This week and for the next three weeks, I'd like to present a little of the world around me. No names are mentioned to protect the innocent (or the guilty, as it were) and I offer these posts up to maybe give you some ideas for your own stories and to show you where I grab some ideas for some of my characters. These posts are meant not to demean anyone, but just to show some of the humor you can find around you every day. If you happen to know some of these people or-egad-are one of the characters here...well, I hope you can get a smile out of it. Besides, I wonder what my neighbors have thought about ME...
I've lived in some interesting places during my almost 44 years. (Egads! Am I really 44 this October?) Every place I can remember had memorable and interesting neighbors. In East Moline, I lived next door to a sweet woman with a garden on one side and an irascible couple on the other. My best friend lived down the street and two houses down lived a Down's Syndrome girl. Behind us on the next block lived a great family who owned a pool and-I swear-lived in a little pink house.
In Danville, we had nobody to our right but a nice couple and their children to our left, a couple of teachers across the street and other pretty good folks up and down our quarter mile stretch of road.
In Kewanee, I knew no neighbors except the one who complained about the noise I made running up and down the metal steps.
When I moved to Oskaloosa about twenty years ago, I found an apartment complex up near the William Penn College (since upgraded to University, ooh-la-la). The efficiency apartment had one living room just over six feet long that included a kitchen, a narrow hallway and bedroom just over six feet long. The bathroom was one where you could do three or four things simultaneously it was so small. There was a covered balcony running the length of the second floor which was nice to sit on during storms. The building was situated sideways to the street, so I didn't get much of a view except the backyard of the house across the driveway. The railroad yard was my backyard and the racetrack was barely half a mile away, so you know that 'quiet' was not a situation I was associated with.
But what made the place interesting were the neighbors. I don't recall how many units there were and I didn't know anybody personally except the landlord who was a cop. In fact, at one time, four officers lived in the building; we were the safest place in town.
The tenants to my right when I first moved in were a young couple. The walls between the apartments transferred sound fairly well and every couple of weeks (in my opinion), the man and woman went stir crazy and argued. She'd yell and his voice would get low and mean. I'm not sure, but once or twice he might have pushed her, but usually, he stormed out with a SLAM of the front door. She'd then open the door, stand there for a few minutes, then SLAM it again. That was the extent of their arguments. Sometime over the course of the next few days, they would...uh...make up. I was an audio witness to every glorious moment.
They moved out and a single woman moved in who had left her significant other (I never did find out if he was her spouse or boyfriend). Anyway, the funny thing about him was that he'd call her often. I'd hear her on the phone repeatedly saying things such as, “No, don't come over; I don't want to talk to you.” “No, I don't want to see you and don't call again; I don't want to talk.” I kept thinking, Well, hang up, already. I was working night shift at the time and on one of my nights off during the summer, I was sitting outside at about four in the morning and he calls her. Similar type of conversations as always, then about twenty minutes later, he actually shows up and acting very pathetic, knocks and knocks on her door trying to persuade her to let him in. “Please, let's just talk. Well, if I call, will you talk to me?” After about ten minutes of this, I turned the porch light off on him and went indoors. As I understand, she finally went back to him.
As I said, I didn't know too much about a lot of the other tenants and except for a few things here and there, there wasn't really much excitement.
The next door neighbors were a different story. A rental house with a sloping backyard...sloping right into the house. Whenever heavy rains would fall, there'd be small creek heading right toward the house. One family moved in with kids who proceeded to litter the backyard with toys. They also owned a mutt that barked and barked and barked, literally for hours. I remember one night the damn thing wouldn't shut up and it took ten minutes of knocking on the door to wake up the owners. Yeah, I was a little upset.
One summer afternoon, I'm cleaning the house (yes, mom, I do clean every now and then). The door and window were open. Suddenly, I hear a little plink sound. I couldn't figure what had happened until the next plink and I discovered a BB lying in front of the television. The little rugrats from across the way had shot from their backyard, through my doorway. Hindsight is 20/20...so oh the things I wished I'd said or done. One day, though, I'm sitting there and realizing that quiet had descended in my little world, I looked out the window and the backyard is clean – they'd moved! Thank heaven.
In 2002, the college decided to purchase the building for student housing. Everyone had to leave. I wasn't sure where to go. I looked into a few places, way out of my price range (and for that matter, any reasonable person's range), but I was lucky (ahem, well, maybe not), to find a place fairly quickly. It's my current abode...and oh, the stories I could tell.
But I'll save them for next time.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Hats On
I think I remember my Dad doing this only once before we were ready to drive someplace, but for some reason the incident stuck with me. We were both making sure we had the necessary items for the trip. He patted, in order, his front two pants pockets, then the back. As he patted, he said something to the effect of, “Keys, coins [money], wallet, handkerchief.”
I know there is a cruder addition to the sequence, but that's not the point of this post. The addition I wanted to make is that Dad rarely goes anyplace without a cap or a hat. Air Force cap, Oregon cap, or an 'old fashioned'
brimmed hat. I say old fashioned not to be demeaning, but many people would view that hat as something from decades past. And, in sense, it is.
I once saw a wide angle picture in a book about minor league baseball stadiums. The shot showed the seats out from the third base line. Every single seat was occupied with the 'same' man. In that I mean, each man wore a suit jacket over a shirt with a tie and a brimmed hat. Every single man.
What a far cry from today's yahoos who wear everything from horns to gobs of paint and no shirt.
You don't see hats very often these days. I mean real hats, not baseball caps or the topless cap which is just a plastic band attached to a bill.
Every now and then you'll see some guy trying to look different wearing a cowboy hat, but unless you're a country singer or wrangling cattle...most of the time it doesn't work.
Watch any old black and white movie from the forties on back, one which features metropolitan streets; all of the men wore hats. Westerns were filled with hats; I think westerns were mostly hats, especially in the crowd scenes. Every cowboy wore a hat and anytime a girl hopped on a horse, she donned a hat. I think it was against the law in the Old West to ride a horse without a hat. And unless you were Glenn Ford, you couldn't participate in a showdown without a hat. It used to be the classic tell of who the bad guy was. Jack Palance, the original bad man, wore a black hat, Alan Ladd sported white. Yeah, it was confusing when John Wayne wore a black hat, but for heaven's sake, he wore a pink bandanna most of the time, too, and nobody said anything.
I like the old gangster movies because Mr. Big sometimes wore a hat, but usually his lieutenants wore them. You can just picture Edward G. Robinson, surrounded and dwarfed by his gang of toughs, all sporting the hats, front brim lowered, shadowing their eyes. The hats were bold and black and never moved when they were roughing up somebody. When the hero clocked one of them and the hat flew off, he wiped his bloody lip, and immediately retrieved his hat. Never mind he was just humiliated, gotta get back the hat.
The classic is Indiana Jones who NEVER lost his hat, even during the wildest scenes. The one time he did, it came back to him on a gust of the wind like a faithful canine finding its master.
Hats sometimes will complete a character. Can you imagine Dick Tracy without a hat? How about Sherlock Holmes without the deerstalker?
Personally, I don't like wearing caps/hats. Yes, I have a 'cowboy' hat I picked up at the fair a couple of decades ago and I still wear it if I'm going fishing. It works for me. I'll wear caps if I'm golfing, but usually, I'm fine without them.
Of course, one of the reasons I write this week's post is because Mallory Petersen, the detective in Beta, usually is never far from her hat. If you've never watched Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, you've missed a beauty.
His Sam Spade character wears a trench coat and hat; Mallory, emulating and saluting him, wears similar garb. I think the coat and the hat are part of what makes her different, unique.
I see the absolutely gorgeous actress Maggie Lawson, blonde hair flowing, dressed in a trench and hat. She's the nearest, in my mind, of who Mallory resembles. (Yeah, I know Lawson once played Nancy Drew, but that's not why I chose her.)
Anyway-I apologize to Dad-at one time I thought his constant hat wearing was kind of...old fashioned. His dad wore hats and I never thought anything of it. However, as the years have passed, I kind of enjoy seeing Dad in his hats and wouldn't mind seeing the culture revert back to men wearing stylish real hats.
We could get rid of the neckties in a heartbeat, but that's another story.
I know there is a cruder addition to the sequence, but that's not the point of this post. The addition I wanted to make is that Dad rarely goes anyplace without a cap or a hat. Air Force cap, Oregon cap, or an 'old fashioned'
brimmed hat. I say old fashioned not to be demeaning, but many people would view that hat as something from decades past. And, in sense, it is.
I once saw a wide angle picture in a book about minor league baseball stadiums. The shot showed the seats out from the third base line. Every single seat was occupied with the 'same' man. In that I mean, each man wore a suit jacket over a shirt with a tie and a brimmed hat. Every single man.
What a far cry from today's yahoos who wear everything from horns to gobs of paint and no shirt.
You don't see hats very often these days. I mean real hats, not baseball caps or the topless cap which is just a plastic band attached to a bill.
Every now and then you'll see some guy trying to look different wearing a cowboy hat, but unless you're a country singer or wrangling cattle...most of the time it doesn't work.
Watch any old black and white movie from the forties on back, one which features metropolitan streets; all of the men wore hats. Westerns were filled with hats; I think westerns were mostly hats, especially in the crowd scenes. Every cowboy wore a hat and anytime a girl hopped on a horse, she donned a hat. I think it was against the law in the Old West to ride a horse without a hat. And unless you were Glenn Ford, you couldn't participate in a showdown without a hat. It used to be the classic tell of who the bad guy was. Jack Palance, the original bad man, wore a black hat, Alan Ladd sported white. Yeah, it was confusing when John Wayne wore a black hat, but for heaven's sake, he wore a pink bandanna most of the time, too, and nobody said anything.
I like the old gangster movies because Mr. Big sometimes wore a hat, but usually his lieutenants wore them. You can just picture Edward G. Robinson, surrounded and dwarfed by his gang of toughs, all sporting the hats, front brim lowered, shadowing their eyes. The hats were bold and black and never moved when they were roughing up somebody. When the hero clocked one of them and the hat flew off, he wiped his bloody lip, and immediately retrieved his hat. Never mind he was just humiliated, gotta get back the hat.
The classic is Indiana Jones who NEVER lost his hat, even during the wildest scenes. The one time he did, it came back to him on a gust of the wind like a faithful canine finding its master.
Hats sometimes will complete a character. Can you imagine Dick Tracy without a hat? How about Sherlock Holmes without the deerstalker?
Personally, I don't like wearing caps/hats. Yes, I have a 'cowboy' hat I picked up at the fair a couple of decades ago and I still wear it if I'm going fishing. It works for me. I'll wear caps if I'm golfing, but usually, I'm fine without them.
Of course, one of the reasons I write this week's post is because Mallory Petersen, the detective in Beta, usually is never far from her hat. If you've never watched Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, you've missed a beauty.
His Sam Spade character wears a trench coat and hat; Mallory, emulating and saluting him, wears similar garb. I think the coat and the hat are part of what makes her different, unique.
I see the absolutely gorgeous actress Maggie Lawson, blonde hair flowing, dressed in a trench and hat. She's the nearest, in my mind, of who Mallory resembles. (Yeah, I know Lawson once played Nancy Drew, but that's not why I chose her.)
Anyway-I apologize to Dad-at one time I thought his constant hat wearing was kind of...old fashioned. His dad wore hats and I never thought anything of it. However, as the years have passed, I kind of enjoy seeing Dad in his hats and wouldn't mind seeing the culture revert back to men wearing stylish real hats.
We could get rid of the neckties in a heartbeat, but that's another story.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Don't Read It Yourself
A few weeks ago, I visited the subject of audio books and how certain narrators can make or break a particular story. I can listen to several of an author's stories and thoroughly enjoy them if they have a decent reader.
Usually, an author will stick with one particular narrator, especially if the stories are in a series with the same characters each time, but sometimes, a new narrator will be introduced and sometimes, it's difficult to make the transition.
A notable exception is Evanovich's Plum series. I don't know if I've ever read any of her books; I've always taken the time to listen to them. She's used, I believe, three different narrators. The current one has been doing the series for awhile, but it still took me awhile to get used to her. I had to listen awhile before her voices became the characters after listening to the other readers in the earlier books. The books are just delightful whoever reads them.
What I wanted to discuss was my opinion that authors should NOT read their own stories. I have heard too many and all of them were...well, bad isn't a word I should use...maybe wrong is better. Please don't misunderstand me; the authors I want to mention are wonderful writers and I have listened and read many of their stories and enjoyed them. I just don't think they should read their own material.
Tony Hillerman is a prime example. He wrote many books featuring detectives Leaphorn and Chee. They are fine stories, however, listening to Mr. Hillerman read his mysteries is a very difficult task. He's hard to understand.
As is James Wight, aka James Herriot. I absolutely and completely love his books and have re-read several of them over the years. Watching the series on television was also wonderful, because I could associate a real person with the characters I read. But I listened to one of his books read by him and if anybody except those in the north Dale country can understand him it's a miracle. His accent was so thick you could chop it with an axe. I love the man, I really do, but I'm glad he let others read the majority of his work.
What brought this subject to mind was a book I was about to read, but found a CD version. House, by Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti. Interesting book, scary in places. Dekker narrates. I managed to get through a few tracks, maybe a chapter, then turned it off and opened the book. When Dekker read, he kept lowering his voice to enhance a character's thoughts and I kept having to replay the passage or turn up the volume. It was irritating.
I'm currently listening to Harlan Coben read Promise Me. He's not quite as bad as the others, yet I still wish someone else narrated it.
Coben and the others all share a common problem: They know their characters very well, better than even their fans. They hear their character's voices and expect us, the readers, to hear them exactly the same. Because of their familiarity, they tend to read a little faster than a neutral narrator.
Faster reading means, because they've written the books, that they will fly over words and sentences. If you are not actively or concentrating on listening, you miss or misunderstand some words. They are speaking as if they are talking to us in person, not as a narrator telling a story so the tongue and the lips tend to cut off word endings or slide over them. And similar to Dekker and Hillerman, their voices lower and raise at odd points and you miss what has just been said. Coben's narration of Promise Me has been fairly easy to follow, but when he reads, some of his sentences sound like throwaway sentences. The way he reads it sounds wrong.
Again, I'm not slamming the above authors' works. I have read several novels by all of them and will read or listen to more. However, I cringe whenever I pick up an audio version of a book to see the author is also a narrator.
I would love to listen to my two books one day, but I don't think I want to narrate them. I'd consider discussing character voices with the narrator if that ever becomes an issue. As I've said, some narrators shouldn't be.
Authors write; that's their job. There are agencies out there who hire professional readers-whether they be actors or people who possess voices others enjoy listening to. Let them do their jobs.
Usually, an author will stick with one particular narrator, especially if the stories are in a series with the same characters each time, but sometimes, a new narrator will be introduced and sometimes, it's difficult to make the transition.
A notable exception is Evanovich's Plum series. I don't know if I've ever read any of her books; I've always taken the time to listen to them. She's used, I believe, three different narrators. The current one has been doing the series for awhile, but it still took me awhile to get used to her. I had to listen awhile before her voices became the characters after listening to the other readers in the earlier books. The books are just delightful whoever reads them.
What I wanted to discuss was my opinion that authors should NOT read their own stories. I have heard too many and all of them were...well, bad isn't a word I should use...maybe wrong is better. Please don't misunderstand me; the authors I want to mention are wonderful writers and I have listened and read many of their stories and enjoyed them. I just don't think they should read their own material.
Tony Hillerman is a prime example. He wrote many books featuring detectives Leaphorn and Chee. They are fine stories, however, listening to Mr. Hillerman read his mysteries is a very difficult task. He's hard to understand.
As is James Wight, aka James Herriot. I absolutely and completely love his books and have re-read several of them over the years. Watching the series on television was also wonderful, because I could associate a real person with the characters I read. But I listened to one of his books read by him and if anybody except those in the north Dale country can understand him it's a miracle. His accent was so thick you could chop it with an axe. I love the man, I really do, but I'm glad he let others read the majority of his work.
What brought this subject to mind was a book I was about to read, but found a CD version. House, by Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti. Interesting book, scary in places. Dekker narrates. I managed to get through a few tracks, maybe a chapter, then turned it off and opened the book. When Dekker read, he kept lowering his voice to enhance a character's thoughts and I kept having to replay the passage or turn up the volume. It was irritating.
I'm currently listening to Harlan Coben read Promise Me. He's not quite as bad as the others, yet I still wish someone else narrated it.
Coben and the others all share a common problem: They know their characters very well, better than even their fans. They hear their character's voices and expect us, the readers, to hear them exactly the same. Because of their familiarity, they tend to read a little faster than a neutral narrator.
Faster reading means, because they've written the books, that they will fly over words and sentences. If you are not actively or concentrating on listening, you miss or misunderstand some words. They are speaking as if they are talking to us in person, not as a narrator telling a story so the tongue and the lips tend to cut off word endings or slide over them. And similar to Dekker and Hillerman, their voices lower and raise at odd points and you miss what has just been said. Coben's narration of Promise Me has been fairly easy to follow, but when he reads, some of his sentences sound like throwaway sentences. The way he reads it sounds wrong.
Again, I'm not slamming the above authors' works. I have read several novels by all of them and will read or listen to more. However, I cringe whenever I pick up an audio version of a book to see the author is also a narrator.
I would love to listen to my two books one day, but I don't think I want to narrate them. I'd consider discussing character voices with the narrator if that ever becomes an issue. As I've said, some narrators shouldn't be.
Authors write; that's their job. There are agencies out there who hire professional readers-whether they be actors or people who possess voices others enjoy listening to. Let them do their jobs.
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