Going Crazy with the Mad Protagonist

The WIP has reached that place called by Blake Snyder the Dark Night of the Soul, which (according to my reading of Save the Cat) should show up on page 205 or so of a three hundred page novel. What this means for Carina Nebula, the valiant escapee from the psychiatric hospital who has come back to Housel's Creek to clear her name and destroy her evil brother, is that she has to get sick again.

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Depressing. But that's the whole idea, right? I've been researching various kinds of crazy, and talking to my psychiatric social worker friend, but the only way to get something credible on paper is from the inside.

One of the things the writers don't usually tell you is that they play all the characters in their books, even the nastiest characters, even the sickest. Another is that the best comedy is separated from horror by the merest hair. So I've got to write this chapter now, and it's going to make me a little strange. When I finish, though, I'll have something killingly funny.

Or maybe just killing.

I'll get back to you next week. I think.

Kate Gallison

*Photo by Melanie Orenius, http://donkeyes.blogspot.com/p/melanie.html

A Crime without a Name

Eight of the Ten Commandments enjoin us not to do certain things: make graven images, covet our neighbor’s goods, steal, kill.  We have names for the sins of breaking those eight: idolatry, murder, theft, adultery. Deadly sins--envy, slander.  Strictly speaking, only some of these taboos are universal enough to make it into the legal definition of a crime here in the USA.  (Some are proscribed by law in other societies, but not since the Salem witch trials have we had to pay with our lives for blasphemy.  I am glad of that!)

There are two positive Commandments:  they instruct us to take specific actions.  But the transgressions against those two don't, as far as I know, have names.  For now I will leave the fourth Commandment alone.  Keeping holy the Lord’s Day is not my issue today.  I want to talk about the fifth: Honor thy father and thy mother.   

Over the past few years, I have encountered criminal behavior on the part of children in this regard.  Well, maybe not actionable by a District Attorney, but in the figurative sense.  The behavior of these people is BAD.

We are not talking here about adolescents.  We all know what they are likely to do—at least in our culture.  Most of the guff teenagers dish out is expected; if we are honest, we did it ourselves.  I know I did.  Puberty is a period of temporary insanity.  But “temporary” is supposed to be the operant word here.

These criminals of which I speak are not of that age group.  They are in their thirties and forties, one approaching fifty.  They are not mentally impaired, the victims of child abuse, or uneducated.  One is a physician.  Another a business executive.  Another a social worker!!

These are people whose parents raised them with care and affection—gave them lovely homes, educated them, went to their school events and tennis matches, paid their tuition, in one case through medical school.  Some of them were supported and are still being supported into their adult lives.  Need your child taken care of after school?  Grandmother will do it.  Take your dog to the vet?  Sure.  Then, suddenly, they cut their parents off completely—will not speak to them, will not see them, will not let them see their grandchildren.  They don’t send a Christmas card.  Or visit them when they are sick.

One set of parents, getting on years, have taken the precaution of finding  a lawyer who will act as power of attorney for them if one of them should die and the other find him or herself with no one to look after their interests.  Another pair have left their home and moved to a faraway state in the hopes of lessening the acute pain they feel over being eliminated from their child’s life.  It isn’t working.  They weep still.

The three guilty offspring that I have known since childhood are not the only transgressors.   An acquaintance has a daughter who takes her mother’s money to support herself but will communicate with her only through an attorney.  A lawyer friend told me of a client who has had a stroke and can no longer pay his adult child’s bills.  She abandoned him.  I wonder if she will show up when the will is read.

Crime writers understand that criminals do not see themselves as bad.  Evil doers can rationalize even their most brutal behavior.  Undoubtedly these little snots all think they have reasons to despise their progenitors.

The Fifth Commandment does not, however, give them any leeway.  Honor thy father and thy mother, it says.  There is no phrase following letting you off the hook if you think your mother didn’t bake you brownies or your father never took you fishing.  There are NO ifs.  Honor them.  Period.

A possible name for this crime is Serpent’s Tooth Syndrome.  Whatever we call it is a crying shame, and I have a strong feeling it is not limited to my broken-hearted friends.

“How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!” 

Annamaria Alfieri 

Moving With Books

Don’t. Leave them behind. Sell them. Give them away. But don’t move with them. Especially don’t ask your friends and relatives to help you move them. That is, if you want to continue to have friends and relatives. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life as a hermit. (Of course, you could get a lot of reading done.)

If you insist on moving with books, do it yourself. The whole operation — packing the boxes, loading the boxes in the van, unloading the boxes from the van, unpacking the boxes, putting the books on the shelves. That is the only safe way to avoid being shunned, dropped, avoided, sued for back injuries, etc.

Recently we closed up our New York apartment and moved all our stuff to Philadelphia. I don’t know how we managed to crowd so much stuff into two rooms. Of course, the “stuff” was mostly MY books. Five bookcases full. I put a lot down in the Laundry Room for anyone to take. But that didn’t even make a dent in the amount. We still have to make one more car trip back to New York to collect the BIG books — the ones that wouldn’t fit in the boxes.

Now the Philadelphia house resembles a book warehouse, because it was full of books before we moved the new ones in. I can barely squeeze between the boxes to reach our bed. And I don’t know how much longer I can sleep with a box of books for a pillow. It will take us weeks to unpack and get things back to normal. Normal? What’s that? Oh, yeah, taking books out of the library and then returning them.

I could open a used bookstore tomorrow, if I so desired. The trouble is — I’d rather read than sell them. My fate is sealed. I’m an incurable bookaholic.

Future generations won’t have this problem. When they move, they’ll just tuck their Kindle or Nook or Whatever, under their arm and their library will be ready to go on moving day. They won’t even have to dust their precious volumes.

Robin Hathaway

Batman!!!

We had the first of the scorcher days of August a bit early this past week, so at midnight as I sat at my computer in my work alcove on the top floor of my historic rowhouse where the bedrooms are, I couldn’t escape a chill, hearing faint scratching outside the screened window that looks out over the garden. I have a non-working clock hung on the wall in front of me whose face depicts Edgar Allen Poe at HIS desk, quill pen in hand, as a bird (raven, I presume) swoops down at his head. Me, I don’t fear ravens, it’s the bats I keep a weather eye out for.

Since moving into this homestead in Downtown Albany four years ago, I have single-handedly captured and expelled nine bats. They come on sweltering nights, and never before midnight, I swear. I hear the scratching for not quite a full minute, then feel the air disturbed by his passage above my head as I sit at my desk composing. I say “his” but don’t really know bat sex. It’s always just one bat; and he always takes the same flight path: from the corner by the window straight down the darkened hallway to its end by the bedroom door, which, as fate would have it, is always closed, for the sake of a/c in summer and heat in winter. A woman friend wasn’t so lucky, two bats entered her bedroom and did aerial loops till she was awakened by the flapping of their wings. She couldn’t tell the medicos with certainty that she had not been bitten so she underwent a series of rabie shots. Scary? You bet, but I’m not (so long as they stay out of our bedroom).

I have not been hesitant to speak of my prowess in capturing bats; in fact, one neighbor consulted me on my technique. I’m a dustmop man, I explained, knock ‘em down then throw a towel over the stunned creature, then fling him out the window or the front door, easiey-peasey. Lucky thing, the bat is more afraid of me than vice versa. He’s one remarkable bird (he’s a bird, right?); his sonar prolongs our match for some minutes till I can tire him, then fell him. He’ll fly right at my face, then veer away before collision (I don’t think he’s aiming) He never makes a sound. Except for once, early on, when I was a novice at this, and having felled him, but without towel, I held him fast to the floor with the handle of the mop, hearing tiny squeaks as he died. That was my first bat, and out-of-character since I discovered him on our mid- or parlor floor. I thought he was a swallow till he alighted on the ceiling and hung upside down from a cornice.

After the ninth bat last year, I threw in the towel and called in the pros, Bat Control of Greater New York. Two young fellows showed up with ladders and rock-climbing gear. First, they plugged up all the holes in the attic, then rappelled down the back of the house to check for entry points, finally setting a trap in the attic that let out any bat inside while barring reentry. Apparently, bats in the attic were suffering like us from the insufferable heat, and dropped down to my cooler work space; bats can fold themselves up to get through the smallest openings. On occasion, the bat would be taken out by the oscillating ceiling fan over my desk.

August is Bat Month in my house. As I compose in the dark of night in my alcove, I’ll think of Fearless Poe in my clock, but retire before midnight, just to be on the safe side.

Robert Knightly

The Marshall House

The Marshall House

What I do on weekends is serve as a docent at the Marshall House, which is the childhood home of James Wilson Marshall, the first person to discover gold in California. The house is a museum now. People stop in, tourists and locals too, between one and four on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. When they show up I say, "Welcome to the Marshall House," and spin stories about Mr. Marshall, the gold rush, the house, which was used as a convent for many years by St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, and the valiant Mrs. Alice Narducci, who saved it from destruction when the church had no more use for it.

On days when nobody stops in I go mad with boredom.

The Parlor

"I'm glad you came by," I said to a young girl and her father on Sunday. "I was going mad with boredom." In fact I had gone so far as to boot up the Historical Society computer and play a couple of games of spider solitaire. Before that I swept the plaster crumbs out of the hall where the water is getting in through the bricks and rotting it out, and before that I read some of the Historical Society's books on local history, and before that I took a picture of the parlor.

As they were getting ready to leave the girl said, "You're English, aren't you?"

"Nope. I'm American. I was born in Philadelphia."

"But you speak as if you were English. 'Mad with boredom.'"

"Ah. That. I'm a writer," I said.

It seems to explain a lot when I tell people I'm a writer. I can get away with all kinds of things.

Kate Gallison