Dress Code

The smiles and waves say it's unlikely that this group gathered at a funeral.

So -- what other event prompted such consistent dress?

SETI Ears

At a SETI Institute ("Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence") listening post, devices constantly monitor the air for evidence of alien signal transmissions.

To date, they haven't found evidence of aliens ... but what might they have found out about your next-door neighbors?

[Photo from Opentopia.]

Taking Leave

In the sobfest that is "The Way We Were," Hubbell Gardner breaks up with Katie Morosky and leaves her apartment key on the table.

But keys are exchanged in matters other than romantic relationships, and their return doesn't always have to be sad.

Why not twist it -- and imagine a situation where the return marks an all-out celebration.

Emotional Distance

Several people have recently expressed awe over health-care workers’ ability to keep an emotional distance from their patients and their patients’ families.

I don’t remember receiving formal training in that objectivity -- other than via medicine’s many analyses and algorithms, which, I suppose, do help to keep things fairly well up in the intellect and away from the emotions of doctors and others.

It’s similar, I suppose, to the choreography of the uniformed officer who strode to the gravesite last Saturday and retrieved the folded American flag from atop my father-in-law’s casket. He brought it to my mother-in-law and stooped toward her. His voice was clear and even: “On behalf of the President of the United States and a grateful nation, this flag is presented as a token of appreciation for your husband’s honorable and faithful service to his country.” He straightened to full height, took one step backward and raised his hand in a long salute to the flag.

Then he turned left-face and strode away, generating a breeze that made my cheek damp.

Exurban

New Scientist magazine calls this Alex MacLean photo (of approximately 200 houses outside South Jordan, Utah) an "exurban" development, "driven by the American dream of owning a detached house with a large backyard."

Um, that's all? -- a house with a yard? The isolation seems extreme, there's gotta be more to it. What else is going on here??

For more amazing aerial photos by MacLean, check out "Designs on the Land" and "The Playbook".

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.)