The case of the botched execution in Oklahoma should never have happened.  Couldn’t find the vein?  C’mon!  Some people are wringing their hands, saying, “They made that poor man suffer.”  Well, that’s the idea, isn’t it?  Isn’t the application of any death penalty just the Old Testament form of justice, eye for an eye, etc, etc?  What kind of insanity is it to talk about humane ways to put someone to death?  What right does our government, or any government, for that matter, have to murder anyone?  What does the victim’s or victims’ families gain?  Some kind of Old Testament revenge?

That’s the first point of this post: two murders, one where the killer offs his victim, and the other where the government offs the murderer, don’t add up to justice.  Two wrongs don’t make a right.  Even if the murderer wants to die, no government should be in the business of killing its citizens.  It’s simply barbaric and grotesque.  Absolutely nothing is gained.  That famous closure victims’ families receive is a smokescreen for institutionalized murder.  No matter how it’s done, that’s what it is.

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Les deseo a todos un feliz Cinco de Mayo, especialmente a todos los lectores mexicanos.  Nachos con chile con queso, algunas  cervezas Coronas, o margaritas virtuales para todos!  Tengan una fiesta toda esta noche….

Translation for gringos: I desire for all a happy Cinco de Mayo, especially for all my Mexican readers!  Virtual nachos with chili with cheese, Corona beers, or margaritas  for everyone!  Have a party the whole night….

The tape of LA Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling allegedly ranting to his girlfriend about not wanting her to embarrass him by socializing with Blacks…the comments uttered by Fox News and Tea Party “hero” Cliven Bundy questioning why Blacks ever wanted to end slavery…these are ignorant old men who are bigots and racists, but the news about them reminded me of a comment Michael Moore made in a discussion last year at the Montclair Film Festival (that’s Montclair, NJ, where I live).  To paraphrase, Moore (no relation, as far as I know) said that we just have to wait for the bigots to die.  NBA owner, Sterling, as rich as he must be, can’t dissuade the Grim Reaper from his appointed rounds—he’s old, and we’ll soon have one less bigot.  (I’ll admit that at the time I write this, proof still has to be supplied that the recorded voice is his, but he has a track record.)  Bundy’s made his money by stealing from U.S. taxpayers, which somehow is more folksy-heroic than stealing from basketball fans and players, but he too is old and will die, erasing another bigot.

Unfortunately, Michael is wrong.  Bigots and fanatics aren’t born; they’re made.  They’re products of their culture.  Technically, these are subcultures, I suppose, but “sub” implies that we have just one or few cultures in the U.S.  We don’t.  We have many.  Every immigrant—and we’re all descended from immigrants, except for Native Americans—imports some of the culture from his Fatherland, and that percolates through the decades.  The average person usually passes through many subcultures during his or her life, but not always.  While one might be a bigot or fanatic as a reflection of their parents’ culture (they’re not mutually exclusive, of course), that can be overcome.  As the nation becomes more diverse and subcultures more plentiful, a person often adapts, realizing that the prejudices and fears inculcated in him by his parents are invalid.  Or not.  Prejudice, even hate, can be so ingrained that the personality collapses without it.

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[Note to readers: If you notice problems with fonts, spacings, etc, in the next few posts, be assured that it’s neither your eyes nor your computer.  WordPress geeks in their infinite wisdom eliminated the W-button I used to employ to insert post rough drafts from MS Word.  I’ve found a temporary fix, but I’m still exploring work-arounds.  Apparently, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” isn’t a workplace motto at WordPress where they’ve adopted a policy that users are beta-testers, just like Microsoft, the company they hate.  I won’t apologize–they should.]

This question is appropriate when considering Afghanistan.  The good Afghans don’t seem capable of standing up to the Taliban.  The bad Afghans—and these aren’t the Taliban, who are worse than bad—are poppy farmers and the people like Karzai, who, through graft and corruption, exploit everyone and everything.  Karzai bites the hand that feeds him too: he has to know that his life wouldn’t be worth a Russian ruble if the Taliban take over again.  And, let’s face it, the Afghan landscape is more desolate than the moon’s; only Iceland’s is worse.

The recent murders of three doctors is but another instance of why we should write Afghanistan off.  There are good people there.  These doctors were on a mission to help them.  One, I believe, had been doing so for seven years.  The Taliban don’t care.  These doctors were Christians, foreigners, and not supporters of the Taliban’s vicious brand of radical Islam.  The Taliban’s ideology is one of death.  Doctors, a little girl making appeals for the right of women to educate themselves, and many others who dare to work for peace and a better life and naysay Taliban fanaticism, are targets.  They are now claiming they shot down a NATO helicopter (the Pentagon claims this is false—I’m not surprised, because the Taliban would probably take credit if Karzai got a cold).

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Every once and a while I make a mental list of what has recently irked me.  Today I thought I’d share the most recent list with you.  Who knows?  Maybe these things irk you too.  And maybe I’ll make this a regular feature.

Item 1: Gum-smacking waitress in a restaurant.  I suppose I should be PC and say waitperson?  Somehow this smacks me as unhygienic.  What’s the problem?  Does she need to keep the saliva going so she can spit in my food?  I hadn’t even tipped her yet!

Item 2: Young gen-Xer passing me on the right to turn left in front of me.  Twenty feet into that next intersection, he’s waiting for a red light as I come up behind him, hoping he sees in the rearview mirror that I think he’s number one.

Item 3: Popcorn and soda at the movies adding up to more than the tickets.  That’s tickets in plural.  We go to matinees.  And we don’t buy any of their crap anymore.  90% of the movies are crap; we don’t need to be fed more crap while we’re watching.

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Probably not.  Its champion is.  Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1982 Nobel Prize winner, died at 87 in Mexico City.  His word mastery and acerbic humor will be missed.

Magical realism is seeing a fantasy-world amidst stark reality, a technique that intertwines the mystical and sensual with the everyday trials and tribulations of ordinary people, making their lives extraordinary.  It has influenced many authors since Garcia Marquez, and not just Hispanic authors.  He wasn’t the first either.  Kafka and some of the early dystopian sci-fi writers practiced magical realism—nowadays King and Koontz practice it in their cross-genre alloying of horror and sci-fi.  Many tales about drug addiction and mental cases contain elements of magical realism, but it can creep into mysteries, thrillers, and that nebulous and catch-all genre we call literary fiction.

My personal discovery of Garcia Marquez was probably a bit different than your average gringo’s.  While my sojourn in Colombia led to a cultural immersion so profound that I soon found myself dreaming in Spanish, I didn’t feel capable of tackling the grand master’s tomes until late in that sojourn.  I’m not going to claim that one must read a great author in his own language—modern translators are rarely literal and often profoundly capture the author’s true meaning—but I’ve never read Gabby in English.  You’re probably familiar with the great trio—One Hundred Years of Solitude, Autumn of the Patriarch, and Love During the Time of Cholera (these are my title translations that don’t necessarily agree with accepted ones)—each novel a masterpiece and each novel totally different.

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(Harry James Krebs, Vengeance Is Mine, Peak City Publishing, 2014, ASIN B00IH8H0KA)

Not really a who-did-it but who-IS-it, this exciting mystery is suspenseful and entertaining fun, its protagonist a bit of Spenser, Lincoln Rhyme, and Alex Cross all rolled into one.  You shouldn’t miss reading this one, although it’s not for the squeamish.

I suppose that more than who-IS-it, the ubiquitous why is also part of the discovery in this mystery.  The author spins both of these questions out in classic mystery-thriller-suspense fashion.  Readers will love this; writers should take note.  You would never find Agatha Christie doing it this way, but this is how modern books in this genre should be written.  We have a case study about the violent depravity existing in some individuals and how much damage they can do to innocent people.  Fortunately, these cases are exceptional, but the exceptions, even in fiction, provide a warning: watch your back—there are evil people out there.

I’m also impressed that the author resists the temptation to make his protagonist a two-dimensional bastion of virtue.  He’s complex, conflicted, and at times comically confused.  He has mental hang-ups about his past, has gone through a bad divorce, and is a bit of a Don Juan, although his philandering causes more self-doubt than pleasure in the long-run.  In many ways, he’s just your average Joe muddling through life, taking what it gives him the best he can.  And, in the few weeks the novel covers, life throws a lot at him.

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#360: Poisoned Ground.  I just reviewed Sandra Parshall’s new Rachel Goddard mystery for Book Pleasures.  If you missed it, you can also look in the section “Book Reviews” of this blog.  It’s an entertaining read for all mystery fans.  Ms. Parshall is a cut above Mary Higgins Clark and Carla Neggers, those Big Five superstars; she doesn’t receive enough recognition.  But there are many authors like that who have written very good books but are unsung.  I try to do my part by pointing them out to readers.

#361: Vengeance is Mine.  I also just reviewed Harry James Kreb’s mystery on Amazon (I’ll repost this review next week here).  Unlike Sandra, Harry is an up and coming mystery writer who is a bit of Robert B. Parker, Jeffery Deaver, and James Patterson all rolled into one.  Read my review and check out the book.  Looks like this is mystery week at “News and Notices”—I’m working on finishing and content editing of The Collector, a new Chen and Castilblanco mystery that I hope to release this year.

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[Note from Steve: I wrote this a while ago as a guest post for Shah Wharton’s WordsInSync website.  It seemed appropriate to dust it off and repost it here with a few edits that make it more contemporary.]

Many writers are avid readers, at least in their own genre.  In fact, I can’t understand how anyone can be a writer without being an avid reader.  I suppose there are exceptions.  I am also a reviewer, but I read many more books than I review.  Some of my reading is information-oriented; most is just entertainment—TV for the most part has few good programs.  Consequently, as a native Californian, it’s obvious that American sci-fi has influenced my writing.  Less obvious is the influence of British sci-fi authors.  There is a reason for that—dystopian vision.

Some of my novels, especially Soldiers of God and “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” have lurking in the background what I call “the social singularity”; my novel Survivors of the Chaos moves through it, for example.  Unlike a black hole, this singularity is diffuse in space and time.  It represents a particular state in world affairs where social problems become so complex that politicians and political institutions are incapable of solving them; where fundamentalist attitudes and local xenophobia have become so prevalent and ingrained that traditional empires break up into more homogeneous, almost tribal units; and where multinational corporations, ever greedy for new markets and more profits, hire mercenary armies in an attempt to keep order.  This state I call the Chaos.  In brief, it’s my dystopian vision of humanity’s future.  It’s not all bleak—I always sprinkle in a bit of hope here and there, created by heroic individuals, of course!

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[Tom Pope is a writing teacher—see the interview with him in a post from a few days ago—and yours truly writes thrillers.  We put our emails together to produce this Socratic discussion about several elements associated with writing thrillers.  This is part two of that discussion.  Enjoy.]

Steve: What you call third person internal is just a temporary lapse into first person.  Putting the thoughts into italics allows the writer to make it present tense: What’s my partner doing? Instead of, What was that partner doing?  The first moves the prose along more.  However, if italics aren’t used in the first, readers are justifiably confused due to the tense change.  Moreover, many authors make the mistake of putting italicized thoughts into past tense, which is also confusing to the reader.

I’m even more of a minimalist writer.  In one of your dialogue lines, it’s clear who’s talking to whom.  You’ve replaced “Are you tracking badges now?” with “You collecting badges now?” while I’d replace it with “Collecting badges now?”  The first might be appropriate for that nebulous genre of “literary fiction,” the second for a thriller, and the third for a hard-boiled mystery or police procedural.  Depending on the person with whom I’m conversing, I might say any of the three in an office situation, but the last really moves the dialogue forward.

These examples are minutia, of course, but over the length of a novel, probably 60 to 80 kwords, the minutia can add up.  Same goes for slang and street jive.  If there’s a lot of dialogue—I mean pages and pages of it—and the slang or street jive used isn’t found in my normal conversational quirks, I’ll eventually tire of it as a reader.  There’s nothing bigoted or hypocritical about this.  When I lived in the Boston area, I found the ubiquitous accent there tiresome at times.  This is a cultural phenomenon.  Same goes for foreign language terms—I use those more than most authors, but I’ve become more careful.  The Goldilocks rule applies here: use just enough to provide color, but not too much.  Of course, too little and too much depend on the reader—you have to aim for the average person in your targeted audience.

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