ENNUI

I feel today like I haven't a creative bone in my body. Or I suppose "cell in my brain" is closer to anatomically correct. But I also don't have a critical bone in my body today, so correctness isn't a high priority either.

The highlight of my existence right now is harvesting herbs. Not an event I'll be talking about for weeks to come. I keep thinking a real writer would already be tossing around ideas for a mystery titled Death By Dill or Poisoned By Pesto, yet nothing occurs to me.

My car went through its annual state inspection and oil change last week. Did that inspire Inspector Tierod and the Corpse in the Corolla? No.

The trash container that I use for overflow from my rain barrel sprung a leak after an epic thunderstorm. The Mildew At The Bottom Of the Can? Be Worried In The Rain? The Perp in the Puddle? Nope. Sigh.

Cole Porter's "I Get A Kick Out of You" was the first time I encountered the word "ennui." Leave it to the French to make being bored and listless sound romantic. Too cool a word for such a horrible case of the blahs.

Writers need brain stimulation. So next week, I've decided to go find some. Going to load up my car trunk with it, bring it home, freeze it. That way, I can thaw a package of stimulation when I need it during my winter doldrums next January.

Meantime, I'm leaving the A/C off. Maybe I can work out a plot to Witness For The Perspiration.

Peace,
Elena

Seeds

Purple peppers, one of this year's experiments.

I think I mentioned before that my Santangelo granddad was a farmer. He was also did shoe repair and, at the end of his life, owned a little neighborhood grocery store, but he still kept a vegetable patch in his backyard and considered himself, first and foremost, a farmer.

Most of grandpop's children also grew food of some sort in their yards, though only one son became a farmer. Two of that uncle's sons also followed the family vocation. One of them became a professor of agriculture.

About 90 square feet of my small yard is devoted to growing vegetables each year, with another 15 reserved for herbs. Each year as I till the soil, I wonder how many more years I'll be able to handle the physical torture involved. I wonder if it's worth it. A month or so later, I taste the first lettuce, then around July 1st, the string beans. This past week, I've had the first bell peppers and tomatoes. It's worth it.

But beyond the obvious gastronomic rewards, I enjoy a kind of scientific fascination with the process of growing. I experiment with different soil additives, different growing techniques (like putting screens over my lettuce to keep the plants cooler), different seeds. I'll plant more than one variety of tomatoes and peppers, observing which grows better in my conditions and which produces more. If I find great tasting veggies or herbs, I try to dry the seeds for next year. Sometimes my experiments work, sometimes not, but the learning process is fun. Farming is never boring.

All good farmers do likewise. You can't farm exactly the same way each year. It's not good for the earth or the food supply. You have to constantly adjust. For centuries farmers have been sharing what works and what doesn't, and even sharing plants and seeds. In my family alone, many of the plants in my garden originated as cuttings from the gardens of my aunts and uncles.

I heard yesterday that Monsanto is now trying to patent seeds. They claim that they've genetically modified them, so they've therefore "invented" them.

Consumers hear the words "genetically modified" and panic, but that's not what's scary here. Mankind has been genetically modifying crops since we switched from hunter-gatherers to agriculture. That's why there are 7500 varieties of apples worldwide instead of only the wild apple that originated in west Asia (the Garden of Eden, whichever you prefer).

The scary part is the thought of seeds as intellectual property, that any one entity can claim ownership to the very root (so to speak) of our food supply. Monsanto isn't about to share what they've learned, plus, if you dry the next generation of seeds produced, they could sue you (despite the fact that the next generation would again be genetically modified, simply because pollinators like bees aren't fussy about what pollen is stuck to their butts, and because natural mutations occur).

The thing is, the genetic makeup must keep changing for healthy crops. Adaptability is how life works.

If you want a writing analogy, free seeds, flowing among writers without restriction, is also necessary for the creative process. Imagine if someone had slapped a copyright on "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" back when it was first used as a plot.

So, I'm going to keep farming as long as I can, and supporting my local farmers. I don't want corporations owning my food supply and saying what I can and can't grow.

Peace,
Elena

Night Lights

Night sky over Devil's Tower, Wyoming

When I was a kid, my mom used to leave our 15 watt hall light on at night (so none of us would take a header down the stairs en route to the bathroom). Since I was afraid of the dark, I'd sleep with my bedroom door open to let in all the luminescence I could from that dim bulb.

I created a character who's afraid of the dark for my Twins series. In researching it, I found that achluophobia is defined as a fear of the dark severe enough to be pathological. That implies that lesser fears of the dark are considered by society to be normal. Makes sense. We're taught from an early age to associate light with goodness, security and clarity. Darkness is seen as dangerous and evil. When we enter a dark room, even if it's a familiar space that we know with eyes closed, our first instinct is to turn on a light.

I recently heard an NPR program called "Lost in 'The City Dark'" about light pollution and the loss of the night sky. These days streetlamps, digital billboards, and flood-lit buildings and bridges have made it impossible to see stars in cities around the world.

My dad, brother and I used to stargaze a lot. From our backyard on very clear nights, you could see a faint, fuzzy Milky Way crossing the sky over our house. My brother had a small telescope, so we could check out the craters of the moon, rings of Saturn, moons of Jupiter, the Andromeda galaxy and the teeny nebulae of Orion. I bought a Scholastic book about constellations and learned to identify every one I could see from my yard. We'd stay up late for meteor showers, lunar eclipses, and the occasional comet visitation.

My current neighbors all have big spotlights. The streetlamps have brighter bulbs. The shopping malls on either side of town create a permanent glow on the horizon. All but the brightest stars are now veiled.

I just heard about an exhibit at a large botanical garden not far from me. They've set up colored lighting fixtures--I guess you could say light sculptures, in some cases--all over the grounds for night tours. A few of my friends have oohed and aahed about it, but my first thought was to morn the fact that no one will be able to see the lightning bugs, or moonlight on the blossoms, or, of course, the stars.

I've gotten over my fear of the dark. In fact, I like it. Darkness is energy-efficient. And as Charles Dickens said, it's cheap--always welcome in this economy. Yet we overdo lighting--we keep wasting fuel to keep our childhood fears away.

When I evoke memories of the most memorable night lighting displays I've seen, I think of the starry sky over the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and over Badlands, and over the little out-of-the-way-town of State Line, PA. I remember the first time the sky was so clear I could see individual stars of the Milky Way, at Kiwanis Girl Scout Camp. I remember my first night hike, when I found, to my surprise, that starlight was all I needed to see the trail after my eyes adjusted.

As filmmaker Ian Cheney on NPR program said, we don't raise our heads and look up anymore. We look down, at our phones, at our artificial lights. Cheney makes the case that "in losing the night sky, we're not only losing something beautiful, we're losing this reference point, a sense of perspective. And to think that most kids now will grow up without that perspective, without a sense of our place in space."

If you've got kids, please take them stargazing, and often.

Peace,
Elena (who still has and uses that Scholastic book)

What Did the Comma Ever Do To You?

Last week I was musing aloud about blog ideas in front of my brother. He told me to write about commas--about why you don't see them much anymore, and about why, at times, you NEED to see them more.

My thought was "Been done." Everyone gripes about the sad state of what amounts to bad editing of the published word.

Then I visited Lubriderm's website, to send them a note asking why their "Fragrance Free" lotion smells. I tried to be informative about the problem, explain that the scent wasn't as strong as the regular lotion. I asked if this was an error in the batch or if they'd changed their formula. I had a limit of 500 words to use in my complaint, and I said what I had to say, politely I thought, in less than 100. I hit "SEND."

A little red warning came up: "Illegal character used in comments."

Huh? I checked my wording to make sure I hadn't mistakenly inserted "&" or "#" or "}." No, everything looked fine. To be sure, I took out the one contraction I'd used, in case the apostrophe was the problem. Hit "SEND" again. Same message.

Then it occurred to me that they might mean commas. I went into denial. How could a comma be called an illegal character? Who wrote that law?

Yet, sure enough, when I went back and ethnically-cleansed the comments of commas, retyping them in short sentences that sounded as if they'd been written by 4 year-old, the complaint was accepted.

You must to be kidding, Lubriderm.

Or I suppose, to get through to them, I'd have to say "You must be kidding Lubriderm."

Which means something completely different.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,!
Elena

Give Me A Nice Locked Room

After the last week, a padded, soundproof cell sounds heavenly.  But actually, this blog is about locked room mysteries.

Mystery fans know I mean the kind of story where the corpse is found alone in a room with limited access, and that access has been cut off from the outside with a lock or other means. The fun of solving this kind of enigma is figuring out how the murderer got in and back out again.

Back in the 5th century, Herodotus told of a headless robber whose body was found in a sealed chamber. What we think of as the first "modern" detective story came from the pen of Edgar Allan Poe: The Murders in The Rue Morgue, published in 1841. This was also a locked room mystery and no doubt inspired variations on the plot that followed--Collins' The Moonstone, Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room, and several Sherlock Holmes tales such as The Sign of Four and "The Speckled Band."

During the Golden Age of detective fiction, locked room mysteries were some of the most popular, and it seems like nearly every author of the genre tried their hand at this kind of plot. Dorothy Sayers set one outdoors--a recent corpse found in the middle of a wet beach, yet with no footprints in sight (Have His
Carcase). Agatha Christie used a whole island as her locked room (And Then There Were None). Christie used the technique in other works as well. One of my favorites is her short story, "The Blue Geranium."

Authors are still writing locked room mysteries, but they're hard to find these days. Maybe the pressure put on authors to churn out novels in a hurry discourages the creation of intricate plots. Or perhaps the trend toward action-oriented thrillers discourages plots based on mental puzzles. It seems a shame, now that we have all kinds of technology--surveillance cameras, motion detectors, ID card, fingerprint and retina-scan door openers--that could make for the ultimate locked room.

So, to kick off the next locked-room renaissance, I wrote the novel TWO-FACED (available only (for now) on Kindle and Nook). Any authors out there wiling to give it a try?

Do you have a favorite locked room mystery?

Peace,
Elena

Getting Cozy with Poisons

Anytime a group of mystery fiction lovers get together eventually the discussion will get around to hard-boiled vs. cozy novels.

The former is the grittier type of novel, taking place on mean city streets, as told by policemen or private detectives. The novels have more physical action, more violence, and more gore. The bad guys tend to be organized crime, serial killers, even terrorists.

Cozy mysteries are named after the tea cozy, used for keeping a pot of tea warm. These stories usually take place in small towns, with bodies often found already dead, and not too messy. The protagonists tend to be amateur sleuths (though not always--think of Christie's Poirot). The bad guys are usually amateurs as well--cases involving domestic murder, embezzlement, secrets that need to be kept quiet.

In hard-boiled mysteries, you'll likely find guns, bombs, knives, and blunt instruments like lead pipes. The bigger the weapons, the better, so big powerful cars are also to be expected. No one in a hard-boiled drives a Smart Car or a Mini Cooper.

Cozy murder victims typically succumb to more genteel methods. Oh, guns aren't out of the question, but they won't be assault rifles or police specials. Maybe an antique musket, or a lady's derringer (I used a Brownie in my last book). A blunt force weapon is more apt to be a fireplace poker or a bust of George Bernard Shaw. If the victim is drowned, it's in the garden pond instead of the East River.

Poisons, though, have always had their place in classic cozy mysteries. One of the experiences that shaped Agatha Christie's career was learning about toxins when she worked in a medical dispensary during World War I. The traditional mysteries are chock full of arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide.

I love garden settings: all someone has to do is mention the foxgloves or oleander in the yard and you know Cousin Horace isn't long for this earth. And certainly the shed out back contains a container or two of rat poison or pesticide.

Like food? Beware of the mushrooms or special herbs Aunt Betsy added to the soup. Or the berries in the tart. Or even certain shellfish harvested in the wrong month.

And let's not forget the exotic poisons--the venom of certain snakes and spiders, the excretions of certain frogs, even poisonous gases that leave no trace. And everyone's favorite, the untraceable poison discovered by a primitive tribe somewhere in the Amazon.

Poisons, somehow, aren't seen as macho enough for tough guys in hard-boiled crime novels. I'm not sure why. The Borgias were the Sopranos of the Italian Renaissance. No one called them wimpy for using poisons. Not to their faces, at least.

So give me a nice un-gritty mystery any day, where you never know what might have been added to the liquid in that pot under the cozy.

Cheers,
Elena

Memorial Day Isn't Just For Citizens

I've put a bit of this story on Facebook the last week, so if you've already read some, I apologize. But here's more of the story.

My mom's father was named Guiseppe Ciccocioppo. A mouthful, right? He immigrated here from Abruzzi, Italy in 1912. In five short years, he was a private in the U.S. Army and his messmates were calling him Joe Chicco.

After his training, he was on a train slowly traveling through the south, at one point through a watermelon patch. Joe jumped off the train, grabbed a watermelon under each arm and let his buddies pull him back aboard. The incident earned him the name Watermelon Joe.

The army must have been impressed with his food procurement skills, because they made him a cook in the 154th Depot Brigade of the 2nd Training Battalion. Joe was sent to a new base built as a training facility, Fort Meade. No one ever remembers the regular soldiers who do the work at boot camps. In this case, the new recruits who went through Ft. Meade in 1917 ended up in the trenches of France. One of them, at least, remembered Joe Chicco afterward. His name was James Ronca.

After the war, James Ronca was at home when his younger sister brought home a prospective beau. James took one look at him and exclaimed, "That's Watermelon Joe!" Which apparently made the approval process go smoothly.

But the point of this blog is that Joe only became a citizen of the United States after the war, when he legally changed his name to Chicco and married Jenny Ronca. During his time as a soldier, he was still an immigrant.

Twenty plus years later, during World War II, Joe's two sons and most of his nephews were in the armed forces. One of his nieces, too, as an Army nurse. Joe walked the five blocks to the train station every day that he could, to welcome any military personnel coming home on leave. If they were from his neighborhood, he'd walk them home, carrying their duffels for them.

When Joe died in 1948, the VA provided a footstone for him with a flag holder attached to the side. For more than 60 years, that stone stood 4 inches above ground and every Memorial Day a flag was placed in the holder. This year, the cemetery decided to sink all footstones to ground level, so they could get riding mowers over them. They buried Joe's flag holder.

I contacted the VA to get a new one. They asked if I had Joe's discharge papers and death certificate. I didn't, but I took a photo of the footstone, and that was accepted as proof of his service and death. So today, I'll put the new WWI flag holder and flag on my grandpop's grave.

Occasionally, PBS reads off the names of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of those names are Latino. They are perhaps recent immigrants, or at least, the sons and daughters of immigrants. Their families deserve better than random traffic stops asking them to show proof of citizenship and other harassments.

American immigrants quite often do the work no one else wants to do, including fighting our wars. We need to remember that.

Happy Memorial Day,
Elena