Peter plotting

Welcome to “Designing Man.” my rechristened blog, with a  new look for 2012.The title reclaims a guy’s right to be just as creative and devious as a Designing Woman. While this column dates back to 2006, a few months after the release of Dad’s War with the United States Marines, a World War II biography of my father, it was time for a face lift, so to speak, to stay up with the times and to introduce my new mystery hero, Patrick MacKenna, an architect bedeviled with problems and confronted with crimes, some of which he’s accused of committing.

Why is an architect and planner fooling with writing anyway? And he also writes books, you say. It’s a long story, starting with my parents, a homemaker and an ex-Marine, both writers and publicists, a grandfather who was a construction contractor and me, an architect that has seen plenty, and who just loves to tell stories. My choice of architecture was a matter of interest and aptitude, but it also had something to do with finding a “practical” way to earn a living. And for a long career I have designed buildings, planned development sites and promoted my firm.  My favorite activity among these, however, was always describing the projects and getting people excited about hiring our team.

This resulted in millions of words cascading from my pen and then my computer screen over the years. That’s a lot of writing practice when you think about it. On that journey through the world of design and construction I’ve met real estate developers, bureaucrats, politicians, office rivals–all human, mind you, many of them honorable and even noble–but with a few bad apples that undo the hard work of all the good folks just trying to make life a little better for the rest of us.

This, then, is a brief explanation of why an architect attempts to write books. You can be the judge of how well I’m doing. Both my parents, by the way, were avid readers, especially of mysteries, a habit that fueled their interest in writing and life in general. And I followed their lead, preoccupied with the puzzle of who knows “what secrets lie buried in the hidden infrastructure?” Well now, besides The Shadow, there’s Patrick MacKenna.

In Crimes of Design,  when Patrick is accused of murder on the site of his dream project, a city-within-the-city, he must turn sleuth to save his life, rescue his family and spare his beleaguered city. Like Patrick, I had to make sense of a lifetime of activity, in order to figure out what it all means, savor and “save” my life for the benefit of the rest of  you. But this you can check for yourself back on my website.

Good reading until next time, when I’ll interview Patrick and try to find out what makes him tick.

Peter

By Peter H. Green

A Red, Red Rose, a suspenseful young adult romance and a good ghost story, revolves around the summer 20-year-old Ashby Overton spends with her uncle Hunter Overton, his wife, Monica, her seven-year-old cousin Jefferson, the faithful, attentive retainer Miss Emma, and the handsome stable boy and main caretaker Luke, with whom she is to fall in love, on the family estate, Overhome, in a rambling 18th-century colonial mansion nestled in the mountains of Virginia. Ashby, daughter of one of three sons of the family patriarch and raised by the other surviving son and his wife, is an aspiring writer seeking adventure, the family’s guarded history and more knowledge about her deceased parents’ untimely death.

As she studies family diaries she finds in the ancient attic, she begins to wonder whose version of past events—Luke’s, her aunt and uncle’s, or Miss Emma’s—she can trust. Although she is a competent and constantly improving horsewoman, a series of riding accidents befall her, as they did her grandmother, who died in just such a mishap. She realizes something is amiss and does some sleuthing on her own to piece together Overhome’s horrible secret.

A beautifully crafted story redolent of the languorous atmosphere and brooding evil of the old South, the thickening plot brings Ashby, a very contemporary girl with a cell phone and Internet access, into intimate contact with her staid and tradition-bound ancestors and eventually aligns her in their common cause, unsatisfied claims and despair over unpunished wrongs. The fast-paced tale weaves contemporary characters, southern charm and Gothic mystery into the historic setting all the way to its violent, shocking and yet fitting end.

Coincidentally, I recently read “The Ballad of the Sad Café,” a classic 1941 short story by another southern writer, Carson McCullers (1917-1967), set in a dull West Virginia mill town. This tale depicts a tragic love triangle among Miss Amelia, who runs the local general store, her criminal one-time husband of six days and a homeless hunchback whom she takes in and whose love stimulates her to open a café that awakens the social instincts of the dead-end town.  The semi-autobiographical, bisexual nature of this three-way relationship is only hinted at in the story, but the violence that results is described in graphic detail. Comments McCullers as narrator, “First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons —but…that does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved… Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time… The most outlandish people can be a stimulus for love…The lover craves any possible relationship with the beloved, even if it causes him only pain.”

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare this relatively new novelist with one of our finest Southern writers, admired by both Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. But the contrast of Coryell’s work with Carson McCullers’s short story points up how the character of Ashby’s Aunt Monica, who has been deceived by her evil-intentioned husband, might have been developed in more depth. While it might be said that such complexity does not belong in young adult genre fiction, it is nevertheless a missed opportunity. The chance to explore Monica’s misplaced trust, unrequited love and a broken heart, to offset Ashby’s romantic fulfillment, while painting a less rosy picture for readers, might have served to enhance its Gothic sense, add tragic poignancy and provide needed balance to an otherwise solid story. Nonetheless, this novel is well worth reading for its romance, mystery, and convincing evocation of the past to influence of characters of today. And since the author hints at the continuation of the series in a trilogy, maybe we’ll learn more about this intriguing family in the future.

Till next time, as John Ciardi used to say on the radio, good words to you,

T. W. Fendley, Zero Time (Fiction), L & L Dreamspell (London, TX), 2011, 347 Pp. and e-book, www.lldreamspell.com .

An absorbing space-time odyssey, Zero Time, by T. W. Fendley, which its ambitious publisher L & L Dreamspell has classified as historical fantasy, is really science fiction. The tale is set on Earth in 2011 in the present day, 150 BCE, in Teotihuacan and other sites in Mexico; Machu Picchu, Peru, and in an even earlier era, 3059 B.C.E on Earth and the planet  Omeyocan in the Pleiades constellation. In the opening scenes the people from whom Mesomericans were descended emigrate to earth’s favorable environment in a last-ditch attempt to save their race from extinction by overcoming a genetic flaw that prevents future breeding by flawed males of their own species

A brilliant conception that provides plausible scientific explanations for the mysteries of the ancient cultures that founded civilizations at Machu Picchu, Peru; Izpaca, Mexico, the Yucatán peninsula, Mexico, and other possible locations around the globe. T. W. Fendley, in her debut novel, transports her protagonist Quilla (Kee’-ah) and other colonists from Omeyocan into three different eras spanning 5125 solar years (or 13 Baktun, in her people’s complex date system) until the end of the Fifth Long Passage through the galaxy, a constellation’s trip lasting 26,000 years, ending and starting over at the hibernal equinox, December 21, 2012, or “Zero Time.”

In the universe she creates, Fendley employs space-time travel across 13 dimensions through “serpent ropes,” virtual pathways through the cosmos that link her planet timelessly with Earth and other way stations throughout the galaxy. Quilla, our protagonist in three incarnations in three different eras, must work with her birth mother Xmucane (shmoo’-kane) , and her father  Xpiyacoc (shoo-pee’-a-cok) to defeat the Lord of Darkness and reconnect with the evil one’s consort and her own wayward sister, to reestablish the Law of One, in which love permeates and connects all things. In the process, the author explicates the role of mystical serpents of pre-Columbian culture, geoglyphs on the Peruvian plain and Aztec human sacrifice (an unintended consequence of the Lord of Darkness’s perversity). The reasons behind construction of the magnificent cities aligned with astronomical bodies through advanced calculations are also explained in this author’s all-encompassing conception of this advanced civilization that traveled to Earth.

The clear, crisp writing style, dazzling descriptions of pre-Columbian cities and sympathetic characters more than make up for the complexities of the story. Readers who master the massive back story, the jaw-busting names of the principal characters and the complex space-time plot and persist to the grand dénouement of this epic—and science and archeology buffs are a hardy lot—-will learn how Quilla, in cooperation with the Daughters of Light and her birth parents, saves her people by permitting breeding with earthlings and allowing the propagation of future males of the species. As the story ends in contemporary Philadelphia, she looks back as Keihla Benton, today a science reporter, at her eons of time-travel throughout the universe in her pivotal role of rescuing and perpetuating Omeyocan’s civilization.

The author confesses that creation of this sprawling, dazzling work took years, evolving over several trips to the sites she so vividly describes, and as depicted in the striking photo of Machu Picchu on the book’s cover. While this epic vision of human history requires effort on the part of the reader, its message is inspiring and eerily familiar, echoing the theories of archeologists who have studied Mesoamerican culture and deduced strikingly similar explanations. For those who like to stretch their imaginations—and who doesn’t?—this novel is a fascinating and compelling read. You’d better get it and read it before December 21, 2012. Who knows what the Sixth Long Passage may hold in store?

Till next time, good words to you.

Peter

Terms of Interment, Fiction, by Marcel Toussaint, in collaboration with Cyrus Pars, NACG Press, 2011, Trade paperback, 273 pages.

Albert Wilson, a semiretired lawyer from a proud family, finds his existence in the family manse in St. Louis’s stately Portland Place threatened by the collapse of his poor investments and his overspending on a debauched playboy lifestyle. In desperate straits he calls in his younger brother Edward, an intern doctor, from Jefferson City, to explain his plight. Shocked that he has depleted all his assets and learning that Albert has a half million dollar life insurance policy, Edward tells his brother he must fake his own death and promises to show him how. In a hilarious series of misadventures, Albert makes his way from hospital to funeral home to cemetery, with surprising results.

This classic caper, reminiscent of Jimmy Breslin’s 1970 classic The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and many others of its comic ilk, could only have been conceived and carried off–with some technical counseling from his collaborator Cyrus Pars–by Moroccan-born, award-winning poet, playwright and novelist Marcel Toussaint, whose Gallic irony and humor, along with an easy familiarity with St. Louis society, seems perfect for spinning the tale. A French-cultured dancing master who spent many years schooling the scions of St. Louis’s Central West End upper crust in the finer points of deportment and the social graces, he recounts the fast moving drama with just the right respect for and alarm at the foibles of the rich and famous. The plot, with its improbable yet comically plausible premise, races from from one adventure to the next through many unexpected twists as the brothers outwit a greedy, pompous funeral director, a necrophiliac grave robber with a bizarre fetish and two real mobsters who set out to unburden them of their supposed treasures. In its surprising dénouement, Toussaint’s characters must learn the classic lesson that crime doesn’t pay—or does it?—to  the great relish of those familiar with St. Louis in a much happier golden era, and those previously unfamiliar with our town, but craving an enjoyable laugh-out-loud adventure. More about this clever caper at www.NACGpress.com.

Marcel Toussaint, recently named National Gold Medalist by the Veteran’s Creative Arts Festival, was born Emil Saint Pellicer, in Rabat, Morocco, where his father worked for the French government, the youngest of three surviving children born to the late Raymond and Maia Gracia Saint Pellicer. His father was French and his mother was Spanish. He was a radio personality, professional dancer, fencing master and “duke of deportment” for St. Louis society matrons and their children in the 1960s and ’70s. He is a poet, author and lyricist of plays, novels and several volumes of poetry, including his autobiographical Poetry of A Lifetime.  Toussaint has two children from a previous marriage and lives in Wildwood with a golden Lab puppy named Madison. A member of St. Louis Writers Guild, he recently read his article in St. Louis Reflections, an anthology celebrating the 90-year history of Guild, at their holiday Book Fair at Kirkwood Train Station. Read more.

Till next time, good words to you,

Recent Works on Hemingway—Rick Skwiot’s new novel, Key West Story, Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat and Woody Allen’s comeback film, “Midnight in Paris,” which recently garnered a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay—prompted me to read The Sun Also Rises, the prizewinning author’s first novel, considered by many to be the best first novel by an American of all time.

In a review on Amazon.com I said St. Louis Writers Guild member Rick’s Skwiot’s latest novel is “a rich and timely contribution to this hearty literary stew. This work stands alone as an intimate portrait of a struggling writer’s close buddy and mentor relationship with a great author in his youthful prime, perhaps coincidentally similar, perhaps the man himself, reincarnate in his main character Nick Adams. Con (for Constantine) Martens, the protagonist in this self-actualization adventure, tolerates his new patrons’ and coach’s moniker Conman, as he joins a sunken treasure quest in Gulfstream waters to satisfy his more immediate need for cash to settle his bills and turn the lights back on.  A work in progress for at least six years, this novel gives us a new personal insight into what it might have been like to know the man and profit from solid advice generously offered from the master’s creative core where, for a writer, the rubber meets the road.” Read more.

In Hemingway’s Boat Paul Hendrickson searches for the human side of this much-maligned author. This well researched biography seeks out the causes of his brain numbing alcoholism, irascibility and downright cruelty in later years to his friends and to those he loved best. Chasing down original sources, some previously ignored – such as his protégé Arnold Samuelsson and his secretary’s new husband diplomat Walter Houk – as well as his youngest son Gregory (Gigi, pronounced Giggy) he uncovers the moving story of the master’s rise to the top of the literary and sportsman’s world and his ultimate decline through his later obsession with fame and struggle to defend his self-image, despite his declining sensitivity, output and health.

And if you haven’t seen “Midnight in Paris,” you should. We time travel back to earlier eras in Paris history: that of the lost generation of the 1920s and earlier literary times. This is Woody Allen at his creative best, finally stepping aside and allowing someone else to take the lead acting role and focusing his genius where it really belongs, on creating and crafting the story.

All this brings me back to Paris at the time of the lost generation and Hemingway’s remarkable first novel. The title The Sun Also Rises comes from Ecclesiastes, and Jake Barnes, a Paris-based American journalist, can be seen as the suffering protagonist in the biblical story as he joins his Parisian expatriate friends in a trip to Pamplona for the July fiesta and the bullfights. Impotent due to a war injury, he is in love with Brett, who in her current marriage is Lady Brett Ashley, wife of a British nobleman. She toys idly with the men in her group, having had brief fling with Robert Cohn and gained him as a doting worshipper. She is seeking a divorce so she can wed another Brit “writer”, Mike—a drunkard, moocher, loudmouthed bully, womanizer, Jew-baiter and braggart, with few redeeming qualities. He rides and baits Cohn mercilessly, as he lives off Lady Ashley’s stipend.  When Brett, bored and disgusted with them all, becomes infatuated with a promising and comely nineteen-year-old bullfighter,  Barnes and the other suitors receive  knockout punches from Cohn, in a fit of justified rage at the ragging from his comrades. Jake Barnes forgives and tolerates them all. Originally a Catholic, he is the only one in the group that will admit to being religious. While they seek pleasure, he seems to live less for self indulgence and more for vicarious experience, absorbing the  local people’s appreciation of the beauty of the landscape, the color of the fiesta,  the nobility of the bullfighter’s art and the dignity of the faithful Catholic population.

For a writer, it’s all about the way words are used to create the emotion. The word play among the expats, the author’s literal rendering in English of the idiosyncrasies of the locals’ Spanish and French expressions and the dialogue’s bite into the characters’ flesh as they love, tolerate, and abuse each other, in the most concise and simple phrasing imaginable, show us the master at his first shining moment.

Until next time, as John Ciardi would say, good words to you,

Peter

In Houston  this month, while visiting family, I had the chance to visit the famed Murder by the Book mystery bookstore, as recommended by Jon Jordan, a driving force behind Bouchercon 2011 in St. Louis. This well-stocked and friendly mystery shop is owned by the eponymous but unrelated McKenna Jordan, who also serves a Co-chair to Jon, Chair of Crimespree Magazine, and fellow planner of Bouchercon.  While I just missed meeting the celebrity owner, I’ve marked my calendar for a return visit on my next trip to Houston in December. For more on Bouchercon, see last month’s post below.

I also attended the one-day Lone Star Writer’s Conference  on Screenwriting, hosted by the Northwest Houston  Chapter of Romance Writers of America, featuring a workshop by Alexandra Sokoloff, accomplished Hollywood screenwriter and novelist. She introduced a new wrinkle to the three-act structure concept, related to the way films were originally screened in theaters, in fifteen-minute reels on a single projector. Thus a two-hour film had eight sequences, with a pause to change reels between each one. Directors got in the habit of providing a climax at the end of each sequence to keep up audience interest during the delay. This evolved into a formula for thrilling motion pictures that kept audiences on the edge of their seats. She observed that, despite today’s absence of the original technological limitations, you can still time movies today and detect the original structure. Packed with many more details and techniques on plot development, cinematic techniques applicable to all genres and methods of solving story problems, this workshop was worthwhile for dramatic writers and novelists alike.

Meeting many of Houston’s talented writers in a well-appointed conference setting was another plus. Flower petals strewn on the tables, goody-bags stuffed with candy and a silent auction overflowing with romance novels supercharged the creative atmosphere, while a stirring and poignant luncheon talk–after an excellent buffet lunch– by Christie Craig , master storyteller and multi-published author of Don’t Mess with Texas and other funny, sexy and mysteries and romance novels, inspired us to persevere. When she was done talking about the importance of romance writing, which she said at the outset seems like a silly, frivolous  pursuit, she had proven that it embodies the most important decisions we all face–the love choices that determine the course of our lives.

Topping off this first-rate event was the opportunity to meet and pitch to three literary agents: Natalie Fischer, of the Bradford Literary Agency, Pamela Hopkins of Hopkins Literary Associates and Taylor Martindale of Full Circle Literary Agency. All were most generous with their time and their advice.

Kudos should go to all the supportive members for the Northwest Houston Chapter of RWA and its talented leaders, President Jennifer Bray-Weber, Stacey Purcell, First VP and Program Chair and Jan Nash, Treasurer. I also had the chance to meet Loretta Wheeler, fellow L & L Dreamspell author. and got an in-person glimpse of her southern charm. Another new writer friend int Texas is member Patti Macdonald, whose “tell it like it is” conversation makes me want to read everything she writes.

Till next time, good words to you,

Peter

Peter as Clouseau

By Peter H. Green

This weekend St. Louis hosted the 42^nd Annual Bouchercon World Mystery Conference, the unique literary event that allows fans and authors to meet and greet each other, up close and personal. Highlights included:

Locally-based writers published, or soon to be, by L & L Dreamspell (of whom there are several, including yours truly) participated and met those from both coasts, including Cindy Sample (Dying for a Date) of the Sacramento area and Nancy Means Wright (Walking into the Wild ) of Middlebury, Vermont.

I enjoyed being a lone Brother at the national Sisters in Crime breakfast, and, arriving late, took one of the few empty seats, right next to Sarah Paretsky, whose latest V. I. Warshawski novel Body Work features a Body Artist, who invites nightclub audience members to sketch on her naked flesh. I recalled for her my nightly chore as a set designer in summer stock of inscribing a boat on Luther Billis’s belly and passed along a story  for her husband , a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute, relating how, during air raid drills in 1944 Miss Dickey, my Chicago kindergarten teacher, would march us like ducks in a row to presumed safety beneath the overhanging walls of Stagg Field, where Fermi himself was producing the first sustained nuclear chain reaction, arguably  the most vulnerable site in the world for enemy attack (see Dad’s War with the United States Marines, Chapters 6 and 14). At Friday’s breakfast Ms. Paretsky was honored for her role in founding this nationwide society in 1986  to advance the recognition of women as mystery writers.

Among the many informative and entertaining panel discussions held here was a session aptly entitled Trouble, including Jeff Abbott (Adrenalin), Ridley Pearson (Walt Fleming mysteries and the Peter and the Starcatcher series with Dave Barry), Steve Hamilton (Misery Bay, an Alex McKnight Mystery),  Harlan Coben (Shelter, his latest Mickey Bolitar novel) and Joseph Finder (Buried Secrets, the new Nick Heller novel, Yale  Class of ’80, Whiffenpoofs member), moderated, to the extent she could manage it, by the popular Boston TV personality and suspense author (The Other Woman) Hank Philippi Ryan.  A typical interchange, punctuated by uproarious audience laughter, went like this (and I quote):

Harlan Coben: I never let research slow down the act of writing the story. Don’t slow the action with cute factoids. Just write the goddamn book!

Joseph Finder: Fix it in post.

Ridley Pearson: All we really mean when we say research is tax deductible travel.

Hank Phillippi Ryan: What did you read as a kid?

Ridley Pearson: Kipling and Poe.

Jeff Abbott: Well, aren’t you special! I read the Hardy Boys.

Harlan Coben: As a young boy, as I was dandled on my daddy’s knee, we read the Collected Works of Ridley Pearson.

Coben, Pearson and Hamilton, when asked about what it meant to have arrived as authors, agreed that the experience was anticlimactic, since the real fun was in the journey, coming up together from obscurity, celebrating each other’s little victories along the way. When the barbs and gags threatened to get completely out of control, Ryan, the only woman on the stage, pulling rank in utter frustration, said: “Do I have to stop this car?”

A nice touch at the opening ceremonies was the official recognition, announced by Ridley, who served as Toastmaster, of the life work of St. Louis’s own “Living Legends”– Robert Randisi, who graciously accepts the title, “The Last of the Great Pulp Writers,” and John Lutz, who wryly commented at the next night’s Shamus Awards dinner, “You don’t know what it’s like to be half of a living legend.” At that event I also had the pleasure of accompanying on our mini brewery tour, fellow architect turned multiple award-winning mystery author, S. J. Rozan, and of comparing notes with her on urban architectural scams in New York and St. Louis, such as midnight brick theft and black market dealings in historic architectural millwork.

Bumming with St. Louis Writers Guild members Angie Fox, Elaine Viets, David Lucas and Leigh Savage, at the Saturday evening party, we almost broke the photo booth and concluded that a good time was had by all.

Elaine Viets as Freddie Krueger

Till next time, as John Ciardi would say, good words to you

Peter

How do you get words on paper? Today, even that phrase sounds funny when you consider all of the electronic media we use—digital files, audio files, computer hard drives, mobile phones, all of which can record our thoughts and ideas. Like you. I’ve endured the sea change of recent years in the way we create our words, and it has been quite a journey.

When I was a small boy, my family used to visit a friend of my parents, Orin Tovrov, who was the writer of the Ma Perkins radio serial, at his home in the town of Orleans, on Cape Cod. Every weekday morning, like clockwork his secretary would appear at the door and Orin would go off with her to his study, which had a view of the wooded seashore out of one side and his lovely yard and duck pond on the other. He would sit and dictate the next couple of episodes of the Ma Perkins drama, and his secretary would present him with a typed copy of the previous day’s work for final edit. What a life, I thought. All he had to do was sit there for a couple of hours and spin wonderful stories. That’s for me someday.

My father used a yellow legal pad to compose and the hunt and peck method for typing his final work. Even during World War II where he served as the de facto manager of Armed Forces Radio Station WXLI—Guam, the radio studio for the troops on the Marianas Islands, he typed his scripts on whatever machine he could commandeer in their Quonset hut office and studio. In his letters home he once said, “This typewriter is no longer my Public Enemy Number One and I am beginning to master it. Incidentally it’s a Spanish typewriter with a tilde over the Ñ and and an accent mark over the é  and also an upside down question mark (¿) to precede questions. Everything is in the wrong place, especially punctuation, particularly the exclamation point, which is where the comma ought to be.” Although he complained as if he were a top-notch stenographer hampered by poor equipment, as a Chicago reporter Dad had acquired the two finger typing technique, and all he had to do to adapt to the foreign keyboard was to direct his two index fingers to different keys.

Lucky for me, now that I spend so much time at a computer, my college encouraged us to take an elective course in typing. They used to emphasize that, when you stay in a steady rhythm your typing becomes more accurate. Even today I noticed I have less of a tendency to invert letters when I stick with the rhythm. I find that sometimes typing on the keyboard is still preferable to any other method, especially for editing, but also sometimes for composing original scenes in fiction, because my thinking slows down to the pace of  evolving ideas, my characters’ thoughts and my word pictures. And I still like to take longhand notes on a yellow legal pad and write by hand in my journal.

However, in the last five years, I’ve become enamored of speech recognition technology. When I was finishing my first book in 2005 I tried something called “Dragon Naturally Speaking”. The software, offered by a company called Nuance, has continually improved to the point where it delivers letter perfect copy, which can be revised at my whim with a verbal command. It types so much better than I do it’s embarrassing. The latest wrinkle that Nuance added to my repertoire was a Phillips dictating pocket machine called the Voice Tracer whose files can be directly transferred to hard copy on the computer. I find that thoughts sometimes flow more easily, dialogue is more natural and it can capture fleeting ideas, because it’s so much faster.

So my world has become the idyllic one that Orin Tovrov enjoyed. I can sit anywhere with my laptop — in bed, in any chair in the house, on my deck, or wander as I speak with my Bluetooth headset, and talk through my compositions, as I’m doing right now.  And while I haven’t managed to gear up to the comfortable living solely from writing that Orin provided for his family, I can at least bring my office wherever I go and create my stories—online, in manuscript form and struggle as we all do to get them published—as I enjoy the beauties of nature. The house on Cape Cod might have to wait a while.

To return to my original question, what techniques have you found to enhance your writing capabilities? Please post a comment and let me know , or post any questions you have, so we can trade ideas.

Until next time, as John Ciardi used to say,

Good words to you,

Peter

As a writer and business consultant, I’ve learned how easily my life can be driven over a cliff by seemingly mundane necessities. I’ve just emerged from a week in computer hell. Please understand, I’m not a computer geek, but an ordinary small business owner trying to upgrade my programs.

My late brother-in-law, a pretty savvy network administrator for a  state finance agency, railed against Microsoft’s impenetrable shield. “They’ll be happy to give you personal attention, for a fee. How can I use this stuff I’ve already paid for? What am I supposed to do, call Bill Gates?”

If you want to upgrade from XP, you have to save your computer’s files to another machine on your network or an external hard drive. To help with this, Microsoft offers Windows-Easy-Step. Right! Microsoft has a long way to go before it will be easy. I wanted to put Win 7 on my older XP machine (2G of RAM, Pentium 4, 1.6 GHz clock speed), which I had been using as my main input point, despite the fact that it just barely passed Microsoft’s downloaded eligibility test. Windows 7 chewed it up that computer and spit it out. What saved me is that it had automatically set a “restore point” before attempting to install. When the installation—which looked like it was going to work except for the fancy new “Aero” graphics—failed after the third startup a day later, my familiar old XP screen smiled back at me, and I sang Hallelujah. I was relieved and happy to have it back, with all its treasures, still usable as a sturdy workstation, server and music player for my local NPR station’s XM Radio classical music channel.

To be fair, on the computers that ran Vista, many programs and files moved over just fine and were ready for use. Easy-Step made sure that all the files I wanted to save were moved from the XP machine and available on the faster computer to which I moved them. On the two former Vista machines, everything came over pretty well. But when I attempted to install Office 2010, all hell broke loose again with Outlook and Outlook Business Manager. I got some help on this from the Microsoft Answers site, where some techies called MVP’s—Microsoft Vice President, Most Valuable Player, what?—will actually answer your questions. However  the poor users had to drag the procedure out of them one step at a time, and ultimately the MVPs punted to a Slipstick web page and admitted that WET doesn’t work for Outlook and that you should just export the .pst files yourself, as if to say, “It should be obvious, you dummy!” Who knew?

Conquering The Beast

The challenge in migrating Outlook is that your profile (i.e.: basic user identification for Outlook) often becomes corrupted when it’s moved from its original computer through Windows-Easy-Transfer (WET, for short, as in “all WET”). To fix this problem, and it took me all day to puzzle it out, here’s what you have to do:

1.    In Outlook 2010, after the attempted migration go to Control Panel/Mail (switch to Small Icons to find the classic, understandable list of options, and select the “Mail” applet). Here you need to set up a new profile with a name different from your current one (the default name is “Outlook,” which lists all your e-mail accounts as its features. Don’t delete your old profile just yet, since it will also delete your e-mail accounts, and you may have to refer to them for settings and export the Outlook.pst file from the Contacts database—if it has successfully created a Contacts list and e-mail accounts.

2.    Click “Next”. Select “Set up e-mail account,” click again and you’ll be asked to enter your e-mail address—this process can be repeated as often as necessary from your profile screen to include all your e-mail accounts. Then enter your password twice, check whether you want to enable text messaging, and here you have an opportunity to check a box that permits you to enter your account details manually. If you’ve got anything other than a simple POP account, such as the more secure Yahoo Bizmail, as I do, and you know or can find your previous settings, you should check this box. You’ll see the familiar brain-damaging screen that asks for all sorts of stuff you may not know and will have to enter about ten times to get it just right. Here’s where it gets interesting.

3.    On this screen, which you have to complete correctly BEFORE you open your Outlook  e-mail account for the first time, it asks for your data base. DO NOT select the one they suggest unless it’s really the one you exported, since it most likely is a new blank file, or if it has your contact records, you probably won’t be able to use them to select addresses from your e-mail screen. It’s vital to select an Outlook.pst file that you have exported yourself from your old computer’ and put on a CD you a or a folder on your new computer. You are allowed to browse at this point to find the file, but if it’s on an external drive or a CD, it will always look for that location when it loads Outlook.

4.    If you don’t know how to enter your settings manually, leave this box unchecked and see if the computer can find your settings by searching online. It’s worth a try, but Outlook 2007 was smarter than the 2010 version: it could find my settings for Yahoo Bizmail. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t go through all the tabs you’ll see when you click on “More Settings.” These tabs let you specify whether your server requires authentication, which then gives you different numbers for the port settings than the default setting. If the program can’t find them you can use numbers  copied from your old Outlook e-mail account. Don’t worry if the automatic feature doesn’t find your settings. You’ll be given another screen with the checkbox for manual entry.

After several attempts at this, and doing it all over to change to a better export file, I successfully pulled in my old database and was up and running, with Outlook, the Mail and  Contacts folders working together properly.

The Business Contact Manager  Fiasco

Can you believe that Office Home and Business 2010 has quietly dropped one of its most valuable 2007 features for the small business person—Outlook Business Contact Manager? This contact manager, calendar, follow-up reminder, lead preserver and record keeper can potentially help you win business. Microsoft, on their Answers site, has admitted their mistake in targeting it to large enterprises and assuming that small businesses wouldn’t miss it. Now, if you can prove you own Office Home and Business 2010 and claim you had Office 2007, you can download it free. From Microsoft, yet. How about that? In trying to make the program look as simple as a Mac, they have dumbed it down to the point where familiar, often used commands (as in Control Panel’s classic list) are hidden, important features (like Select an Address Database) and Business Contact Manager (almost) have been removed. In my view, this reduces functionality—it does not improve it.

Bottom Line: Lessons Learned

But Microsoft can and should do better. With their billions, they should write a better manual (or better online help screens) to explain to us hapless users what may be obvious to the genius geeks in Redmond. And would it kill the thousands of workers out there to take a phone call or answer an e-mail once in a while from those of us who paid good money to buy their programs? Wouldn’t they write better routines if they could hear what we underlings are going through as we try to use their stuff out here in the hinterland? Programmers par excellence they might be; communicators they’re not. If Windows 7 won’t work on an older machine, they should say so and not waste our precious  time trying to do the impossible.

As the auto companies do in the TV ads with stunt drivers, maybe they should put a warning notice on their ads: Don’t try this at home!

Till next time, cheers,

You might want to look online to find innovative authors these days—the best and the brightest new writers may not be represented in traditional bookstores.

In a 2008 ranking by Publishers Weekly’s Jim Milliot, major U. S. publishing companies occupied only three slots among the world’s top ten: McGraw-Hill Education (U.S.): $2.7 billion, Reader’s Digest (U.S.): $2.6 billion and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (U.S./Cayman Islands): $2.5 billion. Two top European companies, Bertelsmann and Hachette, own many familiar American imprints. Despite these trends, it’s premature to sound the death knell of the American book entrepreneur. Industry observers note that from 6,200 to 11,890 publishing companies exist today, depending upon which ones you include and how they’re selected. These numbers include everyone from the legendary presses like Alfred A. Knopf, Scribners and Simon & Schuster, to respected smaller publishers St. Martin’s Press and Midnight Ink, and at the lower end may include the vanity publishers, and printing services that adopt the “publisher” label. Traditional bookstores loom like dinosaurs in the hulking twentieth century shopping malls—which increasingly serve as showrooms for more competitive online sales. According to statistic compiled by UNESCO, new American book titles nevertheless hover at 17 percent (172,000) of the one million books annually published worldwide. Adding some of the less recognized presses, I suspect this number would be dramatically  increased.

Contributing to this the sea change, of course, is the advent of the e-book. The Kindle, Amazon’s pioneering e-reader, is this on line merchant’s best selling item. Borders hustled its comparable version, the Nook, into the market, apparently too late to right its listing ship. And Sony, Apple and others regularly debut new entries into the race.

In recent years, for example, two dynamic women, committed with a passion to the e-revolution and the value of  individual initiative, Linda Houle and Lisa Smith, founded a forward-looking publishing company, L & L Dreamspell. Although they produce skillfully edited and handsome trade paperbacks, which are offered by many independent bookstores and available though Ingram, on Amazon.com and other book services, their total output is also available on line, on their website. In her definitive description of the changing industry, The Naked Truth about Book Publishing, Linda Houle writes, “E-books are now widely accepted, displacing print book sales and transforming a multi-billion dollar industry. Bookstores are fighting for survival…Old wasteful printing methods are fading away, and nearly all paper books of the future will be made to order.”

With  their own initiative as an example, L & L Dreamspell’s principals enlist the participation in promotion and sales of their authors, thus leading them in the very things they would have to do anyway, even if accepted by a big publishing house. This is a powerful formula for success. If we take off our blinders and try to imagine things not as they are, but as they will be, I venture to say we’ll see more publishers following the model of this well oiled and dynamic publishing system. Rumor has it that literary agents are now beginning to knock on Linda’s and Lisa’s door, seeking a market for sales they will claim a commission on—a market that the individual author can, at present anyway, approach without such representation.

In St. Louis alone—a hotbed of literary talent that Catherine Rankovic has compared to Paris in the 1920s in her fascinating collection of interviews with famous writers, Meet Me:Writers in St. Louis—LLD has snapped up the latest works of several talented authors. They include Claire Applewhite, Judy Moresi and Jo Hiestand. I’m happy to report that with the coming publication of my own debut novel, Crimes of Design, I’ve also joined L & L’s “Dream Team,”, along with a host of accomplished authors. My mystery, set in St. Louis during a major flood, involves architect Patrick MacKenna in  a series of crimes that he must solve to clear his name, save his career and rescue his family. It will join a long list of list of 150 LLD titles by over 100 authors, including:  Historical & Fiction, Mystery & Suspense , Non-Fiction, Paranormal & Vampire, Romance & Erotica, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thriller & Horror and  Young Adult . To see my own personal webpage and bio on their site, please visit http://lldreamspell.com/PeterGreen.htm. After all the complex steps of editing  and book and e-book production, Crimes of Design will be available in the first quarter of 2012.

Until next time, as John Ciardi used to say, good words to you,