The (Sometimes) Thin Line Between Advice and the Slammer

By Jamie Freveletti

While working as a lawyer I handled some white collar criminal cases. My law firm specialized in food, drug, and medical device issues, and many of the cases involved pharmaceuticals. For my part, most of the so called “criminals” were just regular people involved in regular jobs that during a particularly stressful time stepped over the line from good judgment to bad.

Sometimes really bad.

Remember that scene in “The Firm” where an attorney dies in a boating “accident” and Tom Cruise as Mitch goes to the house of an older associate to express his condolences? The man is sitting in his garden, unmoving, while the lawn sprinkler is systematically spraying his pant leg on each pass. I loved that scene, because it’s the first time that Mitch gets a sense that something is not quite right in his new firm. It’s understated; quiet, but you see the other lawyer’s numb despair and it leaves you worried for Mitch and wondering what’s actually going on in this firm.

There’s a whole lot that Grisham did right in that story. The other young lawyer characters were friendly, filled with camaraderie, and yet also trapped. You liked them, but knew they weren’t going to help Mitch out of his troubles. Grisham could have made them all unrelentingly evil, but in my opinion that wouldn’t have worked as well. It matched the world of white collar crime, where the criminals are essentially con men and women in suits and they can move among society a lot easier than a gang member in droopy pants. (An FBI agent once told me that in general white collar criminals cave under pressure from his office remarkably fast, but that's a blog post for another day).

I also liked that some of the older partners were evil but showed glimpses of grim determination tinged with regret. Several of the actors, especially Hal Holbrook as the white haired managing partner, were pitch perfect. They expressed that “I regret to inform you that I’m going to kill you” attitude that is the hallmark of a wonderful, menacing performance.

I’m fascinated by the group mentality that convinces smart, moral people to do stupid, immoral things. The lawyer who writes the memo suggesting ways to avoid revealing the defect in a car (Toyota), or the one who gives a legal opinion that allows for multiple layers of corporations be used to shuttle money around within an entity to give the appearance of productivity (Enron). Were you able to pull these people out of their suits, sit them down at their kitchen table and ask them to do the same, many would squirm and hedge, and some would flatly refuse. Yet, take them off to the job and have a fee paying client demand the same thing, and these “smart” people apply their not insignificant intelligence to do just that. Often it involves a blind adherence to the corporation that baffles me, but that I saw over and over in my years as a litigator. Grisham must have too, because he wrote it beautifully.

I use the blind adherence principle in my own writing. It requires painstaking set-up, because the reader needs to see the trajectory of the white collar criminal as he takes each step down the path toward that line between legal and illegal, but the payoff for a crime writer is great. It’s a bit of reality that lends a feeling of truth and makes for a great read.

More Dangerous Than Lawn Darts...

by Sean Chercover

When I was a sprout, we had many dangerous toys. Some of which (slingshots, BB guns, pogo sticks, skateboards) are still around today. Others are not. One of my favorites was the (ubiquitous in the 1970s) Lawn Darts.

Man, those were fun.

Lawn Darts were big, heavy, sharp ... well, darts. They came in a set, with plastic rings that you put on the lawn as targets, and you tossed the darts from a distance at the rings.

Simple enough, and fun ... until someone loses an eye.

And sadly, more than a few children did just that. In the late '80s, Lawn Darts were banned, after racking up three kills and almost 7,000 serious injuries.

The packaging clearly stated that the toy was "a skillful sport for adults" and I'm a big fan of personal responsibility, but I can't really get too worked up about Lawn Darts being removed from the market, much as I miss them.

Folks a couple decades older may remember a toy called the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab. This was one hell of a science kit. It included actual radioactive uranium samples, along with various instruments for measuring radioactivity and particle disintegration.

The toy was developed at M.I.T., with the blessing of the federal government, who thought it would help promote nuclear energy.

The kids just glowed with excitement on Christmas morning...

Today, we are somewhat more careful about the toys we give our kids (as long as you don't mind poisoning from the lead paint that China still insists on using for toys...) But a friend recently sent me a link to a toy that is, perhaps, even more dangerous than Lawn Darts.

Not physically dangerous, but dangerous in a more insidious way. The good people at Gizmodo.com wrote an amusing piece on it, called: Baby's First Cubicle: The Most Depressing Toy Ever?

The piece begins, "It's all about expectation management, you see. If you make your kid think he can be president, he will grow up disappointed. Tell him he's headed for a life as an office drone and at least he'll be mentally prepared."

It got me thinking, and searching for other toys in a similar vein. Here are just a few...

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing dishonorable about flipping burgers for a living, but is this the job you really want your child to fantasize about during play time?

The McDonald's Drive Thru Play Set boasts, "realistic looking and sounding play kitchen and restaurant toy cookware sets that have the look and feel of what the pros use..."

"What the pros use"? Really? The McDonald's pros??

At least it comes with a nifty visor.

It's depressing, if not surprising, that the majority of these set-the-bar-low career indoctrinating toys are aimed at girls.

My Cleaning Trolley is just such an example. With this gem, you can prepare your daughter for an exciting career as a maid at Super 8.

Not only is it pink, but the box clearly says "Girls Only".

I'll spare you the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader Barbie, which won the Worst Toy of 2009 Toady Award, because I found something even worse...

Yup. It is a pole dancing doll. I kid you not.

Apparently, this is a popular toy for young girls. So popular, that there are at least three companies making competing models of the toy.

Of course, I use the word models reluctantly; if they could be models, they wouldn't be working in a strip club.

Am I nuts, or are these toys more dangerous than Lawn Darts?

When Truth is Stranger than Fiction

We have a special guest today on the OUTFIT: crime fiction author Michael Harvey, whose third novel, THE THIRD RAIL, will be out this week. Along with THE CHICAGO WAY and THE FIFTH FLOOR, this novel features Chicago PI, Michael Kelly, and is based on the 1977 L accident in downtown Chicago as well as a 1993 Pentagon report on terrorism at home. But what you might not know about Michael is that he's a journalist and documentary film-maker who has won several Emmys and was nominated for an Academy Award. Today he posts about his current film project. Click here for more about Michael, his books, and his documentaries.




Michael's words: I am currently working on a story about a man who was sentenced to sixty years for a crime he didn’t commit. Below is a summary of the facts. I have changed the names because the project is not yet finished. For the rest of the story, you’ll have to wait until we finish shooting.


A man named Paul is sitting in his living room when he hears a knock at the door. He gets up and squeezes a look through the peephole. There’s a woman on his stoop. She identifies herself as a police officer and asks if she could talk to him. Paul is forty-three years old. White. No criminal record. Never even been inside a cop shop. Paul opens the door. Four cops tackle him, roll him onto his back and cuff him on his living room floor. Two minutes later, Paul is in the back of a cruiser. And the shit begins to roll.

Paul is brought into a room and told he’s going to be put in a lineup. What for? There’s been a woman raped. An anonymous tipster told police Paul’s the guy. He asks for a lawyer. The police tell him they’ll get him one. But the lineup first.

Paul is placed in one lineup. Then, a second. On the other side of the glass is a victim named Louise. Three months earlier, she’d been raped repeatedly in her home over the course of several hours. Louise tells police her attacker wore a mask. But Louise got a glimpse of his face. And so, the lineup.

Louise is scared. Louise is nervous. Louise is angry. She looks through the glass at the faces. The first time, she’s unsure. Police take her outside and talk to her. The second time, she’s certain. Paul raped her. The more she looks at him, the more certain she becomes. Paul raped her. And she wants him punished.

Police charge Paul with multiple counts of sexual battery. He’s denied bail, given a public defender and stuck in a county holding cell. In the cell with Paul is a man named Danny. He’s looking at a third felony conviction and possible life sentence when a detective pulls him out of the cell. Danny is offered the “deal of a lifetime”. If he testifies against Paul, Danny walks with a slap on the wrist. Danny’s all for it, but tells police he doesn’t know any details about the crime...because Paul didn’t tell him anything. Not a problem. According to Danny, the detective slides a police report across the table. Plenty of details in there. Then, according to Danny, he’s allowed to meet with the victim...so Danny can make sure he’s got it all straight. Danny takes the stand, points at Paul and gives the jury chapter and verse about how Paul raped Louise. It’s all a lie. Told by Danny and allegedly orchestrated by law enforcement. Taken together with Louise’s mistaken ID, and the lack of any forensic testing of the evidence, Paul doesn’t have a chance. After a trial that lasts less than a week, he’s convicted and sentenced to sixty years in prison.

Four months after sitting in his living room and hearing a knock on his door, Paul finds himself on a bus, hands cuffed to a belly chain. The bus turns a corner and Paul gets a first look at his new home -- a maximum security lockup where society houses its rapists and murderers. Once inside, Paul is told to strip and run through a delousing shower. Then he gets his prison uniform and bed linens. Paul stands at the top of a small ramp that leads into the main cell block. His hands and arms shake. His legs are like water. He’s crying, but barely aware of it. A female correctional officer reads out the charges. Fifteen counts of rape? They’re going to have fun with you. Paul tells the woman he’s innocent. She laughs and pushes him down the ramp. The noise builds. And then he’s in the house.

The cell block itself is five stories high and filled with four hundred inmates. Paul walks the main drag, holding his prison blues. Inmates love it. They yell at the fresh meat, tell him the many ways they’re going to shank him, rape him and otherwise own him. Paul climbs five flights to his cell and sits on his bunk. His neighbor next door pounds on the wall and screams at him. Paul listens to the noise, and wonders what happens next. He’s never been inside any sort of prison, never mind a max lockup. He’s got no money, no connections, no skills, no way to defend himself. Paul’s sentence is sixty years, but his life might be better measured in days. Maybe minutes.

That first night he rips his bed sheet into strips and prepares to hang himself. Something stops him. Maybe it’s the lies that put him there. Maybe it’s the truth that only he knows. Whatever the reason, Paul decides to walk a different road. The police have buried him. Society has washed its hands and walked away. But Paul is still alive. Doing another man’s time. And unwilling to hand over his life for a crime he didn’t commit. Instead, he decides to fight. And that’s where the story gets fun.

Find a child. Read.

by Barbara D'Amato



Yesterday I was talking with a staff member at our neighborhood Barnes & Noble. She was optimistic about reading in general and about children reading. She pointed me to their Teen section, which I had not realized existed, and said it was their fastest-growing area. Now, I realize that a lot of people view teen-specific books as Literature Light, but I looked at the stock and most of it is good stuff.

This past January Publishers Weekly reported on a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation that total media use by eight-to-eighteen-year olds rose from six and a half hours to seven and a half hours per day between 2004 and 2009. Yes, much of the increase was digital media, but that is still reading. The decline was in print media, but that turned out to be entirely the result of the kids reading fewer newspapers and magazines. They are still reading books.

In another survey, 56 percent of children reported reading more than ten books a year. Of middle schoolers it’s seventy per cent.

Really encouraging was the finding by the National Center for Education Statistics that the percentage of prekindergarten children read to by a family member increased from seventy-eight percent in 1993 to eighty-six percent in 2005. Not only does this bode well for future young readers, but it suggests that the message is getting through to families and caregivers.

I know I’ve said this before. Maybe my optimism is the result of seeing the children I know reading avidly. But the surveys suggest that reading is not dead.

And reading is vital for all of us. Bob Chase, president of the National Education Association has said that the connection between literacy and being a useful member of society is so strong “that some states use grade-level reading statistics as a factor in projecting future prison construction.”

Of course the bottom line here is read to children. Find a child and read.

Eunice

by Michael Dymmoch

When I was a child, back in the stone age, editors knew the rules of grammar. And publishers adhered to the rules. I hated school back then and got through it by daydreaming or sitting in the back of the classroom, reading—something impertinent but interesting. I never studied the rules of grammar, but I learned how to diagram sentences. And since the books I read had been well written and properly edited, I didn’t do too badly on written assignments. In college, my rhetoric professor told me I didn’t need to name the parts of speech as long as I could use them properly.

I found the Red Herrings around the time my first book was published. Led by Phebe Waterman, the writing group met weekly at Scotland Yard Books: David Walker, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Ron Levitsky, Eunice Fikso, and I—among others. Eunice was old—sixty at least. She was well read and well schooled in grammar. She had little patience for unintentional violations of the rules.

Eunice moved away and, eventually, passed away. Scotland Yard Books closed. But the Red Herrings continued, adding and dropping members as the years flew by. We still meet weekly. David and I still participate. Libby Hellmann has replaced Phebe as our unofficial leader.

And I’ve replaced Eunice. I’m usually the first to pontificate on a dangling participle, or to get apoplectic over lack of agreement between parts of speech. And not just in the writing group. I can’t concentrate on TV news. I’m too incensed that the people writing it for anchors to read can’t get their grammar facts straight. If they don’t bother to be accurate with grammar facts, how am I to trust the accuracy of their news facts? And if the people reading the teleprompters aren’t smart enough to recognize and correct grammar mistakes, why should I trust their reporting?

TV commercials are even worse. I should trust my child’s education to a tutoring company that offers to let you Learn how Sylvan can help your child reach their full potential? And should I trust my eyesight to a company that offers Two complete pair of glasses for only ninety-nine dollars? Thanks, but I’d rather have my eye wear made by people who speak English adequately. There’s a better chance they’ll read the prescription correctly and… You get the idea.

I’ve ranted before on this subject, but it keeps coming up. I believe that fuzzy speech is indicative of fuzzy thinking—or strong drink. And I believe I’ve turned into Eunice.

By the dawn's early light

By David Heinzmann

The last couple times I’ve posted I’ve written about recent mob stories in the news. I don’t want to sound like too much of a broken record so I’ll just mention that there was another good one that broke on Friday. A trio of 70-year-old mob jewel thieves caught casing a bank and the house of another dead mobster. Read about it here, and follow the link to read the FBI affidavit for a search warrant. It’s pretty entertaining. And crime writers will find the details of the affidavit intriguing, and maybe even useful.

Anyway, I’ve started writing a new book while I wait to see what’s going to happen to Book 2, which is a sequel to A Word To The Wise. If it sounds like I’m overly productive, don’t be misled. This second book had been mostly written a few years ago, but I set the revisions and rewriting aside for a loooong time once A Word To The Wise was picked up for publication and I had all sorts of editing and other stuff to do.

Over the last few months, I’ve finally gotten the revisions done, and I’m on to the next one. I’ve been messing around with a plot line and a few characters, and have the arc of the plot lined up solidly enough to start writing. I’m half way through the second chapter.

But moving directly into a new book has some special challenges this time around.

The first two books are both about a character named Augustine Flood, and writing about him had grown to feel pretty comfortable and familiar. But this next book is a departure. It is still set in Chicago, but there is no Flood. Most of the characters are Chicago cops, including the protagonist. I’m still finding my way with this character and fighting the urge to throw Flood’s name in there somewhere.

I have faith that once I’m a few more chapters into it the new story will take over and pull me along. But at the moment I’m still laboring to get out of the Augustine Flood mindset and into the new guy. I’m guessing some of you have had the same struggles, especially if you have written a standalone book or started a new character after a few in a series. Thoughts, experiences, advice?

Part of my problem is that I haven’t managed to string together a big block of time to write yet to get the pump primed for this book. I haven’t quite found the writing schedule that’s going to work for me this time around. I was originally a morning writer, but switched to a nighttime writer after we had a baby. Now my second kid is sleeping a little later some mornings, making me flirt with the idea of going back to being a morning writer. If I can keep everybody else in the house in bed until seven, I’ll gladly starting getting up at five to write.

Nights just aren’t working. Lately, I’ve just been too beat in the evenings to do much other than pour a drink and sit down with my wife to watch Damages and Justified. Speaking of which, Justified is sort of a delight if you like Elmore Leonard. It’s an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s character, Raylan Givens. Some of the dialogue and story lines are lifted from his books, but Leonard is also a producer of the show and the episodes feel a little like reading his books. (I shouldn’t be shilling for FX, but both of those shows are pretty good.)

Anyway, it’s 5:25 a.m. as I finish this and I’m about to start Chapter 3. Keep your fingers crossed for me that nobody under four feet tall wakes up in the next two hours.

And P.S., I wish I would have been more on top of the blog last week so I could have been the first person to comment on Bryan's blog about the powers that be evaluating stories by how well they're doing online. The tyranny of the clicks is reshaping the news. It's a frightening trend as media companies get more and more desperate waging a losing battle for online market share.

Like Sevens Come, Elevens Come, Like Manna From the Heavens Come

By Kevin Guilfoile

Earlier this week, as the White Sox and Cubs were read separate fortunes on Opening Day, I was invited to participate in a discussion about baseball literature for local television. Joining me on the panel were Geoff Forsyth, an accomplished short story writer and professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and Terry Sullivan, a former English teacher who is now a scout for the Red Sox. We talked about the long relationship between baseball and fiction, and about our favorite baseball novels, including Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, Bernard Malumud's The Natural.

Inevitably the conversation turned to W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, the novel on which the film Field of Dreams was based.

That book of course, is about Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella who, urged on by a voice in his head, carves a perfect baseball field out of valuable farm land and then tries to figure out why he was asked to do it. In his search he drags reclusive writer J.D. Salinger from his New Hampshire home and takes him to Fenway Park. He tracks down a former ballplayer named Moonlight Graham up in Minnesota. The ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson (as well as the rest of the 1919 White Sox) and Ray's own father emerge to play on Ray's field.

If you build it, he will come, the voice had told Ray.

I said the book was about faith. Not religious faith, necessarily, but any sort of compulsion that we don't understand or recognize.

Then Geoff pointed out something that should have been obvious to me.

The story is a perfect metaphor for writing.

Most writers will tell you they don't understand why they do it. Or why they started. Writing a novel, especially a first novel, must seem like insanity to our spouses and friends. A first novel is a diamond carved out of your precious time over months or usually years. If you're persistent enough to finish, there's no guarantee that anything will come of it. In most cases nothing will.

Somehow you're convinced that if you build it, they will come. Agents. Publishers. Readers.

I would bet that four out of five of the American writers I know are baseball fans. Maybe we are drawn to the baseball player's courage and persistence in the face of failure, and the narrow margin between immortality and mediocrity. A baseball player who gets a hit in six-out-of-twenty at bats is an immortal, a Hall of Famer. A player who gets a hit in five-of-twenty at bats is a bust, forgotten except for the record books. That sounds a lot like being a novelist.

Or maybe we're all just Ray Kinsella's following the whispers in our heads.

As long as it's still opening week, what are your favorite baseball novels? Because I still have a long list.

Readers Crave Crappy Story

By Bryan Gruley

Shit is popular in The Wall Street Journal.

This may come as no surprise to liberals who stoop to read our editorial page or conservatives who insist we’re soft on Obama.

But I mean it quite literally.

On March 25, the newspaper that employs me as its Chicago bureau chief published a story about giant bubbles that had formed in a manure pond in Indiana.
See it here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704266504575142224096848264.html?KEYWORDS=lauren+etter

The story quickly ascended our “Most Popular” lists ranking the articles viewed and emailed most frequently by readers. As I write this blog, it remains at Number 6 on the most-viewed list for the week.

On one hand, I’m happy to report this, because I love quirky-but-true stories like this one; because the reporter, Lauren Etter, works for me; and because I edited the story. And, icing on the cake, it made the most popular list for all of our readers and our WSJ peers to see.

But the rankings--now standard in newspaper, magazine, blog and other websites across the U.S.—bother me. Does the effort to quantify quality tempt us, however subtly, to focus on coverage we think will please the public and look away from stories or subjects that readers or viewers might not want but arguably need to know?

I suppose this marks me as a dinosaur, or at least someone taking things a tad too seriously. Lighten up, Gruley: these lists are just a fun way of seeing what people are reading about, a nifty window on the day’s water-cooler chat. And I haven’t heard reporters or editors talking about pursuing a particular story because it’ll make the most-popular list.

But I have heard people try to end arguments about the relative merits of a story by declaring that it made a most-popular list, as if that were definitive. By that standard, of course, Kelly Clarkson is a finer musician than Van Morrison and James Patterson a better writer than Ian McEwan--and the National Enquirer a better paper than The Wall Street Journal

Of course writers and producers crave readers and viewers. That’s how we justify our existence and, no small matter, pay the bills. But now that we can measure with a greater degree of precision what it is they like to consume, do we gravitate, like a Procter & Gamble or an Apple, to giving them what they want to hear?

News talk shows on radio and television do so every minute of the day, on the left and the right, with Rush Limbaugh telling his fans what they want to hear, Rachel Maddow doing the same for hers. But the people who actually gather and report what happens in the world have to guard themselves against playing to one constituency or another. It would undermine their credibility, of course, and as a crass business matter, risks alienating a big chunk of audience.

Perhaps our inability to predict what people will gobble up will protect us. Some years ago, my former WSJ colleague Roger Thurow wrote a story about a young African girl who had a fistula—an injury to the urethra caused by sexual relations at an abnormally young age.

We had no most-popular list back then, but judging by the emails, letters and calls Rog received, his story would’ve shot to the top. Had we asked readers ahead of time, though, whether they would like a story about a fistula, I doubt many would have said yes, please.

Who really knows what readers desire? A story about shit ponds in Indiana, apparently.

We who write fiction and secretly hope to hit the New York Times Bestseller list face the same dilemmas, and the license to make things up doesn’t make it easier. Do we consciously write what we think our audience wants, create characters that will attract more readership, concoct plots that play off the evening news? Do we create virtual focus groups in our minds? Or do we just try to tell a great tale? Do we write from our hearts or our heads?

My next book: a teenage vampire writes a memoir about her childhood learning magic in the catacombs of the Vatican.

What do you think?

Writers In My Head

Alex Berenson, a New York Times reporter and novelist, wrote a great piece for the Sunday paper about, in part, coming up with intricate plots. He wasn't talking about his spy novels, though. Instead, he'd been asked to be a consultant for the final season of the Keifer Sutherland show, 24.

He described how the writers 'spitballed' plots. "We sit on couches and comfortable chairs, looking for answers. Season 8 will be set in New York. But why is Jack in New York? He’s a diplomat. No, he’s in a hospital, rehabilitating from his near-death experience in Season 7. No, he’s handling security for a rich guy... When the process is going well, it is like playing soccer with an invisible ball. One writer pushes an idea forward until another steps in. Someone says, “So the terrorists seize a school bus filled with rich kids. ...” “except one kid hides a cellphone. ...” And away we go."

As I read the piece, I became envious because this was the same experience novelists squirm through while writing a book, but all in their own mind. I have about six 'writers' in my head when I'm writing. I'll suggest a plot point - Izzy McNeil should represent a woman in Chicago charged with poisoning her best friend to death. But the lawyer writer in my head will pipe up that Izzy has no criminal law experience, and she isn't certified to try a murder case. Then the voice my friend, Beth, who doesn't take no for an answer and who sometimes helps me with my books will speak up and say that's fine, Izzy can second chair the murder trial. Well, who's going to first chair it? the lawyer asks. Another writer, one of the characters, Izzy's friend, Maggie, chimes in that she's happy to take Izzy on and teach her the ropes. A disapproving writer from the back of the mind-room will say well, that's all fine and good, but really, why would a woman poison someone who is her 'best friend?' And as Berenson says, "away we go."

Wouldn't it be great, I kept thinking, if there really were six Izzy McNeil writers, who lob away ideas and scenarios with each other, who could whole the half-hatched plot points that someone brilliantly sketched out.

But ultimately, Berenson said, after rounds and rounds of the brainstorming on 24, the process with all the writers became, "exhausting and circular. As a novelist, I’m not used to this. My ideas are my own. I don’t have to listen to other people tell me how stupid they are."

All right, so maybe I don't want a democracy of writers on my novel. Maybe. If you could have a team working on your books, would you do it?

Welcome to Weenie Nation...

by Sean Chercover

Let's just get this straight, right off the bat...

I AM THE BIGGEST WEENIE IN THE BLOGOSPHERE.

There, I said it.

If you're a regular at The Outfit, you may have noticed the mildly amusing post that occupied this spot is now gone. I removed it, because...

I AM THE BIGGEST WEENIE IN THE BLOGOSPHERE.

See, a friend of mine (not me, really, a friend of mine) told me about something amusing that happened to her at work, and I wrote about it here (with her permission), and then this friend (who may in fact be the biggest weenie in the entire Universe) panicked, convinced that my mildly amusing blog post would lead to her immediate termination.

So, here we are. Because - yes, say it with me...

I AM THE BIGGEST WEENIE IN THE BLOGOSPHERE.

In fact, I feel a little like Henry Limpet, before he became a fish and discovered the power of his "whale-busting thrum."

I Don’t Get Haircuts anymore -- I Update My Profile

by Libby Hellmann

I wrote this a week or so ago for Kaye Barley's blog, Meanderings and Muses, but decided to give it an encore.


Drew Barrymore ‘s riff in He’s Just Not Into You was probably the best thing in that otherwise unremarkable film. She was talking about dating, and how people no longer meet each other organically. That the entire process is now either on voicemail or online.

To that end, it struck me recently that I no longer do anything much “organically.” In fact, I don’t have much of a physical, tactile life. Over the past 10 years, almost everything I do has moved online.

For example:

News
I just canceled my subscription to the Chicago Tribune. At least during the week. Why? I get all my news online. The Trib sends me a daily email; so does Huffington Post and Salon. MSNBC is my home page on the computer. I follow a bunch of news outlets on Twitter. And I’ve bookmarked a slew of other publications and blogs which I visit daily.

Professional Life
I get most of my crime fiction news on line. Wait – who am I kidding? I get it ALL online: DL, 4MA, Sisters in Crime, Shelf Awareness, bloggers like Kaye and Sarah Weinman and Joe Konrath, CrimeSpree, Goodreads, plus PW Daily. (I know I’ve left out a ton of others). I do almost al my research online, order books for my research online, and – well – let’s not even get started on marketing online. Suffice it to say I’m here and here for starters. With bells on.

Book Discussion Groups
I am a member of two online Mystery Book Discussion Groups, plus a private group that focuses on love of our genre. I actually write book reviews (well, a few) and get most of my book recommendations from these lists. I also belong to a flesh-and-blood mystery group at my library, but guess what? We did an online chat with an author last month!

Shopping
This winter saw me redecorating a bit, and I got some fabulous things from Overstock.com. In addition, I ordered two new TVs from Amazon, plus a camera (they had the best prices). I book airline tickets, buy clothes, gifts, and office supplies online. Oh, and I make restaurant reservations online too.

Socializing
Facebook has taken over my social life. What little is left goes on Twitter. My war with the skunks has been well documented, and I’m in touch with friends from waaay back in my life. I’ve probably been on every dating website there is -- with less than stellar results, unfortunately, but that’s another story.

Entertainment
I play Scrabble online, do Suduko puzzles online, and play solitaire on my computer. I listen to music online, forward YouTube clips to friends, as well as greeting and birthday cards. Sometimes I even email thank you notes.I'm not into online gaming, but I know there are people who do little else in their lives. I renew library books online, decide where to go on vacation online. I watch movies through Netflix. Åll my photos are on my computer – I haven’t had a physical photo album since 2001.


Health
Whenever I have an unknown symptom or health problem (which happens more frequently these days), I don’t automatically call the doctor. First I check online. Of course, that can be a double-edged sword since I’m prone to thinking the worst. It could be just indigestion, but I’m convinced it’s ulcers… or worse.

Bills
I pay 90 per cent of my bills online. Haven’t needed new checks in years. And I do my accounting on the computer as well.

Volunteer/Donations
I make charitable contributions online, volunteered for Obama online. I receive at least one solicitation, maybe more, a day.


I can’t remember the last time I used a phone book. Or asked for directions. If I can’t remember who directed a film, I no longer blame it on a failing memory. I just Google it (if I remember). I receive a lost pet alert every few days, and I even communicate with my handyman online. And what would I do without Angie’s List?


Publishing
I don’t have a Kindle yet but am considering an iPad, and as of a couple of days ago, ALL of my books are on Kindle and the other e-book format (at Smashwords)(Yay!). I’m thinking of publishing an e-collection of my short stories this summer. Of course, if I go ahead with it, I will do all my marketing and promotion online.

Whew!

So, what’s the point? The internet has made my life much more convenient (as long as the computers work), but it’s also unsettling. Because I leave tracks wherever I go, it’s a certainty that someone could develop a detailed dossier on me, warts and all. And if it’s true that – as some predict – it’s possible to take control of the internet, what would happen to my life if they did? Could I be erased? Could someone eliminate or – worse -- take control of my virtual footprint? And if they could, what would the ramifications be in my real life? Am I, and are we all, heading toward virtual disaster?

It’s too spooky to contemplate. Happily, I don’t have time. I have to update my profile.

Btw, I’m sure I left out other activities people do online… What have I missed?

Readers Crave Crappy Story

By Bryan Gruley

Shit is popular in The Wall Street Journal.

This may come as no surprise to liberals who stoop to read our editorial page or conservatives who insist we’re soft on Obama.

But I mean it quite literally.

On March 25, the newspaper that employs me as its Chicago bureau chief published a story about giant bubbles that had formed in a manure pond in Indiana.

See it here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704266504575142224096848264.html?KEYWORDS=lauren+etter

The story quickly ascended our “Most Popular” lists ranking the articles viewed and emailed most frequently by readers. As I write this blog, it remains at Number 6 on the most-viewed list for the week.

On one hand, I’m happy to report this, because I love quirky-but-true stories like this one; because the reporter, Lauren Etter, works for me; and because I edited the story. And, icing on the cake, it made the most popular list for all of our readers and our WSJ peers to see.

But the rankings--now standard in newspaper, magazine, blog and other websites across the U.S.—bother me. Does the effort to quantify quality tempt us, however subtly, to focus on coverage we think will please the public and look away from stories or subjects that readers or viewers might not want but arguably need to know?

I suppose this marks me as a dinosaur, or at least someone taking things a tad too seriously. Lighten up, Gruley: these lists are just a fun way of seeing what people are reading about, a nifty window on the day’s water-cooler chat. And I haven’t heard reporters or editors talking about pursuing a particular story because it’ll make the most-popular list.

But I have heard arguments about the relative merits of a story culminate in the declaration that it made the most popular list, as if that settled everything. By that reckoning, James Patterson is a better writer than Ian McEwan, Kelly Clarkson a finer musician than Van Morrison and the National Enquirer is a better newspaper than The Wall Street Journal.

Of course writers and producers crave readers and viewers. That’s how we justify our existence and, no small matter, pay the bills. But now that we can measure with a greater degree of precision what it is they like to consume, do we gravitate, like a maker of widgets or software or frozen pizzas, to giving them only what they want to hear?

News talk shows on radio and television do so every minute of the day, on the left and the right, with Rush Limbaugh telling his fans what they want to hear, Rachel Maddow doing the same for hers. But the people who actually gather and report what happens in the world have to guard themselves against playing to one constituency or another. It would undermine their credibility, of course, and as a crass business matter, risks alienating a big chunk of audience.

Perhaps our inability to predict what people will gobble up will protect us. Some years ago, my former WSJ colleague Roger Thurow wrote a story about a young African girl who had a fistula—an injury to the urethra caused by sexual relations at an abnormally young age.

We had no most-popular list back then, but judging by the emails, letters and calls Rog received, his story would’ve shot to the top. Had we asked readers ahead of time, though, whether they would like a story about a fistula, I doubt many would have said yes, please.

Who really knows what readers desire? A story about shit ponds in Indiana, apparently.

We who write fiction and secretly hope to hit the New York Times Bestseller list face the same dilemmas, and the license to make things up doesn’t make it easier. Do we consciously write what we think our audience wants, create characters that will attract more readership, concoct plots that play off the evening news? Do we create virtual focus groups in our minds? Or do we just try to tell a great tale? Do we write from our hearts or our heads?

My next book: a teenage vampire writes a memoir about her childhood learning magic in the catacombs of the Vatican.

What do you think?

Out of Whole Cloth?

by Anthony D'Amato

Barbara D"Amato: Quite often when I'm on a panel at a writing workshop, someone in the audience will ask, "Can I use real people and places without being sued for libel?" I have said, "Your protagonists can have lunch at McDonald's, but they can't find a fried mouse in the quarter-pounder." The issue is actually more complicated -- and probably too complicated for a brief panel answer. I asked Tony D'Amato to guest blog today. Tony is a professor of law at Northwestern University in Chicago.


A successful French novelist is being sued for two million dollars by a famous Parisian fabric store for setting her story in their établissment. Lalie Walker’s book features voodoo at the Marché St. Pierre, abductions of the store’s staff, a crazed killer, and a mysterious malaise affecting the “kingdom of fabric.”

Tech Dirt is one of the internet blogs that carried the story, and Dark Helmet is one of the readers who has posted a comment: “I find it nearly impossible to not include the city of Chicago and the surrounding areas as chief setting locations, strictly because my familiarity with the area means I can write more believable setting descriptions.”

With a little surfing I discover that Dark Helmet is author Timothy Geigner. He quotes with approval the writer of the blog, Mike Masnick, who says that “most characters that novelists write are loosely based on people they know... and exaggerated or composited with others. That's how you create realistic believable fictional characters.”

My wife’s investigative reporter Cat Marsala lives on Franklin Street in Chicago. If she had to change the name of the street and the city to avoid being sued for defamation, how could Alzina Dale write her “Walking Tour” books where she visits and describes the places where fictional sleuths like Ms. Marsala live and work? How could the movie “Some Like it Hot” state in bold letters that it took place in Chicago and then go on to film the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with George Raft on the machine guns and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon witnessing the proceedings from under a car?

You’re entitled to exaggerate. For example, a theater critic who writes that “the producer who decided to charge admission for that show is committing highway robbery” would be immune from liability because no reasonable reader would understand the critic to be accusing the producer of an actual crime. On the other hand, if you accuse a real identifiable person in your novel of having committed a crime, you can not only be sued for defamation but the person does not even have to prove damages—what you’ve written is libelous per se. And you don’t escape by changing his name. For example, a Massachusetts newspaper reported that a Brookline deli owner was involved in an “Israeli mafia” cocaine operation out of his deli. Although the owner was not named in the news reports, he successfully sued for defamation because the news story could reasonably be understood to refer to him.

Of course a newspaper is not a work of fiction so that made the deli owner’s case easier. But suppose you really wanted to get revenge on someone and worked it into your novel. Let’s say your target happens to be the mayor of the town you live in who once lied to you and jilted you. So you change the name of the town, change the name of the mayor, make him 8 inches shorter, give him glasses, sport him a bow tie with polka dots, add ten years to his age, and give him a pot belly. Then you really let him have it. You say that he was arrested for sexually abusing a child and that he paid off the cops and the judge and successfully covered it all up—true in the novel but false in the real world. If the mayor’s friends knew about your past encounter with the mayor and are able to see through the disguises in your book, he can sue you for defamation because you accused him of a crime. If you say that the story about sexual abuse was just another disguise like the bow tie and pot belly—well, it won’t work. The jury will see right through it.

Nevertheless, if I were Lalie Walker’s lawyer, I’d countersue the Marché St. Pierre for using the lawsuit itself to stimulate business. They knew or reasonably should have known that Ms. Walker’s intent was homage and not dommage.

The Clown Defense

by David Ellis

Probably the most frequently asked question I get about Rod Blagojevich these days is: What will be his defense at trial? At the most recent talk I gave, someone noted that they’d been watching Rod on Celebrity Apprentice, listening to him repeatedly claim that he was innocent and that he would show as much at his trial. How, this person wanted to know, did he plan to accomplish that?

My answer: Keep watching that dumb show.

I have to admit that I’ve watched Celebrity Apprentice this season. I’m not sure why. The guy’s a complete buffoon, but unfortunately he wasn’t a harmless buffoon. He was remarkably destructive. The system of government effectively braked to a standstill while he was governor. Nobody could trust him, and when the man with so much power can’t be trusted, how can you do anything?

He also made my life, personally, rather hellish with the retributive, childish games he played, including forcing the legislature to remain in session, pointlessly, for almost two years straight.
I had enough Blago to last me a lifetime. And yet I watch that show.

A lot of people think he’s making matters worse by running around like a moron, blabbing to every talking head and now appearing on this reality show. (By the way, how is that show in any way reflective of “reality?”)

But I disagree. I think that Rod is selling his defense on that show.

Have you seen it? It’s guys against gals, and the first week the challenge was to run a diner for a day and see how much money you could raise. Rod, not surprisingly, completely blew his assigned task and was openly mocked on the show for doing it. The only reason he wasn’t the first celebrity eliminated was because his side—the men—won the competition.

Last week, he once again proved absolutely worthless. He couldn’t even turn on a computer, much less type or do any kind of research. Again, he looked completely stupid, and he quite possibly would have been eliminated had it not been for the fact that another celebrity volunteered to be eliminated.

Plus, even in his interactions with others, he looks like the polar opposite of a leader. He’s a wall flower, a blowhard at best with no substance. That’s the Rod I remember; the guy couldn’t run a meeting to save his life. He could hardly organize a thought.

And that, in broad terms, will be Rod’s defense at trial. He’s a clown. A blowhard. He smiled for the cameras and issued press releases, but his aides did everything else. Those things he said on tape? That was just blabber. Nobody took him seriously. The people around him said, “Yes, Governor, right away, Governor,” but then they blew him off when he left the room. Nobody actually followed through on the things he said, and he knew they wouldn't.

The harmless goof. He plays it naturally on TV. Let’s see how he plays it at trial.