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Whitby, Queen of the British Seaside

Today, the Femmes reach across the pond to welcome British cozy writer Frances Brody, who writes about her post World War I sleuth, Kate Shackelton. Here's Frances' latest, Death at the Seaside.

Nothing ever happens in August, and tenacious sleuth Kate Shackleton looks forward to a relaxing seaside sojourn in Whitby where she will visit her school friend Alma. Drawn into the jeweler’s shop to buy a gift, Kate makes a horrifying discovery in the back room -- Mr Philips the jeweler lies dead. Sworn to silence by police, Kate seeks out Alma, who works as a fortune teller on the pier. Alma's daughter Felicity has disappeared, leaving her mother a note and the pawn ticket for their only asset: a watch-guard. The jeweler who advanced Felicity the thirty shillings is the late Jack Phillips, Alma's gentleman friend. Kate can't help but become involved, and begins her search for answers. Met by a wall of silence by town officials, keen to maintain Whitby's idyllic façade, it's up to Kate -- ably assisted by Jim Sykes and Mrs Sugden - to discover the truth behind Felicity's disappearance.

 And they say nothing happens in August . . .

 

 Whitby, Queen of the British Seaside  

By Frances Brody

Part of the good fortune of living on a small island is that we are never more than 80 miles from the sea. One of my favourite spots is Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast. This summer, a friend bought an old London black taxi – sadly, black taxis seem to be going cheap these days.  Five of us set off on an adventure. I use the word ‘adventure’ somewhat loosely. Our plan was to have fish and chips and a walkabout on the sea front. We are easily pleased. The oldest member of our party has a wheel chair and an advantage of the taxi is plenty of space and a ramp.

We drove the 70 odd miles to Whitby via the scenic route across the moors. (Not to be recommended on a dark night when you are alone and the rain lashes down.) The taxi windows allowed for panoramic views.

Whitby, a former fishing and whaling port, is the place from where Captain James Cook, eighteenth century explorer, navigator, cartographer and former grocer’s boy, set sail on his voyages across previously uncharted seas. There is a small museum commemorating him, and a fine statue. Oddly enough, the statue does not face the sea but gazes across the estuary.

The parish church of St. Mary is reached from the old town by 199 steps which I have sometimes climbed. It is an easy climb because the steps are wide and deep and there are “coffin stops” on the way up where pall bearers rested on the way to the churchyard. This is the churchyard that inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. The church is where poor, mad, tormented King George III worshiped when he was sent north for treatments and recuperation. I am not a royalist but always think of him with pity.

What I love most is the sheer variety and energy of the place, its annual Folk Festival, Goth Festival and Pirate Festival that allow day trippers and holiday makers the chance to let down their hair and play Dracula. The resident clairvoyant once told my fortune, and a very good fortune it was.

A favourite author of mine is Storm Jameson, not much read now but brilliantly insightful about the impact and aftermath of the First World War, the Great War as it was called, the war to end all wars.  Storm Jameson was a Whitby lass who headed for London, as anyone with ambition did in those days. She later lamented that Whitby wasn’t what it was when she was a girl. That is the melancholy complaint of every generation in Whitby, and perhaps across the globe. But it is Whitby’s capacity for change and renewal that keeps it at the top of the list for those of us in the North of England who love the seaside.

And, dear Readers, I like to think that Whitby Library, looking across to the ruined abbey, has the best view of any library in the world.

                                

  Frances is at the Moerderische Schwestern conference in Germany -- giving the opening talk in German. She will respond to your welcome comments when she's back home. 

Cartoons Are Complicated

by Leigh Perry / Toni L.P. Kelner

You remember when you were in [insert name of subject or teacher you were bored by] class in school, and you'd stay awake by doodling stick figures on the corners of your notebook, them flip through them to show movement? You were, no doubt, secure in the knowledge that you understood how animation work.

You were wrong.

Well, the basic principle was right. If you flip a series of illustrations quickly enough, persistence of vision will fool the eye into thinking you've seen a continuous stream of motion. (That's how all films work, not just animation.) But the truth beyond that principal is so much more complicated.

I admit, I considered myself reasonably knowledgeable about animation. I'm a big fan of animation, whether on TV or at the movies or for games. I watch "behind the making" videos on our Disney and Pixar DVDs. Plus I've absorbed a certain amount of know-how via my daughter Maggie, who recently graduated from SCAD Atlanta with a degree in animation. So I figured, sure, I know how this works.

Nope. A couple of weeks ago the family attended the CTN Animation eXpo in Burbank, CA, and via panels and chatting with people in the field, I learned a whole lot about how little I actually know.

I knew an animated feature has a whole team of animators, but I didn't know that animators get typecast. One panelist says he specializes in people walking determinedly as they accept their fates, usually singing as they go. Think Elsa singing "Let It Go" in Frozen or Moana in Moana running down to the shore once she realizes she knows the way. Other animators have more specialized specialities: hair, walking, background characters, and so on. There's an incredible amount of teamwork to bring it all together. One animator for Coco admitted he was iffy when his boss kept telling him to add more wrinkles to the title character, Mama Coco. He was afraid she'd look ugly, but once the scenes were lit by other artists, her beauty and character shown.

I knew there were character designers, but I had no idea how many iterations a character goes through before reaching the final version. Looking at characters-in-progress also showed how much even the smallest of details--hair style, skin color, eye shape, age--changes the way a character is perceived. And I never imagined how long that character design process takes. One 30-minute TV cartoon series has been in production for two years, and they're still refining that protagonist. Even previously existing characters--Stretch Armstrong the toy and Unikitty from The LEGO Movie required some polishing before they were ready to star in their own series.

Of course I knew that voice actors add a tremendous amount to an animated character, and I knew the voices were recorded before the animation begin. But I didn't know how many takes they record with the actors saying the words a variety of different ways because the shape is still taking shape. Josh Gad, who voices Olaf in Frozen, does quite a bit of improvisation with his lines to get the funniest jokes he can. Hours of this material is never used.

I knew about story boarding, but I didn't know how those were different from beat boards, or how story boards are used to create a rough animation called an animatic. And story boarding and story animation are wildly different. (I would explain what all that means except I'm still not sure I've got it right, and my daughter might read this and laugh at me.) Then there's scripting, which is something different. We had a chance encounter with Alex Hirsch, the show runner for the animated series Gravity Falls, which showed me that animated series can have long-reaching story arcs. There were clues in the first episode to how the series ended with the third season.

One of the most pleasant discoveries was learning how animation continues to evolve. Obviously, the switch from classic 2D animation to 3D animation has been a quantum shift for the industry, but there's still plenty of great work in 2D animation and there are other techniques like stop-action animation still in use. But sometimes there's something totally different. Loving Vincent is a remarkable piece of work in which each frame of the full-length movie is a different oil painting, most of which are based on the works of the movie's subject: Vincent van Gogh. It's just as amazing a movie as it sounds, and best of all, the team responsible is looking into the possibility of creating a horror movie using the work of Goya. If it happens, I'll be first in line at the box office!

So I came out of CTNx a lot more knowledgeable about how ignorant I am of the process of creating even the shortest piece of animation. So next time you're watching Coco or Loving Vincent or Gravity Falls or Unikitty! -- and I recommend them all -- sit through the credits and give a little love to those story artists, set dressers, renderman developers, lighting artists, and other creatives whose work I don't understand in the least, but which I appreciate so much more now.

Yeah, Got to Love The Writing Life

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Back to work, right? After the Thanksgiving festivities (or whatever you all did.) I am sitting at the computer, yes indeedy, getting ready to do my words for the day. Oh. But first--better check Facebook. Just for two seconds. But I know, if I do that, half an hour will disappear. How do you deal with this? I know it's because I am not in love with my manuscript at this moment in time, even though I know this always happens, and I know the writing/story epiphany will come soon. Still, it is SO much easier to do something else. Do you all feel this way?

CATRIONA MCPHERSON: The problem is that Facebook and Twitter aren't strictly skiving for us. We need to put things on the author page at least, right? My trick is to do what I need to do in the way of posting, cross-posting, retweeting and all that before I take my first sip of coffee (in bed) in the morning. I sit there with the delicious aroma of double French roast drifting out of the thermal cafetiere and I don't let myself drink any until the social media is done and the laptop is off. Then I read for half an hour until caffeinated and - hopefully - inspired (sometimes, disheartened) by the genius of other writers.

ALEXIA GORDON: How do I procrastinate? Let me count the ways. Facebook is sure death for me when it comes to getting any writing (or much of anything else) done. That "quick check" or "one quick post to my author page so my legions of fans don't feel abandoned" turns into 2 hours wasted, especially if my friends share memes that I can't resist commenting on or I give in to the urge to check the posts of one of the news sites I follow like "News and Guts" or The Guardian. Then it's all over. I have to adopt the "if you don't start then you won't have to force yourself to stop" philosophy when it comes to social media.

HANK: Oh, Alexia. Exactly. TWO HOURS! How does that happen? And we think, oh, it’s connecting.  And what would we do without coffee? Anyway, I do it by word count. I have to write at least 540 words a day, and then when I succeed at that, my next goal is 1000. It's so much fun to get to 1000! How do you all do it?

ALEXIA: I binge write. Deadline-induced panic is a big motivator for me. I've been that way since college. (I blame collegiate all-nighters for my caffeine addiction.) I also find that getting out of my house helps. Too many distractions at home. I bought a membership in a co-working space, which is enough like an office to keep me in the mind-frame of "writing is your job". I'm less likely to decide that a nap is the absolute most important thing I need in a given moment if I'm in an office setting. Can't say the same when I'm at home. Hotel lobbies/lounges also work for me, for the same reason. Public places are also good for inspiration. If I'm stuck, I can usually eavesdrop on a nearby conversation or people watch and come up with an idea for the book.

CATRIONA: I'm editing at the moment. The first edit (aka the shovel edit) is horrendous. I'm sitting here with the pages I wrote in July trying to work out what this book's about. When I was writing it I left all sorts of glitches and inanities "tobefixedintheedit". Trouble is, during all the months since then, I managed to convince myself it was a clean draft with nothing to be done. Oof. My edit method is to work back from the hand-in date: if it leaves the house then, I need the week before for a last read over and polish to produce draft 4, so the week before that I write draft three, the week before that I read draft 2 and make fewer (see below) notes if the gods are smiling, the week before that I write draft two, and the week before that I read draft one and make a squillion notes. This works but it produces maximum panic and leads to me saying things like "I can't make canneloni three weeks on Wednesday. Those tubes take too long to fill. It'll have to be lasagne. Okay?"

HANK: There's a great quote from maybe...Wallace Stegner? Or maybe not. But anyway, someone like that said: I write every day, even for five minutes. Because I have to at least give the muse a chance to visit. I do try to do it. And I’m convinced it makes a difference. Do you write every day?

CATRIONA: I write five days a week, when I'm writing (a first draft). I sometimes edit seven days a week when I'm in a tailspin, sobbing at the bank and walking round the garden in a nightie and a head torch at 3am (which I did last night). Because remember the careful week-by-week editing plan I just said worked? It doesn't. I'm in week four doing week one's task, so I've extended my deadline. It's going to my agent the same day as it goes to the publisher instead of three weeks early like I said it would/ She'll cope. It happened last time too. And the time before that, I think.

HANK: It’s so mysterious. We all know the work expands to take up all the time that’s available. But I will confess. I know what day my book is due. I backtime to a month before it is due. Then I calculate how many words a day I have to write toget a first draft before that. All good. BUT. Three are so many distractions that each day I actually set a timer, for 34 minutes, and make a deal with myself that I will not stop writing will not budge for that amount of time. And then I do it again, and again. Ridiculously childlike. But—it works. Still, at the end, there is always this crazy week of charette. Why is that? And yet, crossing fingers like mad, it works.

ALEXIA: I write every day but I don't always write fiction every day. Writing is a major part of my day job. Today, for instance, I wrote 3.5 reports for the day job. I'm pretty sure all of them were true. My fiction sometimes gets neglected, I'm sad to admit.

HANK: Once I decided, in a fit of procrastination, to alphabetize my spice rack instead of writing .What's the most transparent bit of procrastination you've considered?

ALEXIA: This month? Putting up Christmas decorations. And making homemade mayonnaise. And surfing Spotify to find Christmas carols I could sing along with. On the same day.

CATRIONA: Behold my guest linen cupboard, presented without comment.

HANK: Okay, I cannot make this work. It only goes in sideways. I have labored for 30 minutes to make it vertical, but no. But trust me, It's impressive. That said, what are you working on now? How's it going?

ALEXIA: I'm working on book 4, Fatality in F. It's going slo-o-o-wly. Because Christmas decorations.

CATRIONA: This is going to be a contemporary standalone in 2019. It's got no title at the moment, which is just one of the things that needs to be done. And it's going very badly. But there is one surefire way I've found to refresh my brain. Books don't work because I'm always noticing how great other writers are, telly doesn't work because it's too small and easy to look away, and meditation simply lets me panic more effectively once I've cleared my mind of distractions. But going to the pictures is a salvation. Sitting in the dark staring at a screen too big to ignore is my last ditch method of cheering myself up when the book's a mess. And in the time I've got to edit the WIP, there's Coco, Murder on The Orient Express, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Wonder, Lady Bird and Darkest Hour to go and see. Procrastinate? Moi?

HANK: I love this. I do. My next book is complete! In. Final. Over. Called TRUST ME, my first psychological standalone. (The title TRUST ME was revealed, finally, after some life-altering angst. But I am thrilled. I will say it. Thrilled.) The additional good thing is that I know this final book is so different from my first draft. And as a result I have faith that the new book, now on page 75—and which right now is TERRIBLE—will, eventually, no longer be terrible. I live for editing. I rely on it. I crave it.

(And I saw Coco. With my 8-year-old grandson. I cried, beginning early on. Because, you know what’s gonna happen. Josh: Grammy, why are you crying? Hank: Didn’t you think it was sad? Josh: No.)

So Femmes and readers: tell us your secrets to avoiding procrastination. Obviously--We need them.

Giving Thanks

 

The Femmes Fatales wish you all a happy Thanksgiving, and we are thankful to you all for your continued support!

Timing is Everything

I'm going to open a can of worms.

It's Monday night, two nights before Thanksgiving. Is it too soon to play Christmas music?

I'm browsing Spotify playlists, having exhausted all the new podcasts on my Stitcher true crime playlist. Buried among "Digging Now," "The Newness," "Rap Caviar," and "Viva Latino" (I have no idea what music I listened to to prompt Spotify to offer those suggestions.) is "Christmas Classics". More than half a million followers. I tap the icon—a 1970s-style album cover featuring a couple in striped socks lying in front of a fireplace and a Christmas tree. The playlist includes "Jingle Bell Rock," "Let it Snow," "Silver Bells," "Sleigh Ride," and about three dozen more peppy songs that make me think of animatronic snowmen in store windows, red Salvation Army kettles by store entrances, and parking spaces in store parking lots that seem twice as far away when your arms are laden with shopping bags than they did when you arrived at the store with empty hands and full wallet.

Sorry. Hang on.

(Sounds of a scuffle, huffing and puffing, a door slamming.)

I'm back. Had to lock my inner grinch in the Closet of Cynicism. As I was saying, Spotify offers me a plethora of pop songs that remind me of tinsel, candy canes, and the Hallmark Channel. My finger hovers over the "Shuffle Play" button. Do I tap it?

I do not. It's tempting but I resist the urge and go back to browsing.

You see, I have a tradition. The Christmas season doesn't officially start for me until the Santa float appears in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. No Christmas music or decorations or junk food treats before then. I have no idea where this tradition came from but I've followed it since childhood. It wasn't my parents' idea, although they indulged me when I told them about it. They never handed down any prohibitions against starting the Christmas preparations five minutes after the last trick-or-treater leaves your door. I don't remember them consciously choosing a date to start decorating. We began, always after Thanksgiving, whenever Dad talked me out of getting the tallest (most expensive) Frasier Fir on the tree lot and into getting something more affordable and small enough to fit into the family room and Mom hauled the ornaments up from the basement storage closet. My family isn't anti-Christmas. It's a religious holiday for us, more hymns than ho-ho-ho, but we enjoy making merry and we ooh and ah over tinsel and twinkle lights as much as anyone. But not before the fat man rides by on his float. Earlier just feels wrong.

Back to that can of worms. I have to ask, are you a put-up-the-mistletoe-as-soon-as-you-toss-the-jack o'lantern type? Or do you wait for the official Christmas season to decorate for the Christmas season? (Advent begins Sunday, December 3, if you're wondering.) Do you break out the holiday sparkle somewhere in between? (Hanging ornaments burns Thanksgiving calories, doesn't it?) Do you say, "Bah, humbug," and hibernate until the fuss ends?

When do you take your decorations down? The day after Santa departs? New Years' Day like my mom? Twelfth Night/Epiphany (January 6, 2018), like me? (I think whoever finds the baby in the King Cake should have to take down the Christmas tree.) Later? I knew one priest who kept her décor up until the Feast of the Presentation in February. But that's just procrastinating.

Donna's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Four Days.

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

I'm in the midst of revisions on my latest book—Toucan Keep a Secret, scheduled to come out in the summer of 2018. So what I mainly want out of life right now is for it to amble along with some semblance of normality, so I can have the peace and quiet I need to focus on my revisions.

Life had other ideas.

Background: I normally keep two desktop computers side by side on my desk. (Big desk.) One, the main computer, is for writing and emailing and every other practical thing. The other, which I call the gaming computer, is for playing games, processing photos, and streaming video—although in a pinch, I could work on it. Like if the main computer suddenly died. There's also a laptop for when I'm traveling, and I could work on that, too-- but I'm infinitely much more comfortable and productive on a desktop.

A couple of months ago the gaming computer began showing signs of distress. Periodically the video would go wonky, turning from a normal picture to something like abstract art. Rebooting would fix it . . .but sometimes I'd have to reboot a couple of times. I figured maybe it was nearing the end of its useful life. The local computer store was having some sales, so I went out and got a replacement. And then I got busy on my draft and tucked the replacement under the desk, planning to set it up when I got time. I mean, surely I'd find the time before the gaming computer died altogether, right?

Wrong. Last week the gaming computer finally went. Seemed to boot, but sent no signal to the monitor. No problem! Messing about with computers is an excellent form of writing avoidance. So I put my draft aside—I was in revision mode by now—and started to set up the new computer.

And couldn't. Not because I didn't have the know how, but because I didn't have the right cable to connect it to the monitor. (If you want the technical details: the monitor took DVI-D or VGA. The computer took HDMI or display port.) I ordered the necessary cable and went back to my revisions.

Disaster struck on Thursday morning. I ambled downstairs at a reasonably early hour. I won't say I was filled with enthusiasm for working on my revisions—more like enthusiasm for getting them over with. But I was ready to spend a day quietly plugging away. 

My main computer was dead. The message on the screen suggested hard drive failure.

I didn't panic. Okay, I panicked, but only a little. After all, I am a responsible, tech-savvy writer. I had two things going for me.

One: I have a backup service. (Carbonite, if you're curious which.) It was set up to check both computers regularly and back up any new or changed files. I checked Carbonite, and was able to determine that yes, it had been active up to the bitter end. So if it worked properly, my files were there to be reclaimed, once I had a working computer to put them on.

Two: I have a computer guy who makes house calls. I put in an anxious (okay, slightly panicked) call to him and he promised to drop by that evening.

In the meantime I whipped out my laptop, and tried to get some work done without looking too often and with too much misery at the three dead desktops littering my office. Okay, maybe the new computer wasn't dead, just not yet come to life. And I was hoping the gaming computer wasn't actually dead, only blind. Still—three computers that were doing me absolutely no good whatsoever. And apart from not having my optimal setup to work on the revisions, I was really missing my normal email setup—I could access new mail over a web interface, but not the hundreds—okay thousands—of old emails in my system. Emails I still owed answers to. Emails containing data I might need. Emails I didn't want to lose.

When Paul, my computer guy departed Thursday evening, I was less stressed. He got the new computer up and running. He took the gaming computer and the hard drive from the main computer with him to work on. And he reassured me that since I'd been smart enough to include my email data files in the Carbonite backup, one way or another we'd get them back.

On Friday or Saturday—I forget which—he shared the glad tidings that he could fix the gaming computer's video and it was otherwise in good shape. And—better still—the hard drive from the main computer worked fine—the problem must be something else in the computer. He'd figure it out. And this made recovering the old email setup easier.

And Sunday afternoon Paul brought back the gaming computer—no longer blind—and the hard drive from the main computer. He figured out why the main computer wouldn't boot and got it up and running. This enabled him to import my email setup from old to new.

I'm still not entirely back to normal. I'm compiling a list—so far relatively short—of things to do when he makes his third visit later this week. But now the discrepancies between what my computer setup can do and what I want it to do are annoying rather than crippling.

While the last days were not fun, they could have been a lot worse if I hadn't made some reasonable preparation for possible cyber problems. So I will close with a call to action to all writers—are you in good shape to deal with a computer meltdown? Do you have a backup system—preferable an automatic one rather than one that depends on you remembering, at the end of a busy day, to do it yourself? And do you know who you'd call if your computer suddenly died in the middle of a deadline? If the answer to any of those questions is not, make it your mission to turn that no to a yes this week!

 

How to Be a Good Ancestor

By Elaine Viets of the Femmes Fatales

My grandparents, Edward and Frances Vierling, were married more than fifty years, but there are no wedding photos. They got married at age 16-- on their lunch hour. Grandma and Grandpa quit school after the fourth grade, and went to work to help support their huge families. After their lunch-hour wedding, the new bride and groom went back to work, and then each went home to their parents' house.

What did their parents think of this sudden wedding? Why did they marry so suddenly -– and so young? Grandma wasn't pregnant. Did they decide they couldn't live without each other?
When did the young couple start living together? Where was their first house?
These mysteries will never be solved. My grandparents and their generation have passed away, taking their secrets with them.
Tracing your ancestry is all the rage. Femmes Marcia Talley and Dean James both wrote about their amazing family history discoveries.

Some of us are lucky enough to have letters or journals from our family members. The rest of us dig through dusty records, check out gravestones, even have our DNA analyzed to discover more about our ancestry.
But what did those people – the ones who gave us the gift of life, not to mention our blonde hair, our brown eyes, our bad knees and flat feet -– what did these people think and feel? We don't know.
But we can be good ancestors. We need to start now. I don't care if we're twenty, forty, or eighty, we owe our family information.
What should you tell your future family members? Here are a few ideas.

LOVE
Marriage records are easy to find. But why did you marry? Tell your family why you fell in love. How did you meet? Where did you meet? Why did you decide to marry?
Tell your family something funny that happened at your wedding.
When Don and I married, most of our wedding party was from out of town, and after the wedding, they got lost on the way to the reception hall. This was before cell phones and Google maps. They finally showed up an hour later.
Divorce can be a sensitive topic, and divorce decrees are cold. Your future family will want to know why you split. 

CHILDREN
How did you feel when you saw your newborn?
What were those first days like with your new family member? Were you afraid, proud, tired? All of the above?
What were your babies like: Did they have distinct personalities, even from the first weeks? Were they happy? Stubborn? Fussy? Curious? What funny things did they do?
My parents had a photo of me in a highchair, my face slathered in Gerber's prunes. I was thrilled that one was lost in a basement flood.

SCHOOL
I still remember my first day of kindergarten. I wore a little navy blue cape with flowers on the collar and Mom walked me to the bus. Share memories like these with your family. Tell them about the good teachers and the bad ones, the classes you liked. How you struggled with geometry. Why you loved English. Tell them about school from kindergarten till you threw your mortarboard in the air at your college graduation.

YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS
Remember the time Aunt Gertrude -– yes, stout, white-haired Gert -– rode a horse bareback on a dare when she was 16? You wouldn't believe it to look at her, but she was a hellion when she was young. And Uncle Al. The sensible one who bought his wife an extension cord for Christmas because she said the vacuum cleaner cord was too short? At age seven, he tied a towel around his neck and jumped off the porch roof playing Superman. Broke his arm.
This is your chance to bring those solemn relatives to life.
There are so many more things you can talk about: your first house. Your first car. Your grandparents' wonderful holiday dinners.
Don't lose this family history. Write it down. Talk it into a tape recorder. Video it. Make a scrapbook if you're crafty. Keep a journal. Choose your favorite form of expression.
Be a good ancestor. One who's gone, but not forgotten.

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In Stalag 383

This last Remembrance Day (UK)/Veterans' Day (US), people were posting pictures of parents and grandparents in uniform all over social media, and telling tales of their service. So I thought I'd share the story of my grandad, James "Mac" MacDonald in WWII. Here he is before he went, with my wee granny:

 

Mac was in the army - the Royal Scots Fusiliers - long before war broke out and stayed in the army long after peace was restored, ending up as Regimental Sergeant Major, but for five years of the war itself he wasn't actually fighting. He was captured early in 1940 and became a POW. I've seen the little official document that was sent to the British War Office and forwarded to my granny. It's just a checklist with a couple of dates and a few stamps, except that a kind German official scribbled the words "he is well" at the bottom. Until VE day in 1945, that was all she had.

So Mac spent the war in one of the four hundred huts, twenty bunks in each, that made up Stalag 383 in Bavaria. He wasn't on active serivce. But boy oh boy was he working against the Nazis! These men, you see, refused to carry out their allotted tasks. They wouldn't labour for Hitler. The retaliation for this refusal was that they were kept on starvation rations. So they starved. Each man, even in the bitterly cold winters, got a couple of potatoes and a slice of bread to eat every day. Some of them ate the lot in a oney to feel full for a while. Others portioned them out so as never to feel painfully empty. Some tried to keep their ration for just before bedtime in hopes of getting off to sleep.  

What cheered them and saved them were the Red Cross parcels: boxes of bully beef, tobacco, biscuits, soap, sardines, margarine, salmon, peas, socks, playing cards and magazines. One winter the guards ordered the men to stab all the tins so the food inside them rotted. They stabbed the tins of stuff that wouldn't go off and hid the rest. They could be sure that some of the hidden tins would remain undiscovered until the next Red Cross parcel arrived.

And they bartered. They swapped cigarettes for socks and cake for soap. There was a lively trade in pillowcases. Yes, pillowcases. A prisoner called Terry Frost mixed Red Cross powdered paint with sardine oil and offered to paint mens' portraits on half their pillowcase if he could keep the other half to paint whatever he chose. Mac was one of the men who accepted. (Frost kept painting after the war, eventually being knighted for services to art and elected a member of the Royal Academy.)

This portrait is one of my most treasured possessions. I'd admire it as a work of art even if I knew nothing about it, but I love that my Grandad brought it home even though he wanted only to forget everything about those years, that - despite the sackcloth pillowcase and sardine oil - it's in good shape (now carefully restored and stabilised) and that I was able once to meet Frost's son and let that family know one more of the portraits had survived. 

You might be wondering how I got so much information about Stalag 383, if Mac only wanted to forget. Certainly he never spoke about his experiences there. The most he ever said - if one of his grand-daughters was whining about having to eat liver, or cabbage, or raisins (we were awful) - was that we should be grateful we had food at all. Then he'd put pepper on his pudding to make us laugh and tuck in.

The answer is that another of the prisoners wrote a book, Barbed Wire, about life in the camp. It's also a prized possession but it's a tough read. It explains why, even on the happiest of days - such as his daughter's wedding - there was always a sadness about Mac. He was haunted. But he was definitely a hero.

  

On missing Crime Bake

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

I hate being sensible.

Last Thursday I'd expected to be insanely busy with all the last minute preparations for my trip to the New England Crime Bake. On top of the packing for a trip, there's tidying the house so it will be a joy rather than a pain to return to . . . clearing the refrigerator of anything that might die while I was gone . . . making sure friends and family knew I'd be gone . . . finishing any projects that were due while I was gone or right after I came back. A lot of work, but fueled by the anticipation of going to a convention that's always a lot of fun. Seeing interesting panels . . . picking up a few new books . . . reuniting with old friends and making new ones.

Instead, I spent Thursday canceling my travel plans and suffering through the first really bad day of a cold. I'd awakened Wednesday feeling merely a little tired and sniffly, but as the day wore on it become increasingly obvious that I was getting sick. But Wednesday was about anticipating misery. By Thursday morning, misery had arrived. Misery had settled in and made itself at home. I didn't really want to drag myself out of bed, much less all the way up to New England for Crime Bake. Sigh.

I dedicated as much of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday as possible to napping. I've often found that if I get enough sleep, I can short-circuit the worst of a cold—reducing the severity and duration, as they say in commercials for zinc lozenges. (Yes, I was also doing the zinc lozenges.) Most of the time naps seem to help you feel better, and even when they don't, at least when you're unconscious you're not experiencing the full misery of your cold.

And the most miserable thing about a cold? It's “only” a cold. You're not going to die from it. (Even though at times you feel as if you might.) It will run its course in a predictable amount of time. (It just feels as if you've been sick forever.) Your situation isn't unique or even unusual—most human beings get colds from time to time. (And as for those few who boast that they never do, I think it's time we tested them to see if they're really human.) There's even the vague feeling of guilt that if you'd taken better care of yourself—eaten better, slept more, taken a better mix of vitamins, washed your hands more obsessively—you could have avoided it. (But never say that to someone suffering from a cold. She might throw her cough syrup bottle at you.)

When not napping copiously, I did manage to get a few things done. Not, alas, the sort of exciting creative things readers would be glad to hear about. Boring stuff like filing and paying bills and gathering and sorting laundry. Lately I have begun binge-watching Dark Shadows: the Beginning while doing such boring tasks--”the Beginning” means that I've started with the first episode ever shown, and am now deep in the middle of the six months before Barnabas Collins arrived to rescue the show from cancellation. I'm now a lot closer to Barnabas's arrival than I was before the cold. Dark Shadows is great for watching while ill—if you have a sneezing fit during a dramatic scene, or suddenly realize you're starting to fall asleep sitting up, it's no biggie—any plot point you really need to know will be repeated several more times before the next episode. But the problem with watching Dark Shadows—or any TV--while sick is that it requires keeping your eyes open.

Reading has the same drawback. You close your tired, itchy, puffy eyes, and it just doesn't work very well. What works best is audiobooks—I can play them on my phone. How delightful to have a calm, cheerful person reading to you when you're sick!  But I wish someone would invent a device that tells my phone when I have fallen asleep. Last night I curled up in bed in the early evening with Inspector Banks just arriving at a crime scene and woke up at three a.m. with the light still on and Inspector Banks arresting the killer. Took a while to figure out exactly where I'd fallen asleep. Sigh.

I checked Facebook occasionally to see what my friends were up to at Crime Bake. On Friday and Saturday I merely noted the existence of writerly fun and frolic and was grateful that I hadn't tried to drag myself up there to experience it. On Sunday I began to feel the occasional faint flicker of envy, which I took as a sign that I had turned the corner and was on the road back to normal.

And here I am on a Monday morning when I expected to be sharing tales of Crime Bake highlights and pictures of some of your favorite writers. And instead, all I have to share is the story of how I was sensible and stayed home.

 Bah, humbug.

 Maybe I should start a rumor that I was faking the cold and doing something else instead. Taking on a hush-hush undercover assignment for the CIA or the FBI. Accompanying Indiana Jones on his quest to claim whatever new artifact the bad guys are threatening to take over the world with. Helping Frodo with the last leg of his journey to Mount Doom. You think people would buy any of those?

 

 

How Many Names Does Your Pet Have?

By Elaine Viets of the Femmes Fatales

    Mystery, our copper-eyed Chartreux, is our only cat who has a birthday. All our other cats have been rescues, and we had to guess their ages.
Mystery is cat royalty. She's a registered show cat.

       Like people with pedigrees, show cats have their official name, and it's an impressive moniker. Mystery's is Columbleu's Unsolved Mysterie.
Her "call name" – the name we use around the house – is Mystery. It fits her.
    Mystery is a sweet-natured cat. Except for twice in her 13 years.
    The first incident was at her first cat show, where she bit a judge. That made sense: People don't judge Her Highness, she judges them. She didn't want to be poked and prodded by strangers.
    That chomp meant Mystery was barred for life from the show ring.     That's how we got to adopt her from her breeders. Mystery never seemed to miss the show ring, but we can still see glimpses of her old life. When she comes into a room, she expects strangers to admire her.
The second time Mystery lashed out was when we took her to the vet for the first time. The little cat with the smoky gray fur turned into a fury, knocking everything off the exam table, including the computer. After that outburst, she's been perfectly behaved.
    Why did she over-react at her first vet visit and never again?
    Mystery seemed the right name.
    Over the years, she's acquired a host of other nicknames. Some make sense: "Little Kitty," because she used to be small enough to fit in the palm of Don's hand. She's now a healthy 13 pounds.
    Others pet names latched on for reasons we can't explain – Pomper. Pomp-Pomp. Pomperdale. Why did we start calling her those names? I don't know, but she answers to them all.

    

        Names are free, and not just the fat cats have more than one.
Our second cat, a striped tabby, is a rescue. Someone shot his whole family – mom and all the other kittens. This big-eyed brown tabby, the only survivor, wound up at our vet.
    "I know you don't want another cat," the vet said. "But if you'd just come take a look. You don't have to do anything. Just look."
    I took him home that night. The green-eyed tabby needed a name.
    At first, I called him Diamond, because he has double-diamond markings on his shoulder blades. But the cat would have nothing to do with that name. He refused to answer to it.

    

    Next, I tried Harry, after one of my favorite detectives – Harry Bosch.     The cat liked that name, and Harry he became. The fictional Harry Bosch was named for the painter, Hieronymous Bosch. Later, I found out Hieronymous really means Jerome, not Harry. I tried that out on Harry the cat.
    He hated that name. With a passion. Harry glared at me and walked out of the room.

    I was back to calling the cat, Harry.
    Until a friend saw him and said, "Handsome dude."
    Then I started calling him Harry the Dude, or just Dude. Harry now has two names: Harry and Dude.
    If I want to tick him off, I call him Jerome.
    The most popular pet names in America are Bella, Lucy, Max, Charlie, Daisy, Buddy, Molly, Bailey, Sophie and Maggie, according to a recent survey. In 2017, American rabbits are called Thumper, our fish are Nemo and our hamsters are Oreo. At least for starters.
    What pet names do you have for your pet? Go ahead. You can tell me.

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