In the market for a word?

The paradox of the thesaurus is that you can use it only to find words that you already know. Plucking an unfamiliar word from a list of synonyms practically ensures misusage. Now and then I consult a thesaurus to remember a word that has slipped my mind, and the one I reach for most often is the OXFORD AMERICAN WRITER’S THESAURUS. There are now three editions; I have the first one, published back in 2004.

Rather than boring lists, the OAWT provides examples of usage for the most common synonyms. It explains the fine distinctions between words of similar meaning and the contexts in which they are properly used. Sometimes I read the OAWT just to learn.

Recently I came across this commentary by David Lehman:

Why do some words last while others fade into oblivion?

There was a time when dungarees and jeans vied on an equal footing for the linguistic market in blue denim pants. Jeans won that competition handily, in a rout, rather in the way that a company achieves dominance in an industry.

The linguistic process is little like capitalism, then, but purer, with no antitrust legislation or zealous attorneys general to limit the monopoly.

Dungarees

The word dungarees is still used occasionally to describe the bib overalls that you wear while painting a room or planting a garden, but these dungarees aren’t always denim or even blue.

If you accept Lehman’s analogy, does it follow that the best word always wins? I guess that depends on how you view capitalism. Does the best product invariably dominate in the marketplace? Or is it the cheapest product? The gaudiest? The one with the most aggressive advertising behind it?

Anyway, here a couple of once common words that I miss.

Whippersnapper is defined in the RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY as “an unimportant but offensively presumptuous person, esp. a young one.” What other word conveys the same meaning with as much poetry?

There are several ways of saying “a very small amount,” but do any of them sound as tiny as smidgeon? Such a cute little word.

Think about those words you know but seldom or never hear. Why is no one buying them anymore? And if you’re a writer, do you have the power to make them sell again?

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A compelling historical novel

In Miseerere Caren J. Werlinger has written an historical novel that weaves together narratives from two periods: the mid-1960s dominated by the Civil Rights Movement and the mid-1800s that saw the Civil War and the end of legalized slavery in America. The story centers on the descendants of Caitríona Ní Faolain, an Irish girl brought to America as an indentured servant.

One descendant in particular, eleven-year-old Connemara Mitchell, carries a heavy burden. Only she can lift a curse that began with Caitríona and has afflicted the family for a hundred years. But first she must uncover its secret.

After Conn’s father goes missing in action in Vietnam, her mother moves the family to their grandmother’s rundown house in West Virginia. Soon after their arrival, Conn sees the ghost of Caitríona, who reveals the terms of the curse. In each generation, one girl child will survive so that someday the curse might be lifted. All her siblings will perish. Soon afterward Conn’s younger brother almost dies of polio. She realizes that his life depends on her finding out the secret.

Through dreams and visions Conn experiences her ancestor’s life. Caitríona and her sister, Orla, are still children when their father sells them to the ironically named Lord Playfair. After a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, locked in the hold of a ship, they come to a pre-Civil War plantation where they labor alongside the house slaves. They are treated a little better than the Africans, but not much.

Catríona falls in love with Hannah, one of the slaves. The lives of the girls become more precarious as they try to conceal their love from everyone in the household. Catríona doesn’t help matters. Quick tempered and embittered, she’s whipped for impertinence. Conn experiences the whipping in a dream. Afterward faint scars appear on her back. She discovers a network of tunnels beneath the house and begins to explore, guessing the secret of the curse is hidden there.

Meanwhile Conn’s mother, Elizabeth, struggles to make a life in a new place. She hires Abraham Greene to help her fix up the house. Once a schoolteacher up North, Abraham now makes a living as a handyman. He becomes a friend of the Mitchell family. Word gets around, and rumors spread. Some people in the West Virginian town think Elizabeth and Abraham have crossed a line and must be punished.

Werlinger moves skillfully between the two narratives, building suspense in both. Her pacing is just about perfect. The characters are complex, believable, and sympathetic. Her view of human nature seems essentially hopeful and kind, given her compassionate rendering of characters that might have been cartoonish villains.

Miserere grabbed me and carried me all the way to the end. I put aside everything else and devoted a day to reading it, which is the highest tribute I can give to a story.

 

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Be sure to catch Loose Dogs

Kirsten Mortensen’s Loose Dogs is a wonderful novel, full of comedy without ignoring life’s sadness and cruelty. The characters are deftly drawn. The author gives them individuality even when they’re recognizable types. The story unfolds at a satisfying pace that kept me reading from start to finish.

Paige Newbury, the narrator and protagonist, works as an animal control officer in Rochester, New York. She seems content with her life, but then she receives a ring in the mail—not a diamond engagement ring, just gaudy costume jewelry that her erstwhile boyfriend, Gil Rudman, picked up at a flea market. Paige takes the ring as a sign that Gil, who left a while ago to pursue his career as an artist, is coming back to her.

She doesn’t want Gil to think she’s been waiting around for his return, even though she has, so she enlists the help of an acquaintance to pose as her boyfriend. Larry Crawford is a slick attorney and an accomplished player. He’s attracted to Paige and only too happy to help out with her scheme.

At this point I almost lost respect for Paige. The fake-boyfriend routine is such a stupid move, bound to end badly. And she obviously lacks the panache to bring it off. But Paige is a kind person. She sacrifices a meal at an expensive restaurant (courtesy of Larry) to catch a loose pit bull whose wounds suggest he’s been used for dogfighting. She worries about what will become of the pit. When a callous owner abandons her pregnant dog, Paige takes Lady in and sets about finding homes for the puppies. How could you not like and respect someone like that?

Many of Paige’s observations about the world and herself are laugh-out-loud funny. She thinks of romance as “the Prozac nature has slipped in our drink” to make life bearable.”  She has intelligent and wit. Even though she’s not glamorous, it’s altogether believable that Gil would come back to her and Larry would chase after her.

The plot of LOOSE DOGS turns on the romantic triangle, but I enjoyed the subplots just as much, especially Paige’s efforts to find and stop a dogfighting operation. Animal welfare is clearly an issue that matters to Mortensen. She donates some of the profits from the book to pit bull rescue.

Unlike many of the stories I enjoy, Loose Dogs has no foul language and no graphic sex or violence. Like its protagonist, it has humor, intelligence, and a good heart.

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Zombie love story

I could never get into zombies. Sad reanimated corpses, mindless and sexless, they shuffle along dropping rotted body parts in their wake, pausing occasionally to gnaw living human flesh. Horrifying, sure. Funny in a grisly kind of way. But mostly boring. Certainly not figures that evoke empathy.

I’ve enjoyed a few zombie movies—George Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead, Peter Jackson’s slapstick Dead Alive, and Edgar Wright’s satiric Shawn of the Dead. But I wouldn’t have watched any of them without the urging of my husband, Joe, Heumann, a film scholar. (Joe takes to movies for reasons other than the stories they tell. He would watch anything by Peter Jackson because he loves Jackson’s visual style. Joe has seen The Lord of the Rings movies, parts of them more than once, but he has only a vague idea who Eomer and Faramir are.)

Given my indifference to zombies, it’s not surprising that I greeted the Zombie Apocalypse with a yawn. I had no interest in reading one of the many novels with a ZA premise. I wouldn’t have read Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (now also a movie) except for a recommendation from a friend whose judgment I trust. She loaned me the paperback.

Isaac Marion changed my mind about zombies. In Warm Bodies he creates a zombie hero who’s sympathetic, intelligent, and—amazingly—attractive in spite of his decomposing body.

R tells his own story and wins my sympathy from the start. He remembers nothing of his former life except the first letter of his name. He has a humdrum existence, hanging around an airport colonized by others of his kind, and venturing out to hunt and consume the few remaining humans in the novel’s post-apocalyptic world. But what else is he supposed to do? Everyone has to eat, right? R accepts that his flesh will eventually rot away until he becomes a skeleton, one of the Boneys who act as the colony’s elders.

Boneys keep zombie society functioning. They create schools to teach newbie zombies how to hunt. They join couples in a kind of parody of marriage, and they lead fervid religious services worshiping the sky. Fierce defenders of the status quo, Boneys keep everyone else in line.

The parallels between zombie and human society are humorous at the start, but they grow darker as the story unfolds and it become apparent that zombies are a manifestation rather than the root cause of the worldwide collapse of human societies. Things have gone terribly wrong, and nobody seems to know exactly how or why.

R shuffles through this structured non-life with a kind of bemused acceptance. Then something unprecedented happens. While out hunting, he consumes the brain of a young man named Perry. He experiences the usual pleasurable rush of memories and sensations from the brain, but they don’t pass within moments as they usually do. They linger, and gradually Perry takes up permanent residence in R’s mind.

R feels the need to help and protect Julie, Perry’s girlfriend, who is in immediate danger of being eaten. He conceals her from his fellow zombies and brings her home to the old airplane where he entertains her with recordings of Frank Sinatra songs.

Like a socially challenged high-school boy, R feels deeply but cannot express himself. His stuttering attempts to declare his love to Julie are touching and funny. And her gradual acceptance and growing affection for him show the best qualities of humanity—tolerance, empathy, and forgiveness.

Caring as he does for Julie, R finds he cannot go on as before. He can no longer eat people. He doesn’t know what he might become or whether he can survive the transformation, but love compels him to change. And the love between him and Julie inspires other zombies to question whether their fate is inevitable. In the end the lovers risk everything to find out.

Warm Bodies has zombies, but at heart it’s a love story. It embraces the treasured and audacious belief of romantics that love can change the world.

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The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice

My cousin Deon doesn’t email often, so when a message from her lands in my mailbox, I open it with curiosity. Some time ago Deon wrote to recommend a book. Knowing I read about serial killers, she thought I might enjoy David Rose’s The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice. The stocking strangler was active in Columbus, Georgia, in the late 1970s. His victims were elderly, well-to-do white women, all from the same wealthy neighborhood. Deon lived in Columbus at that time and witnessed the city’s fear and outrage at the brutal crimes.

I had read very little about the crimes or Carleton Gary, the African-American man convicted of committing them. I leafed through a number of books and found brief references to Gary in Robert K. Ressler’s WHOEVER FIGHTS MONSTERS and John Douglas’s MIND HUNTER. Ressler and Douglas mention Gary only in passing. Both note that he was convicted, and both divulge a bit of the evidence against him. Neither seems interested in examining Gary’s psychology the way they examine other serial killers. For one reason or another, they appear to find him and his crimes uninteresting. Possibly I internalized this attitude; I wasn’t especially eager to read about the stocking stranglings. But I found the book on Amazon—on sale!—and decided to give it a chance.

I’m glad I did. The Big Eddy Club is an excellent piece of journalism. It is not, however, a serial killer book in the usual sense. Rose isn’t interested in analyzing the crime scenes or probing the mind of the killer. Instead he raises the question of whether Carleton Gary actually is the killer. Rose places the crimes, the hunt for the perpetrator, and the trial of the accused in the context of the place where they happened: Columbus, Georgia. He presents a history of racism in the area going back to the end of the Civil War. He gives accounts of lynching and other violence inflicted on African Americans, acts even more savage than the crimes committed by the stocking strangler, and makes the point that no white person had ever been sentenced for killing a black person in Columbus.

The Big Eddy Club of the title is a venerable private club for socially prominent folks in Columbus. Many of the strangler’s victims belonged to the club or moved in the same social circles as its members, as did the trial judge, the appeals judges, and the prosecutors involved in Gary’s trial. Rose presents it as a bastion of traditional Southern values and a symbol of institutionalized racism. Only recently the club admitted its first African-American member, one sign that things are finally beginning to change in Columbus.

Excellent as it is, The Big Eddy Club makes difficult reading—not because the subject is tedious or the book poorly written. Rose recounts so many past and present injustices against African-Americans, piled one upon another and culminating in Gary’s trial, where the prosecution withholds evidence from the defense and lies to the jury, and where the judge is blatantly biased against the defendant and makes no attempt to disguise his feelings or be fair. It was making me furious. When I reached the account of the judge’s refusing the defense any financial resources then booting them from a courthouse office for failing to pay a long-distance phone bill, I put The Big Eddy Club  aside. Not until weeks later did I pick it up again and push on to the inevitable conclusion. After years of appeals, new exculpatory evidence, and blatant evidence of the prosecution’s wrongdoing, Carlton Gary is still on death row.

If you’re shocked or baffled by the contempt expressed by many African-Americans for our system of justice, read this book.

Note: This review was published a few years ago just as I was beginning to blog and not many people were reading it. I want to spotlight the book again. It truly is worth reading.

 

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Riveting legal thriller by TJ Cooke

In his legal thriller Defending Elton, TJ Cooke takes on formidable challenges.

First, his protagonist is a British solicitor who sets out to frame a mentally challenged client, Elton, for a murder that he himself committed. How can readers sympathize with a guy like that? Yet Cooke succeeds in evoking not just a grudging understanding of Jim Harwood’s motives, but empathy and hope that his life will take a turn for the good.

Jim tells his own story, so readers experience it from his perspective. And he’s a reliable narrator. He might be lying to every character in the novel, but he tells readers the truth—about his traumatic childhood, his tangled motives, his shameful behavior, and his obsessive love for the murder victim, Sarena. Her death is an accident for which he is partly responsible, and he’s tormented by guilt as he frames the hapless Elton. He has a conscience. He knows what’s right. In one memorable scene, a brute attacks a junkie in the street, and Jim comes to her aid even though he gains nothing by doing so. He’s not a psychopath, just a flawed human being trapped by circumstances and bad decisions.

Cooke develops two parallel narratives. In one, Jim goes through the process of preparing for trial. He conceals evidence and deflects questions from the barrister who will present the case in court. He negotiates an ambiguous relationship with Loren, the colleague/girlfriend whose jealousy precipitated the murder. And he ducks insistent messages from a former client, a criminal who keeps demanding favors. Dangerous favors.

The other narrative unfolds the backstory. Jim falls in love with Sarena, who breaks his heart when she vanishes mysteriously. He enlists Loren’s aide in uncovering the truth. By the time Sarena suddenly reappears, Jim knows she’s involved in some kind of illegal scheme, but he can’t help loving her anyway. After she dies in a confrontation with Loren, Jim carries out his elaborate plan to pin the murder on Elton.

Cooke’s challenge is to move back and forth between the narratives without causing confusion or slowing the pace, and to maintain suspense in the backstory even though readers already know the outcome. He does it superbly. The novel is beautifully constructed.

By the end of Defending Elton it’s apparent that TJ Cooke is a masterful writer of suspense. He constructs an intricate and coherent plot propelled by complex and believable characters. In short, he tells one hell of a story.

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Taken March 2013 Charleston, Illinois
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Ghost story

Time has not been kind to the once beautiful house.

Thirty years ago Joe and I lived in a beautiful house overlooking a lake. It was his second year of teaching at Eastern Illinois University. Uncertain whether we would settle permanently in Charleston, we leased the place from a professor on sabbatical.

The house had an unpaved driveway that wound steeply downward to a gravel road. Since trucks had to come up the driveway to deliver propane for the furnace, heavy snowstorms made us nervous. But the living room had a glass wall offering a view of a ravine. In early spring when the redbud bloomed, the ravine exploded with color.

The incident

I wrote fiction in an office in the walkout basement. One morning in the spring, I suddenly felt the need to take a walk. My writing was going well just then, so the urge made no sense. Leaving the basement, I descended the winding driveway and turned right on the gravel road. This direction led to a stone quarry about a mile away.

The embankment today

I wondered if I was going to the quarry. It felt strange not having a choice, but I wasn’t frightened. Shortly after passing the ravine, I turned and began to climb an embankment steep enough that I needed both hands and feet to clamber up. It was about fifteen feet high. At the top I found myself in a clearing with a few trees, weeds and sparse grass, and rocks embedded in the hard ground. I wandered the clearing and stopped in front of one particular rock. A voice in my head said, Here.

I knew then the rock marked a grave and I’d been brought there to see it. The possibility of a ghost occurred to me, but I didn’t take it seriously. I was, after all, an inventor of fiction with a lively imagination

Evidence accumulates

Abandoned and broken headstones

Summer came. Shortly before Joe and I moved out of the house, I took a last walk along the gravel road. I loved the place despite the difficulties of living there and was sorry we had to leave. Approaching the embankment, I saw the sign: Kelly Family Cemetery. I climbed up to the clearing and saw it had been cleaned up. The weeds had been pulled, and dirt swept from the rocks. They were old gravestones. I found the one where I’d been taken a few months ago. I tried to read the engraving now visible, but it was too eroded by time.

Look closely. You can almost read the name.

Someone named Kelly wanted me to know that she/he resided nearby.

Several  years  later I heard a story about the house. The professor went on unpaid leave and leased it to a man who moved out after a few months, claiming it was haunted. He sublet the house to a woman who decided she didn’t want to live there either. Before leaving, she tried to sell the furniture. Luckily, one piece was very distinctive—a massive, elaborately hand-carved table the professor’s wife had bought in Mexico. I remember that table well. Dusting it was a tedious job. Someone else remembered it too, and the woman was busted.

Do these stones mark a grave?

Today I revisited the spot. The sign is gone, but I found remnants of the old cemetery in the clearing. Climbing the embankment, I got clawed by a vicious branch. (See photo above.) Maybe something wanted to keep me from going up there to take pictures. Or maybe today was muddier, and I’m not as young as I was then.

Are ghosts real?

I neither nor disbelieve in the paranormal. When a phenomenon seems to exist but cannot be verified empirically, I’m an agnostic. I feel no driving need to hunt down the truth one way or the other. It surprises me how few people can tolerate the uncertainty of agnosticism. They must either devoutly believe or strenuously disbelieve.

Readers of Talion know the novel has paranormal elements but leaves open the possibility that Lu, the girl who sees demons, might just be out of her mind. The novel’s ambiguity reflects my attitude toward the paranormal. It also puts off readers who can’t handle ambiguity.

The sequel to Talion leaves no doubt as to the existence of the demons. Some readers resist the notion of demons invading an otherwise realistic world, but these particular demons refuse to go away. Why should I ignore them any more than I ignored the ghost—or whatever it was that summoned me to a neglected grave?

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When an idea sparks a story

I get too many ideas for stories, more than I have time to write. How to choose among them? I take the ones that call to both my head and my heart.

An unusual premise might interest me, but unless it comes with a character I care about or moves toward some kind of emotional unfolding, I’ll probably let it go. For instance, I wonder what would happen if an unreasonable customer managed to get a department store clerk fired, and the desperate clerk set out for revenge. A premise like that could be developed into a story humorous or horrifying—maybe both. But neither the customer nor the clerk exists as a character in my imagination. They are little more than vehicles for malevolent motives. With effort I could make them characters, but I don’t feel compelled.

Sometimes I see people whose situation moves or intrigues me, a pair of elderly men sitting on a bench at the local mall, chatting with one another. I wonder what their lives are like. I imagine one man’s modest house and the other man’s dead wife whom he still mourns. But I don’t have a story for them. Again, I could invent a story, but I’m occupied with the stories and characters that command my imagination.

They begin with a spark that illuminates the character and her journey and the emotion that gives them meaning. I experienced a moment like that with my short story “Yubi” about a woman who falls in love with her parakeet. I knew the story would end “[       ] would love [       ] as long as she lived.” Although I had not yet named the woman or the bird or constructed the events that would bring her to the realization. I felt its humor and pathos and love. It was a story I had to write.

The story that became my thriller Talion began with a spark—a moment when two girls make a bond of friendship, when all the distrust and blame and preconceptions that separate them give way to understanding. Despite all the room he occupies in the novel, the serial killer Rad first entered the story as a way of getting Lu and Lisa to that moment. It’s there in the last chapter of Talion, just as I imagined at the start.

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How We Die – Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter

I read Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter while doing research for my novel TALION. I’d never seen anyone die—not yet, anyway—and I needed a clinical account of the process. Nuland explains what happens in the body as life ends. In each chapter he covers a different manner of death: heart attack, old age, Alzheimer’s disease, AIDS, cancer, and so on. He also addresses some of the philosophical issues connected to death and dying.

The book delivered what I needed in the chapter “Murder and Serenity.” When someone is bleeding to death, he goes into shock, his heartbeat ceases, and his muscles spasm in what are known as death agonies. For a few minutes he is “clinically dead,” which means his brain is receiving no oxygen, but with medical intervention he might be revived. Doctors can tell by examining the person whether the effort is likely to succeed. One important clue is the eyes.

If open, [the eyes] are at first glassy and unseeing, but if resuscitation does not commence they will in four or five minutes yield up their sheen and become dulled, as the pupils dilate and forever lose their watchful light. It is as though a thin cloud-gray film has been laid down over each eye . . . . [T]he eyeball soon flattens out, just enough to be noticeable. It is a flatness from which there is no rising. (122-123)

Nuland goes on to discuss the serenity and freedom from pain observed in victims of trauma. When the body is damaged, it produces endorphins, pain-killing chemicals like those in narcotics. He provides several examples of when and how this happens, including soldiers wounded during battle and a child who is murdered.

Though I didn’t use any of Nuland’s material directly, it underlay my accounts of what Rad’s victims endure as he tortures and kills them, forming a base on which my imagination could build.

I didn’t need the other chapters for my research but read them anyway, fascinated by the complexity of the dying process. I learned why my father died of kidney failure even though it was heart failure that put him in the hospital the final time. I learned enough about cancer to suspect my mother had it when fluid accumulated around her lung. The doctor’s diagnosis confirmed my fear.

My mother as a young woman

I noticed a copy of How We Die on the bookshelf in the office of my mother’s oncologist. I doubt it was there because the oncologist needed its medical information; he would have learned all that stuff in school. But the book has more to offer doctors. A physician himself, Nuland questions the wisdom of continuing to treat patients whose illnesses are terminal. In such cases, he argues, treatment often purchases a few extra weeks or months of life at the price of additional suffering.

My mother was such a patient. Chemotherapy would slow the process of her lung cancer but could not cure it. She underwent a few treatments and then decided the trade-off wasn’t worth it. For almost a year afterward she continued to live normally. She and I went to Utah where she visited her sisters a final time. Nuland observes that death seldom comes peacefully, that most of us can expect to suffer in the process. Mom did. Learning how we die has made me less happy, but the knowledge I’ve gained is a trade-off I can accept.

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A tribute to my father

An entrepreneur at heart, my father owned and operated more than a dozen small businesses in his lifetime, two or three at a time. Since he liked spending money and always needed more, he also sold cars for various dealerships in Heber, Utah, where he lived. He was a terrific saleman. He won national prizes for his record in sales—gold pins, cookware, trips to Las Vegas.

Unfortunately I didn’t inherit my old man’s greatest sales asset, the ability to connect with all kinds of people and a personality that immediately put them at ease. I’m more of an introvert. When I decided to become a writer, I imagined a life cloistered in my office, creating stories and novels, emerging to give the occasional reading. Someone else would persuade readers to buy my books. But life didn’t work out that way. As the independent publisher of my books, I have the entire responsibility for marketing them.

Although not a natural like Dad, I learned a few things from watching him sell cars.

Believe in your product

When Dad sold Fords, they were the best automobiles on the market. Nothing beat a Mustang for speed and handling. Then he went to work at the General Motors dealership. Suddenly their vehicles became superior. I teased him about changing his opinion from one day to the next. But he stuck doggedly to his position: you couldn’t beat a Cadillac for luxury and comfort or a GM truck for power and reliability.

Ultimately authors have to believe in their work; otherwise they wouldn’t create. But even great writers harbor doubts about the value of their writing. Franz Kafka wanted his manuscripts destroyed after his death. I’m not that depressive, but then I’m no genius either. I revise incessantly and agonize over sentences.  Doubt is useful when it drives me to improve my writing, but I have to put it aside when I market my book. If I don’t believe in the book, neither will anyone else.

Never stop selling

Dad talked to everyone he met about cars—good friends, casual acquaintances, and strangers. If they showed the least interest in buying one, he had a deal for them. I’m sure he got rebuffed plenty of times, but he made a lot of sales, too.

That kind of persistence is hard for me. Rejection hurts. I have to remind myself not to take it to heart, to seek out opportunities and jump on each one.

Rise above disaster

I was amazed at Dad’s unflappability when he was selling. Once, a customer took a test drive in a used car—emphasis on used—and as he pulled back on the lot, the radiator hose burst. Dad opened the hood and quickly stepped back to avoid the spout of water. So much for that sale, I thought. But Dad led the customer into his office. They talked awhile, and then the guy came out and left. Dad emerged a few minutes later.

“Too bad about the hose,” I said.

“Oh, he bought the car,” Dad said. “I was just writing up the sale.”

“He didn’t care?”

“Car’s fine except for the hose,” Dad said. “We’re putting in a new one.”

The first edition of Talion was pretty much a bust—ineffective cover, insufficient copy editing, formatting mistakes. When I realized how completely I’d screwed up, I wanted to crawl beneath my bedcovers and hide. But I didn’t (not for long, anyway). As I learned from Dad, mistakes are fixable, and you don’t fail until you stop trying.

(This has all the earmarks of a Father’s Day post, but I don’t feel like waiting until June.)

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What is it about drug dealers?

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” — Oscar Wilde

My husband, the always perceptive Joe Heumann, recently pointed to an alarming pattern in my TV obsessions. The shows that hook me have disturbing elements in common. Crime and violence. Lots and lots of violence. A lead character who is a conflicted sociopath—Dexter, Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy, or any of a dozen characters in The Wire. And now Walter White , the high-school chemistry teacher who starts cooking meth to pay for his cancer treatments in the AMC series Breaking Bad.

A Midlife Career Change

Family Guys Get No RespectWalter (Brian Cranston) is a talented scientist who—for personal reasons that remain shrouded—turned his back on a lucrative career as a researcher  and became a high-school teacher. In the first episode, he’s so underpaid he works part-time at a car wash, where one of his smartass students takes a picture of him wiping tires, a shot that will no doubt pop up on two or three hundred adolescent cell phones. What unbearable humiliation. Yet Walter bears it.

Then he’s diagnosed with lung cancer. The medical bills will wipe out the family’s meager savings. No college for Junior. A diminished future for the daughter soon to be born. During a ridealong with his DEA brother-in-law, Walter sees the piles of cash confiscated from a busted meth lab and wakes up to the unvarnished truth about life.

Nice Guys Finish Last

Walter is done being a nice guy. He teams up with a former student (Aaron Paul) and begins his transformation into master meth cook Heisenberg. By the end of the first episode he’s already snuffed a guy. True, the guy is going to kill him, so he doesn’t have much choice. With this initial killing Walter takes the first step onto a long and very slippery slope. By the middle of season two, he’s responsible—directly or indirectly—for the deaths of quite a few people. Hundreds if you count the midair plane collision caused by the grieving air-traffic controller father of Jesse’s girlfriend, whose life Walter could have saved. He watches as she chokes to death on her own vomit. The bitch is just too snotty and inconvenient.

Near the end of season three, Walter casually plugs a bullet into the head of a man lying wounded in the street.

Fragments of the old Walter remain. At one point he gives up cooking to keep his wife from divorcing him. But it’s too late to go back. When he sees it won’t work, he signs the divorce papers and accepts a three-million-dollar offer to cook for a drug kingpin, whom he eventually assassinates.

There’s Something about Walter

I love the way he keeps calling Walter "Mr White"I can’t help liking this renegade high-school teacher. He doesn’t have Dexter’s animal magnetism or Jax’s slinky sexiness. He has the face of a guy who should have started using sunscreen decades ago. If he’s going parade around in his underwear, he needs to take up Pilates or weight-lifting. For viewers who want sexy, there’s his partner, Jesse, played by Aaron Paul. But Cranston brings such compelling and charismatic energy to the role that I have to get behind Walter. I hope he resists the urge to destroy himself. I hope he crushes his enemies, ends up with piles and piles of cash, and enjoys a quiet retirement, his cancer in remission. One evening he’ll be eating dinner at a posh restaurant where the jerk who snapped his picture at the carwash now works as a busboy. Walter could give him a hard time, even kill him. But why bother? Stepping on the little jerk would mean getting shit on his shoe.

Yet I know the story won’t end like that. Nice guys might finish last, but bad guys don’t escape retribution. One way or another, Walter has to go down in flames.

 

Photos from FanPop

 

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An emotional journey

Don’t miss Rachelle Ayala’s latest book, Hidden Under her Heart (A Story of Abortion and Courage), available for a short time at the introductory price of $0.99.

About the novel

Maryanne Torres is a compassionate nurse who fails at relationships. After a string of losers, she swears off premarital sex, hoping to land a marrying type of man.

Lucas Knight, a law-school dropout, moves to California to train for the Ironman Triathlon. He’s smart, sweet, and everything Maryanne wants in a man, but their relationship suffers from his dedication to the sport. Seeking consolation in the arms of a handsome preacher’s son, Maryanne attends a church party where she is raped.

Maryanne is pregnant from the rape and plans to abort. But the identity of her rapist is hidden in her baby’s DNA. Lucas asks Maryanne to seek alternatives and pledges to support her through the pregnancy. When Lucas becomes the prime suspect, Maryanne must clear his name and make a life-changing decision.

The rapist has other ideas. In order to destroy the evidence, he offers Maryanne an illegal offshore abortion. With Maryanne’s life in danger, Lucas races to save her and her baby. However, Maryanne hides a secret that threatens to tear them apart forever.

From the author

Hidden Under Her Heart is an emotional and hard-hitting story about a young woman facing a heart-wrenching decision. We’ve heard the rhetoric, maybe even argued over the issue of abortion and rape. But behind the debates are real people—women and men with real problems and feelings. My story is not meant to be preachy, but compassionate, especially for post-abortive parents seeking closure. I think people on both sides of the fence will find meaning in the changes that both Maryanne and Lucas go through. Ultimately, it is an uplifting story, and my hope is that it will be a help to you.

About the author

I am the author of three novels: Michal’s Window, a historical romance between King David and his first wife, the princess Michal, Broken Build, a romantic suspense thriller set in a Silicon Valley startup, and Hidden Under Her Heart, a story about a nurse wrestling with her decision to abort. My stories tend to be dramatic and emotional, crossing genres and cultures. I like to dive deep and live through my characters’ eyes. Each of them are passionate but flawed women paired with conflicted men with good hearts. I hope you enjoy the emotional journey I take you on. I love to hear from readers. Please contact me on Facebook or my blog.

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