posted this, because the first time I read it I was sure I was dreaming such a far-fetched, bizarre story. (Oh, to imagine details like that...)

My post originally linked to a short, early morning version of this story -- fragmented and nearly screwball-comic in tone and detail. However. AP has revised the story numerous times since, and MSNBC continues to incorporate these revisions under the original link. The revised details and tone now paint a tragic incident. And they serve as a reminder of how much a writer influences the reader's takeaway by choosing what is written and how it's structured.

Done Good

Maybe few will write my headline about Da Bears today, but hey, it's been a good ride.

I love the traditional fight song (audio alert). But what struck me this year were the unexpected renditions -- in country-western, lounge-lizard and opera; by a bird, a class of pre-schoolers ... and yesterday, my church's congregation!

Plus One

I noticed this in one of the URL summaries from a Google search:

“26 - 5th graders go to Camp Kett. 27 - 5th graders return from Camp Kett.”

Huh? They gain a kid?

Imagine the story that explains this.

Then, if you're still curious, go to the link below to see the actual context.

"The Brookside" newsletter

Outside In

My first apartment after college was a one-bedroom with a balcony. I worked evenings then, and spent mornings buying and borrowing items to furnish a livable space. But it wasn’t realistic to hope a plaid sofa (new) and a turquoise chair (borrowed) would meld with gold shag carpet (it was the ‘80s). The combination -- seen in my daylight hours at home before work -- always seemed a little harsh.

Then one night off from work, I cooked a late supper on a portable grill on my balcony. The meat smoked and flared enough to keep me out there next to it, and I remember looking into the apartment through the sliding-glass door to watch TV. The soft lamplight inside not only warmed the beige living-room walls, but also muted the argument between the furnishings’ colors and patterns. As my gaze drifted across the room, I caught myself inexplicably thinking, “I’d like to live there!” It seemed such a different apartment from the balcony at dusk than I’d come to know from the sofa at noon.

Most people, on an evening walk, like to glance through windows into the houses they pass. Next time, try it with your own home that you know so well.