I get bored with cover pictures and themes on my web site, Facebook page, and blogs. Tinkering with those is fun. Less fun is keeping the blogroll and other links in the margins up to date. And then there are the old posts.
When I sign on, I notice old posts that are getting a lot of hits. Sometimes I wonder why. Occasionally, I even go out and look at them and find (horrors) that my signature line has an out-of-date link in it, or worse yet that the post has a cover photo of an earlier edition of one of my novels.
If the posts are getting a lot of hits, then that’s where housekeeping is important. Writers who blog hope some of their readers will visit their websites and buy their books. This won’t happen if posts have links to web sites and books that no longer exist.
When blogs focus on events that are ongoing, you can also add updated material or fresh links. I did this a lot with my posts about the White House Boys (notorious school in Florida) and the fate of the aircraft carrier USS Ranger. Both of these were for a while developing stories. You can rewrite the posts, of course, or you can add to them. When you add substantial new information, you can add the word UPDATED to the title.
I don’t delete a lot of old posts, but sometimes it’s good to take a look at them and see if you still feel the way you did when you wrote them. For a writer, this is often like finding old short stories in a file drawer and being a little embarrassed you haven’t thrown them away.
There’s more to do with a blog than meets the eye–just like the attic or the garage in your house.
Salt to the Sea, Ruta Sepetys, (Philomel Books: February 2016), 400pp, young adult
Between January and May, 1945, Germany evacuated two million people from the advancing Soviet army in the Polish and East Prussian corridors via Operation Hannibal, the largest sea evacuation in modern history. Over 25,000 of them died in the Baltic Sea when 158 of the estimated one thousand merchant vessels were lost, many to enemy fire.
Among the lost were 9,400 of the German, East Prussian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Polish refugees on board the Wilhelm Gustloff that was sunk at 9:15 p.m. January 30th by three torpedoes from Soviet Submarine S-13 at 55°04′22″N 17°25′17″E, nineteen miles off the Polish shore.
Ruta Sepetys’ superb young adult novel traces the flight of Joana (Lithuanian), Florian (Prussian), Emilia (Polish) and Alfred (German) from the advancing Soviet army. Alfred is a sailor sent to the port of Gotenhafen for duty on board the Wilhelm Gustloff to help evacuate those escaping from the Soviet advance. Joana, Florian, and Emilia have a more difficult trek to Gotenhafen because they are also running from the German army.
The story is told in one-to-three-page chapters from the viewpoints of the four major characters. By the end of the novel, readers know each of these characters like family for they will have heard an unforgettable story of brutality, death, guilt, fate, shame and fear from every angle that matters.
Joana is a compassionate nurse, Emilia is a pregnant teenager, Florian is a young man with secrets, and Alfred wants to receive a medal for small, self-important deeds. And then there are Eva, who is tall and gruff; Heinz, a cobbler who knows people by their shoes; Ingrid, a blind girl who sees better than many, and the other seemingly doomed but hopeful souls along the way.
As they walk through the snow, Joana thinks: We trudged farther down the narrow road. Fifteen refugees. The sun had finally surrendered, and the temperature followed. A blind girl ahead of me, Ingrid, held a rope tethered to a horse-drawn cart. I had my sight, but we shared a handicap: we both walked into a dark corridor of combat, with no view of what lay ahead. Perhaps her lost vision was a gift. The blind girl could hear and smell things the rest of us couldn’t.
Sepetys’ great success with this novel comes from many factors over and above her research. The story, including the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, is told in pointed, straightforward, often graphic language with well-chosen details and no authorial editorializing or sentimentality. If the refugees reach the ships in Gotenhafen, they may not be given a boarding pass: the Germans can easily find reasons for and against each of the characters. And, the subplot of secrets ultimately linking Joana, Florian and Alfred adds tension.
It’s difficult to imagine a more perfect story about the tragedy of civilians in wartime or a better historical introduction to the plight of the Lithuanian, Prussian, Polish and German refugees caught between the opposing, but equally brutal World War II regimes of Hitler and Stalin.
Salt to the Sea is the novel no reader will forget.
“Although Urrea has stitched a seamless end to the saga initiated in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Queen of America lacks the clarity of vision of its prequel. Having left behind Mexico’s rich landscape and languages, the Urreas — Tomás and Teresita, and the author as well — grasp for inspiration.” – New York Times 2011 review by Mythili G. Rao
If Urrea’s powers as an author of magical realism and his great-aunt Teresa’s powers as an inspiring healer reach their apex in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, they become a lingering, bittersweet denouement in Queen of America. Urrea writes in the novel’s notes and acknowledgements that “The story is not the history.” Writing a novel rather than a non-fiction account of his family’s history led Urrea on a twenty year journey to pull together myths and stories and facts into a cohesive whole that is whole as an impression of what happened rather than–as he says–a textbook.
After she flees Mexico at the end of The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Teresa is carried by multiple tides more powerful than even her imagination can grasp. Initially, she settles with her father in a variety of locations in the Southwest. It’s closer to what they know, but it’s also dangerous inasmuch as the Mexican government still considers her an enemy of the state and persists in sending assassins to put an end to it. Until her father manages to land on his feet and start a profitable life in the States, finances are in short supply.
After suffering through an assault, Teresa leaves her family behind and looks for a way to continue her healing work elsewhere. Unfortunately, her upkeep and life are taken over by a consortium that primarily seeks profit out of her fame. Her life becomes, in today’s terms, a lengthy tour where she is at once visiting royalty and a caricature of her former self.
She experiences many wonders on this journey, including a prospective chance for love, companionship and normality. And she experiences many heartbreaks. In these highs and lows, readers will find her to be wonderfully human. Urrea knows his character and brings out her soul in this sequel.
By the time she frees herself from the sweep of events controlled by others, she has spent her capital. In many ways, it’s a well-deserved rest, one that she’s ultimately at peace with.
Urrea has handled her story with humor, more of his rich language, and a deep look into the psyches of the major characters. The story is told well and Teresa emerges as a complete person. While Urrea did not write a textbook and was free to interpret events (perhaps more truthfully as fiction than as facts) he is nonetheless constrained by the realities of Teresa’s life. No doubt, he would disagree. Suffice it to say, the historical Teresa did not lead a revolt against the Mexican government or become a catalyst for Indian rights and freedom while on tour, nor go on to accomplish great and mythic deeds in the U. S. If she had, Queen of America might have reached the stunning heights of its predecessor.
Teresa bloomed in The Hummingbird’s Daughter and faded as all flowers must in Queen of America. It is still a must-read for everyone who began the journey in The Hummingbird’s Daughter–for closure.
–Malcolm
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the magical realism novella Conjure Woman’s Cat
If you’re like me, and for the sake of the world I hope you’re not, you occasionally accept a book to review and then before you’ve finished reading the first five hundred words, thoughts like these come to mind:
My doctor won’t prescribe enough meds for me to finish this book.
Burning toast would make a more compelling plot.
If I shut my eyes, maybe the book will go away.
Can a reviewer go into the witness protection program if s/he (a) stops reading the book and acts like it got lost in the mail, or, (b) gives it a negative review in hopes the truth will keep him/her safe and then discovers that it won’t?
Why can’t the authors who have books like this send me an honest e-mail in advance that warms me that the book has put a hex on every reviewer who tried to read it up to now?
Where was the author when the memo went around reminding people that Italics isn’t an easy type font to read, meaning don’t use it for 90% of the book. (Reminds me of some of my classmates who highlighted everything in every textbook which had the effect of highlighting nothing.)
Goodness knows, I don’t want to send you an e-mail that hurts your feelings–much less that makes you go buy a gun–that tells you this thing (or baby/pride and joy/life’s work/last thing between you and the poor house) isn’t cutting it.
If you were a real mensch, you would realize that I’m stuck: (a) ending up in an asylum after “doing the right thing” and reading your entire book and/or (b) lying about the book in a glowing review, and/or (c) going into the hiding in Two Egg, Florida until the whole thing blows up or blows over.
Frankly, I just want my life back and don’t think that’s too much to ask.
–Malcolm
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the comedy/satire Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire.
We all have stuff that bores us so much that our eyes give the impression we’re dead. Hopefully, this doesn’t happen when your spouse says “I love you” or your boss is telling you what you have to do to get a better performance review.
Generally, most people try to pretend their eyes aren’t glazing over when they are. Even though manners don’t seem to matter as much as they used to, we generally know how to fake being interested in something even if we’re not. I’m sure appearing bored is probably politically incorrect along with everything else that might bother people.
Nonetheless, sometimes some things are so boring that we can’t help appearing dead. Do you have your own top ten list? I’m sure you do even if you’re not sure what it is because–if you’re like some people–making a list of what bores you is so boring that your eyes glaze over before you have more than a couple of things written down. For what it’s worth, here’s my list:
Writing discussion questions for book clubs. (I feel that if the club isn’t smart enough to discuss the book without suggestions for discussing it, they’re probably not smart enough to read the book.)
Forensics shows on TV about old cases. (Yes, I marvel at what labs can do–especially if it’s Abby on NCIS–but watching people shake clues up in test tubes isn’t my thing.)
Open caskets. (I really don’t want to see the person in the casket so I let my eyes go out of focus.)
Golf. (I don’t understand the need for it. Simple as that.)
Health Discussions. (Why do people get together and compare all the ailments they’ve had during the past week? It’s like a bloody contest. Yawn.)
Sermons. (I guess I was raised wrong, but I don’t like listening to somebody telling me what to do for an hour or so while people from the neighboring churches have already finished their services and are hogging the best seats at the nearby cafeterias.)
Badly written sex scenes in novels. (Make it stop.)
Parades. (I never saw the attraction of watching a bunch of people walk or drive down the middle of a street.)
Overly obvious advice. (What the hell am I supposed to say when somebody says, “you know, Malcolm, God moves in mysterious ways.” Am I supposed to nod in agreement or say something wise like “when you’re right, you’re right.”
People with a new baby who invite you over to watch their new baby. (Past a point, when I’ve seen one baby, I’ve seen them all. So what happens to people who used to engage in good conversation with guests once they have a baby and think we want to stare at it for two or three hours?)
What about you? Can you keep your eyes from glazing over long enough to jot down the top two or three things that make them glaze over?
Over time, I’ve learned that while everything we acknowledge we did probably impacted our lives forever, it’s best to say little or nothing about the other things that almost happened, because had they happened, we wouldn’t know the very people who sometimes ask to hear the story.
Göteborg (AKA Gothenburg)
I seldom mention Sweden, not because I’ve ever been there, but because I almost went there during the Vietnam War. When I went to Europe about a year before the draft would catch up with me, my local draft board had to be convinced I was planning to return. I was when I filled out the paperwork for permission to leave the country. By the time the summer was over, I came very close to never coming back.
While on a summer church work project, the two Americans in our international group started dating the two Swedish girls in our group. Most people will say, “that figures” because dating a Swedish girl is supposed to be the epitome of dating. Frankly, I don’t know how it happened because even though you won’t believe this, I wasn’t paying much attention to the Swedish girls in our group because at the outset they stayed together and chattered in Swedish.
When it did happen, I was lost.
In time, she asked me what I would do when I went back to the States at the end of the summer. I said that I had another semester of college to finish and then I’be probably be drafted unless I joined, say, the navy (which I ended up doing) before the draft put me in the army.
This began multiple conversations about the Vietnam War, my distaste for it, the fact I couldn’t (not then) file as a conscientious objector if my church had no formal anti-war statement, and how military service was one of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune we all had to put up with.
One day A___ said, “You would be safe in Sweden.” I knew that already because the newspapers constant printed stories about people who dodged the draft by going to Canada or Sweden. I said I was pretty nearly broke and couldn’t afford to go to Sweden, and that even if I could, I’be put in jail if I ever went back to the States.
She said, “well, you know the government will teach you Swedish and help you get a job. Before that happens, you can stay at my house. ” “What?” “My parents are fine with it.” “You asked your parents?” “I thought it best to make sure before I brought an American home with me because you know what we say about dating Americans.” (She never did tell me what they say, but I figured it would be unflattering.)
My parents didn’t support my anti-war beliefs and, I believe, my not coming back home was something that might have occurred to them. If they had, I would have gone home with her and would probably be writing this post in Swedish. As it was, when I borrowed the work project’s truck to drive A___ to a nearby city at the end of the project where she would catch the ferry back to Sweden, I seriously considered leaving the truck in the parking lot there and going to Göteborg with her.
As the sages say, you have to be at least a little mad to take such a leap of faith. I guess I wasn’t mad enough in those days, though several of the people at the work project were surprised to see me return. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” they asked. “I couldn’t take a step that meant never seeing my family again.”* They had to admit that made sense.
Who knows how it would have ended up. Everything and everyone I’ve known since that day in August, 1967, would have been vastly different. As it turned out, my parents would have passed away before amnesty was offered to those who went to Sweden, though they did take a vacation trip over there after my dad retired. I was happy for them, I thought, seeing the life I almost had without ever knowing how close I came to seeing it before they got there.
I’m glad I came home. I wasn’t glad then. I had trouble keeping my grades up during that last semester of college. My folks wondered why. I thought it best to tell them I had no idea or that it was bad karma or evil spirits. That seemed better than saying that when I fell asleep at night, I dreamt of A___ whispering “Gammal kärlek rostar aldrig.”
It’s easy to see now, of course, that if the wind or the clouds had been slightly different and I’d gotten on that ferry, my cool daughter and my two wonderful granddaughters wouldn’t exist, that I wouldn’t now be married to the person who is my soul mate, and that I would have missed a lot of memorable moments with my parents and two brothers.
Sometimes the gods keep us from doing what we want to do for a reason we think is capricious at the time.
Hej då,
Malcolm
Following up on an amnesty related comment, I actually would have been able to come home sooner than I expected. Gerald Ford offered conditional amnesty in 1974 with some legal strings attached that I wouldn’t have liked. Carter offered a pardon in 1977. My folks lived until 1986 and 1987. Knowing what I knew in 1967, I had to act on the assumption that amnesty would have never come or would come much later than it did.
My life began at a Gulf Oil Service Station at Immokalee, Florida, back in the days when the attendants came out with a whisk broom and swept the beach sand out of your car while they pumped your gas for you.
Papa at work
Word is, I was swept out of the back seat of our 1949 Nash even though I didn’t look like beach sand. Since authorities were certain that even though I was an ugly five-week-old baby, somebody would claim me sooner or later, they put me in the service station window with a sign that said IS THIS YOUR BABY?
Word is, I was there several weeks and learned how to use a whisk broom. By the time I had a resume, whisk brook operator didn’t cut it with modern day gas stations where nobody did nothing for nobody. I also learned how to tell the difference between swamp gas, ghosts and aliens from other planets. However, the feds have classified this and so I can’t tell you unless I move out of the country–like, to Russia maybe.
An aging alligator couple took pity on me and raised me as one of their own. They taught me to swim and they taught me to lurk in the water with only my eyes showing so that I could grab hapless ducks in my teeth and bring them home for Duck a la Orange.
Mugsy Walters Requesting Lunch Money
When I got to high school, playground bullies made fun of my swamp dialect and taunted me with phrases like “see you later alligator” and “after while crocodile.” That’s what they said after they stole my lunch money.
Papa Gator said, “Son, you’re never going to bring home the bacon with your teeth like your brothers and sisters. You’re going to have to use your wits.” That advice has served me well.
I convinced the playground bullies of several truths: (1) When I grew up, I was going to be a famous writer and would put all of them in my books for better or worse, (2) Looking good in a novel was a good way to pick up chicks, something they needed to think about since their teeth weren’t large enough to grab anyone at the prom, (3) Papa Gator knew where they lived.
No doubt, truth number one (1) got their attention; that, along with my weekly column in the school newspaper called “Alligator Alley Gossip.” Everybody read it, but nobody wanted to be in it: Is that hickey on a certain red-haired girl’s neck a true love bite or did somebody forget their lunch again? Once again, a lover’s lane romeo with the initials W. S. forgot the distinction between “Jail Bait” and “Gator Bait.” Note to S. T.: old lady Anderson doesn’t keep the test answers in her drawers any more.
The world has moved on from the Immokalee I once knew. The Gulf Oil Station was torn down years ago. Seaboard closed down the rail line. Most of the gators, including many who still remember my name, have retreated deeper into the swamps. And now, the people coming to town aren’t there for the fishing, but for the Zig Zag Girlz Blackjack at the Seminole Casino.
The basic truth comes down to this. If you can’t earn a living with your teeth, you need to go out and find an occupation that fits your station in life, one that honors how you were brought up. Even those who don’t know my first adult meal was a pine warbler on toast or that I still make slaw with swamp cabbage, walk carefully around any writer who just might put them in his books.
Papa Gator would be proud.
–Malcolm
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the “Tate’s Hell Stories” series which includes the new Kindle short story “Visiting Aunt Ruby.” Papa Gator has friends in Tate’s Hell Swamp, so if you’re in the Carrabelle area, stop in and say hello.
…but you better have something extraordinary to say if you want to convince me a published version of those memories will be a bestseller.
When I was a kid, I read books about explorers who kept journals about where they went and what they saw. Some of them happened to know how to draw and included illustrations showing where they went and what they saw.
I was just an everyday kid going to school. Nothing unique there. In spite the fact most of the people who knew me at school would describe me as nondescript, I kept logs (I liked sea stories) and journals (because guys didn’t keep diaries with hideous phrases such as “Dear Diary, Jenny looked at me in between classes today like she wished we were alone in the dark”).
The thing is, I was already too much aware of the fact that writers’ journals and private papers often got published after they were dead and (hence) unable to stop greedy heirs from trying to make a buck off stuff that was supposed to be private. Practically speaking, what this meant was that I made myself look better in my journal entries than I was.
“How will this read in the future?” I asked. This kept my journals from being the cathartic process of self-discovery modern-day advocates of journaling claim is possible. You’ll heal. You’ll change your life. You’ll grow. Maybe so, but truth wasn’t for me.
Consequently, I saved the healing/growing process for my fiction where I tell a story about somebody else while including disguised secrets about myself that I would never dare write down in a journal. These days, everybody and his/her brother is writing a memoir, including people who’re still in high school. But why?
I can’t decide whether all these memoirs by “regular people” are a service to human kind or examples of arrogance run amok.
Maybe some day my kids and your kids will be interested in some of our best true stories about life in an era that will seem very foreign to them by the time they’re reaching middle age. Maybe they’ll want to know about their family and where there ancestors came from and what it was like to live during those dark ages times when telephones were attached to the wall with a cord and didn’t show movies.
But, should you publish those memories as a book? I have no answer to this because–being 37.5% psychic–I know that the moment I say that we shouldn’t, people will come up with a hundred examples of “regular people’s” memoirs that had a great impact on the world. That can happen.
I do like the idea of continuity, the kinds of things we read about in oral history projects that give folks in later generations a sense of what life was like for people in their parents and grandparents generations. Perhaps we can provide that kind of information for our kids. Maybe they’ll never read it. We may never know.
My folks used to send a Christmas letter out every year. Years later, my brothers and I would actually find ourselves referring to these old letters because we could no longer remember what year we saw Niagara falls or when our father received an award. If I’d kept a journal, I would know all this.
If I did know it, I find it hard to imagine that thousands of people would race to the bookstore to buy even a well-edited version of that journal, along with a snappy title and a jaw-dropping cover.
An author’s fiction already contains enough secrets in it than he dares disclose any other way.
–Malcolm
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Visiting Aunt Ruby,” and Kindle short story that he’ll swear on a stack of Bibles didn’t happen in “real life.”
Junction City, TX, Star-Gazer News Service, February 13, 2016–A local man trying to juggle gifts and cards for multiple lovers arrived at Lost Horizon Hospital & Mortuary near death here today after simultaneously confronting Bambi, Monique, Caroline, and a woman calling herself “The Dark Lady” on aisle three between the beef jerky and the pet treats.
Darcy is currently indisposed.
When Dan Darcy, of 148 Bonnie Meadow Road, arrived at the emergency room during the hospital’s 12th “code black” of the year, doctors took one look at him and assumed he lost the race at Pamplona.
“How many hooves do all the bulls in Pamplona have?” asked Dr. Grey, rhetorically as she attempted to intubate a mouth that turned out to have run into multiple fists.
Using sign language, Darcy said, “Watch out for The Dark Lady.”
“Everyone assumed he was hallucinating,” said attending physician “Bill Smith” who refused to give his real name due to “malpractice issues.”
“Screw The Dark Lady,” Smith reportedly added.
“Your place or mine?”
“Oops, no offense intended, m’am.”
According to first responders, the four women showed up at Walgreens where they shouted “hi lover” in unison before realizing they were a choir.
“Try as he might, he couldn’t preach to us once we caught him with a Valentines Day card for each of us. Inside, he scrawled ‘HAPPY VD’ in a hurry because he probably had to hurry home to his wife, AKA ‘Clueless in Abilene,'” said Bambi, speaking in secret after being assured her name would not be used in the newspaper.
Monique told reporters that “an honest philanderer would go to another town to buy gifts for his paramours so this kind of awkwardness doesn’t happen. I mean, golly, The Dark Lady is my mother. I always thought she was out delivering meals on wheels.”
Hospital spokesmen who were laughing too hard to keep their priorities straight, refused to confirm or deny that a woman that staff believed to be “Clueless in Abilene” begged the hospital to let Mr. Darcy go on to his great reward as soon as she filled out a fast-track DNR form.
“I just want my friends and family to know that I’m not the ‘Caroline’ they know but a different ‘Caroline’ from another planet or maybe from some God forsaken place such as Tulsa,” said Caroline.
Reportedly, my Darcy is resting in guarded condition beneath his wife’s thumb.
–Story by Jock Stewart, Special Investigative Reporter
When I sign on, I notice old posts that are getting a lot of hits. Sometimes I wonder why. Occasionally, I even go out and look at them and find (horrors) that my signature line has an out-of-date link in it, or worse yet that the post has a cover photo of an earlier edition of one of my novels.
Ruta Sepetys’ superb young adult novel traces the flight of Joana (Lithuanian), Florian (Prussian), Emilia (Polish) and Alfred (German) from the advancing Soviet army. Alfred is a sailor sent to the port of Gotenhafen for duty on board the Wilhelm Gustloff to help evacuate those escaping from the Soviet advance. Joana, Florian, and Emilia have a more difficult trek to Gotenhafen because they are also running from the German army.
My doctor won’t prescribe enough meds for me to finish this book.
I was just an everyday kid going to school. Nothing unique there. In spite the fact most of the people who knew me at school would describe me as nondescript, I kept logs (I liked sea stories) and journals (because guys didn’t keep diaries with hideous phrases such as “Dear Diary, Jenny looked at me in between classes today like she wished we were alone in the dark”).
Malcolm's Round Table 