Trey R. Barker – Official Website and Blog

To Talk, Perhaps To Think (slightly long post)

March 1, 2011 – 9:26 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

It started with one of my Facebook posts.

“Hmmmm, the Bristol Palin ‘memoir’ is now official: ‘Not Afraid of Life.’ And for some reason, the second half of Socrates’ famous quote comes to mind: the unlived life is not worth examining.”

Then there was a comment or two declaring the book not worth reading.  Those posts understood the asshattery of having a girl barely twenty tell us about her years of wisdom, not to mention that there are brilliant writers having trouble getting books published while this is passed off as literature.

Then this:  “Agree or disagree with her politics, she has given more ‘hope’ for families that have kids with Down syndrome than anyone in the past few decades.”

It came from a high school chum.  While we passed a pleasant word or two in the hallways, we were never friends, never drank beer or got busted, never trolled for chicks.

I remember he was a monster athlete and a decent human being (not as in half-assed good, but in that he seemed to have a decent soul and tried to treat people decently).

I value ideas and debate and thrashing out what I believe and why I believe it.  So I question everything and want to be questioned.  I want to defend my ideas, to make them logical and sound.

The next post was his: “Sorry, wrong Palin.  You’re right she hasn’t even lived a life yet.”

I did not see that post when I responded.  Had I, I wouldn’t have taken him to task for confusing Sarah with Bristol, but I still would have asked the other questions.

My response: “ First of all, Bristol’s child doesn’t have Down Syndrome…unless you believe Sarah didn’t actually bear that child and Bristol did.  Secondly, hope for what?  How does simply having a child with Down’s Syndrome give anyone hope?  Thirdly, Trig is nothing more than a prop the Mama Grizzly waves around at rallies and speeches.”

Understand that I have no experience with Down’s Syndrome.  I’ve never known anyone who had it and if I’ve known family members of those with DS, it’s never been made clear to me.

I posted again immediately: “And I wonder if maybe the kid on the show ‘My So Called Life,’ which was about a kid with Down’s Syndrome, maybe gave more hope in the last few decades than any third rate talking head…seeing as how he actually had Down’ Syndrome and proved you could be a productive member of society rather than spending your time quitting jobs before blathering on and on at 100 grand per speech.”

Another high school chum posted this: “I would say the actress who plays the character, Becky, on Glee has given more hope to children with Down Syndrome than ANYTHING Mrs. Palin has done to date.  As a matter of fact, when she defended Rush after he used the word, retarded, she pretty much took that train backwards a couple of decades!”

The response: “Well I guess since I have an older child with Down Syndrome I would have a different perspective.  I’ve met Chris Burke and he is awesome, but only so many kids with DS are going to grow up to be actors.  Me and my wife have been on our local board for DS for quite some time and been to National events as well.  Palin has given the common family a voice that hadn’t been there since the Shriver family.  The Liberal elite and wealthy just don’t have kids with Down Syndrome very often, because they usually get aborted, so there is not much support among this class.  I’ve heard first hand how she has spent hours meeting and talking with families with kids.  I know the liberal media never showed this side of her, but you can use the word ‘prop’ if you like, but that just shows where your mind is.  There is more to people than just politics, but some people can’t get past that.  I’m sorry some can’t get past that, but I guess it takes a little more than watching the news.”

Wow.  A jolt of electricity, anyone?

So let’s take a look at his accusation.  With the exception of me calling her a third-rate talking head, there was no name calling.  What we posted was fact.  Palin has, in fact, quit jobs.  Palin does pull down, in fact, about $100,000 per speech.  Palin did, in fact, defend Rush Limbaugh when he called a huge swath of America retarded.  Those are facts, not hate.

(I will admit the bit about Trig being a prop is not a provable fact….)

So how did he respond to facts?  With the notion of a liberal elite that aborts most of their babies because they might be stricken with DS.   And then the idea that I am a lesser human than he and SP because I used the word ‘prop.’  “…just shows where your mind is.”  Honestly, I don’t even know what that means.

He follows with this: “(name), thanks for sharing, I didn’t know there was an actress on Glee with Down Syndrome, I guess I should try and watch a show.  I also enjoy how people that don’t have kids with Down Syndrome know what drives our train.  I know other groups that don’t like outsiders telling how to live their lives.  I wonder why people that preach tolerance are some of the most intolerant!”

Again, I have no clue what he’s talking about.  When he writes that people without children with DS don’t know what drives his train, I haven’t any idea what that means.  Obviously I can’t know his life, I never said I did.  I never told him how to live his life or gave him direction on a course of action for his family.  I would never do that because I’m not on his train.

What I did do was ask a question.

One of the things I hate most in debates are people who hide behind broad brush arguments, as he does here.  “I wonder why people that preach tolerance….”  Using the generic and collective ‘people’ rather than calling me out.  If you’re talking to me, then talk to me.  I’m a big boy, I can take it.

Plus, come on, no one has ever heard me preach this dog whistle concept of ‘tolerance.’  In fact, I’m not particularly tolerant.  I think idiots ought to be called out for their idiocy, just as I would expect to be called out for mine.

But he’s not done.  There is one more post: “Well I’m pretty sure I said that politics aside she has offered ‘hope’ to families with kids with DS.  The (sic) I said sorry, wrong Palin, and then you spouted off quite a bit of hate.  So I guess that’s how it got started.”

Then he and the other poster had a short, pleasant discussion of the DS characters on Glee and the politics and name-calling were left behind.

But his last post points up most of why I wanted to write.

First and foremost, as I said at the beginning, I’m all for debate.  I am not for name-calling in the stead of debate.  I hate avoiding questions or answers by dropping a bunch of nasty names and making broad brush statements.

Ultimately, I asked a question which he refused to answer.

Instead, he filled the air with obfuscations, hitting the money-word ‘aborts,’ and twice using the oh-so-scary ‘liberal,’ once as part of a supposed elite and once as part of the media.  What was truly odd about that name calling was that he lumped the wealthy in with the liberal elite.  Those are two very different bits of class warfare and I’ve never heard them put together before so kudos for the mash-up!

But here’s the thing: he never answered the question.  He referenced the question in his later post, declaring again that she’s given hope to families with kids with DS, but never explained what that hope was.  Has she pushed for more research funding?  Has she pushed for greater understanding of DS?  Has she pushed for greater public acceptance of people with DS?

If so, then she’s done it damned quietly.  All I ever see her talking about is how Obama has fucked up everything and how FLOTUS should quit forcing us to eat healthy.

I want him to answer the question.  I want to know what she’s done.  I want to be proven wrong.  I want to know, since I have little to no understanding of this condition, that there is someone pushing America on it.  I want to know that she’s doing what Michael J. Fox has done for Parkinson’s, which is push and push and push for more research and better funding, and what Betty Ford has done for addiction since 1982, which is bring it front of mind for the average American.

Has she done all that?  Has she done any of that?  Tell me she has.  I’m begging to know she has.

Fundamentally, I guess I’m disappointed the debate went south so quickly; that I was accused of spewing hateful rhetoric even as he told the world that am part of a liberal elite that routinely aborts its babies.

Silly me, wanting actual debate in my debates, wanting actual facts in my debates.

As useless as it may seem, I will never stop hoping to one day discover exactly that.

 

Random Einstein

March 1, 2011 – 9:23 am by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

Albert Einstein - 

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”

Yeah…what he said.

(non) Book News

February 25, 2011 – 5:33 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

Last summer, I published two books.  They were small books, published at my own expense.  It’s what the book industry quaintly calls ‘vanity publishing.’

One was a compendium of my cancer blog entries.  The Cancer Chronicles.  It gave the entire year, from diagnosis to the end of chemo treatments and the ensuing party…wherein friends brought me huge amounts of Jack Daniels’, Dr Pepper, and Oreos as  way of saying, ‘We’re glad you’re not dead.’

I published that book because lots of people asked about it.  Those entries, for whatever reason, struck a chord.  Friends and family obviously, but also people struggling with cancer and what that might mean.  I’d shopped the idea around to a number of small publishers and no one was interested.  I shopped it to my former agent, too, and he was exquisitely unimpressed.

The second was a collection of my darkest crime stories, Remembrance and Regrets.  Did I say dark?  Very dark.  Waaaay dark.  Extremely dark.  The first story is about child molestation and it doesn’t brighten up much from there.  All of the stories except one had been published before, in magazines and anthologies, on the web.  But taken together, I found no publishers interested.

Full disclosure: I didn’t work too hard finding publishers for that one.  I knew it was too dark.  Having been in the business for a long while, I generally know what is out of most publishers’ boundaries.  It’s possible I could have found someone interested, but I wanted to try fiction as the second half of my self-publishing experiment, non-fiction being the first half.

So it was that I set out last summer to do a tour and shove those books down some people’s throats.  Tried a new reading tactic, as well.  Instead of doing bookstores, where I never sold more than a couple of books, got zero publicity from the store (either media or in-store), and, in fact, once didn’t even have books on hand at the store(!), I tried something different.

I got friends to host readings.  It was a complete gas.  My friends invited friends they knew were interested in books or authors, cancer, crime, whatever, and it was intimate and fun and extremely worth while financially.  Sold more books in that one tour, with only four stops, than I’ve sold in every single bookstore appearance COMBINED.

So my plan this year was to do that again.  I wanted to publish a collection of the best CopStories on this blog, and hit the road.  Had at least half a route mapped out and five friends already wanting to host a shindig, with more showing interest.

It would have been great fun.

It ain’t happening.

Let me tell you why.

At my Sheriff’s Office, we work twelve hour shifts.  They’re long and they’re hard.  It’s tough being on duty for twelve straight hours, especially on busy days.  Granted, this is a small county and busy days, for us, are very different than busy days for the Chicago cops.  But twelve hour days are tough.

Given that we work such a schedule, our days off are glorious.  Over the course of a year, we only work six months.  Sounds like we’re swindling the taxpayer, but remember, we work twelve hour days and every other weekend, it’s three days in a row.  Thirty-six weekend hours of fights, drunks, domestics, illegal hunters, underage drinking parties, etc., etc.

But the great thing about how our schedule is laid out, taking fourteen days off actually only cost us four or five days of vacation time.

That was what I used last summer for the tour and what I was planning on using this summer for the tour.

But our schedule has just changed and now we’re working eight hour shifts.  On a day-by-day basis, that rocks my world.  Each day will be better because it’s shorter and I won’t be so exhausted at the end, I won’t be so cranky and tired and ready to climb into bed and hide.

The drawback is…obviously…how the schedule is laid out.  Six days on, two off for four or five weeks, then a three day weekend.

Thus taking fourteen days off will cost me, generally, twelve vacation days.

I simply can’t afford to take two weeks to do a summer tour for a new book.  And doing anything less than two weeks (preferably three) doesn’t make it worth my while gas and time wise because I can’t get schedule enough readings.

So where we had it slightly better than the average worker, we now have it slightly worse.

Not a big deal, really.  I mean come on, my primary job is at the Sheriff’s Office.  Writing is secondary and I’ve already done more writing and publishing than most people ever have a chance to do.  So I’m far, far ahead of the game.

At the same time, it makes me a little sad.  I’d made some great new friends on the road last year and was looking forward to seeing them again.  The librarians in Oklahoma, the Stanton chick with the great laugh, my high-school chums who bought a lot more books while drunk after the reading than sober during the reading (hmmm…might have to remember that as a sales technique).

The CopStories book could still be published, obviously, but being unable to promote it means it would have a tougher go in terms of sales.  It would come and go and that’s a sad, sad fate for a book.  Maybe next year I can build up enough vacation time to get it done.

But not this year.

So for those of you who’ve been asking about such a collection, my apologies.  You’ll have to wait just a weeeee bit longer.  But take heart, there is another CopStory coming soon.  Involves a big red bus.

And blood.

And making my huevos hurt!

Cain’t You Right How I Talk?

February 2, 2011 – 9:44 am by Trey
Category » All Things Literary

(I just finished a piece for a forth-coming book of writing tips.  It’s all about dialogue and, as happens so frequently, my original was scads longer than what the editor wanted.  I cut it back and we both came to a happy place.  But I thought I’d post both the original essay and exercise here.)

“Then he will talk – good gods! How he will talk!”

That’s from Nathaniel Lee’s 1677 play The Death of Alexander the Great, and while it bemoans how much a character talks, I use it as a reminder of how a character talks.

As writers, we have to recognize that regardless of our style or genre, our work is absolutely pinned to our dialogue.  If the dialogue is bad, the story will die a slow, horrible death.  But the converse is also true: if the dialogue is good, it can save even a mediocre story.

How do I know?  Because I know a reader will absolutely read the dialogue.  They may ignore everything else, but they will drink in what a character says, and if it’s good, they’ll remember the story positively.  Dialogue is so important that Elmore Leonard mentions it frequently in his Ten Rules of Writing:

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.  Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing [is] perpetrating hooptedoodle…or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.”

So the challenge is to write great dialogue without the hooptedoodle.  Or, in crime terms, to get ourselves a nice, shiny, nickel-plated .357 rather than a beat-up .25 with a broken butt.

I believe great dialogue comes in three parts.  The dialogue, the attribution tags, and the dialect.  To help you get those three things together, I’ve got a few suggestions, then some exercises I do all the time.

You can’t have great dialogue on the page without great dialogue in your ears.  So fill up your ears.  Dialogue is anywhere and everywhere.  People are the talking-est things ever.  They talk in stores and bars, on street corners; and they do it morning, noon, and night.  But they’re inability to shut up means we get to steal their great dialogue all the time.

Just make sure you listen critically.

Don’t listen for the exactness of a conversation because most conversations are verbal train wrecks.  People talk over each other and into each other; they start and stop and start again.  They begin ten sentences before finishing one.  They bounce from topic to topic.  They foul tenses and agreements, they mangle verbs.  They talk in passive voice.

So don’t transcribe the conversation verbatim and call that dialogue.  If you do, your editor will put a double-tap behind your ear, toss your body in the water treatment plant, and sleep like a baby.

Listen instead for the rhythm of those conversations; for the informality, the contractions, the dropped words, the questions phrased as declarations, the slang, the lack of exclamation points.  Listen for the interesting ways people describe even the most mundane things.  Discover the conversational short hand specific to people’s particular groups.  (Cops are great for this.  Listen during their coffee or meal break and you’ll wonder if they’re even speaking English.)  It is that conversational short hand that can lift dialogue from bad to good or good to great by making readers feel like they’re being allowed to see inside some super-secret club house ritual.

Listen for who’s dominating the conversation.  How are they doing it?  By volume?  By speed?  Maybe they’re speaking softly or slowly, forcing everyone else to listen.  Note, too, how others in that conversation respond to their domination.

Listen listen listen.  Listen for rhythm and then recreate the essence of those conversations.

Okay, try this bit of dialogue on for size.  It’s based on a real conversation and it is exactly how a real conversation sounds

“Good afternoon, ma’am.  Deputy Mullins with the Sheriff’s Office,” he said officiously.  “Can I see your license and insurance, please?”

She said, “But…what’d I do?  Why did you stopping me?  I…uh…I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Well, ma’am, you did not come to a complete stop,” he said.  “At that sign back there?  Route 40 and 2500 North Avenue?  You did not come to a complete stop.  In fact, you – “

“I did so, I stopped,” she interjected.

“Ma’am, I was watching and – “

“Yes, I did,” she ejaculated.  “I absolutely stop -   I absolutely…uh…stopped.”  She said, “But I’m not going to argue about it.”

“Uh…ma’am,” he said, “Do you understand the definition of not arguing?”

“You listen to me,” she said forcefully.  “I have lots of things on my mind.  My head is just full right now.  Did you even know my husband is in Iraq?  He’s fighting over there and I can’t think about anything else.”

“Ma’am, I understand – “

“No, you don’t understand anything,” she yelled.  “Most of the time he’s…that’s all I can think about.  Because he’s fighting over there….  So I’ve got lots on my mind.”

Okay, so rewrite it, but just clean up the dialogue, don’t worry about anything other than what the characters are actually saying.  Take out repeats and stops and starts.  Remove stutters and anything that doesn’t flow.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Done?  So what does your version sound like?  Maybe it’s something like this:

“Good afternoon, ma’am, Deputy Mullins, Sheriff’s Office,” he said officiously.  “Can I see your license and insurance, please?”

She said, “Why did you stop me?”

“Ma’am, you didn’t come to a complete stop,” he said.

“I stopped,” she interjected.

“No, ma’am.”

“Yes, I did,” she ejaculated.  “I’m not gonna argue about it.”

“Ma’am, do you understand the definition of not arguing?”

“Well,” she said forcefully.  “I have lots of things on my mind.  My husband’s in Iraq.”

Not a bad cleaning job for just changing the direct dialogue.  The essence of the conversation is still there, but it flows much better.

So now let’s look at how those characters said what they said.

Attribution tags, those ‘he saids/she saids’ which guide the reader, can be your greatest ally or your biggest enemy.  I recognize they are a necessary evil with which I have to make peace, but mostly I don’t dig them.  If handled badly, they will absolutely get in the way of a great story or scene.  They are literary mechanicals, the equivalent of seeing the boom mic in a TV shot, or seeing a lighting source badly hidden on a stage set.  But when done well, or done as infrequently as possible, they don’t have to be deadly.

When it comes to most writing, the biggest problem with attribution tags is that writers use entirely too many of the damned things.  I’ve seen stories that have tags on every single line of dialogue…in conversations of two people.  So how many do you have in your stories and novels?  I’d bet a day’s salary it’s too many (and yeah, I realize that’s a subjective standard, but I’d also bet even you think you use too many).

The thing is?  Most readers actually don’t need many.  And fewer still if you’ve done a great job on the dialogue.  Think of ‘said’ as a street sign that occasionally lets a reader know they’re on the right street.  Anything other than ‘said’ is a giant stop sign that can yank a reader out of your story.  This is another of Leonard’s rules:

Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.  The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.”

At some point, you’ll be tempted to use a tag that explains how the dialogue was spoken, thus hiding the tag behind other words.

“John, I’m leaving you,” she whispered.

“John, I’m leaving you,” she cried.

If she needs to whisper, have him lean forward so he can hear her.  It’s more dynamic by virtue of movement and puts her in control by forcing him move.  Also, when you tell us she’s crying, you miss an opportunity to explore the kind of crying and thus give us more about the situation and her character.

Okay, so you decide to use nothing but said.  Great.  Perfect.  Except now you’re thinking maybe you should modify it.

“I did not,” Lindsay said forcefully.

“Yes, you did,” Goldie said evenly.

Bad idea.  Think of it like an actual conversation rather than something on a page.  If you were talking with a friend, you wouldn’t stop the conversation to tell them your emotional state.

“I did not,” Lindsay said.  “By the way, I’m being forceful.”

“Yes, you did,” Goldie said.  “And I’m being even.”

Instead, Lindsay would kick her shoes off into the street and Goldie would be expressionless.

Okay, so now you’ve decide to use only ‘said,’ and not to modify it.  Just a plain, old, boring tag; literary vanilla ice cream.  Now remember this: most times, you don’t need them at all.

At one point in James Lee Burke’s The Neon Rain, Robicheaux and Cletus Purcel are deep in conversation.  Toward the end, they have a rapid-fire back and forth, something Burke does frequently in a number of his books.  In this particular conversation, during almost two full pages, Burke uses exactly three attribution tags.

I’ve read writers who have more tags in a single sentence.

But Burke doesn’t need them.  We know who’s who not only because there are only two people in the conversation, but also by how those two people ask their questions and phrase their statements.  Each character has his own rhythm in what and how he speaks.

Here are some examples of when you can bag the tag.

1)         Don’t use a tag if there is some physical action immediately following.  ”Not what I said,” John said.  John flicked his hair.

2)         Don’t use a tag if the next line of dialogue includes a name.

“I didn’t say that,” said John.

“But, John, you did say that.”

3)         Don’t use a tag if there are only two people in the conversation unless you need a rhythm break.

4)         If there are more than two people, cut the number of tags by giving a character certain words or phrases or sentence/structural style.  It’ll signal the reader as to who is speaking.

With all that boiling in your brain and computer, let’s take another look at our conversation from earlier.  Now edit it with an eye toward ‘said’ and its modifiers.

“Good afternoon, ma’am, Deputy Mullins, Sheriff’s Office.  Can I see your license and insurance, please?”

“Why did you stop me?”

“Ma’am, you didn’t come to a complete stop.”

“I stopped.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Yes, I did.  I’m not gonna argue about it.”

“Ma’am, do you understand the definition of not arguing?”

“I have lots of things on my mind.  My husband’s in Iraq.”

That’s beginning to be a tight, sleek conversation.  Lots of changes and fixes and clean-ups, but the foundation of the conversation hasn’t changed at all.

So my challenge to you, then, is to write an exercise that is a conversation with no tags.  But do it with three characters (two characters is too easy).  Remember the guidelines, but also remember rhythm and what words each character would use as well as their personal sentence structure.

And then do the same exercise but with four characters, or five, or more.  Every time you add a voice, your job gets exponentially harder.  It becomes more difficult to distinguish between voices.  When you get this many characters, you have to use tags, there is no way around it.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean blasting attribution tags like buckshot from a shotgun.  Maybe, instead, you can yank a different weapon you’re your holster.

I mentioned earlier that you should listen for interesting ways people say what they say.  Usually, that means conversational short-hand or slang.  But every once in a while, you’re going to hear dialect.

Dialect, or patois, is a great dialogue spice as long as it fits the character.  But a touch of spice goes a tremendously long way.  Too much and the entire conversation goes off the end of the dinner table and even the dog won’t touch it.

For example, from early 20^th century Georgia writer Will N. Harbin’s short story, “A Humble Abolitionist:”

“I reckon you’d ruther set out heer whar you kin ketch a breath o’air from what little’s afloat,” she said, cordially….

“An’, Pete Gill, I’m powerfully afeerd you are in fer it.  As much as you’ve spoke agin slave-holdin’ as a practice you’ve got to make a start at it.  The Colonel said that you held a mortgage on Big Joe, an’ ef you don’t take ‘im right off you won’t get a red cent fer yore debt.”

I think I’m choking on dialect.  In fact, I think I’ve choked to death.

On the other hand, if he had stripped every bit of dialect out, how boring would that be?

“I guess you would rather sit out here where you can catch a    breath of air from what little is afloat,” she said….

“And, Pete Gill, I am powerfully afraid you are in for it.  As much as    you have spoke against slave-holding as a practice you have got to make a start at it.  The Colonel said that you held a mortgage on Big Joe, and if you do not take him right off, you won’t get a red cent for your debt.”

Nice and clean.  Boring as empty hand cuffs.

Plus, some of it sounds Southern informal while other bits sound too formal.  And there is really nothing in the second example that gives you much flavor of the character speaking.

So use dialect.  Don’t be afeered of it.  Make sure you’ve got the right dialect, and use it cautiously.  Choose something obvious that the reader will instantly understand.  Since you want to use dialect less often, make it mean more when you do.

And yes, Mr. Leonard discusses dialect as part of his rules.

Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop.

In the unpublished sequel to my novel 2000 Miles To Open Road, I have a character who peppers his dialogue with ‘y’all.’  Once upon a time, that was just a southern thing; it’s pretty well spread itself throughout much of the country now.  But because he’s the only character who uses that word, the reader knows immediately who’s speaking.  That reduces the number of attribution tags I need for him.

As obvious as it sounds, dialect is like a foreign language.  If you have a Hispanic character, you wouldn’t write everything in Spanish, but you would drop Spanish words in every once in a while because those are the words that character would use.  Dialect is the same.

Those are the three things I think make great dialogue.  It takes lots of practice and lots of listening and an incredible amount of writing before you’ll get comfortable with it and begin to be happy with what you’ve written.

Lastly, remember this: dialogue can almost always be improved by cutting it.  Look at the exercise we did.  We cut half of it immediately because it just repeated – in different words – something the characters had already said.  So figure out a better, shorter way to have your character speak and that’ll make it seem better instantly.

And read read read.  If you’re not reading, but trying to write anyway, you’re wasting everyone’s time.  Read anything and everything because every word that passes through your eyes and into your brain will teach you something about the words you want passing from your brain to your page.

CopStories: Reason #16 Why I Was Speeding

January 10, 2011 – 9:20 am by Trey
Category » CopStories

“I’m the pastor.”

Then, “We’re late to church.”

And then, “I think I’m going to change my sermon this morning.  How hurrying can cloud your judgment.”

…uh…what?

January 1, 2011 – 12:47 pm by Trey
Category » ...uh...what?

I overheard this in Applebee’s recently….

“Well, Uncle John just passed away…does that help?”

CopStories: Still The Truck Comes

December 31, 2010 – 10:29 am by Trey
Category » CopStories

She came to my attention in September, 2009.

It was amusing, funny in a sad sort of way, and so I made fun of her a little.  Mostly gentle humor, I like to think, but I laughed at her.

She’d been drunk.  Riding a bicycle through one of our small towns, calling loudly for her boyfriend.  I’d been afraid she was going to get run over by one of the semis thundering through on the state highway that sliced the village in half.

She’d been sheathed in a mostly see-through shirt and she’d kept her cell phone in her bra.  When she figured out that, instead of calling for her lover, she could actually call her lover, she yanked her shirt up and her bra down to get at her cell phone, and let the glory of the twins hang out.

I came across her again a few weeks ago.

Wasn’t as funny this time.

My partner and I got called to a domestic early in our shift.  Call it 6:15 or 6:30.  When I arrived, I realized I’d been to this ramshackle disaster of a house a few times before, serving papers and checking welfare.

The windows were covered in broken panes of glass and plastic sheeting, the side door was hidden deep inside an alcove open to the outside.  The alcove had a desk stacked with mail, bras hanging from a line of Christmas lights strung from corner to corner, and a door to the house that wasn’t quite paper-mache, but close.

I knocked, hard, and got no answer.  So I opened the door.

She sat at the table, staring at us, her eyes streaked with mascara and tears, and wearing a tight, mostly see through shirt.

I recognized her immediately.

But I also recognized something else: her posture.  It was straight and harsh, uncomfortable.  And her eyes keep shooting from us to a doorway to our left.  I put my hand on my gun and asked if I could come in.

She said yes and I moved quickly.  Her posture was so strange, and her expression so discomfited, I had no idea if the other half of this call was still around, maybe with knives, maybe with guns.

But she was alone.  The guy who’d beaten her had left.

Her posture was odd because since the last time I’d seen her, just about a year ago, she’d had a couple of back surgeries.

We talked to her for a while and got the standard story.  She moved in with him so they could take care of each other; two people who’d been beaten up by life and who’d met at a bar while too deeply into their cups.  They argued constantly, but then believed what passed for making amends was love.

To me, it seemed less like love than desperation and a twisted kind of co-dependence.

I try not to judge because relationships can never be understood by those outside of them, but I just wanted to get in her face and yell, “What the fuck is wrong with you?  Get out of this nightmare.  Get away from this son of a bitch before he kills you!”

She wasn’t quite incapacitated; she could move, albeit slowly and with great effort.  Even sitting at the table and talking to us seemed to be difficult. And this guy – this Brent – had been beating on her because he’d been drunk and swacked on coke and mad she couldn’t get on her knees and blow him.

While we were there, Brent called.  I answered the phone and invited him to come talk to me.  He declined my request and immediately started crying.  He loved her and was sorry.

“For?” I asked, hoping I could get an admission.

“For not being a good person.”

But try as I might, I couldn’t get him to cough up that he’d beaten on her.  He wouldn’t tell me where he was and eventually, he hung up.

She had no marks at all, and the house was a disaster above and beyond anything that might have happened as the result of a fight.  Beer cans were strewn everywhere but they were in the yard, too.  Empty vodka bottles were piled on every surface but none were broken.  The fast food wrappers seemed to be a decorating choice, as did the piles of clothes and mish-mash of toiletries.

It was chaotic, but that seemed a natural state.

In other words, I had zero physical evidence of anything other than a nightmarish, alcohol-driven living situation.

I believe he beats on her.  I believe she beats on him.  I believe that together, they hurt each other frequently, violently, and nearly endlessly.  Who knows how many black eyes and scratches there have been?  Who knows how many minor trips to the hospital?  Who knows how many cuts from broken booze bottles?

But there was nothing criminal I could prove that day.  And after nearly a half hour of talking, she changed her story and said he hadn’t hit her and anyway, she didn’t want him arrested.

He was the only one who worked, she said.

And he loves me, she said.

So finally we left.  There was nothing we could do.

I half expected the sound of a semi to pound down on us as we left, blasting through on the state highway, but none came.  The air was dead silent.

And I realized that maybe my concerns for her getting run over by a truck when she’d been drunk were misplaced.

Maybe, just maybe, the truck is their relationship.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s barreling down on them, full speed with no brakes.

We’ll be back…and it will be bloody and ugly and we’ll be lucky if only one of them is dead.

CopStories: Tony Montana?

December 28, 2010 – 11:21 am by Trey
Category » CopStories

It was like that scene in the flick where he falls asleep in his coke.

White everywhere.

Now…I admire that we mounted a rescue mission.  I really do.

But maybe putting together a convoy of five vehicles to drive into 50 mile an hour winds whipping up more than a foot of snow on a roadway that was invisible (hence the need for a rescue mission) was not the most efficient way to do that.

I, being the only available deputy, was tapped to partake of this rescue.  I was fourth in line, behind two giant plows, their boss in a four-wheel drive, high-clearance truck, me in my two-wheel drive crime cruiser, and a four-wheel drive tow truck behind me.

We were told to drive into the nightmare, stop at each and every vehicle, get the occupants out, then hook the things to a tow truck, and follow the plows out.

Problem: one tow truck, five or six known stuck vehicles.

Problem: the plows never stopped.

Driving at less than 5 miles an hour, I followed the convoy into the storm.  At the first stalled car, half buried in a snow drift, I got out of my car, slipped and fell on the ice, was blinded by the snow, but made it to the stalled car.  I found no one and got back to my car.

Put it in drive, looked up, and saw no one.

Because the plows had never stopped.

They had disappeared into the raging wind and I couldn’t see the road.  I told the tow driver behind me that the car was empty and we were leaving it in the ditch where we found it.

Slowly, ever so slowly, we inched forward to the next few cars, going through the same ritual at every stop.  My uniform got increasingly wet, I got increasingly frozen, and the plows got further and further away.

At the third or fourth car, I found her.  Older, anxious, sitting behind the wheel of her car, trying to drive it out.

It was more than three-quarters buried by a snow drift that continued to grow because of the wind.  The back wheels spun and spun, digging her deeper and deeper in.

“You’re coming with me,” I said.

“What about my car?”

“Fuck that car,” I said.

She looked stunned for a moment and I immediately regretted my choice of words.  But I was standing there, straining with everything I had to keep her car door open against the wind.  I’d already fallen half a dozen times, my fingers were turning blue while I found I couldn’t hardly move my mouth or lips.

We weren’t going to take the time, at the height of the worst storm in years, to hook it up and try and drag it out.  Even if the tow truck had been able, which I didn’t think was possible because you can’t haul something out of being stuck when you have no traction on the ice.

“We’re leaving it.  We’ll get it later.”

She hesitated for just a second, then came with me.

Once in my car, I realized we were completely alone.  The plows were long gone, the tow truck driver behind me was lost somewhere behind me, and I couldn’t see the front end of my car.

I don’t normally suffer from claustrophobia, but seeing nothing but white for 360 degrees is more than a little unnerving.

I drove slowly and everything was fine for a couple seconds.  But it didn’t take long before I inched into a drift.

I got out and realized the car was now at a fairly severe angle from the road.  So I backed up a few inches, tried to straighten out, and headed forward again.

Into another drift.

Again, the car was at an angle.

Though it felt like I was driving straight, I kept getting sideways.

So I drove a couple feet, got out and checked.  Got back in and drove a couple feet more, got out and checked again.

But I had no point of bearing.  I couldn’t see the road, which meant I had no visual on whether or not I was passing anything.  And I couldn’t tell when the car was moving because the only thing I could see around me – the snow – was moving constantly.  It actually left me with a touch of vertigo.

And now I’ve got another problem because my uniform is completely wet.  Down to my skivvies.  And every time I got out to check the road, the wind froze my wet uniform.

I sat and waited for the tow truck driver behind me to find us.  He did when he almost ran into us.  Then I got on the radio and called the plows.  They were a mile down the road at a staging area.

They had to turn around and come back to rescue the rescuers.

Which leads to another problem: now they’re facing us.

With not enough road space for any of us to turn around.

Eventually, both plows managed to plow out a huge swath so they could get turned around.  Then we managed to follow them out to the staging area.

At that point, we closed the road and I went home to change into a dry uniform.

I then spent the rest of the afternoon directing traffic away from the road.  In the teeth of that storm, people drove right  up (and frequently tried to drive around my squad that was parked sideways on the road with the lights on), and demanded to know why the road was closed.

“Uh…snow?” I said.

Part of the traffic had been directed off of Interstate 80 and around a 20 vehicle accident.  A few hours later, slightly further west, there was another giant crash with five or six cars.

It was an ugly day.

But as it finally wound down, the wind and snow stopped enough for us to get the road cleared.  It took two state plows and eight tow trucks.  Turns out there were something like 13 or 14 vehicles buried in all that snow, way more than we’d realized.

Luckily, there was no one in any of them.  So while they may have been stupid enough to drive into the storm, once they got stuck, they were smart enough to get out of the storm.

But my question is: how?

We never saw anymore cars drive into the nightmare.  And we never saw anyone walk out.

Ooooohhhhh…freaky.

The upshot for me?  I got sick…duh…and had to take three days off.  Then I got better and went to an agency Christmas party where…I got sick again!

I love the holidays.

Is An Unknown Loss Still A Loss?

December 15, 2010 – 11:42 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

Dave Catney is dead.

I just learned of it today.

He died in 1994.

Dave Catney was a jazz pianist based in Houston.  The first album I knew of his was First Flight, released on the tiny Justice Records, a hip independent Texas jazz label, in 1990.  I’d gotten the thing for free for the jazz radio show I hosted and produced at the time (which was what allowed me to get killed on the basketball court by Wynton Marsalis and buy tons of porno mags for The Yellowjackets’ bassist Jimmy Haslip…ah…good times)

It absolutely blew me away.  To be honest,  I hadn’t expected much from it.  I’d lived for a while in Houston and while there was (and still is) good jazz in Texas, Houston isn’t top of mind when it comes to jazz.  What I didn’t know at the time was that Houston was busting seams with great new jazz.

And Dave was part of that.

I played that album quite a bit on the radio and fell more deeply in love with it every time I laid down a track.  Piano, bass, and drums and don’t kid yourself, there was nothing simplistic in the simplicity of that group.  Everything you needed to know about the history and heart of jazz was on that record.

A while after discovering him, I had the chance to bring him to Lubbock for a concert at Texas Tech University.  Every year, the student association hosted various events.  Concerts, speakers, lectures, art exhibits.  A number of times I helped them land some jazz acts, including Spyro Gyra, The Yellowjackets, and lots of Texas jazzers of whom you’ve never heard.

Catney had always been my favorite.  He and I, his bassist and drummer (who I think, for that show, was Ed Soph but some twenty year old details escape me) went to what was, at the time, a Lubbock joint for lunch.  It was called, appropriately enough, Jazz, and while now it’s a chain with locations even in Omaha, at the time it was a tiny joint that played live jazz twice a week.

We must have been there for three hours.  Eating Cajun food and discussing the very essence of music and literature, art and art commerce.

Not once during the entire afternoon did Catney ever make me feel like a kid siting at the adult table.  He was gracious and wonderful and exuberant and modest.

The show that night was quite successful and went on for something like two and a half hours.

I had no idea that, at the time, he was already fighting AIDS and had been for roughly a year.

This was still early in the battle against AIDS.  There were medicines, but all of them were toxic and none seem to be doing anything but delaying the inevitable and – from where I stood, it seemed – making the inevitable more painful.

But even with the diagnosis, even with the painful medications and the uncertainty, Dave kept gigging.  And he traveled all the way to Lubbock from Houston to play jazz.

Huh?  Jazz?  In Lubbock?  At a university?

I can’t imagine what he thought the gig was going to be.  I can’t imagine he thought the rednecks would appreciate his music.

But they did.  It was a standing ovation, if I recall correctly, and the audience asked and asked and asked for more songs.

Fairly soon after that, I left Lubbock and went to Denver.  Dave faded to the background, though I never forgot how much I loved the First Flight album.

Somewhere between Lubbock, a small house in Denver, a larger house in Denver, then a house in Princeton, Illinois, I managed to lose my copy of First Flight.

Today I decided to replace it.  I started trolling the ‘Net, assuming there would be – by now – a twenty year catalog of Catney’s music.  I was anxious to see what he’d done and how he’d grown in the intervening years.

And that’s when I discovered he’d died.

August 11, 1994, when I was still working at D.J.’s Music Box, selling sheet music and talking to people about Dave Catney and his tunes.

After I learned of his death, I spent the day wondering how I could have lost touch with the artist.  Not personal touch, I’d only met him the single time, but how I could claim to be a fan of a guy I’d paid no attention to for nearly two decades.

Seems selfish somehow to have never gone back to that well and tasted the water again.  I could say I was busy with life, or that I was discovering too many other artists and genres, all of which I explore fervently, or some other reason.

And maybe those are all true.  Or maybe I was just selfish.

But I prefer to think that I had Dave’s music.  It was in my head and in my heart, and even though I never got around to replacing my CDs, I never lost the music because every time I thought of it, it made me smile and lightened my step a little.

And isn’t that what music is supposed to do?  Beyond everything else it can do, shouldn’t touching the listener be one of the most fundamental things?

By that definition, I was never too far from Dave’s music.

I just wish there were more of it and that he’d been given the chance to see what he could do with that piano.  Man, I’m telling you, it would have been a helluva ride.

CopStories: Deer Sausage, Anyone?

December 8, 2010 – 9:11 pm by Trey
Category » CopStories

Okay, understand it wasn’t my fault.

That’s first and foremost, all right?

Secondly, you have to remember that even with headlights…and high beams…it’s impossible to see everything.

So after tracking down a possible drunk recently, I headed back to the jail.  (I’d spent quite a bit of time with this guy and realized, eventually, that he wasn’t, in fact, drunk…just feloniously stupid.)

It’s already winter time and night comes very quickly in this part of Illinois.  In fact, night fall happens in about 3.7 seconds.  From the moment you realize the sun is setting, it’s a heartbeat, maybe two, before you’re plunged into darkness.

So I’m driving along and there he is.

First thing I realize is this son of a bitch is HUGE.

I’m not a deer hunter, not by any stretch.  I do not define ‘fun’ as sitting in an outhouse-y sort of structure teetering precariously in a tree at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, freezing my huevos off, waiting for an animal who’s senses are so attuned to danger he smelled and saw me in my little outhouse 30 minutes before he woke up from seventeen miles away.

Plus, it doesn’t seem sporting to me to shoot an animal from a mile away with a scope that could pick out the sex of an astronaut on the moon while covered in deer piss scent to hide your own smell.  You want to impress me with your hunting?

Mano-a-mano, baby.

Which isn’t to say I won’t eat deer meat.  Especially when it’s made into sausage with jalapenos and cheese.  Mmm mmm mmm, lip-smacking good!

Anyway, I’m driving along and there he is.  He’s huge.  He’s in front of me and my car.  And he’s staring at me.

Daring me to hit him.

Damn thing crosses the road two seconds earlier or later and we’re both good.  We both go home that night, he to his mommy, me without having to call my Lieutenant and explain why my squad car has $3,000 worth of damage.

I hit the brakes and hold the wheel straight (I’ve seen too many accidents made worse, if not fatal, when the driver yanked the wheel to try and avoid the hit.)

Then I realize that this thing has a rack of antlers taller than Dikembe Mutombo.

Now I’m thinking: just for karma, this honker’s gonna come tearing through my windshield, which I’ve seen happen, and gore me with that rack.  I’ll be punctured 40 or 50 times and I’ll bleed out before I can stop the car.

I actually heard the conversation of my co-workers: “Damn, lookit all them holes in his face!”

“Must’a shot himself with that shotgun.  You know he wasn’t any too bright.”

But it doesn’t come through the windshield.  Instead, it manages to land dead center on my hood.  Thus none of my headlights or turn signals are damaged.  But one point of the rack blasts right through the right quarter panel on the squad.

Three inches down from the windshield!

So either this thing bounced around like a freakin’ pinball or I actually hit an antlered giraffe with a loooong neck and simply didn’t realize it.

After stopping, I made sure I wasn’t dead, made sure the animal was, then checked the car.  It was drivable and so I continued on to the jail.

My stomach was in knots.

‘Cause I had to make a call.

Our fleet has taken a beating lately.  Lots of deer strikes, a raccoon or two, various other things.  And most cars have lots and lots of miles.  The last thing I wanted to tell my Lieutenant was that my car was down and out.

But I make the call and he is supremely unconcerned.  Actually, he sort of laughed.  I was sort of freaked out and he had to remind me a couple of times that I had never hit a deer before.  In fact, he said, other than the raccoon, I’d had exactly zero problems with my squad.

“Yeah, but here’s my problem,” I said.  “See, I’ve handled a thousand car versus deer calls.  And every time, those people say, ‘I wasn’t going very fast…and, gosh, it came out of nowhere.’”

“Yeah?” he said.

“And I always thought, ‘bullcrap.  You were going 90 and you weren’t paying attention.’”

“Yeah?”

“Well…damn, LT, I wasn’t going very fast.  And it did come out of nowhere.”

He laughed.  “Guess you gotta apologize to all those people.”

Damn.  OK, here goes:

David Turner…sorry.

Kathleen Simpson…sorry.

Little Joe Haggard…apologies.

Dude, this might take awhile….