Ah, bliss!

By Mike Crawmer

Last week I spent five days with my brother and sister-in-law on their sailboat off Great Exuma Island in The Bahamas. Nothing especially interesting happened. One day was like the next: one fabulously empty white sand beach after another, waters that went from aquamarine to deep blue, all of it under an endless sky of blue by day and star-sprinkled black by night. So boring.

Yeah, right! If this was heaven, I was ready to move in. Up before dawn every day, I would slather myself with sun blocker so I could soak up the rays without burning my winter white skin. I learned to snorkel, drank my first Dark and Stormy (rum and ginger beer) at a sundowner (boaters’ version of a cocktail hour), and gathered sea shells along the shores. Sunset meant a couple hours of card games, then early to bed. The only radio on the boat was the ship-to-shore type, and there was no TV. I didn’t miss either, but I did miss my daily newspaper (well, for the first day or so).

Boaters like Fred and Rose--and there were a couple hundred of them anchored in the many coves of Elizabeth Harbor--are an interesting breed. Most retired early and are now cheerfully spending their grandchildren’s inheritance. They leave their northern homes in early fall, returning tanned and white-haired in the spring. Between sailing, fishing, maintaining their boats, checking the weather forecast and visiting one another, they don’t have time for much else, and certainly no interest in what’s happening beyond their pleasant little world.

I learned how happily out of touch they are one night when I was trying to discuss current events. Imagine how amused I was when Rose mentioned that they’d heard something about some actor or actress dying. At first I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. Then I had a “duh!” moment: of course, it had to be none other than Anna Nicole Smith.

When I mentioned to folks that I was going to The Bahamas, I was immediately asked, “Are you going to the funeral?” (I do not exaggerate; even my dentist asked me that.) Anna S. was the topic of the day (seemingly every minute!) for weeks up here; down there, on the beautiful blue waters off Great Exuma Island, the late, much-lamented (well, by some) celebrity was less than a footnote.

As a news junky, I usually could be counted on to utter a tut-tut at poor, clueless Rose (I say that with love and respect; she is a MENSA member after all). But in that setting, on their boat, it simply didn’t matter what was happening “up there.” The sun, the sky, the beaches, the impossibly blue waters were all that mattered. Ignorance, I found, is just the icing on the cake of true Bahamian bliss.

In Search of That One Perfect Word

by Mike Crawmer

Looking back on it now, writing the first draft of my mystery seems like purgatory, albeit a purgatory of my own making. It took me way too long to get to the point where I felt I had written all that needed to be written and I could type that last period on that last sentence in that last paragraph. Done, at last.

Now, for the rewrite, the next daunting step in the creative process, but one that I looked forward to--really. At the office I rework, rewrite and sometimes re-imagine others’ writing. How much more satisfying the editing experience will be when rewriting my own WIP. Now I can fix the contradictions, repair POV problems, and figure out what to do with that subplot that, so important in chapter four, peters out in chapter ten. Rewriting will be challenging and, yes, fun. But I’m still in chapter one when I hit a dead end. One sentence refuses to be fixed.

“Andre’s words echoed throughout the hall” seems, at first glance, to be just fine. There’s the requisite subject and verb, and a hint of the setting. But, on second look, “hall” won’t work. You see, Andre is speaking inside a vast, empty stable. For the average reader, “hall” conjures up an office building, a hospital, a school, maybe even a Southern plantation house. Not a stable.

Okay, let’s see how I can fix this. I write, “echoed through the stable,” but I’ve already established the setting. To write “stable” again would be repetitious and--horrors!--unimaginative. How about “room”? It is a room, but, oh, how bland! “Space” then? Nope. Sounds like something an interior decorator would say. Hey, what about “interior”? But “interior,” besides being about as unspecific as you can get, suffers the same affliction as “room”—it’s boring.

Figuratively tossing my hands up in the air, I look at the entire sentence rather than focusing on one frustratingly wrong word. “Andre’s words” has to stay, but what about replacing “echo”? Maybe Andre’s words could “bounce off the stable’s musty walls” or “fall with a thud amid the empty straw-filled stalls”?

I look at all the options. Hall. Walls. Stalls. Is there a pattern here? I’m really stuck, aren’t I? And now I’ve gone from echoing to bouncing to thudding, and I’m no happier than I was when I first realized “hall” wouldn’t work. Ten minutes wasted and I still have 68,346 words to go.

At this pace, “WIP” will go from shorthand when referring to the novel underway to the very title of the work itself. And I thought writing the first draft was a chore!

Who is Fred, really?

by Mike Crawmer

I’m obsessed with Fred. No, not my brother Fred. Obsession thrives on imagination unhampered by knowledge. I know my brother all too well.

This “Fred” is pure mystery. For one thing, I don’t even know if he exists. Or if “Fred” is a he or a she--or even human. But, for the sake of argument, let’s agree that “Fred” is a guy, not a Fredericka, or a pet or some cartoon character.

I first became aware of Fred last spring. I was cycling along the Southside Trail, waving to the engineers on passing freight trains, veering around wobbly weekend cyclists, and enjoying the good weather. Somewhere along the four miles between Ninth Street and the Glenwood Bridge this love note painted in white on the trail’s asphalt caught my eye: I LOVE FRED.

Graffiti is as much a part of Pittsburgh’s biking/hiking trails as the weeds that line these urban paths. On the Eliza Furnace Trail (aka the Jail Trail), the north-side wall (the one holding up Parkway East) is an exploding canvas of color for an ever-changing cast of “graffiti artists.” (BTW, I really don’t consider these people artists; in my book, they’re no better than strip mine operators and clear-cut loggers. Environmental destroyers all.) Some of their “art” hints at potential. Mostly, it’s little more than the juvenile scribblings of some bored kids with little talent and less regard for the public good.

Amid all this colorful, chaotic and incoherent chatter, I LOVE FRED was just another scribble. But, as spring morphed into summer, I LOVE FRED (or sometimes just FRED) started popping up everywhere. In black paint on benches. In red paint on the sides of port-o-johns. On large boulders and submerged barges. Whoever loved Fred certainly wanted to tell the world about this passion.

Then, one day last summer, this valentine to the mysterious Fred went from a trail-side advertisement to a giant billboard. Looking across the Monongehela River from the Southside Trail I couldn’t help but notice a new I LOVE FRED, this time in giant block letters--8, 10 feet tall at least--on a riverside wall.

While some of the other messages have faded or been painted over (bless the city’s beleaguered anti-graffiti crew), the giant I LOVE FRED lives on, difficult to reach and invisible to motorists passing overhead. By now I can’t help but see it every time I pedal down the trail. I’ve even taken to looking forward to seeing it, as if seeking reassurance that the artist’s love for Fred has not faded.

For all I know, the artist and Fred are no longer an item. Or maybe they’ve married and moved on, taking their love and their paints to another city. Then again, the artist may have been Fred all along, and these avowals of devotion are just his way of announcing this truth: that the graffiti artist’s first and only true love is himself.

First Job Adventures

by Mike Crawmer

My 16-year-old niece announced this summer that she was no longer eating meat. Seems that one day her job in a deli took her into a back room, where she ran into the reality of the meat course in the form of a freshly slaughtered pig hanging from the rafters, awaiting the butcher’s knife.

Curious, I thought--my first exposure to food only whetted my appetite for more. The summer I turned 17 I was back home from a six-week visit with a widowed aunt in Arizona and beyond broke. I jumped at the chance to join two friends as a busboy at a restaurant next to a Holiday Inn. What my so-called friends didn’t tell me was that my first day on the job was also their first day of a two-week vacation.

While they slept in and caroused, I worked my butt off. I helped open the restaurant at 6 a.m. and stayed til closing around 11 p.m.—every day seven days a week until the first day of school. I bussed the front room--which catered to families and diners looking for a quick meal at the counter (how often they were disappointed)—and the Lounge, a dark cavern of a room with fake-red-leather arm chairs and an ever-present pall of cigarette smoke. This room catered to salesmen, anniversary celebrants, and mysterious, chain-smoking women who swiveled seductively on the bar stools while nursing their overpriced cocktails.

The work was fast, furious and never-ending. Besides bussing tables, I washed dishes, worked the counter, ran the cash register when the hostess was busy in the back (doing what with whom I could only guess), and carried motel room service orders.

Every job had its challenges. Kids threw food. The dishwasher broke down. And room service could be, well, interesting. One Sunday morning I was carrying a breakfast order along the outer second-story walkway when I crossed paths with a jowly old man (probably mid forties but old to me) wearing a rumbled sports coat and slacks and shoes (no shirt or socks). A few doors after passing him I knocked at my destination. The door was opened by a haggard-looking woman dressed only in a slip. I had time to register the word “pendulous” before Mr. Rumpled Man stepped between us, grabbed the tray out of my hands and paid me. When I described the incident to a Lounge waitress later, she explained that the couple had met in the bar the night before. She thought it was funny. I didn’t. She had seen their perfumed and prettified bar faces; I had seen the dissipated morning-after look. Not a pretty sight.

I lasted a record 13 months in that job. Call me stupid, but I learned to respect hard-working, underpaid waitresses; avoid the lecherous cook’s advances and still keep my job; greet every subsequent restaurant meal with a degree of skepticism; and love Boston cream pie. As for that last one, perhaps love too much; my weight ballooned by 50 pounds. Maybe that’s the lesson I can pass on to my niece: It’s not always what you eat, but how much.

Were there any lessons in my first paying job for a writer? Maybe. But there’s certainly fodder for a story or three.

All Is Not Lost

by Mike Crawmer

I beg your indulgence as my rant about the use and abuse of the English language continues. (I promise to be less cranky in my next entry.)

Take “I,” that self-centered pronoun so beloved of the “me” generation. They love it so much they use it everywhere, even when “me” is the obvious choice, as in this example taken from an e-mail message I was copied on at work: “Please let Mike and I know when you get a chance.”

To the college-educated author of this note, I say, “Tell I this: Do you ever listen to what you’re saying? Take it from I--probably not.”

Then there's the case of the disappearing “go.” It wasn’t that long ago that people “went” somewhere; nowadays people only “come” or “came.” (The same problem afflicts “take,” which is fast fading from use as everyone “brings” things to and fro.) The chattering heads of the broadcast media go out of their way to muddy the “going” and “coming” of people. One local TV reporter told of an assailant who “came into the house” to shoot his gun at terrified occupants. Was the reporter in the house when this happened? Of course not. Was the intruder invited? I doubt it.

Eventually, I fear, I’ll have to accept the loss of “go,” “going,” and “gone.” The English language is always in flux, continuously adding, dropping and adapting words. But I will never accept a clerk or waitress (or waiter if male, but never a server, a term better suited to a robot) referring to me a “guest.” Where I come from, guests don’t pay, so don’t call me a guest if you expect me to hand over money. “Customer” was good enough for me before, and it still describes me. Hell, I’ll even accept “sucker” before I’ll accept “guest.”

Is there any hope for the salvaging what’s left of the integrity of a fickle language? Or are we (well, me at least) doomed to suffer the slings and arrows of these outrageous stupidities?

Maybe not. It seems that dismal scores in the verbal section of the SAT college entrance exam have prompted some educators to re-evaluate grammar instruction. The Washington Post reported recently that some schools in the metropolitan D.C. area are instituting structured grammar instruction for the first time in decades. And instructors are starting to consider grammar when grading papers (gee, what a concept!).

That is good news. I should be happy. But what does this trend portend for the editing profession? Will the return of grammar education mean a future where everyone knows that “action” isn’t a verb? That a comma never goes between the subject and the verb (an all-too-common outrage at work)? That dangling modifiers are a no-no?

Somehow, I don’t think I need to worry about the future for editors. We didn’t arrive at this muddle overnight. The solution that pulls us out of the muck will be a long time a-coming.

Fighting the Good Fight

by Mike Crawmer

Tacked to a wall in my work cubicle is this Calvin & Hobbes comic strip. It pretty much sums up the dilemma I face in my job.

Calvin: I like to verb words.

Hobbes: What?

Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when “access” was a thing. Now it’s something you do. It got verbed. Verbing weirds language.

Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.

That strip appeared in the 1990s. If anything, understanding is harder to come by today than it was then.

In my job as an editor in the publications department of (ready for this?) an international human resources training and development consulting firm, every day I battle the forces of evil in an attempt to slow the sad decline of the English language. Some days I win, some days I don’t.

For one thing, my “axis of evil” won’t play by the rules (of good grammar or good common sense). The folks in Marketing seem duty-bound to manipulate and mangle English in their drive to persuade. The consultants—over-credentialed but amazing undereducated—treat words like annoying children they are happy to dump onto the nanny (me and the other editors). Then there are the clients, who live by the motto: “I want it yesterday, quality (that is, good grammar) be damned!”

Yet, the challenge of battling these forces can be invigorating and, yes, sometimes even fun. The keys to surviving and thriving are a sense of humor and taking the long view—I’m the first to admit that English is ever-evolving, but there’s also this: Some day in the not-too-distant future I’ll retire and saving the language will be somebody else’s problem.

In the meantime I nit and pick at such delightfully clumsy constructions as “I’ll flip chart that” (as in “I’ll write that on a flip chart”) or “He was very planful.” (If “wasteful” and “dreadful” are legitimate words, why not “planful”? Yeah, right.)

These I could edit, but I can only do so much. I can’t edit what people say (that’s my 85-year-old mother’s job!). So, I put on my actor’s mask and barely blink when a co-worker blithely spits out “Let’s action that.” “Let’s action that”—I have to repeat it in print, like pinching my arm to make sure I’m not dreaming. I thought about sending the Calvin and Hobbes strip to the person who uttered that statement, but decided against it because (1) she probably wouldn’t get the point and (2) she’s the daughter of the owner of the company.

So, I look forward to the evening hours when I wallow in the utter delight of creating another world peopled by characters from my own imagination. Plugging away on my work-in-progress is the perfect therapy for the post-traumatic syndrome that comes from a day spent on the front lines fighting the good fight for the beauty and integrity of English, our (more or less) common tongue.

Looking for Inspiration in All the Wrong Places (or Maybe Not)

by Mike Crawmer

Summer was coming to an end, the perfect time for my partner and me to leave town for an eight-day driving tour of Maine and New Hampshire. (Look in future posts for stories from my day job, where I edit the clumsy creations of writers for whom English is a Gumby toy to be twisted to fit their own inscrutable needs.)

Ah, Maine! As predicted, the rocky coastline and lighthouses were postcard perfect…its towns, quaint and charming…its rivers and mountains pulled from a painting…its people, friendly and easygoing. Taking advantage of a stay in Bar Harbor, I looked for inspiration at the site of the former home of our chapter’s namesake. The house was destroyed in a 1947 fire that ravaged Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. But Mary Roberts Rinehart was a formidable woman--maybe, just maybe, I could pick up some vibes from the grand dame while taking in the vista from where her house once stood. Alas, the view of Bar Harbor and the islands beyond was just too beautiful to conjure up thoughts of nefarious deeds and heinous crimes. Stories of Nature’s beauty and wonder, yes, but murder and mayhem, no. Obviously, I’d have to look elsewhere for inspiration.

It wasn’t going to be in our next stop, the Androscoggin River area, where the litany of “quaint,” “charming,” “beautiful,” and “enchanting” continued unabated. The rare dark thought faded quickly, overwhelmed by the warm glow emanating from the historic towns, babbling streams, covered bridges and dreamy white birch forests. We were trapped in a postcard vacation. There was no escape until our flight back to Pittsburgh.

As it happened, we were in the midst of all the inspiration a mystery writer would need (for at least the next book). A couple days after returning home, news reports out of Maine told of an inexplicable murder spree. The victims: the owner of a Sunday River area B&B, the owner’s daughter, a friend of the daughter, a male guest at the inn--and three dogs! The suspect: A young cook at a Bethel B&B, who, according to police, dismembered some of his victims, leaving the women at the inn and dumping the male victim in a nearby state park.

OMIGOD! I squealed as I read about the crime. We ate at the Bethel B&B where the suspect worked. Did he make my pizza? My partner’s sandwich? We drove past the B&B where the women’s bodies lay. And we picnicked and hiked in the park were the male victim was dumped. Just how close were we to that poor man’s scattered remains?

This suspect is now in custody, and I hope the people of the area do not for long carry the scars of this horrific, grisly, unexpected crime.

But, deep inside, I couldn’t help thinking: Inspiration at last!