Mano Loco

When I was a kid, Phoenix had not expanded to the size it is today; my house was near the edge of town. The fields that stretched to the West and South of us were owned by farmers who grew cotton, and they irrigated their fields the same way the ancient Hohokam Indians did a thousand years ago, with a series of canals. Back then, most kids who lived in my area were Anglo, but some were Mexican American, and the Anglo kids who hung out with Latino kids heard some strange stories about a monster, the ghost of a woman who drowned children in canals. The Anglo kids mangled the Spanish name of this creature, they called her Mano Loco. Later I realized her name was probably La Llorona.

The story I heard was that Mano Loco liked to drown children, she was sort of a female boogeyman. If you wandered near the canals at night, she might come after you. The kids who talked about her did so with such dread, you couldn’t help wondering if it was all true.

And then my brother David saw her.

He was about twelve at the time. This was during the summer, and David declared he couldn’t stand to travel around with us on vacation any longer, he had stuff he wanted to do at home. My mother decided to give him the benefit of the doubt (partly because he was such poor company on those trips), so she asked an adult friend to look in on him regularly and gave him a food allowance. David actually took care of himself just fine, he only had one scare the whole time. This was the night in July when he and his friend Duane were setting off fireworks in the back yard.

These were small fireworks, not the kind that could blow your arm off, and they were both experienced at handling them. It was getting dark when they started, and David actually started to feel a little uneasy as the light died. We had an above-ground swimming pool, and by that time of year we always lost our battle to keep it clean. It had turned into a murky swamp, and David was beginning to wonder if he should just drain it and take it down. That was a lot of work, and he kept putting it off, so now it was horrible and even kind of scary at night. David didn’t want to be outside with that pool when it was dark.

But he wanted to set off a few more fireworks, and the arcadia door was just twenty steps away. Duane said he was ready to go in, and David told him he’d be right there, he just had a couple more he wanted to light. So Duane slid the glass door shut and David lit the last fireworks, thinking I'm outta here, because he was beginning to feel like something was watching him from the pool. In fact, as he turned to go in, he thought he saw a shadow there, like something might be hovering over the water.

David hurried to the arcadia door. Duane stood on the other side, looking at him through the glass, grinning. David tried to open the door, and that’s when he realized Duane had locked it. David wrenched at the door, pounded on it, called to be let in. Duane just laughed. And then he looked over David’s shoulder. All the humor drained out of his face, along with most of the color. David screamed for him to open the door, but Duane turned and ran, leaving David locked outside with something just behind him.

We had a locked gate at the side of the house. David broke the sound barrier getting to it. He doesn’t remember climbing it, he thinks he may have actually jumped over it. It was six feet high. He was moving so fast, he actually bumped into Duane in the driveway, even though Duane had a head start. The two of them ran across the street and crouched under a street light, watching the back gate.

Her head topped the gate, and she stared at them. "Mano Loco," choked Duane. (Yes, he actually choked it, just like in a comic book.) She looked like a dead woman, like someone who spent all her time rotting underwater. She pinned them in her glare for several seconds, and then she sank out of sight again.

They ran all the way to Duane’s house. It was two miles away, and they made it in record time. They spent the rest of the night there, and David stayed at Duane’s for every night afterward, until we came home again. The pool was drained shortly after that, and we never put it up again.

Years passed, and the cotton fields were sold to developers. Phoenix grew far to the West and the South, the canals were filled in. As the Hispanic community has grown here, Anglos have learned to pronounce more Spanish words, including the names of monsters like la Llorona. Some legends say she hangs around under trees, others repeat the legends about canals or other bodies of water. But no matter where she hangs out, she always kills children. That part of the story never changes. We don’t have many canals she can haunt anymore, but our summers get extremely hot, and swimming pools have proliferated here.

My brother and I are too old to see Mano Loco now, but children drown in Phoenix all the time, and many of these drownings seem suspicious to me. Plenty of other cities in the U.S. have just as many, if not more, swimming pools. Why do we have more children drowning than they do?

Maybe it’s bad luck. Maybe it’s inattention.

Maybe it’s an old monster. Maybe the Hohokam had a name for her, too. And if our civilization eventually dies out, maybe she’ll still be here, watching for the next wave of settlers, waiting for their children to wander near the canals.

I wonder what they’ll call her then.

Dreams Are Infectious

I have proof positive that NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC warps young minds, causing kids to grow up to be explorers, adventurers, world travelers, and writers. When Stephen Bodio was a kid back in the fifties he opened a magazine and saw a photograph of a Kazakh nomad and his hunting eagle. It haunted and inspired him for decades until he finally got a chance to go to Mongolia and find those nomads. His adventure is recorded in his book, Eagle Dreams. On the cover is yet another photo of a Kazakh nomad and his hunting eagle, and that photo haunted me until I could track down this book.

Now I hope to do the same thing to you.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hunting enthusiast. I’ve got nothing against people who hunt for food, it’s just that I don’t know a lot about the subject. I’ve got lots of other time-consuming hobbies, like rockhounding, hiking, and recipe-mangling, and there’s only so much time in a given day. Also, I am way too sentimental about animals, and if I had to actually kill the cows I so love to eat, I’d be relying on fish, eggs, and cheese to get my protein fix. It’s my love of birds that drew me to this book, from the tiny hummingbirds with the big attitude to the semi-fabled Harpy Eagles of Africa. Couple that with a picture of a nomad descended from Chingiz (Genghis) Khan with a gigantic Golden Eagle perched on his arm, and you’ve got my attention.

Bodio’s account of his journey is not a long one, though it took him decades to realize his dream. Like many adventurers, his path is oblique, almost accidental, and he ends up in Mongolia mostly because he maintained contacts with editors who could eventually send him there. It’s a story of persistence and resourcefulness – and courage as well, not because the nomads were a danger to him, but because he encounters unknown cultures, labyrinthine bureaucracies, and harsh living conditions. Once he manages to make the trip, he employs natural diplomacy, patience, and intelligence to win the trust of the nomads. He never brags about any of this; Bodio tells his story with self-deprecating humor. Neither does he bog the story down with too much terminology, it’s easy for non-birders (not to mention non-world travelers) to follow.

Bodio’s story packs a lot of good information into 216 pages, but more than anything else, the story inspired me. I’m not as resourceful as Stephen Bodio and probably not as brave, and I doubt I could win the respect and trust of Kazakh nomads who hunt with young eagles – though I might be able to amuse their wives by mangling a recipe or two. But I am a fellow traveler, and his account makes me want to venture out more, even if it’s just into the American Wilderness.

Take a good, hard look at the cover of this book. But be warned, it has unexpected side effects. May cause dreams.

Once More Unto The Breach

This time of year, my garden always turns into a jungle, and it’s my own fault. I know I’m living in the desert, I know 90% of my plants should be low-water use, and yet I keep designing areas that get too much water run-off. Well, no more, my friends! Or mostly no more. Hardly any. I’ve made up my mind, this is the year when the Big Shift begins. I’m keeping a few roses, but the rest are going bye-bye.

Don’t laugh – this is not going to be easy. You know that scene in Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, where Malificent turns into a dragon and almost claws the prince to death? My roses treat me that way when I’m being nice to them, you can imagine what a fight they’re going to put up when I try to prune them out of existence.

A few of them will be given away to unsuspecting acquaintances. And a few of them are doing so badly, they’ll probably give up without drawing more than few pints of blood. I’m pretty sure this process will take three months this fall, and next year I’ll be getting rid of some more. I’d do it all at once if I had a crew of five men and a dump truck, but I’ve got one full-time worker (me) and one part-time (my poor, uncomplaining husband). Together, we’ll cut up rose canes, haul bricks away from raised beds, shovel out the extra soil, and shore up what’s left with stones, decreasing the bed sizes by two-thirds.

And what will go in their places? Rocks! Cacti! Weird desert shrubs! Peculiar garden sculpture! Sound boring? Not at all, I love the Martian weirdness of desert flora. I love how they stand up to the heat and the blazing sun, how some of them will burst into bloom in the worst part of the summer. And I admit, I love how they need so much less water and time (though some of them draw almost as much blood).

I guess every gardener passes through the early phase of trying to turn their garden climate into something it’s not. You can kid yourself into thinking you won’t pay serious consequences for it, until you’ve suffered through a few years of invasive grass and the yellow jackets who love to nest in it – not mention the mosquitos, ticks, fleas, weeds, white flies, and mildew.

Despite all that, my garden has actually been pretty healthy most of the time. If I had several hours a day to devote to it, it would be a more successful micro-climate. But this time of year, I need to take about ten rests a day when I’m out there hacking back the jungle. Those rests take at least fifteen minutes each and include multiple glasses of water and the A.C. turned down to 77 degrees F. Plus I have to use gallons of grass killer to keep the yard police from breathing down my neck, and that stuff is smelly and expensive.

So bye-bye roses (or most of you, anyway). Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still plant my flower seeds this fall. That’s the nifty thing about living in Phoenix; you can still have your cottage garden in the fall, winter, and spring. Veggies too, if you’re feeling intrepid. I won’t even miss those roses.

Assuming they don’t get rid of me before I get rid of them.

So wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

Hummificent The Magnificent

I’m not sure when it happened, I can’t even remember when I bought my first hummingbird feeder, but somehow I became the servant of a tiny, noisy, multicolored creature who loves sugar-water. By the time I moved into my current home (seven years ago), this mutual addiction was firmly established. I have two feeders now, and two Ruby Throats have battled over them for as long as I’ve been here. They may be the same fellows from the beginning, or they may be the offspring of the originals – it’s hard to tell. Hummingbird psychology is simple: battle fiercely for your territory, sip as much sugar-water as you can, and scold the lady who fills the feeders when she’s not moving fast enough.

One spring I was privileged to witness Hummy wars. Two Ruby-Throated males hovered like helicopters, scolded each other loudly, then dive-bombed the yard and swooped to new positions, about fifty feet up. They may have been trying too scare each other off, but it didn’t work. They still perform amazing aerial feats all year ‘round, but I haven’t seen the helicopter stunt in a while.

I like them best when they’re perching outside the living-room window, on an old tomato cage, staring in at me as if I were the entertaining oddity. This is why the sugar-water will always get refilled. This is why I remain the devoted servant of Hummificent The Magnificent.

So, You think YOUR Day Job Is Tough

Before I came to work for my current employer, I worked for the Department of Corrections. I was an officer at a minimum security facility in the middle of town, an odd place that had been converted from an old motel. I think the place appealed to state officials because it didn’t require a lot of renovation in order to make it work as a minimum security facility. The lobby was converted into a control room, the guest rooms were fitted with metal bunks, and the perimeter was secured with a chain-link fence and razor wire.

This may not sound like a lot of security, but I promise you, getting in and out of that joint took effort, even if you weren’t an inmate – although a small percentage of inmates were allowed out on work crews. Since they were minimum security inmates who didn’t want to become maximum security inmates, those who were allowed out for work always came back. So you could say that the security features of the facility were both physical and psychological.

I confess, I spent many days wondering how I would break out if I were an inmate. I did this partly because I was bored out of my skull and partly because I desperately wanted out of that place every minute I was there. I was warned at the academy that inmates do time 24/7, officers do time in 8-hour chunks (16-hour if you do a double shift, but by that time you’re so light-headed you don’t know what time it is anyway). Correctional officers have a very high incident of alcohol and tobacco abuse, and a high rate of divorce.

Don’t get me wrong, my minimum-security women’s facility was no Sing-Sing. The inmates weren’t dangerous, at worst they were annoying. A lot of them were just plain odd. A few could have passed for men (and they spooked me just a tad), but most of them were petty thieves and check-bouncers -- although we did have one gal who tried to kill her husband (twice) and one who set her children on fire.

I think what gets to most correctional officers is 1.) long-term confinement with a large population of maladjusted people combined with 2.) the adversarial (and sometimes downright hostile) treatment of officers by the Department of Corrections. If you want to compare it to retail, you could say that not only are your “customers” from hell, but your boss is old Mr. Scratch, himself.

I liked my fellow officers very much, and as a writer I was fascinated with the inmates. If my current employer, a big-chain bookstore, goes out of business, I might consider working for the D.O.C. again. But I couldn’t do it for more than a couple of years. In order to illustrate why, let me tell you about one of the things that happened at that minimum-security facility. The incident itself will seem like a minor thing until I tell you why it spooked me.

Occasionally, inmates were punished for rule violations by having some of their privileges suspended. We had one gal who racked up a lot of those violations, an 18-year old who had given birth to 3 children by the time she went to prison. Suffice to say she did not have a lot of self-control. At one point she was confined to quarters for a week. This was a big problem for her, partly because she couldn’t socialize with her friends, but mostly because no smoking was permitted inside the rooms, and she dearly loved her cigs.

The no-smoking rule wasn’t just a matter of discipline. Those rooms were old, wood-frame construction, as dry as kindling. If one of them started on fire, there was a good chance the flames would spread rapidly. The rooms were arranged in a giant circle, we’re talking Ring of Fire, folks.

So this gal was confined, and it drove her nuts. She stood in the doorway of her room, hoping her friends would happen by (even though they weren’t supposed to be on that side of the yard) and sneaking cigarettes. I could have forgiven her for that, but when she saw me walking my rounds, she flicked her burning cigarette into the trashcan next to her bunk, which was right up against the wall of the room, next to the door.

First I foolishly tried to explain to her why she shouldn’t do that. But she refused to admit the incident had even happened, so I quickly abandoned that tactic and corralled the Alpha inmate for that room, a Latina who had been trying to recruit other inmates into a gang (without much luck). I told her what I had seen.

“Chances are,” I said, “The butt will go out and nothing will happen. But cigarette butts in ashcans have been known to smolder for hours and then burst into flames in the middle of the night. If that happens, you and your roomies will be trapped in a burning room, and that little fire extinguisher at the end of the row is the only thing they’ll have to fight the fire with.”

She got the idea fast. I told her to tell the other gal to smoke in the bathroom if she was going to sneak cigs and throw the butts in the toilet. She agreed that was a good idea. But afterward, I couldn’t help wondering – even if I had warded off disaster that particular day, could I be sure it wouldn’t happen again? Or even that someone wouldn’t set the joint ablaze on purpose? So I asked the Lieutenant on duty what our fire escape plan was. He told me that in the event of a fire, inmates and officers were all supposed to gather at the center of the facility and wait for the fire department to put the fire out.

Remember, this facility was built in a circle. Also remember, it’s old, and very, very dry.

Have you ever barbecued chicken? Just imagine us in the middle of that gigantic, raging fire. This is assuming we could stop the Human stampede for those razor-wired fences. This is assuming we wouldn’t be leading that Human stampede.

This is why I switched to my current job, ten years ago. Every time I think I’m having a bad day there, I think about what could have happened at that old motel that was turned into a prison. My very worst day at my current job is better than my very best day as a correctional officer.

But yes, if I had to, I could work that job again. I’m a lot tougher than I look. Probably a lot crazier too. If I ever work at a D.O.C. again, one of the first things I’ll do is find out what the fire-escape plan is.

Then I’ll pray like hell I never have to use it.

The Case Of The Sloppy Pincher

Funny how doing things wrong (or in this case, semi-wrong) can lead to a discovery. I bought some tomato plants this year, against my better judgement, and too late in the season. Furthermore, I bought seedlings instead of sowing my own seeds, which is ridiculously expensive. I’ll never get a big enough crop out of my plants to justify their expense, but at least a couple of things went right this year.

First, we had a freakishly cool June in Phoenix. Long-time vegetable gardeners around here will tell you it’s always tricky to get your tomato plants timed right – you don’t want a late frost to fry them, you’ve got to have them blooming when the pollinators are interested in them, and it’s all got to happen before the heat of summer sterilizes the pollen. I deserved to have a big failure in the tomato department this year, since I bought my plants in May (instead of late February). Happily, nature intervened and cut me some slack, extending spring far into summer.

But that’s not the only thing that went right. The other thing has to do with sweet basil. I planted some with my tomatoes in pots, in a spot that gets morning sun and afternoon shade. I figured the basil would shade the wimpy tomato greens and keep them from getting fried. And that’s what they did. But they did something else for the tomatoes as well, and that’s where the partial goof comes in.

I always pinch back blooms on sweet basil, because they spoil the flavor of the leaf. The plant puts so much energy into the bloom, it sucks all the flavor out of the rest of the plant. I also pinch because bees love those basil blooms so much, they’ll ignore other fruiting blossoms in favor of it. If you want your beans to develop, you may be disappointed if the bees are busy with your basil. So I pinch developing basil blossoms almost every day. But here’s the funny thing: I’m a sloppy pincher. So usually a few blossoms develop right at the bottom of the stalk. Because I planted the sweet basil in the same pots as the tomatoes, and because there were a few blossoms to attract the bees to that location, it looks like the tomatoes have benefitted from the close proximity. They came for the basil, and when they ran out of those flowers they moved on to the tomatoes.

I’m thinking I’ll try the trick with other fruiting plants. Mix ‘em up with sweet basil, and plant plenty of tansy too, because I’ve managed to have an entire spring without aphids, thanks to the tansy I planted in several places. I don’t believe in pesticides, I’d rather throw a plant away than squirt it with poison, but I don’t mind doing lots of companion planting. Butterflies and ladybugs love tansy, that’s good enough for me.

So, just to recap – I goofed, but the goof turned out all right. Maybe it steered me in a more productive direction. Next year I’ll mix more basil and tomato plants, maybe throw in some beans for good measure. And I’ll do the same sloppy pinching I always do. We’ll see if my theory is sound.

For the time being, at least, the Great Experiment continues . . .

Tough Noogies

The brick & mortar business where I work has made me sign a document stating that if I talk about them online, I can be fired, so I won’t mention them by name. But I’m not mad at them for making me sign that paper. Because they’re up the creek without a paddle, and I can’t blame them for being freaked out about it. They’ve got a right to look after their reputation. God knows the retail giants aren’t doing anything else very well these days.

Unfortunately, the way most retail chains have reacted to the bad economy is to decide that they’ve got to start harassing the customer from the moment they set foot in the store and not let them go again until they have their name, phone number, e-mail address, and shopping preferences – and woe betide the customer who doesn’t also have a couple dozen frequent shopper cards. Furthermore, at my store I’ve been ordered to address you by name, no matter how much that may offend you. And you need to know my name too. If it’s any consolation, I’ll try to use your last name instead of your first, and I only mispronounce it about 35% of the time. I’ll try to mumble it so you won’t think I’m hitting on you.

But all of that “customer service” will do no good at all in the end, because I work at a book store, and within a few years, most book sales will be done online or with a phone app. Yes – I know everyone is saying that, and I also know there tends to be a gold-rush attitude about new formats and technologies that often turns out to be exaggerated. But in this case friends – it ain’t exaggerated. People are underestimating how big the change is going to be.

Forget all that stuff about how much you like paper books and how you don’t want to change. Because that’s just tough noogies. It’s not about what you want. It’s about what they’re going to give you, what they think they can do to turn a profit. Controlling costs is the only way big biz can squeeze the bottom line right now, and shipping around tons of paper is expensive. Zapping electronic bits in your general direction is way cheaper, and if you put it on a reader you like, you’ll get used to it pretty fast.

Don’t get me wrong, I love printed books. But I have to admit, I’ve been appalled at the waste I see in the book biz. We manufacture astounding amounts of trash every day at our location, just in terms of cardboard boxes and merchandising lists, just so we can build displays of things we want people to buy. But after all that effort, after all that paper and gasoline, most of the books that make it to our shelves get packed right back up eventually and shipped back again. It’s very Sisyphus-ian. Move that pile of sand over here, then move it back over there. On the small scale, no big deal. But we’re talking gigantic, and without easy credit to make it look like actual moolah is being made, the losses are apparent much more quickly than they used to be. So the electronic medium will sweep all that away. And how could that help brick & mortar stores?

Not one bit, actually. So they’re in complete denial about it. That’s why I’m wondering if you’d like a bag for your items, Mr. Smith. What was that phone number again?

The funny thing is, even if the brick & mortar chains crash, I don’t think amazon is going to be the only game in town. Google won’t either, even if they end up selling their own gigantic library of e-books. I think writers are going to control the e-book market, mostly because we’ll be able to set our own prices. We’ll tend to keep them really low, because we don’t have a gigantic overhead to pay for. Of course, we’ll be plagued by pirates and we’ll have to compete with millions of other sites for the attention of shoppers, but that won’t stop us. After all, we’ve been treated like dirt for decades, we’re used to trouble. We’re not easily discouraged, either. In fact, it’s scary how hard it is to get us to give up.


So here’s my advice to shoppers: don’t pay a lot of money for books, or movies, or music. Pay something, give writers and musicians a reason to keep making the stuff that entertains you, but don’t pay a high price for it unless you can’t live without it. If you think someone’s price for an e-book is too high, tell them so. They may lower it. Believe me, if you tell a book store clerk the same thing, they’ll just have to refer you to Customer Care. And there’s just one way a call like that can end.

“Thanks for shopping with us Mr. Smith. Have a nice day.”

My Dad The Time-Traveling War Hero

When I was about 8, I got caught in a really big lie, one so ridiculous there’s no way anyone would possibly have believed it – except me. It was a lie about my dad, and in my own defense, I have to say I told it because of something I honestly did not understand. And I don’t blame my mom for this fact, even though it was partly because she hadn't told me that she and my dad were divorced. My dad was in the Air Force, he was stationed in Viet Nam, so when I asked where he was, she always told me he was away fighting the war. What she didn’t realize was that I was too young to understand that the war was in Viet Nam. The war I saw on TV every day was the one in the movies, WWII. It was WWI, as well, but I figured it was the same difference. I loved those old movies, and I did not completely understand that they were about the past; in my mind, the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s all blended with the present. The past was incomprehensible if it was more than a few years old, so I decided it must all be happening now.

If I had been the kind of kid who watched the news, I might have heard about the war in Viet Nam, but my favorite show was The Time Tunnel. It fed my delusion that the past and present were really the same thing. So one day in school, as we were trooping through a section on WWII in our history books, I pointed to a picture in the book of a fighter plane and informed the class, "My dad flies an airplane just like that! He’s in the war!"

The boys in the class immediately caught my mistake, they pointed out that current fighter pilots flew jets. But to me, a fighter plane was a fighter plane, I didn’t see the point arguing about props versus jet engines. And to make matters worse, I insisted that Dad was still fighting WWII, because that was the only war I knew anything about. So when the boys pointed out that WWII had been over for 20 years, and the gap in my logic became really apparent, I felt the need to fill it with an explanation. "My dad is part of a special force," I said, "they’ve gone back in time to fight the Nazis – because the Nazis figured out how to use the Time Tunnel! They’re using it to steal the plans for the atomic bomb so they won’t lose the war! And my dad is going to stop them!"

Nobody bought that story, and that really ticked me off. Even if it wasn’t true, they could have given me the benefit of the doubt, right? Could they be absolutely positive the Nazis weren’t engaged in time travel experiments? No they could not! And furthermore, attitudes like that just get you eaten when the monster really does come oozing out of the vents at the movie theater. That’s been proven a thousand times over, at least in the movies.

I gave up trying to convince people that my dad was a time-traveling Nazi-thwarter. After a while, I forgot that I had ever told that story – until I read a book by Dean Koontz titled Lightning. I got halfway through that book, realized the good guy was German, then understood exactly what was going on. Okay, maybe he didn’t use the Time Tunnel, but those nefarious time-traveling, bomb-stealing Nazis showed up, just like I said they would!

I’m not saying Koontz used his idea-sucking, thought-theft device on me. He came up with that idea because it was a good idea. Vindication!

When I was about 9, Mom told me she and Dad were divorced. Years later, I was finally able to see far enough past the tip of my own nose to realize there had been a war in Viet Nam, though the truth seemed almost as strange as my lie had been. Maybe we can never make up anything as weird as the truth is.

But we can try, can’t we? Those holes in logic have to be filled somehow. Pardon me while I fetch my shovel . . .

Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, The Writer's Life For Me

At the risk of incurring the scorn of blogmasters and literary critics, the wrath of REALLY powerful talk-show hosts, the ire of authors of legitimate biographies, and the undivided attention of CNN, I’m going to call some of these blog entries mini-memoirs.

Okay, I suspect none of the personages listed above will actually give a rat’s ass what I call my silly blog entries, or that they’ll even be aware they exist, but in the slim chance any of that happens, I figure I’d better be up front with the fact that I’m a liar. And when I’m not lying, I have a really crummy memory. And when I’m telling the truth, I’ve changed names, dates, facts, and people’s hair color to conceal their identities, not because I’m concerned for their safety or privacy, but because I don’t want to be sued out of all my worldly possessions, which currently consist of a 1050-square-foot duplex and a ten-year-old Ford POS with one broken window.

So why call biographical blog entries mini-memoirs? Why not call them stories if they’re so full of hooey? After all, many writers base stories and novels on their own lives, not to mention the lives of their friends, families, and neighbors. Everything we see and hear, everything that happens to us, is weighed and considered as possible subject matter. But you’d be surprised how much of it changes when we run it through the Fiction Machine. Especially my Fiction Machine, which usually churns out Science Fiction.

On the other hand, I couldn’t call many of my blog entries straight biography either. Because frankly, straight biography would be kind of boring. I’ve never been an international spy, a movie star, or an ex- junkie with a really compelling story of redemption and hope. The only thing that makes me stand out from the e-crowd is that I’ve written and sold several novels. I’m a professional liar. And so is every other writer, even the ones who write non-fiction.

Have you ever noticed that when you share stories at family gatherings, no one can agree about what really happened? As I’m writing this, there are five different books about Abraham Lincoln on the shelf at the book store where I have my day job. Each of them has a different interpretation of Lincoln’s character, his mental health, his relationship with his wife, his style of governing, and even his sexuality. Granted, none of them have engaged in outright lying, as I plan to do, but look at it this way: you’re not going to lose weight using my diet, cure your health problems by referring to my list of natural cures that THEY don’t want you to know about, or become a millionaire by following my investment theories. I’ve got to come up with some way to hold your attention.

But I’m not totally without ethics. I’m not simply going to lie and not admit it. Though I won’t try to point out which parts were deliberately made up, as opposed to the parts that are false just because my memory sucks. If you write a lot of blog entries yourself, you already have some idea why writers lie, not to mention what drives us to write in the first place. This ain’t exactly redemption, but it might be insight.

Recently a new phrase has been coined, truthiness, meaning a lie you tell that you wish to be the truth. But I prefer fibbiness (much easier to say than lie-i-ness). Fibbiness is a lie you tell that you wish were true, but that you don’t expect anyone to believe. Only Mathematicians pursue pure truth. The rest of us tell lies all day long, to ourselves and to everybody else. The lies aren’t just a way to get what we want or to avoid trouble. They’re an attempt to re-shape reality into what we want it to be. Maybe that’s a good definition of a memoir. Or even a mini-memoir. Not to mention a blog entry.

And even if it isn’t – it’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

And While We're On The Subject

Here’s another awkward question people ask me: "Why did you change pen names so often?" And once again, I get a lot of blank stares when I give the honest answer: Because my publisher wanted me to. And not because they were trying to fool readers – at least, not at first.

The first time I changed my pen name, from Emily Devenport to Maggy Thomas, my publisher was trying to fool the book store chains. They had gotten into the habit of only ordering as many copies of a writer’s new title as they recently ordered of the last book. Think about this for a moment – we’re not talking about total sales for the last book. We’re talking about the order information for the last few months. So even if they sold 12 copies of your last title, if they only ordered 1 or 2 copies in the last few months before the new title was released, they would only order a couple of copies of the new one. Not only did that give you no opportunity to grow your audience, it actually caused your sales figures to shrink.

So it was time to become Maggy Thomas and write the book that readers liked the best, the one that got nominated for the Philip K. Dick award, Broken Time. Only my publisher didn’t do anything else to boost that book other than having me change my name. They didn’t make it a lead title or publish it in hardback, it was just another obscure mass-market paperback release for that year. So when it came time to sell the next proposal (for Belarus), my editor had to hustle to keep me on board with the company, and this time her reasoning was simple. She thought I could gain more readers if my name was "gender obscure," meaning that it could be a man’s name or a woman’s. That’s how I became Lee Hogan. So that time around, they were trying to fool the reader.

And that strategy worked fairly well. If the economy hadn’t started to slide the year Enemies was released, I might still be doing Lee Hogan titles. Instead, I and a bunch of other midlist writers got "remaindered" a few months after the 911 tragedy, which means the remaining stock for our titles was sold at a discount, reducing their value and screwing up our sales figures.

It’s not the saddest story out there – I actually managed to get 9 titles published and get my professional credentials, and I worked with great editors. I learned how to write novels, and no one committed suicide. But I have to say, having three pen names has been a pain in the neck. I made fans with all three names, and trying to direct them all to my new stuff could be a real challenge. Just trying to set up Facebook pages for each pen name makes my head spin – as of this writing, I’ve only done it for Emily Hogan and Emily Devenport, because I need a different e-mail for each pen name. I suspect the same is true for MySpace and LinkedIn, and I’m not sure it’s even necessary. I’m hoping I’ll only need two fiction websites, one for my adult fiction and one for my YA, because I’m pretty sure my head is going to explode if I have to remember even one more password.

I’d like to tell you I’d never get another pen name, but if I sell a book to a publisher and they want me to assume yet another pen name, I’ll do it. That’s the biz, folks. Sometimes you end up with Multiple Pen Name Disorder. God help me if I run out of e-mail accounts . . .

Missing Sequels

As a writer, one of the toughest questions I have to answer is, “Why didn’t you write a sequel to . . . ?” It’s not that I don’t have an answer, it’s just that no one believes me – at least, no one who isn’t in the same biz. The short answer is, “I didn’t write that sequel because my publisher made it clear they wouldn’t buy it.” And why wouldn’t they buy it? They say it’s because the previous books didn’t earn enough money. But this is where the answer gets complicated, because usually, what they’re saying isn’t true.

Understand, most of us earn peanuts for our books, anywhere from $4000 to $9000 advance against royalties. Those royalties are usually 8% of gross sales for a mass-market paperback, maybe around $.35 per book. The publisher rarely prints more than 20,000 copies of a book, so you don’t actually have much chance of earning back the advance, and they don’t have much incentive to go back to print. The mid-list books exist to be the french fries of the book industry (you want fries with that?), the product that didn’t cost the publisher very much and the one they actually earn the best margin on. You’d think that would get them to work harder to promote and re-print that product, but that’s where things get psychological. If they start doing that, they don’t have a mid-list book on their hands anymore, they’ve got a potential bestseller. A writer whose book falls into that category can demand better royalties. Get it?

Every mid-list writer is hoping to write the break-out book, the one that will bust them into the bestseller category. But the way the book business is structured, this is almost impossible, and it’s not just the fault of publishers – not by a long shot. Book chains create extremely tough circumstances for publishers, not the least of which is the “strip” system. When they need to generate income to purchase new product, they’ll go through their paperbacks, strip off the covers, and mail them back for credit – regardless of how well those books are selling! The publisher (and especially the writer) just lost that income and that leaves fewer copies available to allow the writer to “earn out.”

Lots of other writers have written extensively about this situation, I suppose I’m not adding anything new to the argument, not even when I say that this old way of doing things is crashing and burning. As my pal, writer Rick Cook says, they’ve been trying to finance an expensive distribution system all these years, and now they can’t do it anymore. The internet and the e-book is going to shatter their business model, especially since they absolutely refuse to do the new thinking that would allow them to flourish. And that’s a great opportunity for writers.


But it’s also a big challenge. One thing publishers have going for them is professional editors. These people help writers polish their work. When we’ve worked on a book for the better part of a year, we lose our objectivity about it. There are problems we can’t see anymore. If professional editors are smart, they’ll start contracting with writers, maybe even lure us into partnerships. An editor who manages a book website and pays good writers 70% of the profit from sales could transform the book biz.

I’ve already got a professional editor I work with: Elinor Mavor, who edited AMAZING STORIES in the early 80s. For the time being, I’m going to manage my own fiction website. I’m so used to not getting rich, all I care about is that it shouldn’t cost me too much money. I’m not afraid to venture into new territory – I do that every time I write a book!

So which books do people ask me about the most? There are three of them. First, a sequel to my Emily Devenport titles, Shade and Larissa. I had both a sequel planned (called Knossos) and a prequel (Stripe).

Second, a sequel to my Maggy Thomas title, Broken Time. This is the title that earned the most critical acclaim, and readers on amazon.com have begged for a sequel. I hadn’t considered the idea until I got so much positive feedback, so I sketched out an idea that I thought I would call The Abyss Looks Back. If I had successfully pitched it to my publisher, they probably would have demanded that I change the title. Now I’ll have to rely on Ellie and my husband Ernie to tell me if my title is dopey.

Last, readers have expressed an interest in a sequel to my Lee Hogan titles, Belarus and Enemies. I could actually envision several books in that series, I’m afraid that universe is too big for just one more book. But the book that’s clearest in my mind is not a sequel, though it’s set in the same universe. It’s set on Tally Korsakova’s engineered world, Canopus, and I wanted to call it Harpy. Of all the possible books I’ve just mentioned, Harpy is closest to my heart. For sure, I’m going to write that one. I hope one day you can read it, too.

Two Cents About Ten Composers

When the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his 3rd Symphony, the Pastoral, it was during World War I, and he was driving an ambulance, transporting wounded troops in France. France and England are as different as they can be from the Arizona desert, yet when I listen to R.V.W.’s 3rd symphony, I see beautiful, lonely landscapes in Arizona.

When I drive the highways that skirt Vermilion Cliffs and the Grand Staircase in Utah and Arizona, I hear R.V.W.’s Concerto For Two Pianos. The Grand Canyon reminds me of his 5th Symphony, which he wrote during World War II. His 7th Symphony, the Sinfonia Antartica, is based on his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic, but it evokes Mars as much as it does Antarctica, and both Arizona and Utah can seem very Martian in places, especially if you’ve ever seen photos of our sister planet.

You can assume that I see Arizona when I hear classical music simply because I was raised in Arizona, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Not all of R.V.W.’s music causes me to see my homeland, plenty of it evokes landscapes I’ve never seen. And the music of other composers doesn’t automatically cause me to picture Arizona landscapes either.

But it’s true that classical music tends to evoke pictures in the mind of the listener, much like the opening sequence in Disney's Fantasia demonstrates. Classical music is the sound equivalent of the virtuoso paintings and drawings of illustrators. Some of it may be abstract, even mathematical in tone, but most of it tells a deliberate story. In the case of Vaughan Williams, that story is often about some lonely, beautiful place, so the listener might be inclined to see places very different from the ones that inspired the composition.

I know for some folks, Classical music must be soothing rather than evocative, stimulating the intellect instead of the emotions. I can understand that need, I feel it myself from time to time. Other listeners want the story spelled out for them in lyrics; the music may not evoke any images at all, regardless of its intent or execution. The interesting thing about this kind of music is that the lyrics can be at odds with the lyrics; for instance, happy music combined with dark, painful lyrics.

I’ve been suckered that way many times, and though I enjoy a lot of popular music, I think this is one of the reasons I tend to prefer orchestral works. Having spent a fair amount of time warning you about my preferences, here’s a list of my favorites. I’m not presenting it because I think you ought to like it too, I just hope that if you haven’t heard it before, and you’re interested in investigating, you may be inclined to look it up and sample it.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: my favorites are his 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th Symphonies. I’m also fond of his Oboe Concerto, his Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis, his Concerto For Two Pianos, and (my absolute favorite) The Lark Ascending. I like most of what Vaughan Williams wrote, but that’s too long a list to feature here, so these are a good place to start.

Gustav Holst is famous for writing the Planets suite, and it’s a hum-dinger, but my favorite pieces by Holst are The Perfect Fool and Egdon Heath. His Saint Paul suite is also marvelous.

I know everybody tends to rave about Claude Debussy, but his most famous works are not my favorites. It’s okay with me if I never hear La Mer or Afternoon of a Faun again. I’d rather hear The Sunken Cathedral, L'isle Joyeuse, and Nocturnes With Female Chorus.

Anatoli Liadov is a little-known gem – you may have trouble tracking down his albums online. If you can find one with his folk song suite, Baba Yaga, and The Enchanted Lake, buy it now!

Aaron Copland is the American standard, and if you haven’t heard Appalachian Spring, or Fanfare For The Common Man, definitely try them. But my favorites are Quiet City, Concerto for Clarinet, Music for Theater, and Music for Movies.

Alan Hovhaness is another great American composer, but he’s as different from Copland as he can possibly be. He’s a mystical soul. Try Mysterious Mountain to begin with, and if you like it, sample some of his compositions for harp.

Rachmaninoff is famous for his piano concertos, and rightly so, but I love his Suites For Two Pianos. The double-piano version of his Symphonic Dances is also magnificent. If you can get the RCA LIVING STEREO recording of Rubinstein performing Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini, that one is the absolute best.

Prokofiev is best known for his ballets, but I love his 1st and 3rd piano concertos. His movie music is also wonderful; try Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible.

Respighi is a favorite for classical music lovers, especially his Pines of Rome and Fountains of Rome. My two favorite recordings of this are the GREAT PERFORMANCES (RCA) album with Eugene Ormandy conducting and the LIVING STEREO album with Fritz Reiner conducting. Try The Birds as well, and Three Botticelli Pictures.

Probably everyone has heard Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho – it has pretty much ruined showers for a whole generation. I love his brilliant score for The Day The Earth Stood Still – it will always personify the other-worldly for me. Another must-have score is Fahrenheit 451, and don’t believe conductors who say they did a better job performing and recording it than Herrmann did. No one did a better job. Get his original soundtrack recordings if you can, in whatever format.

That’s my two cents about ten composers. Some of you will agree and some will disagree, but I hope you saw something on this list you’ve never heard, and I hope you’ll feel inspired to check it out.

Ernie's Robot

My husband, Ernest Hogan, is a writer and an artist. I've had a lot of his work framed, and it crowds the wall of our home. This one may be my favorite. He calls it "Hot Blooded Machine," I call it "Ernie's Robot." If Ernie's brain could be placed into a robot, this is what it would look like.

Mr. Disco Hooves

Every ghostly encounter is always at least 50% imagination. I’m happy with that equation – it makes me sound almost scientific, while leaving some room for the unexplainable. Sure, it could be 100% imagination; or it could be 60% imagination and 40% weird-but-natural; or it could even be 70% imagination and 30% supernatural. But you always have to meet a ghost at least halfway. No encounter with a ghost is ever going to be more than 50% supernatural.

However, I’m not sure the same can be said for other supernatural creatures. Imagination may play a strong role in these other encounters, I’m just not sure to what degree. You can look at folk tales and see societal trends and psychological factors, but the beings encountered in these tales have a weirdness that transcends the folk tradition from which they come.

Take the story my friend Mark relayed to me about a scary encounter he had around Midnight, in Framingham Mass., as he was walking to an all-night hamburger joint. One side of the street was lined with apartment buildings, but the other side belonged to an old graveyard. That night the gravestones were obscured by a mist that marched all the way up to the fence but stopped short of the sidewalk, as if it didn’t feel inclined to cross the street. Mark didn’t want to walk on the side with the apartments because of the bats that swooped in and out of the lights (chasing bugs), so he braved the graveyard side.

Mark wasn’t one to be afraid of graveyards, but he felt uneasy as he walked toward the end of the block and the distant light of the hamburger joint. He kept his pace casual, and his eyes open, but it was his ears that warned him something was wrong. Behind him he heard a distant clop, clop, clop, clop, clop.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw a figure walking about 100 yards behind him. He couldn’t make out the guy’s face, or even what he was wearing, except that he assumed the guy was wearing disco boots. That was the only thing he could figure that would make a clop, clop noise like that.

The guy was well back, so Mark kept walking at the same pace, but in another minute the sound was louder. Once again, he glanced over his shoulder, and though the guy hadn’t picked up his pace at all, he had gained on Mark. Yet his features could not be seen at all, nor any detail about his clothing, he was simply a shadow shaped like a man. "Hey buddy," Mark wanted to call, "those are some really big disco boots you have on!"

But something about the guy made Mark uneasy. So he kept his remark to himself and sped up his pace. He didn’t really want the guy to overtake him. He walked faster for a few minutes, and he heard the steady clop, clop, clop behind him. But the sound got louder. Mark glanced over his shoulder again and was shocked to see the guy had gained on him some more, he might have only been 100 feet away now, yet his features still could not be seen, his body was still in shadow. He wasn’t moving any faster at all, so how had he closed so much distance?

At this point, Mark gave up any pretense of casualness and broke into a full trot. For all he knew, the guy was taking wider steps, if not faster, so now it was time to put some real distance between them. No way could he overtake Mark at this point, unless he wanted to jog.

But though the sound continued at the same pace, it got louder. Mark glanced over his shoulder again, and now the guy wasn’t more than twenty feet away. The end of the street was in sight, but panic spurred him into a mad dash. He ran like a sprinter trying to win an Olympic gold, and behind him the clop, clop, clop got steadily louder, until it sounded like the guy was right behind him. Mark jumped off the end of the sidewalk and into the street, aiming straight for the front door of the burger joint.

And the sound stopped. At the door of the diner, Mark looked over his shoulder again. The guy was gone. He had stopped right at the edge of the road and simply disappeared. "He couldn’t have gone anywhere without making noise with those boots," he told me. "He just vanished. It was like he couldn’t cross the street, like that would be against the rules."

"Are you sure they were boots?" I asked. "Could they have been hooves?"

He went pale at that point. "Yeah," he said. "They could."

Mark’s heritage is Native American and African American. Was there something about his blood that provoked a response from Mr. Disco Hooves? Was there some prayer he should have said to appease an elemental resident of that ancient territory? Or was Old Hobbes just having fun with him?

It’s hard to say. But if you happen to be walking down that particular street at midnight, I recommend you walk on the side with the bats.

Ent Sighted In Utah

"He was leaping from rock to rock," claims witness. "We would have missed him if he hadn't been moving so slowly . . ."

And If You're Ever In Moab, Utah

This rock & fossil shop is on the main drag, right as you enter town from the North, and the bike rental shop is just a little further in. Moab is one of those places I'd like to live . . .

For Those Who Shop The Odd

I found a wonderful shop in Cave Creek, a little town North of Phoenix. It's called The Town Dump, and though it doesn't have a website, you may find it if you surf the google Images pages. The lady who co-owns the shop tells me I'm not the first smitten shopper to take pictures of the place and blog about it. The address is 6820 E. Cave Creek Road, and the stuff they sell there could be placed in the Home & Garden catagory -- especially if the home and the garden belong to Morticia Addams . . .

Needless to say, that's my kind of place.

Surviving Summer In Phoenix

Just about everyone thinks summer is too hot where they live, and just about everyone is right. Some people are more right than others – especially those in humid climates. But on average, Phoenix is probably the hottest city in the United States from June to October, if you’re just counting the temperature and you don’t count Death Valley (which isn’t a city, so no fair). After living in Phoenix for 46 years, I think I’ve earned the right to say it’s too hot at least part of the summer. But being too hot isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Someone once described Phoenix as air-conditioned Hell. Taken at face value, that phrase is an oxymoron. The air-conditioning is actually what makes Phoenix about ten times more comfortable than, say, Miami in July. If you’ve got a.c. in your car and in your house, you’re going to pretty much breeze through the summer in Phoenix. Add some ice cream, ice-cold tea, and a covered porch out back, and you’re going to be downright happy. You’ll complain about the heat, sure, but mostly for recreation, and to keep visitors from crowding your over-heated paradise. The seasonal decline in population is one of the positive aspects of too much heat. Personally, I’ve never been fond of crowds.

But my husband and I have never had a.c. in our car. On one historic day back in 1990, when the temperature in Phoenix reached 123 F, we were in our little Honda, which hadn’t even been built with an a.c. unit. We were running our own housekeeping service back then, and we had learned from extensive driving during the previous year (during which the summer lasted six months instead of the usual four) to go directly to a convenience store and buy a 48-ounce cold drink for the trip to the first job, then to another store for another 48 ounces of ice-and-whatever for the trip back home. On that momentous day, we set out across town with our cold drinks in hand, and we may have remarked to each other, "Jeez it’s hot!" or we may not. We didn’t know how hot it had gotten, we only knew it was probably somewhere over 110 .

It’s at a time like this that you find out whether you’re a hot-weather person or a cold-weather person. Me – I’m hot weather, to the core. And I proved it on that day, because I didn’t croak in my un-airconditioned car. In fact, I did something that only desert dwellers can truly understand. I went into Dream-time mode. This mental state may seem philosophical at some times, spiritual at others, and still other times it may seem both. And it’s the other reason that too hot is not always a bad thing. It’s altered consciousness without the drugs, it can stretch time or make it stop completely, it can make you believe in God, or Space Aliens, or Bigfoot.

It can also kill you, if you don’t stay hydrated. Do not, upon reading this account, go charging into the Arizona desert with no hat and no water on a hot afternoon, thinking, This is so cosmic! The news of your unhappy demise will be featured with film at 11:00 the following evening (though if your body lies undiscovered for long enough, you’ll make an interesting mummy).

I’ve learned to appreciate Dream-time mode, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like a.c. I use it extensively at home, thank you very much. And by this fall, Ernie and I will be buying a vehicle with fully-operational a.c. in it (believe me, it’s never been because we didn’t want it). But before we do that, we’ve got one more summer to suffer through, a long drive every day without good ol’ a.c. We’ll haul our cold drinks with us and try to ignore the thermometer, just one more time.

It’ll be Dream-time, all the way.

What's Joie de Weird?

Now that I’m 50, I remember what I knew when I was 5 :The Secret of happiness is Joie de Vivre, the ability to enjoy the simple things in life. Every other pleasure springs from this basic ability; the lack of it cripples your appreciation of everything from food, to music, to romantic encounters. But it takes more than just the love of waffles and singing birdies to fully appreciate life. You can’t have Joie de Vivre unless you also have Joie de Weird.
Everyone probably has their own definition of Joie de Weird. For some, it may be a fascination with the macabre, or the grotesque, or the abnormal, or any combination of all three. But Joie de Weird isn’t that simple, any more than Joie de Vivre is. Joie de Weird, as it relates to happiness, is an attitude. Perfectionism, intolerance, and cowardice will drive it away. If you are continually feeling disappointed in things because they don’t live up to your standards, if you are always bored because nothing seems interesting, you don’t have Joie de Weird, even if you like to watch slasher movies. Maybe Especially if you do.
So – what is this Joy of Weird stuff, then? Can you love monsters without being one? I love gardening and geology, so I’ll use those subjects to explain why the answer is Yes. Gardeners deal with as much failure as we do success – in fact, some years it’s mostly failure. But most of us are as interested in what goes wrong in the garden as what goes right, and not just because we’re trying not to repeat the same mistakes. We’re like scientists in an outdoor lab – some of us are even mad scientists (Give my creature – Liiiiife!) So when mold and black spot show up, we watch in fascination even as we hustle to fix the problem. When flowers age past their prime and dry up, we enjoy crunching them between our hands and sowing their seeds. When aphids show up, we squish the little devils and joke about the true meaning of "green thumb." We make compost out of yucky garbage and cultivate the friendship of wiggly red worms. And we think this is fun. Non-gardeners marvel at the beauty of our creation without guessing how much weirdness goes into it.
Geologists also have Joie de Weird. In fact, it may be a prerequisite for the job. A geologist may agree that a mountainside covered with trees and grass is a lovely thing, but what she really wants to see are the bare bones of that mountain so she can figure out what it’s made of, when it formed, what’s been happening to it for millions of years. She may have plenty of practical reasons for figuring this out, like mining, oil prospecting, looking for gems, but these reasons are really just excuses (okay, really good excuses) for satisfying her curiosity. The weirder the rocks, the better.
Joie de Vivre is the love of the natural world. Joie de Weird is a fascination with natural processes mixed with a sense of wonder. Without Joie de Weird, the natural world is just going to freak you out. And that’s no fun at all.
This blog is dedicated to Joie de Weird. I hope you are too.