NOT WRITING? BEST EXCUSE EVER! - May 1, 2025

The world has been too much with me in recent months, in spite of my feeble attempts to ignore the relentless drumbeat of the political horror show that threatens the sanity of most of us. You would think that writing a story set in the 1980s in a city I loved would provide sufficient shelter from the apocalypse of real life. But you’d be wrong. The story seemed frivolous in the face of our current daily disasters. I wrote nothing for weeks, including a blog post for April 1 that left an empty space here. Not even the guilt I felt was enough to send me to my laptop.

It didn’t help that it had been a year since our last dog had died. We had agreed Cooper would be the last of our many dogs. We were getting older. It didn’t make sense to take on a creature that might outlive us. But I found myself searching PetFinder, trying to convince myself I was just browsing. Then this face popped up.

On April 11, we drove across the bridge to Portland to pick up our new-to-us, eight-year-old rescue dog, a Shih-Tzu/poodle mix, who needed a home.

Arlo loves people, and especially us, not trusting us to be out of his sight. His fear of abandonment has been challenging. So has his lack of leash training and house breaking. He’s full of energy and loves chasing a ball around our yard and our house. He’s a genuine lap dog, something new to us since our dogs had always weighed anywhere from 40 to 90 pounds. Arlo tops the scale at 13 pounds.

The biggest problem has been his manic aggressiveness toward other dogs. It’s still a mystery to us, since he was housed with four other small dogs at the rescue with no problem. We’re hoping that once he settles in with us and his anxiety levels diminish, we’ll be able to introduce him to other dogs without fear of a bloody disaster. If/when that happens, obedience school will be on top of the to-do list!

I’m starting to look at the shelved mystery story again. Maybe I can get back to it during Arlo’s nap time. With luck, he could become my new muse!

WHERE DO YOUR STORY IDEAS COME FROM? March 10, 2025

            My latest story, “My Hand to God,” is now available in the anthology, CRIMEUCOPIA: Chicka-Chicka Boomba! The stories in this volume are all written by women (hence, the Chick in the title). If you asked me where the idea for this particular story came from, here’s what I would tell you.

Idea number one came from a true story about my maternal grandmother. She arrived at Ellis Island after a harrowing trip in steerage from Poland. Or maybe Russia. When asked where she came from, her reply was always, “Minsk. Pinsk. What difference does it make?” She and my grandfather had eight children. During the Depression, his eyesight failed, and their survival was up to grandma. With her fractured Yiddish/English, she started a small grocery store in Newark, New Jersey, to make sure her family would always have food.

The store was across the street from a social club, the informal headquarters for mobster Longie Zwillman. Crime on the street was unheard of. Everyone knew the neighborhood was under Longie’s protection.

Well, almost everyone. One day, grandma’s grocery was broken into. Food was stolen and damage done. Longie was furious. He insisted on giving grandma money to make up for her losses and promised her he would take care of the culprit. Rumor had it that he did.

The second idea came from a conversation I overheard one day when I was sitting at my desk with the window open. Two teenagers walked past, and I could hear their conversation clearly. Naturally, I wrote it down before I could forget what they said.

Teen 1: “I couldn’t believe it. He got shot. Right next to me. I could’a been killed.”

Teen 2: “No shit!”

Teen 3: “If I hadn’t of bent down, he’d a blown my head off.”

For reasons I can’t explain, those two incidents came together in my mind to create “My Hand to God.” I wish inspiration would always be so close at hand.

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE - February 1, 2025

The fun part of writing fiction is chasing the research White Rabbit down the rabbit hole. Doing research involves following the rabbit in hopes of finding information that will provide authenticity to the fictional world you’re creating. The danger is in enjoying the chase so much that you have difficulty knowing when it’s time to get back to that fictional world and start writing. Research is much more fun than writing first drafts.

When you do manage to force yourself back to the empty page, you’re faced with difficult choices. How many of the sparkling gems you’ve discovered are too many? And how many actually drive the plot rather than become a distraction?

Currently, I’m working on a private investigator crime story set in 1991 in Boston, a hotbed of Mafia activity. Having lived in Boston from the 1970s to the 1990s, I was very familiar with the setting, but I felt that additional research would be useful. A central figure during those years was James “Whitey” Bulger, brother of Billy Bulger, a State Senator who somehow managed to avoid being ruined by his gangster sibling. In my slide down the internet rabbit hole, I came across a story I hadn’t heard before. Alas, it didn’t fit into my fictional world, but I thought I’d share it here.

An episode of “Inside Edition,” a tv news program, popped up on YouTube with an announcement that Whitey Bulger and three friends had won more than $14 million in the July 1991 Massachusetts State Lottery. The story was followed by additional coverage that included raised eyebrows and sarcastic voices. Was the fix in? Several investigations were unable to prove the lottery had been rigged.

The significance of Whitey’s good luck was obvious. He was under investigation by the IRS and desperately needed to launder his illegally obtained funds. With the legitimate fortune the lottery provided, he was going to be able to show the IRS a noncriminal source for his wealth.

It was true that lottery was legitimate, but Whitey wasn’t the one who got lucky. He heard that a South Boston man he knew had bought the winning ticket and “persuaded” him to sign the ticket over to him and Whitey’s friends for a fraction of the value of the winnings.

After he collected four of the twenty annual payments, law enforcement was closing in and Whitey went on the lam. Ultimately the Bulger family was unable to collect the remaining lottery winnings. [https://crimereads.com/boston-true-crime-through-the-decades]

Sometimes, truth really is stranger than fiction.