Friday, October 30, 2009

Fiction Friday: Results and a Prompt

This is my own entry in last week's challenge:

I can't rightly say, not being from around here and all, but if I was to say, I'd say just head on up the road till you come to that stoplight up yonder, then head east, crost the road. It's right next to one of them Starbucks. My horse pisses better coffee than they serve at that place. If you come to the eye doctor's, you've gone too far.

Here's a challenge everyone, even the non-writers can play -- based on the voice, give me a gender, age range and location of origin for the character above.

Last Week's Players:

(If I've guessed wrong, and there's something in the voice/text that shows it, please let me know!)

Sandra Leigh

Let's see, dear. That would be -- let me think -- oh, yes. The 7/11. I believe that's what it's called. It's in the building that used to be Henry's Hardware Store. Oh, my. I'd almost forgotten about Henry. He was just the sweetest man, and he loved his store. He was there every day, seven days a week. Poor Mabel had to look after everything at home, but she didn't mind a bit. She knew how much Henry loved his work... What was that? Oh. Yes, of course. It's just around the corner, dear. If you walk down the street toward the water until you get to Mrs. Wilson's house -- that's the one with the lovely rose garden -- and then turn left, you'll see Henry's -- I mean the 7/ll, just on your left. Oh, dear. Now what have I done with my glasses?

Gender: Female
Age: 70’s
Location: Anywhere in the US

Dedene

"Go three bornes til you see Rousseau's farm, then turn towards the old saw mill. Keep going until you hit the forest, then follow the horse trail and you can't miss it!"

Gender: Male or female
Age: Adult
Location: France

Steven G

Who,me? My name's Sarah Mackelhaney and this here's my little brother Joshua. I'm watchin' him t'day.

What? We ain't got school t'day cause it's Presidents Day.

We ain't s'pose to be talkin' to no strangers. We gotta go!

What? Yeah,I know where one is. You just need to keep goin' on this here road 'till it stops, and turn off t' the right and you'll see a big ole Piggly Wiggly there. They sell newspapers and stuff like that there. We gotta go.

You're welcome. C'mon Josh! Bye.


Gender: Female
Age: Elementary school, probably middle grades, since she’s babysitting her brother
Location: Southern U.S..

Berowne

Ja, es ist in der naehe. How you say? Close by? Eine kleine konditorei, what you call it a sweet-shop. Was sagen sie? Was I in the Krieg? Ja, ich bin sehr alt; ich war Krieger, but only in Wehrmacht. Never, niemals, in SS. Haben-sie verstanden?

Gender: Male
Age: 70’s or 80’s (because he was in WWII)
Location: Germany

This Week's Challenge:


Using one of the voices below, inform a teller that you're robbing his or her bank.

1) Techie/nerd
2) Granny with a Gun
3) Professional bank robber who wants to pull one more heist before he retires
4) Cheerleader who's doing it on a dare

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Old Joke #21

How do you know when an elephant is on its period?

There's a dime on your dresser and your mattress is missing.


(This one's pretty moldy, but it still cracks me up.)

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Web Wednesday: World's Best Panhandler



The best part of this is around the 2 minute mark.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

It's the Prinicpal of the Thing, Part 2

Each morning, J. Willy would start the day with announcements over the school's intercom system -- upcoming events, miscellaneous awards, reminders to follow the rules.

It was his chance to reinforce his vision.

One day in the late 1950's, though, he encountered a problem: the planes from nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base set up a new flight path that brought them over Wilbur Wright High School precisely at 9 a.m., shaking the ceilings, rattling the windows -- and interrupting the announcements.

Over the next week he considered various options. He tried talking louder, but couldn't outshout an F-105 Thunderchief. He considered rescheduling the announcements, but that meant they'd fall into first period, when the pupils were actively engaged in learning, rather than homeroom. Besides, there was no guarantee the strafing runs wouldn't change their schedule to match his.

A week later, after a particularly abortive attempt to warn the students to stay off some newly-sown grass seed, he'd reached his limit. Snatching the phone from its cradle, he dialed the number for Wright Patterson. After working his way up the chain of command, growing more incensed with each bureaucratic obstacle he encountered, he finally got hold of Major General Stanley T. Wray.

“Do you know who this is?” he demanded as soon as Major General Wray came on the line. We don't know how Major General Wray responded, but J. Willy’s next words were these:

“This,” he said, “is J. William Holmes, principal of Wilbur Wright High School. And I am not happy.

“Would you like to know why I’m not happy? The reason I am not happy is because each morning at 9 a.m., as I am trying to make morning announcements to my students, your planes buzz my building.”

According to my source, the crown of J. Willy’s head, at this point, was the color of a cranberry, and the fringe of white hair around his crown was almost perpendicular to his scalp.

“I demand,” he went on, his voice quaking with rage, “that your planes cease buzzing my building immediately.

“And if they do not cease buzzing my building,” he shouted, “then I will have them SHOT DOWN!”

And he slammed down the phone.

And, according to Ben Campbell, the teacher from whom I heard this story, those planes never flew over during announcements again.

Monday, October 26, 2009

It's the Prinicpal of the Thing, Part 1

Last week, Knucklehead, over at Knucklehead!, did a post on high school principals, as portrayed by Hollywood.

My high school principal was along the lines of Strickland in the Back to the Future movies. Earlier in life, he'd been a fighter pilot and a professional tennis player, and we kids respected him. For sheer personality, though, you had to go back to the previous principal, who was there when my older sisters attended WWHS and I knew only by legend.

J. William Holmes (aka J. Willy), would have made a great movie character. Perhaps 5'4" tall, with a bald head and a round belly, he was a figure that struck fear into the hearts of students and teachers alike.

He once, in front of an entire auditorium of teachers and students, introduced the new shop teacher, who was a Master Mason, as a masturbator.

And not one person dared to laugh.

He filled the hallways of our school with reproductions of famous artworks, so that students walked past Utrillo and Gaugin and Da Vinci every day. In the stairwell that led to the third floor Spanish lab hung a story-high crucifix – and this in a public, mid-western high school.

Now picture this: It is 1961. The entire school -- 1200 students plus the entire faculty -- are assembled to rev up the spirit for that night's football game. The brass section of the school band is channeling John Phillips Sousa. The cheerleaders are building human pyramids. The jocks are standing around the edges of the frenzy, trying to look cool.

Suddenly, the door of the auditorium slams open and in the doorway stands J. Willy.

The room instantly goes silent.

"I am looking for Joe Saunders," he thunders.

Silence.

"Where," he demands awfully, "is Joe Saunders?"

The silence grows louder.

Finally, timidly, one of the teachers says, "Joe Saunders graduated last year, sir."

J. Willy thinks about that.

"Ah," he says, "Resume your pep."

And walks out.

Tomorrow: J. Willy Takes on the Military Industrial Complex

Friday, October 23, 2009

Fiction Friday: Point/Counterpoint

Last week on Fiction Friday, I proposed a simile:

Happiness slid from her face like a fried egg from a Teflon skillet.

I went on to assert:

…the narrator has to be a housewife or a chef, because if, for example, a cop, or a dentist, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company says something like this, it just doesn't work. (Unless he's the CEO of Farberware.)


Doggybloggy, aka Christo, from over at Chez What?, took issue with that statement:

...I have to disagree with you on the Teflon one - I think it works for no matter who you say it about - why does it specifically have to be a cook or a housewife or even more linear someone that works for Teflon?

To which I responded, via email:

The point I was trying to make was more general -- that the metaphors/similes a character uses need to fit the character, and to reinforce it. While it may be an overstatement to say the character needs to be a housewife or a chef, he/she does need to be someone who has fried enough eggs to know that they'll slide off Teflon in a way that they don't off, say, cast iron. A bachelor with a six-pack of beer and an expired jar of mayo as the sole contents of his fridge would not use this metaphor.

To which HE responded:

I think everyone gets it no matter the six pack or the champagne flute - "it was hot enough to fry an egg" do you need to have experienced frying eggs to get it? "his anger equaled the storm" what if you live in a mild climate? The beauty of the metaphor and the simile is that it takes out of your normal pattern of thinking and transports you –

So I said:

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. My experience with metaphors that don't match the character's voice is that they pull the reader out of the "willing suspension of disbelief" that's necessary for fiction to work.


But Christo wasn’t willing to let it go at that:

You need to give your readers more credit. I for one would get tired of reading about housewives and pots and pans just so that I can be held in a certain level of 'suspension' its when the harried housewife metaphor gets transferred on to a race car driver that the 'suspension of disbelief' starts to get more visual. Linear thinking is not the willing suspension of disbelief it is the obvious and obvious does not make a good metaphor. Naturally you don’t want your metaphors all over the board - it would be highly unlikely for a rancher to be talking about tulle and chenille but if it is done properly it works better than if he is only talking about cows.

Later, I said:

I've been turning this over in my head since your last email, and you've got a point. It's funny -- one of the number one criticisms folks in my writing group have about my writing is that I'm not subtle enough. The number two criticism is that my metaphors/similes tend to stick out like sore thumbs. In some cases it was because the device was a mismatch for the voice, but now I'm wondering if it also had to do with clumsy implementation. Hmm.

And he said,

For me the real beauty of the metaphor is when it isn’t in the voice you would normally expect, that’s when the reader is truly suspended. Ranchers always talk about cows - housewives always talk about their domestic chores - that is my point.

And a good point it is!

I yield to Christo’s argument.


Last Week's Results:


To keep this from being the looooongest post in the history of blogging, I've selected ONE entry from each entrant.

Barb

Happiness was wiped away from his face like last night's stage make-up.

Gender: Male
Age: 20-something
Location: NYC

Berowne

Like a night burglar who's scared of a bush because he thinks it's a cop. Or, as Will S. puts it: "The night thief doth fear each bush an officer." (Henry VI)

Gender: Male
Age: Mid-twenties
Location: Merry Olde England, circa 1589

Knucklehead

Sadness shook the smile from his face like an Emote-a-Sketch.

Gender: Male
Age: Anywhere between 20 and 60
Location: USofA

Sandra Leigh

Her face fell as flat as the first cake - and the first joke - she ever made.

Gender: Female
Age: 20s or 30s
Location: USA

Doggybloggy

Fear was on me me tighter than a little boys jockstrap.

Gender: Male
Age: 30's or 40's
Location: USA

Steven G

...the light fell away like a lifetime of mistakes.

Gender: Male (mentioned earlier in this sentence)
Age: 20's-70's
Location: USA or Europe


Chef E

Fear seized me like the frog's tongue flying out and taking grasshoppers from the nearby monkey grass.

Gender: Male or Female
Age: Teens through 60's
Location: Anywhere there's monkey grass, which, according to the websites I visited, is practically anywhere.


This Week's Challenge:

Continuing with the theme that metaphors/similes should reinforce the voice of the character or narrator, this week I'd like to try yet another exercise used in my writing class.

Imagine a character. Give him or her a gender, age and hometown.

Got it?

Now have him or her give directions to the nearest convenience store, and do it in a way that will allow the reader to infer his/her demographics without saying any of them directly.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Our Gone Awaycation

Late last week, Old Dog and I traveled to Michigan to see Greenfield Village, to tour the Rouge River Ford Plant and to see Edsel Ford's mansion at Grosse Pointe Shores.

The best feature of the trip was a chance to have dinner with Jan from I Thought My Life Would Be Different, who generated the idea for the trip in the first place, with her post on Eleanor and Edsel Ford last spring. She very generously mailed me some coupons, which made the trip a lot more affordable.

On the way home, at a Wendy's outside Toledo, we saw the following signs.

Inside:














And on the door:

It's clear what's going on: Canadians have been sneaking across the border for taste of our delicious American food, only to discover that their money is no good here. But they'll stop at nothing, those crafty Canadians: they next try burgling our burgers.

Let us pray that that little paper sign is enough to guarantee the security of our fast food nation.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Fiction Friday: Similes, Metaphors and Personification

This week in the fiction class that I'm taking, we talked about three rhetorical devices: similies, metaphors and personification. If you're not sure what they are, follow the links for definitions.

Then we did a writing exercise. For each of the three devices, we selected one of the cliches below and rewrote it. Our instruction was to generate at least 5 attempts for each device.

Fear seized me.
Her face fell.
Darkness fell.


The idea of doing this multiple times is that the first thing you come up with will generally be trite, but each successive attempt will be more original.

Here's what I came up with:

Fear performed a Heimlich maneuver on my rib cage.
Happiness slid from her face like a fried egg from a Teflon skillet.
Darkness stumbled across the landscape like a late stage alcoholic.


I was pretty happy with these, but the whole exercise got me to thinking about voice and point of view, and how they determine which metaphors, similes, etc. you can use.

Because, for example, "Fear performed a Heimlich maneuver on my rib cage" only works in first person. When you write "Fear performed a Heimlich maneuver on Suzy's rib cage," the narrator's voice becomes intrusive.

And for the happiness one, the narrator has to be a housewife or a chef, because if, for example, a cop, or a dentist, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company says something like this, it just doesn't work. (Unless he's the CEO of Farberware.)

Because it's not enough to come up with cool ways to describe things. You have to do it smoothly, in a way that is so integrated with the rest of your prose that it doesn't stop the reader, making her wonder, "Who would say something like that?"

This Week's Challenge:

Try generating 5 similes, metaphors or personifications for the above cliches. Submit your favorite(s) and I'll try to guess the gender, approximate age and job of the character or narrator who would say it.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

My Little Town: Good Fences

Seen on our morning walk a few weeks ago:


Not sure if it's readily apparent at this angle, but the owners of this 6-foot privacy fence added another 18 inches of (non-matching) lattice work to the top.

How much do you have to dislike your neighbors to do that?

Next, this one:



Can anyone say, "Redneck Privacy Fence"?

Monday, October 12, 2009

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

I was sitting at my desk at the Clinic, minding my own business, when the Front Desk came on the intercom.

"Channel 22ABC/45 Fox News is on the line," they said. "Can you take the call?"

My boss was in Washington, DC, lobbying Congress on health care reform, which means I was covering for her. She is a registered nurse, with 30-years experience and a PhD in health administration. I am a former computer programmer who wouldn't know cellulite from cellulitis.

"Sure," I said.

Malcolm Maddox, a local reporter, wanted to come out and film the clinic and talk about health care reform. I explained that Sharon was out of town, and it would be better to wait and talk to her. Plus, though I didn't mention this, I LOATHE public speaking.

"My deadline is 10 p.m. tonight," he said.

He wanted to pitch the story around a 22-year-old Miami University graduate who died of pneumonia a couple of weeks ago. She didn't go to the doctor because she didn't have health insurance and was afraid of incurring the bill.

"We want people who are uninsured to know they have options," he said.

The Clinic needs money. More than that, we need volunteer doctors. What we don't need: more patients. It's not unusual for 50 people to show up for one of our adult walk-in clinics. Depending on the number of doctors who've volunteered that night, we sometimes turn half of the people away.

(In case you're wondering how that works, we triage all of them. Then we select the number we can see from among the sickest, and ask the others to reschedule, or, in some cases, to seek care in a more appropriate venue, like the ER or the Public Health department.)

But when your revenue comes from grants and donations, it's not not a good idea to refuse publicity. And it's an even worse idea to piss off the media.

After explaining all this to him, I agreed to let him come.

The result:

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Sunday Snippet: In the Eyes of a Child

Yesterday, I was putting on makeup, in preparation for taking a couple of grandkids to the Yellow Springs Street Fair.

"What's that?" asks Kylie, age 5.

"Highlighter. It covers the dark circles under Grandma's eyes."

"Ooooh."

I finish applying the highlighter, then turn to her.

"What do you think?"

She inspects me carefully.

"Do you have any more?"

Friday, October 9, 2009

Fiction Friday: 3 winners and a new prompt

Had a particularly good week with my novel.

Yesterday I wrote this scene:

When I arrived at Kim’s, I could hear the rumble of the foot-bath through the apartment door. I knocked once and then let myself in. The scent of nail polish remover greeted me.

Since Kim started working at the hospital, we’ve gotten into a routine of getting together every other Tuesday, her day off when she works the weekend, for mani-pedi’s. This week she’d apparently started without me. I passed through the foyer and into the living room.

There, in the papasan chair where I usually sit, her feet ensconced in a bubbling foot-bath, sat Ben.


And I don't know who was more surprised: Ellen, my protagonist, or me. Because it was never in my conscious mind for Ben (who is female, by the way -- Ben is short for "Benatar" -- her mother was a Pat Benatar fan) to be there. I was just typing along, and when Ellen turned the corner, there she was. I instantly realized it made perfect sense. The scene, which needed to include an important conversation between Ellen and Kim on the subject of having children via artificial insemination, would be greatly enriched by Ben's presence. (Odd numbers are good for characters in a scene. They automatically generate the potential for conflict.)

Even more important, I realized I've hit what I think of as the crockpot stage in writing a book, where the soup keeps simmering whether you're actively stirring it or not.

Now let's hope I didn't just jinx myself, bragging about how well things are going....

Last Week's Winner:

Last week, in response to my challenge to describe a character strictly by the contents of his pockets/her purse, we had 3 takers: Steven G, Dee and Mrs. Mullet, from Frogs in my Formula (a hilarious blog -- if you've never been, she's definitely worth a look-in).

Each of them left me wanting to know more about their character, which is exactly what a character description should do, so bravo!

Next Week's Prompt:

For next week, we're going to try a variation on a prompt Katrina Kittle, Dayton's own bestselling novelist, who's teaching the fiction class I'm currently attending, used this week.

Choose one of the following personas: A ballerina OR a surgeon. In that persona, describe a fight that broke out at a night club.

The Rules:
1) Must be 100 words or less.
2) Must be posted by Wednesday midnight Eastern time.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Web Wednesday: Awkward Family Photos

Hoodchick over at My Life Requires Alcohol sent me this Powerpoint show. It should more accurately be titled, "Fucked Up Family Photos."

Which one is the most truly twisted?

I'll let you be judge.

Awkward Family Photos - Slide Show

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

The Trouble with Tort Reform - Part 2: McCoffee, the Real Grounds

The most common example of tort law gone awry I hear cited is the McDonald’s spilled coffee lawsuit.

In case you were living in a cave in 1992, here are the essentials:

A 79-year-old Albuquerque, New Mexico, woman ordered a 49¢ cup of coffee from the drive-thru window. She was sitting in the passenger seat and her grandson was driving. He parked the car so she could add cream and sugar, but when she opened the lid, she spilled the coffee on her lap, burning her thighs, buttocks and groin. She sued McDonald’s and the jury awarded her $2.86 million dollars.

Like most other people, I saw this as a frivolous lawsuit, the kind with which people looking to make a quick buck clog the court system. I changed my view after a product liability lawyer visited my Business Law class at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, MN and shared the rest of the story:

1) Stella Liebeck, the old woman in the case, wound up with 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body, and lesser burns over another 16%. She spent eight days in the hospital, where she received skin grafts and her weight dropped to 83 pounds. She required follow-up care for two years.

2) She originally asked McDonalds for $20,000, to cover her medical costs. The company offered her $800.

3) She then contacted a lawyer, who filed the now famous suit, asking for $90,000. McDonald’s refused to settle.

4) The lawyer discovered that between 1982 and 1992, McDonald’s had received more than 700 complaints about people being scalded by the coffee, including many involving small children, whose faces were burned when the cups were knocked over and McLava splashed across the counter. McDonald's had settled various claims previously, for amounts up to $500,000.

5) Despite all these problems, including this high-profile suit, McDonald’s refused to change the temperature at which the coffee was served. Why? Because you get the most coffee from a given amount of beans at that temperature and the amount they were spending on scalding claims cost less than using cooler water would.

6) The award, which seemed so ridiculously high, amounted to two days revenue from the sales of McDonald’s coffee world-wide. On appeal, it was reduced to $640K. Ms. Liebeck settled for something less than that.

Based on my posts over the past two days, you'd think I'm totally against tort reform, but I'm not. I'm willing to back ANYTHING that will help get health care costs in this country under control before they kill a bunch more people and destroy any chance America has of competing in a global market.

But before we start making changes, I want to ensure people understand that:

1) This is only a small piece of the health care cost issue and

2) The media only tells you the part of a story that will sell papers, or get ratings, or generate clicks.

Just one more reason to read the Chronicles!

Monday, October 5, 2009

The Trouble with Tort Reform - Part 1

One idea for fixing the access to healthcare/medical insurance issue in this country is to simply enact sweeping tort reform.

The logic is this:
a) You limit the amount of “pain and suffering” damages plaintiffs can receive to a quarter of a million dollars. (Research indicates this is the optimum amount.)
b) This, in turn, trims both malpractice premiums and “defensive medicine” costs and
c) Voila! Problem fixed!

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this approach:

1) Malpractice premiums represent only 2% of the healthcare costs in America.
2) Malpractice premiums are primarily affected by two factors:
a. Number of claims/anticipated claims for a specialty (unlike car insurance, doctors aren’t generally rated for malpractice premiums based on past claims, because past claims are not, statistically, an indicator of future claims).
b. How well the malpractice insurance company did in the stock market the previous year.
3) “Defensive medicine,” that is, the practice of running unnecessary tests and procedures, is not strictly defensive. Doctors are paid by insurance companies and by Medicare/Medicaid for each service, so they make more money if they do more tests.

The thing that’s especially interesting about that is, because every medical procedure is an opportunity for another medical error, running more tests/ performing more procedures actually yields worse outcomes. The Mayo Clinics in Rochester, MN and Jacksonville, FL have some of the lowest Medicare costs in the country and they also have the best outcomes.

As for the $250,000 limit on pain and suffering, I’d like to share this story.

A number of years ago, the pastor of my church went in for a routine laparoscopic procedure on his gall bladder. During the procedure, the surgeon accidentally nicked his aorta. For the next few hours in recovery, he bled and no one noticed, which damaged his internal organs. When he awoke a week later, they told him it was unlikely he’d ever walk again.

He did not sue the hospital, because, he said, Christians don’t sue people over mistakes. They forgive them. (Gotta love someone who can walk the talk.) And the entire church prayed for him, and he put a lot of energy into physical therapy, and he did walk again.

But my thought is this: if he had never recovered, would $25,000 a year for the next ten years been reasonable compensation for a man in his early 40’s who could no longer earn a living?

Tomorrow: McCoffee – The Real Grounds

(Most of the data for this post was drawn from the Robert Wood Johnson synthesis project paper "Understanding Malpractice Insurance: A Primer," which you can find at http://www.rwjf.org/pr/synthesis/reports_and_briefs/pdf/no10_primer.pdf. The rest I found on the Kaiser Family Foundation website (http://www.kff.org/).

Friday, October 2, 2009

Fiction Friday: Please Say "Hi" to Dee!

The first time I attended the Central Ohio Fiction Writers' Conference, I met Dee Garretson, a woman a little younger than myself who was working, as I was, on a historical romance. We emailed a few times after the conference, but I suck at keeping up contacts and we lost touch.

Three years later, I again went to the COFW conference, where I met up with Dee once more. She was pitching her historical romance, but growing frustrated, and I had moved on to Novel #2, a suspense thriller. This time we managed to keep in touch, meeting occasionally for dinner and non-stop writing talk.

Then, in the spring of 2008, for a lark, she dashed off a middle-grade action adventure novel about the President's son getting trapped, along with two young friends, inside Camp David while outside a forest fire raged. She wrote it with her own son in mind and when she emailed me the manuscript, I was blown away. It was terrific.

Long story short, she's one of the few people whom I know personally who's ever gotten a contract with a major publishing house. HarperCollins will publish Escape from Camp David next summer.

Last week, at the prodding of her agent, she launched her blog. If you find time, go visit her: she's not only a great writer, she's a cool lady.

This Week's Prompt:

Describe a character ONLY by the things in her purse/his pockets.

Think of things that will tell us her/his age (no driver's licenses - that's cheating), profession, marital status, religious beliefs, political persuasion, criminal history, relationship status.....

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