Boucherpants, and the Speech I Didn't Give

Thanks from a grateful author.

A few hours before Denise and I were supposed to hop in the car and drive to Raleigh, NC, for Bouchercon, I found myself yelling downstairs, “Where the hell are my Boucherpants?"

I had a particular pair in mind for the con, you see. I was supposed to have tossed them in the laundry the night before, only I didn’t, so now I’d be packing without them.

Denise thought the line so funny that, for the rest of the week, we privately referred to the con itself as Boucherpants, which in our alternate universe was named after its illustrious namesake, Anthony Boucherpants.

I was in a good mood. Only a day before, the new Best American Mystery Stories 2015 anthology had pubbed. As readers here know, I have a story in that collection, “Harm and Hammer,” which pubbed November 2014 in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. To top it off, on the second night of the con, I’d be receiving a Derringer medal for a 2014 flash fiction story, “How Lil’ Jimmie Beat the Big C.” I got in the car feeling eager and proud.

But somehow, two days into my very first Boucherpants, I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and not a little terrified. On the four-hour ride over, Denise happened to ask, “What do you hope to get out of this weekend?” I knew I wanted to pick up my medal, see what there was to see, meet whoever I could, and have fun. Beyond that, I didn’t have much else on my personal agenda.

As a kid, I used to be fairly shy, timid, even. But I don’t really think of myself that way any more. Years of journalism work, book talks and signings, have largely erased my fear of socializing and public speaking. But on the ground in Raleigh, I regressed. I didn’t know how to get up the nerve to introduce myself to people, let alone carry on a decent conversation. I kept critically judging every word that left my mouth. What an idiot. How could I have just said that? I suspect that the closer you are to the thing you love—in this case, the mystery community—the more vulnerable you become.

Then came the awards Thursday night. I hadn’t prepared an acceptance speech because I’d heard through the grapevine that there typically wasn’t time for such things. And really, how much of a speech was I going to make? Uttering even a few hundred words on behalf of a 684-word flash fiction story seemed indulgent. But come Thursday, every single author who won an award gave an acceptance speech, even those who weren’t in attendance.

The Derringers were announced at the very end of the opening ceremonies. By then, the crowd had been promised some tasty Carolina BBQ. Tender, delicious meat was waiting in the wings...

As I watched those speeches, my heart sank. I thought about jotting down some notes, but I know myself well enough to know that I needed time to polish those words. I could extemporize, but I risked making a fool of myself. I couldn’t do it. The crowd looked larger than any I'd ever addressed, not to mention ravenous. In the end, I accepted my medal and sailed wordlessly off the dais. Presenter Art Taylor nimbly covered for me. (Bless you, Art.) Denise filmed the whole thing. Watch.

Only later did I realize that what needed to be said was altogether brief. If I had spoken, I might have said this:

Thank you to my editors at Shotgun Honey.

Thanks to my colleagues at the Short Mystery Fiction Society.

I'm very grateful.

I could go on, but I won’t, because I live in North Carolina, and I respect barbecue way too much.

By Sunday, I had calmed down and managed to meet quite a few people at the bar. No doubt we’ll meet again at some future con, where I resolve to be more sociable and to wear my lucky pants.

My Quirk book's on sale for Constitution Day

Today, September 17th, is Constitution Day in the United States. It’s not nearly as well celebrated as Fourth of July, but it’s arguably more significant. Two hundred and twenty-eight years ago, 39 men in Philadelphia signed the document that would soon become the U.S. Constitution. You can take a fun quiz here at the Washington Post to refresh your memory on those events.

My publisher, Quirk Books, is running a sale on my book about that event. Right now the e-book version of Signing Their Rights Away is under $4 across all platforms—Amazon, B&N, Apple, and Kobo. (Predictably, Amazon is the cheapest last time I checked: $3.01.)

Of all the books I’ve done with Quirk, Rights is my favorite. It’s the best written, the best designed, and the best illustrated. I had a lot of fun writing it. I don’t know how long the sale is running, but definitely check it out if you’re at all interested.

Moving!

View of the patio. 

It's crazy but true: we bought new house in the same town. More space, a better office for both of us, and some really nice garden spaces to keep us sane in between. We haven't scheduled a moving-day per se, but are choosing to move piecemeal from our old place, so we can purge unneeded possessions along the way. I'm not quite up and running at the moment, but look forward to being productive in a cool new space. Yay.

Look for My Story in the Nov 2015 Issue of Hitchcock's Mystery Mag

Look for my short story, “The Truth of What You’ve Become,” in the November 2015 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM). The hard-copy issue hits newsstands tomorrow, Tuesday, September 15, but digital issues are already available.

I’d describe “The Truth...” as a Good Samaritan story gone wrong.

You can download a single digital issue via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Magzter, Kobo, and Google Play. Just make sure you are downloading the November issue shown above.

Submissions stats: I finished this story sometime in November 2013. I submitted it to AHMM in February 2014, and didn’t hear from them until they bought it in September 2014, nearly eight months later. So it’s appearing a year after acceptance, nineteen months since writing and submission. Payment was $208, plus an additional $52 prepayment against a future AHMM anthology. That came to a total of $260, or about 8 cents a word.

Yes, I will eventually release an e-book version of “The Truth of What You’ve Become," which I’ll offer free to readers on my list. If you’d rather wait for the free copy, please join my e-newsletter.

Oliver Sacks: Farewell and Thank You

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Oliver Sacks, whose work made a big impression on me during the handful of years I was writing for science publications. He and I had never met, but he did one thing for me that I’ll always be grateful for. He chose one of my nonfiction articles for the Ecco/HarperCollins annual anthology, Best American Science Writing 2003. It was my second appearance in that collection, and I was just as surprised the second time around as I was for the first. So thank you, Dr. Sacks. Hail and farewell.

The story he picked was the one I did on sanctuaries for retired lab chimps. You can read it here.

'Big Weed' in the New York Times

Incredibly, I missed this the other day. My co-author Christian Hageseth did a Q&A with the travel section of the New York Times, talking about his upcoming marijuana Colorado “weedery.” As he describes it in our book, Big Weed, a “weedery” is like a brewery or winery, except for legal marijuana.

From the article:

Wineries and breweries should brace themselves for some unusual competition. Colorado, which legalized marijuana for recreational use in 2012, will get its first “weedery” in early 2016.

The $35 million project, Green Man Cannabis Ranch and Amphitheater, the brainchild of Christian Hageseth, is set to open in Denver. Its greenhouses represent a major shift because producers have largely cultivated marijuana indoors; there will also be a performance space, a restaurant, a rooftop bar, a gift shop and, of course, a marijuana dispensary.

My Poem's Up Today on The Five-Two

For those who are interested in such things: A short work of mine is the featured Poem of the Week at The Five-Two, an online poetry weekly devoted to poems about crime. This offering is squeaky-clean and suitable for readers of any age. My thanks to editor Gerald So and reader Joe Paretta, whose reading of the poem (available on the site) imbue this piece with far more gravitas than I’d ever be able to muster. Thank you, gentlemen.

E.L. Doctorow (1931-2015)

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I was (and still am) a huge fan of E.L. Doctorow. One of the first “adult” books I ever read was his. I picked up a paperback copy of Ragtime at a library book sale back when I was a kid, and was blown away—more by the novel’s narrative technique than by the story. Doctorow did things in that book that I didn’t know you could do in fiction. He eschewed quotation marks. He blended fictional characters with real-life figures doing fictional things. He presumed to speak as narrator for an entire period in history in a fearless manner.

I was never in love with history class at school, but I probably learned more about America and Americans by marching my way through Doctorow's bibliography. He was clearly fascinated with U.S. history, and how a writer could exploit and subvert the expectations of using historical material. In every book, you could almost feel him saying, “Yeah, I know this is supposed to be history, but it’s fiction first. Get out of the way—I’m writing here."

One of the best profiles of him I’ve ever read appeared in the New York Times Magazine back in 1985. You can read the whole thing here, but I’ve always liked this quote:

"Henry James has a parable about what writing is,'' Doctorow says. ''He posits a situation where a young woman who has led a sheltered life walks past an army barracks, and she hears a fragment of soldiers' conversation coming through a window. And she can, if she's a novelist, then go home and write a true novel about life in the army. You see the idea? The immense, penetrative power of the imagination and the intuition."

Helen. With the Heart.

Yesterday I woke to the terrible news that my cousin Helen had died in the night. She was 45. She leaves behind a loving husband and two children.

We grew up only eight miles apart and played often as kids. Then came an awkward adolescence where we didn’t see each other much. By the time we reconnected as adults, she was about to be married and move to New York City, where I was working. After all those years, we were delighted to discover how much we had in common—not the least of these was a love of writing.

Almost immediately, Helen was inviting me to dive bars in the East Village where she and others were reading their fiction. That was a side of her I’d never anticipated. She was an incredibly talented writer-performer. Even today I am in awe of anyone who can get up on stage and read something they’ve written. I don’t lean that way. Every now and then, one of the MCs would say by way of introduction, “Helen is an attorney, but hopes you won’t hold that against her."

Yeah—she was a lawyer. A tough one, who I suspect looked to language, reason, and intellect to bring clarity to chaos. In her fiction, young, smart women were always grappling with grim problems and stupidity in what should have been charmed lives.

We grew close in New York, Helen and I. Yesterday, as the shock set in, I relived that part of my life by rereading some of our old emails. In them, I saw us bitching about the city, about coworkers, about the madness of our families, her ex-boyfriends and my then-messy stream of girlfriends. I remembered how, while living in Brooklyn, New York, Helen had used her training to solve some nagging mysteries about our grandparents, and in the process uncovered some new ones. Her emails were often addressed, “Hey, Cuz,” and signed, “Love, Me.” When I moved to Italy for a while to be with Denise, Helen would sometimes phone my old U.S. mobile number and leave long voicemails filling me in on her life.

Hers was a sweet one that had become unaccountably burdened by that chaos, after all. Somehow she developed a heart problem that could only be resolved by a transplant. She was in a hospital bed for nearly three months while an BiVAD machine kept her body alive. Two months into her stay, a doctor friend broke the news to me and another cousin: “Her body is in complete organ failure. It would be a miracle if she survived."

She got that miracle. As some other family in the universe mourned the loss of a daughter, Helen got her life back. She was 33 years old. She retired from the law and focused on being a mom instead. Initially shy about talking about her experience, in time she took to the road, speaking at high schools and blood drives about the importance of being an organ donor.

“Why do you do this?” people would sometimes ask. "Tell people your life’s story?"

“For two reasons,” she’d say. “One day you may be in a position to help someone like me. Or one day you might be me.”

Fifty percent of heart transplant recipients live only ten years. If you’re a seventy-five-year-old heart transplantee who lives only a decade more, no one feels as if you’ve been cheated out of a long life. But yesterday I was feeling cheated, even though all of us—especially her husband Tim and her kids—were privileged to have thirteen more years with Helen.

Her doctors had hoped to help her, but that miracle heart of hers gave out suddenly, ending the life of a woman who was the closest thing to a sister I’ll ever have.

Check out my story on Shotgun Honey today

I have a flash piece up at Shotgun Honey today. "Wood Man" is short, sweet, and unpleasant. I hope you'll check it out. My thanks to Ron and the other editors there.

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Unrelated:

I've been absent from here a bit. I'm sorry to say that my wife lost her grandmother over the Memorial Day weekend. On its own, that loss would would have been bearable, but coming two months to the day after her mom passed, Grandma's death seemed to carry on even more weight. I originally wanted to write more about her, but I find I just don't have the energy to go there. We are still mired in the world of wills and estate resolutions that the living must attend to, even in their grief. The double-death experience has already taught me a lot. Everyone needs a good, clear trust or will, like, yesterday. Writers especially need to figure out how they're going to dispose of their intellectual property after death. I'll write more about this when I've completed my own estate plan, but you might start here and here.