On Superwoman and Humanity

by Janis Patterson

Am I the only one tired of Superwoman? You know the kind of heroine I’m talking about - when challenged she can leap six feet in the air and take out half a dozen attacking bad guys with a symphony of martial-arts moves, all without mussing her hair or make-up. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of all kinds of esoteric knowledge and can solve a crime with a single piece of exotic evidence. Locked in a dungeon? She picks the lock with a hairpin, overpowers another gaggle of bad guys then goes home and cooks a gourmet dinner for her adoring stud-of-the-week.

Oh, there are other examples of Superwoman, some not as extreme but all redolent of the bad old days of the early feminist movement when average women were told they not only should be but were expected to be Superwoman.

Now I don’t want heroines to revert to the simpering, cloying wimps they were in the early days of the last century, incapable of much of anything except looking beautiful and allowing the hero to rescue them. They are just as unbelievable as Superwoman - and just as if not more annoying.

But - doesn’t there have to be some sort of a middle ground, one with which most people can identify? Of course there are extant examples in real life of both Superwoman and the wimp, but even their admirers admit they are rare.

I’ll admit I don’t like fantasy. Witches, shapeshifters, goblins, alternate worlds where the denizens have magical powers... they all leave me cold, and quite frankly I put both Superwoman and the incompetent wimp in that category of unbelievability. Now those of you who love fantastical stories, I wish you many joyous hours of reading and writing them... just don’t expect me to join you.

I prefer reality - at least, a reasonable simulacrum of reality. People whom you could know in everyday life, not the extremes. To me it is much more engaging to read about a heroine (or a hero, for that matter) who could be my next door neighbor - or maybe even me. Thoroughly human, with some skills others might not have but lacking others, yet all on a human scale. To me that is encouraging, heartening, something to strive for - that someone as ordinary as I can triumph in ordinary circumstances.

Maybe I should learn more about the denizens of fantasy worlds, get myself more in tune with Superwoman. Maybe not. I’m happy with ordinary fallible humanity. If they can rise above their very ordinariness and do great things, maybe I can too.

Guest Mary Black with A Thanksgiving Mystery

A fellow prehistory fiction writer has put together a mystery for us. Not a prehistory mystery, but an intriguing one. Please help me welcome Mary Black to the blog. For info on her awesome fiction, please see below.

The Thanksgiving Mystery

Mary S. Black

My family used to spend Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house out in the cotton fields near Lubbock, Texas, when I was a child.  It was a six or eight-hour drive for my mother, with three kids packed in the back seat.  The night before she would always make fried chicken and butter and lettuce sandwiches on soft white bread for our lunch.  We loved those lunches! 

We knew we were almost there when we passed the Four Sixes Ranch.  Sometimes we would even see a real cowboy riding a horse.  The closer we got to my grandmother’s, the more newly-plucked cotton fields we would see, with white cotton blowing along the road like snowdrifts. Hundreds (or maybe tens) of cotton trailers would be parked around the old metal gins, waiting their turn to be processed.

When we arrived, we jumped out and squealed to meet our cousins, our favorite people in the world.  Soon my older cousin and I would be playing paper dolls or trying on our grandmother’s jewelry, a wonderful secret thing we loved to do. The grown-ups gathered in the kitchen for coffee and were soon down to serious conversation about farm production and politics.

On Thanksgiving Day I loved to set the table. Beautiful china on a worn, white damask cloth. I thought I was chosen especially for this task because I was so responsible. It made me feel grown-up.  Meanwhile my little brother and our boy cousin were running through the house shooting plastic guns at each other, having a great time re-enacting their favorite TV shows.

If there was enough room, we kids could sit at the big table, but otherwise, we had our own table off to the side.  That’s what usually happened. We always had turkey and plenty of giblet gravy, cornbread dressing, home-grown green beans, and pumpkin pie with Cool Whip. And Mrs. Baird’s store-bought white rolls. Delicious!  But the best part came at night, hours after the big mid-day meal.  That’s when we would wander into the kitchen one by one, and make ourselves great turkey sandwiches, complete with dressing and cranberry sauce.  And gravy, lots of gravy.  Yum! Those sandwiches seemed somehow luxurious to me. All was well as the elders played dominoes and we kids enjoyed our own luscious diversions.

Until the middle of the night. That’s when the puking would start, usually with the kids.  Often two or three of us were throwing up all night and into the next day.  I remember lying on the sofa, feeling helpless, while my grandmother urged me to drink some Seven-Up.  I had just thrown up and I didn’t want anything in my stomach ever again. But I would drink it at her urging, and then barf again just to prove I was right.  This “food poisoning,” as my grandmother called it happened year after year. 

Why were the kids always sick at Thanksgiving? Well, they caught something at school, one grown-up would say. Or she’s run-down said another. Too much candy someone would always add.  Just “food poisoning” my grandmother would say. 

There were two kinds of poisoning when I was growing up: food poisoning and blood poisoning. I never have figured out what blood poisoning is.  But about thirty years later it hit me that food poisoning was what we call today “food-borne illness,” caused by a number of different bacteria.   

 It was those wonderful evening sandwiches we’d made. Where did we find all that food when we went into the kitchen at night?  Sitting on top of the stove of course.  There wasn’t room in the refrigerator for all those left-overs, and I’m not sure High Plains women of my grandmother’s generation would have even thought to refrigerate cooked food anyway.

So all that turkey and home-made gravy sat on the stove, reaching the perfect temperature for the nasty bacteria Clostirdium perfringens to flourish.  And flourish it did, right in our digestive tracts.  It’s commonly found in meat and gravies that haven’t been kept hot enough after cooking, or left out too long. Symptoms usually appear with 8-16 hours.  Yep, that was us! 

May you all have a wonderful—and food safe—Thanksgiving holiday!

***Mary has taken an area in Texas and made it her own. She fell in love with the Lower Pecos more than twenty years ago. Since then she has studied the archaeology and related ethnography of the area with numerous scholars. She has an Ed.D. from Harvard University in Human Development and Psychology and lives in Austin with her husband, and archaeologist, and two cats.

Please check out her fiction at http://marysblack.com/! 

How Big Is Too Big?

by Janis Patterson

I’m a Texan, so ‘bigger is better’ is part of my DNA… but, I’m discovering, only up to a point.

A week or two ago I was lucky enough to go to the final George Strait concert. The Husband is a rabid fan and I like him, too, which is rare for me and country singers. We knew this was going to be An Event, but nothing could have prepared us for what happened.

The concert was held in the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, the same place where the Cowboys play football. It’s roughly the size of a small European country. Just getting to the parking lot was a trial – a journey that should have taken no more than 45 minutes took over 2 ½ hours – the last 20 minutes of which were spent going about 20 feet so we could turn into our parking lot. We were shuttled to the stadium, then frisked and wanded by security (no purses or backpacks allowed unless they were transparent) before we were allowed to enter the building.

After standing in line for 45 minutes plus for the privilege of paying $35 each for t-shirts, we finally started the trek to our seats. I tell you, maneuvering through a crowd like that gives me new respect for salmon!

We had very decent seats – second balcony, second row. Down on the playing field there were about 1,000 folding chairs set up (and packed!) around the revolving stage on the 50 yard line on which these little ½ inch tall people performed. Yes, it was that far away. I wonder if the people up in the gods could even see the stage!

Not to worry, though – I doubt if there was a seat in the place that didn’t have a direct sightline to at least one of the multitude of tv screens. Yes, multitude, and in all sizes. The biggest appeared to have just about the same square footage as a 70s tract home. So – we had our choice – anything from a ½ inch George Strait on stage all the way up to a George Strait face the size of Godzilla on a tv screen.

I love music, and love to hear all the nuances of it. Good luck there. The sound system was cranked up so high that the sound was hopelessly distorted. It had to be that way, I guess, because of the crowd. I can understand – somewhat – the screaming during applause, but for the life of me I cannot see why people pay the equivalent of a fairly good-sized car payment for a seat to hear an artist and then scream while he’s singing. It makes no sense. It does, however, make headaches.

All of that was cream, however, compared to getting out of the place. We had maps of the area and had plotted a reasonable way of getting out and getting home. Good luck! The police had blocked off streets seemingly at random and sent clogged lines of cars off in torturous directions. We rebelled, and as soon as we could get off the main street we dodged through secondary and tertiary streets until we finally found the southern interstate. This route took us approximately 20 miles out of the way, but traffic there was moving, and there was a much smaller chance of being surrounded by a bunch of concert drunks. Yes, the beer (small - $8) and the margaritas ($15) were flowing freely. Two couples in the row ahead of us had at least 6 margaritas apiece. (I think those were the prices – we didn’t buy any!)

So what does this have to do with writing?

The concert was all out of proportion. The charm of country music is the words (which were lost in the noise) and the music (distorted) and the down-home folksy ambiance (in a concert with a record 104,7?? attendees? Come on…) As in so much of life, it – and we – have lost the human proportion.

Think about it. Most thrillers aren’t about people, they’re about nations and giant corporations and saving/destroying the world. Yes, usually there’s a lone hero who is either an impossibly perfect standard of beauty and bravery with knowledge of just about everything (Jack Bauer, anyone?), or an impossibly average man who rises to the call and eventually reaches an impossibly perfect standard. He’s usually at least good-looking, too. In both mysteries and thrillers there is all too often what I call a Moriarity villain – each time he is vanquished he manages to get away, escaping things that would annihilate a normal person and coming back again and again until it becomes both excruciating and ridiculous. Think Red John on The Mentalist. I personally call it lazy writing.

One of the reasons romance is so popular is that it is human-sized – one man, one woman, a happy ending. Cozy mysteries, too – normal people solving a normal-sized crime in a normal world. These storylines are something to which most people can relate. Country-gobbling corporations or nations setting to enslave the world are – for me at least – too big. I can’t become emotionally or empathetically involved in something set to such a gargantuan scale.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for such large-stage fiction. Or, for that matter, gigantic, record-breaking concerts. Some people enjoy it. I just hate to see it become so prevalent that it sometimes threatens to choke off less strident and overreaching stories.

Or am I all wrong? No matter. I’ll still take things – concerts, storylines or whatever – that are human-scaled.

Guest Scammer, I mean Blogger, Terry Ambrose

Kaye George

My guest today is Terry Ambrose. His own life has been colorful enough for a thriller autobiography, I think. But he's turned to fiction to tell his stories. Here's a bit about him:

Terry Ambrose started out skip tracing and collecting money from deadbeats and quickly learned that liars come from all walks of life. He never actually stole a car, but sometimes hired big guys with tow trucks and a penchant for working in the dark when “negotiations” failed. You can learn more about Terry on his website at terryambrose.com.

Terry’s latest book, License to Lie, is about a con artist and a criminologist who join forces and learn that with $5,000,000 and their lives on the line, they can’t trust a soul—even their own.

“License to Lie is fast and well written, almost sure to satisfy discerning readers of thrillers.  There’s a verve to Ambrose’s language and the story moves with assurance, defying easy predictions.” — T. Jefferson Parker, Author of “The Jaguar” and “The Border Lords”

And here is Terry's post! 

The scam—it’s all about stimulus and response. A good con artist creates a world that makes you believe what she’s telling you. Wait…isn’t that what writers do? Create worlds where our readers can escape? Is there a difference?

In a mystery, the story typically focuses on a murder, but could also begin with a kidnapping, a theft, or any other act that garners the protagonist’s interest.  Once that hook has been set, our protagonist, and probably the reader, must see the story through to the end. Again, such similarity, but also a difference. A good con appeals to the basest of human emotions, greed. The con artist might offer quick riches, or maybe just the promise of easy money. Either way, the mark wants something so badly he’ll take risks he knows he shouldn’t. He is, pure and simple, caught on the hook and can’t let go.

Con artists know that scams typically succeed or fail because of the emotional responses they evoke, not the logic. Even the most ridiculous and farfetched scam will succeed if that’s what the mark wants most. In fiction, I’m drawn to stories with complex characters and sharp dialog. Does there need to be a murder to get things started? Maybe, maybe not. If the characters are strong and have captured my interest, the crime doesn’t need to be that severe. What’s important for me as a reader is that the crime is something that captures the main character’s interest. Because I’m interested in that character, I’m also hooked.

A scam that involves huge sums of money grabs everyone’s interest. Why? Not because it’s complex. Not because it’s ingenious. It gains attention because of scope. Madoff’s scheme operated on exactly the same principles as the smaller ones: establish rapport, provide a stimulus, and evoke a response. He just thought bigger than most. But, he also gave us a model for stories.

When you think about the last book you read that you really liked, did it not draw you in by establishing rapport in some way? I just started reading T. Jefferson Parker’s “LA Outlaws.” I’m very grateful to Mr. Parker for reading (and writing a blurb for) my latest novel, but that’s not why I’ve included him here. The truth is that I didn’t read “LA Outlaws” when it first came out. However, I’d heard about it many times and when it cropped up (again) in another discussion, I decided that it was high time I read it. The book begins, not with us meeting the hero of the story, Charlie Hood, but in the mind of a thief. She’s smart, sexy, and despite the fact that she’s an outlaw, we like her. I’ve only finished four chapters, but I’m absolutely hooked and will have to finish this one. There are no maybe’s here, Parker immediately established rapport with his character’s voice and provided the stimulus of putting her into a situation that can only lead to more trouble. In essence, he triggered the basest of my reading responses, the desire to bask in the joy of being reeled in by a master.

What do you like in your fiction? Are you a character person? Do you prefer the plot? For you, what’s the stimulus that creates that “must read” response?

Some links: 

Web: terryambrose.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/supense.writer

License to Lie on Amazon: 

http://www.amazon.com/License-to-Lie-ebook/dp/B00AWU8FZ0