On the Trail of US Presidents

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In September, we took one of our Midwest driving trips, visited many (23) friends and family along the way, and made several new tourist stops. These included two sites established to commemorate U.S. Presidents who fought for their country: The Eisenhower National Historic Site outside Gettysburg, Pa., and Indiana’s Tippecanoe Battlefield, where President William Henry Harrison made his mark on U.S. military history.

You may wonder why Ike, our 34th President, settled in the rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania. “Hey, wait, wasn’t he born in Texas?” “Didn’t he grow up in Kansas?” You’re right! But, after his presidency, he settled near Gettysburg. His ancestors had lived in Central Pennsylvania, and I believe the park ranger said that, as a child, Ike spent a lot of time there. Also, in retirement, he was still consulting with the government, and the farm was a (relatively) short commute to D.C.

So, that’s why. Now to the what. The farm is a beautiful piece of property and, when the Eisenhowers bought it in 1950, it included a smallish house that had to be rebuilt. More than most historic houses, this one is filled with the Eisenhowers’ own furnishings and decorations (a lot of “Mamie pink”). We saw the sunporch where the couple reportedly ate their dinners on tv trays, watching the evening news (!). The house had generous accommodations for guests, and an office for Ike that couldn’t have been larger than 8’ x 10’. Here, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, who directed the Normandy landings on D-Day, carried out his work, modestly and efficiently.

You can tour the house and grounds, garage (presidential limousine!), barns, and the farm he and his partners established that raised prize-winning Black Angus cattle.

And, if you also want to tour the battlefield while you’re there (which we have done numerous times, not this trip), the downtown Hotel Gettysburg is a lovely spot.

The Tippecanoe Battlefield and Museum is a national historic landmark a little over an hour northwest of Indianapolis. At 96 acres, it’s small (much smaller than Ike’s farm!). On 7 November 1811, a decisive battle occurred there between U.S. forces and the Native American Confederation and a bloody prelude to the War of 1812.

The Americans were led by William Henry Harrison, later elected the ninth U.S. President—the last one born as a British subject. He died of a fever after only one month in office. (We’ve seen his monument outside Cincinnati.)

The Native Americans were a large, multi-tribal community led by the famous Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his younger brother Tenskwatawa, called The Prophet. The brothers, who had seen Natives repeatedly displaced from their homelands to the east, vociferously advocated that they reject European ways and return to a traditional lifestyle.

Tecumseh traveled to the South in 1811 to recruit more allies for the confederation and warned his brother not to attack the encroaching U.S. military forces until he returned. On the fateful day, the Prophet nevertheless ordered a pre-dawn attack. The Natives were defeated, their community destroyed, and their hope of continued settlement in the Great Lakes Region went down with them. In retaliation, Tecumseh sided with the British against the Americans in the War of 1812.

Adjacent to the Battlefield, the Tippecanoe County Historical Association operates a small museum with thoughtful displays that put the battle in context.

Two very different historical sites. Both well worth a visit!

Every Word’s a Choice — Part 7 — Word Order

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A famous story about James Joyce recounts how, after a day’s work, he told a friend he’d produced two sentences. The friend asked, “You’ve been seeking the right words?”
“No,” replied Joyce, “I have the words already. What I’m seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentences I have.”

This series of posts is about how to choose the most effective words to tell your story, and what to keep in mind as you make those choices.

Now we’ll talk about how you arrange those word—the order you put them in. The technical term for word order is syntax. English (and many other languages) usually organize the parts of a sentence with subject first, then verb, then object. No matter how baroquely convoluted a sentence becomes, how many phrases and predicates it includes, it usually follows a subject-verb-object order, as follows.
Jack ate the chicken (SVO)–not
The chicken ate Jack (OVS)
Ate Jack the chicken (VSO)
Jack the chicken ate (SOV)

This conventional order of sentence parts is something we absorb without thinking about it. Disrupting that order stands out and is called hyperbaton. It can give a pleasing break in the rhythm of the prose. Or it can be confusing. Sometimes, verb and subject are switched for poetic effect. For example: “Softly blows the nighttime breeze.” And, you can occasionally present words out of their accustomed order, for emphasis. Shakespeare did. You may have guessed that hyperbaton is a device to be used sparingly—and carefully. Where you’re likely to encounter it is in dialog for characters who are not native English speakers. In that usage, it immediately signals the person’s foreign origins. But, for most of my writing, as my Lithuanian manicurist would say, “I was not there going.”

Like subjects, verbs, and objects, when you use a string of adjectives, they have a conventional order too. When we violate that convention we may change the meaning or at the very least prompt a “Huh?” on the part of our reader. We don’t usually think about this. We don’t need to. The right order is ingrained.

Test yourself. Here’s a list of adjectives to modify the word “truck”:

big pickup American white disgraceful old

Quickly jot them down or number them in the order that feels right. Don’t struggle. Just write down what comes naturally. Was your order of adjectives more or less like this? Disgraceful big old white American pickup truck?

Here’s another try. These words modify the word “shirt”:

silk black long-sleeved Italian new overpriced

Was your order similar to this? overpriced new long-sleeved black Italian silk shirt?

There are 720 possible word orders for the set of truck adjectives and 5040 for the shirt set. I’m guessing the word order you chose is quite similar to mine. Why is that?

Obviously, there’s a reason. Adjectives in English almost always MUST be in this order: opinion first, then size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose NOUN. Opinion can be anything, even something you initially think of as factual. Thus, “beautiful blonde detective” versus “blonde beautiful detective.”

Who knew? As you’re reading, you may be surprised how often this adjective word-order rule is followed. Mostly unconsciously, on the author’s part. After writing this exercise I did run into a sentence that violated the rule. It wasn’t a catastrophe, but it did muddle the meaning. It mentioned a “comfortable old wingback red chair.”

Now if the world were full of red chairs, or they were some special category of chairs—a type of Chippendale, say—then “wingback” would distinguish this red chair from, say, a beanbag style red chair and might precede “red,” as the author had it. But neither of those conditions applies. To achieve a more precise phrase we’re left with following the rule: “comfortable (opinion) old red wingback chair.” Wingback chair being a specific type of chair, like dining room chair. You’d stumble over “dining room” if it appeared anywhere else in that phrase, as I did with “wingback.” For situations that aren’t so clear-cut, the rule is a handy thing to have.

Next Week: Those pesky adverbs!

To see previous posts in this series, covering nouns, verbs, and modifiers, click the “Writer’s First Draft” tab on my website home page (www.vweisfeld.com).

The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

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Second in this talented team’s genre mashup, The Railway Conspiracy builds on the characters introduced in last year’s The Murder of Mr. Ma. Set in London in 1924, the series’ main characters are Judge Dee Ren Jie, based on a real-life Tang Dynasty jurist and the traditions of Sherlock Holmes; Lao She, a university professor who plays Watson to Dee’s Holmes; Sergeant Hoong, owner of a shop selling Chinese goods, and the man you want with you when there’s a fight brewing; and Jimmy Fingers, whose business tends more to monkey but whose acquaintanceship with the London underworld comes in handy.

In this story, three great powers—Russia, Japan, and a power-hungry Chinese warlord are vying for control of the railways being developed in China. The precarious state of the Chinese Nationalist government and the persistent growth of the Chinese Communist party are ripe for political turmoil. Rumors of a conspiracy to take over the railways swirl about, including at the elegant dinner table of Madam Wu Ze Tian, to whom Dee, uncharacteristically, seems to be forming an attachment.

The next morning, one of the dinner party guests is dead. Bodies begin to pile up, and Dee and Lao must figure out how the deaths are connected and who is responsible. All they seem to have in common is an interest in the railway politics playing out several thousand miles east.

Rozan and Nee’s evocation of 1920s London is charming. Lots of cabs; lots of walking. The authors make especially good use of Dee’s ability to impersonate the Victorian folkloric character, Spring-heeled Jack. Lots of martial arts prowess is on display—perhaps a bit too much near the story’s climax—but it’s easy to follow. Jimmy Fingers always provides some humor, and Lao’s self-deprecating style doesn’t mask his substantial contribution to their investigations. The London constabulary is a source of both help and, as often, shortsighted decisions.

If Nee is well grounded in visualizing superheroes, Rozan is an award-winning writer of detective and crime fiction. Together their books are pure fun—Adventures with a capital A. Cultural insights along the way add spice.

Four times a year I send a short e-newsletter with the best in what I’m reading and viewing, news about my own writing, and other interesting tidbits. Subscribe with this link and receive a pdf of three award-winning short stories!

Why the Media Are Failing Us

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Back sometime before the Dark Ages, when I was in journalism school, we thought of the news business and the entertainment business as separate entities—the difference between Walter Cronkite and Star Trek. Now the line between the two is increasingly blurred. So when we say “media” today, we cannot mean only the NewsBiz. Americans are influenced by the entertainment and infotainment they watch, just as they are by the “straight” news. And they watch waaaay more of the former.

Financial analysts estimate news and entertainment—collectively, the “media”—is a $3.04 trillion international enterprise. It includes news outlets, as well as digital media [television, music and radio, etc.], streaming services, and more. In many ways, the business models for news and entertainment are similar, with revenues coming from advertising, customer payments, and licensing deals. They also are subject to the same regulatory regimes: the FCC (federal communications commission) and FTC (federal trade commission).

In those days of yore, Americans got their news from a few standard outlets: local newspapers and broadcast television. Because many people in a community read the same newspapers and mostly watched one of the same television networks (originally three—NBC, CBS, and ABC), they tended to share a perspective on events, even though there were some difference among them. Local media helped establish a sense of community, a feeling that “Things may be bad, but we’re all in this together.”

In a big city with more than one daily newspaper, one might be identified as Republican and the other as Democratic. In Detroit, where I grew up, there was the Detroit News (or as my parents called it, the Nixon News) and the Detroit Free Press. The Detroit News, like many other big-city newspapers is no more; the Free Press no longer publishes daily, and there isn’t home delivery every day. If you’re out and about, you can snag one from a vendor standing in major intersections. New Jersey, the nation’s most densely populated state, has no daily newspaper in any major city, not even the state capital. For most New Jerseyans, news is online only.

More than 1,800 US cities and towns have lost their newspapers in the past 20 years (60 dailies and 1700 weeklies); 1300 of these outlets were in metropolitan areas. Over the past 15 years, total weekday newspaper circulation has declined from 122 million to 73 million. Rural areas and small towns have been hardest hit by the loss of local news, but numerous major US cities no longer have a daily newspaper. These include Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Tampa. Most recently, the 157-year-old Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced it’s abandoning its print edition. Those newspapers still publishing are shrinking, due to a loss of revenue from advertisers and subscribers. They’ve become shadows of their former selves, “ghost newspapers.”

Today, online media are filling the gap. Online newspapers cannot provide the depth of coverage of print. Stories are shorter and may lack helpful context. Reporters are fewer and generally less experienced. In online sources, the line between news and entertainment is especially fuzzy. Digital formats had a 45% media and entertainment market share in 2024. And it’s growing, in part at the expense of traditional media.

For where this economic sector is going, look to the investment firms. The fragmented media market poses a challenge to investors, just as it challenges responsible citizenship and social cohesion.

According to Standard and Poors, advertising is healthy in digital platforms, as advertisers shift their money from legacy media to digital; linear television (which follows a schedule, as opposed to on-demand streaming) at the national level, as well as radio, are struggling for advertising dollars. Only sports programming keeps this sector afloat.

The diversity of media in this new landscape leads to further splintering. The days are over when everyone watched the same programs, listened to the same news, and gained something of a shared perception of their community, the country, its strengths and its problems. That’s not to say that the media world of the last mid-century was perfect, but the results of this splintering are all around us. And we haven’t even discussed the impact of social media yet.

Every Word’s a Choice: Part 6 — More on Modifiers

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In the last post of this series, the emphasis was on modifiers, adjectives specifically. It talked about three keys to choosing a adjectives that will help your readers create the story picture you want to paint: they must be significant, sensory details are powerful, avoid overload.

Here are a few more attributes of adjectives to be alert to.

Precision
Some adjectives are so overused and vague they’ve become meaningless. What does it mean when you read that someone received “a big check” or “a little diamond,” that a new co-worker is pretty or beautiful or handsome? These judgments totally depend on the reader’s perspective and provide remarkably little information. They’ve become empty calories on the adjective buffet.

You might think it’s descriptive to say a dress is blue. But how many shades of blue are there? A website for designers shows 144. How descriptive is it, really, to say “blue”? Or green? There are 50 of them above. How different are Army green (maybe you’d choose it for the clothes of an ex-military character), fungal green (for a house in disrepair), Kelly green (for a patriotic Irishman), or teal (for a fashionista)?

The point is to make your descriptions as vivid as possible, which may mean going beyond the first adjective that comes to mind.

Surroundings
You know the old saying, “clothes make the man.” How you describe what characters wear, their living accommodations, their cars, the foods they eat—all should be selected based on who they are. A Buick is an American car manufactured by General Motors, as we all know. But if you write that your character is a Buick owner or a Lamborghini owner, your readers will surmise more about him than that he has a vehicle to get around in.

In other words, as in our discussion of verbs, the descriptive words you use have not only a literal, everyday meaning, they also carry connotations. If you say your protagonist is a Harvard graduate, that’s different than sending him to Michigan or Baylor. Different schools convey different impressions about the graduate, his family, his connections, and his attainments beyond the seal on the diploma. Make these choices mindfully.

Cliches
A word of caution: You don’t want to describe a character by drawing on all the clichés of status, high or low. People are more complicated than that, and such descriptions don’t ring true. I’ve received dozens of Facebook friend requests—you probably have too—from “retired Navy Seals” who live in Hawai`i, whose photos include friendly-looking dogs and adoring grandkids. And, oh, they’re all widowers. And handsome! Lucky me! These are clichés meant to make the guy seem manly, upstanding, and really OK. They make me laugh.

Once you settle on which details you need, you also have to find a fresh way to express them, avoiding clichés and overused phrases. Publishers don’t like them. Readers roll their eyes. Five years from now, your text may seem dated. Some clichés are so common, they can slip into our prose without our even noticing them. It takes a good ear to tune them in. One I read frequently is: “She let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding.” Have read this a dozen times, most recently last week (in Yellowface), where it was used to demonstrate use of a cliché–an archetype of the trite. How do you know what’s tired and what’s fresh? This is one more reason writers have to READ.

Here are two descriptions, one of a city scene, the other of two sisters. These are the kinds of topics authors write about every day. They can be banal. But these authors dug in and their descriptions are memorable.
“We stopped in the shadows of decrepit wooden structures leaning toward one another over the cobbled pavement as though telling secrets.”(The Railway Conspiracy, SJ Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee)
“Mandy’s clothes are smooth and sharp, Tia’s are rumpled and faded. Mandy’s hair is always pulled back. Tia’s is a mess of tangles. In short, Mandy is pressed. Tia is line dried.”(The Final Episode, Lori Roy)

Dialog is Different
As always, dialog is different than narrative. Trite phrases you wouldn’t consider including in your narration may be perfectly acceptable in dialog. In fact, I’ve read stories in which a character speaks almost exclusively in clichés. It says a lot about them, too. It’s as if they only know what someone else has told them—or have absorbed only tired, worn-out ideas. Author J.P. Rieger has created a wily Baltimore police detective who spouts business jargon whenever he doesn’t want his bosses to know what he’s up to. It’s meaningless—and hilarious—but it reassures the bosses every time. (A recent review of the new biography of Elmore Leonard talks about his stellar dialog: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/elmore-leonards-perfect-pitch .)

Next Installment: Part 7: Word Order Mayhem (A family emergency has slowed the posting of these articles. Expect Part 7 in early October.)

Find past articles in this series in the Writer’s First Draft tab on the home page.

Down and Out in the River City by Wm Stage

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Down and Out in the River City, the third crime thriller by Wm Stage, is a refreshing change of pace in both setting and characters, with a strong feel of gritty reality. Contemporary society’s schisms and Americans’ careless assumptions and prejudices are on full display. This well-paced story puts St. Louis, Mo., special process server Francis Lenihan in the precarious position of having to break the law if he wants a devious serial killer to get justice. St. Louis has as many swirling currents as the mighty Mississippi flowing alongside it, and some are just as dangerous.

River City is one of the city’s many nicknames. A good bit of the action takes place in a homeless encampment that has sprung up in the riverside park surrounding the city’s most famous manmade attraction—the Gateway Arch. Stage doesn’t neglect the city’s troubled racial history, notably the 2014 death of Michael Brown by police in nearby Ferguson. That event created the backdrop of interracial resentments, fear, and anger for this story’s opening.

When Lenihan walks out of the Civil Courts Building, he finds himself in the midst of an incipient riot. A former police officer accused of murdering a 24-year-old Black man has just been acquitted. Caught up in the melee, Lenihan is rounded up with everyone else, and must sit in jail until he can be processed.

Lenihan’s views on this and other examples of racial discord are not easy to pigeonhole. He seems to be on first one side, then the other. Maybe at all times he’s simply on the side that will give him the quickest path out of it. What I particularly valued in this book is that, through Lenihan and the people he drinks with, you hear the full range of attitudes about race and social issues, for better and worse. It’s no shade of polemical.

Lenihan works for the sheriff’s office, delivering legal papers to people involved in landlord disputes, divorces, court cases, and the like. As you can imagine, although a process server has no authority to arrest people, the recipients of these notices can be unhappy to see him. Lenihan goes about his day-to-day work during the course of the story and how he works is an interesting window on a behind-the-scenes job.

The story starts in earnest when Lenihan receives a call from the father of a young murder victim. Lenihan’s business card was in the dead man’s pocket. The father wants to know more about his son’s last days and, desperate, asks Lenihan to investigate. This takes him to the homeless encampment, where Lenihan hopes to pick up the young man’s trail. There, Lenihan connects with a Black preacher named Cleo looking for his brother. Through Cleo, Lenihan meets some of the colorful characters who make the camp their home. Chasing down fragments of information of wildly varying reliability leads in a direction that threatens Lenihan himself. I liked this book a lot. The setting and characters are fresh and well-developed, and a nuanced understanding of the process server’s life grows out of author Stage’s own background as a licensed process server in St. Louis.

“The Power of Titles”

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By the time authors finish writing a story, they (should) have a pretty good grasp of its essence. But that intimate knowledge doesn’t necessarily lead to a good title for the work. Sometimes too much knowing just confuses things. As frustrating, a title that would fit perfectly might be overused. Another one doesn’t convey much of a first impression. Still another might cross genre boundaries and provide little clue to the content. AI advocates suggest letting the machine review the story to come up with a title. (Didn’t work for me, even after several prompts.) “My Book” isn’t much of a title, even with (Finally!) added.

Last week, Author’s Publish hosted a webinar, “The Power of Titles,” in which author Emily Harstone addressed this problem. The most common type of title is what she calls the “placeholder” or “license plate” title. It conveys the work’s core idea or theme, but not much more. It’s often the most obvious choice, one anyone might pick if asked to suggest two or three possibilities.

A disadvantage of generic placeholder titles is they may be forgettable, so when your cousin who reads and loves your book talks about it with her friends, and they ask, “what’s the title?” she gives them a blank look. But placeholder titles can work. Harstone suggests The Hunger Games as one that manages to be specific and intriguing. The DaVinci Code is another.

Many books may share a one-word title like Witness. A quick Amazon search brings up multiple books with just the one word title, an added “The,” or close variants. John Sandford, though, has taken the one word “Prey” and tacked it onto various other words for a whole series of books, even when the combination doesn’t exactly make sense (coming next April, Book #36, Revenge Prey). Doesn‘t matter—you see that word “Prey” in big type and you know instantly what you’re looking at.

Harstone suggests reviewing titles in your genre (Amazon makes this easy if you search for, say, “best-selling thrillers”) and seeing whether your prospective title fits in with current trends, since a good title supports marketing. She says titles generally have to: convey a unique aspect of your book, convey the genre (in partnership with the cover art), and/or “communicate an idea you want readers thinking about.” Good examples of this last would be All the Light We Cannot See or We Begin at the End.

Titles that suggest the book itself will plow overworked ground are generally not of interest to me. That would include any starting with “The Woman Who . . .” or, worse, “The Girl Who . . .” They make me think (possibly unfairly) that the authors are trying to ride the wave of other books’ popularity, rather than coming up with their own ideas. Well, there are lot of books out there, and I need to make choices based on some criteria, even flawed ones. A trend possibly near its tail-end that Harstone notes is the use of numbers in titles. Examples are 2017’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo or 2018’s The Seven 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (another Evelyn with same last initial). One such book I read at the outset of this trend, which I recommend highly, is 2017’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti.

Having so many words, these titles risk violating Harstone’s advice that a title should look good on a cover, that is, not too long. Yet, we can all think of successful books that do have lengthy titles. I’m thinking of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Both memorable. At the other extreme was the brilliant Dodgers by Bill Beverly (2016), about young men on a cross-country criminal mission (dodging the law) who were massive fans of the LA Dodgers. When I see that title, the whole book comes back to me. Harstone might consider Dodgers a “helium title,” one that adds another layer, making it more than it first appears. They are more common in short stories (and poems) because shorter works are more focused. Novels do a lot of things, and a title generally picks only one of them.

Another example is Exposure by Ramona Emerson about a Diné crime photographer and a series of deaths, out of doors in the wintertime. Exposure clearly has two meanings here. My short story “The Queen’s Line,” set in 1884, might make you think of the London Underground (the Circle Line was completed that year), but no, it’s about the death of Queen Victoria’s son Leopold from hemophilia and the rumors about her genetic line that ensued. So, the title not only gets at the essence of the story, it conjures an era. At least to me.

If you have any tips based on how you develop titles for your own work, please share!

Every Word’s a Choice — Part 5 — How Adjectives Sharpen Definitions

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Whether you’re describing a person, a location, or a bit of action, details help readers envision it. Adjectives and adverbs provide many of these details. They help readers draw a mental picture of what your characters are experiencing. But adding details doesn’t mean piling on any old modifiers. Details, first of all, must be significant.

Here’s an example: “The entire palette was muted, faded, earthen . . . save for a lone splotch of brilliant, hysterical red on the dress of the peasant girl . . .” This quote is from the 2025 gothic thriller Victorian Psycho, which I reviewed yesterday. A key detail is that “splotch of brilliant, hysterical red.” Not only will the reader encounter quite a few splotches of red before the book’s last page, the most interesting aspect of the description is the unexpected word “hysterical.” They’ll run up on that one too.

Here’s another example: In my novel set in Rome, the blond hair of one gangster is mentioned several times the first time the reader “meets” him. Being white-blond, his hair sets him apart from other members of his gang and Italians in general. It’s a marker. When the blond hair is mentioned afterwards, most readers (those paying attention) will know exactly which gang member I’m writing about. A visual cue, like that blond hair, is sometimes more memorable than a character’s name.

That goes for sensory details in general—our descriptions can include more than what we see in our imaginations. They can include what we hear, feel, smell—even taste. A woman who always wears lilac perfume, a man whose voice has a growl underneath it, air so thick with pollution you can taste it. Or what our senses can’t perceive: sudden silences, the emptiness in a room, as in this example: “Robert switches off the ignition. The engine shuts down. The air-conditioning and radio turn off. Inside the car, it’s suddenly quiet.” (Lori Roy, The Final Episode, 2025) The sudden quiet is a significant detail.

The corollary to choosing significant details is to avoid using too many of them. If a barista who’s an “extra” in your story hands over a cup of coffee, readers don’t need an inventory of her bleached-blonde hair and low-cut shirt. Readers work hard to assemble a mental picture of what you describe, and then try to keep track of it. It’s annoying to go to that effort for unnecessary facts. Plus, too many details slow the story.

Master story-writer Anton Chekov once cautioned a young author about overloading the details: “You have so many modifiers that the reader has a hard time figuring out what deserves his attention, and it tires him out.” The key here again, is significant details

If you’ve done a great deal of research on some technical topic, and you believe it’s important to convey it, try weaving it in like you would backstory. Information dumps of any kind are tedious. Still, as I remember the late Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, he spends a considerable number of words describing the gun the Jackal selects for his assassination attempt and the modifications he wants made to it. It’s techy-stuff, but Forsyth’s character explains the purpose of each feature and change he wants. He made these details significant. He gathered me in, making me an accomplice to the crime he was planning.

Next Tuesday: More modifiers

Part 1: Introduction to “ Every Word’s a Choice”—finding the best words to tell your story. The series is based on a talk I recently gave at a writers’ conference. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11484

Part 2: Using effective nouns to establish a relationship with readers. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11501

Part 3: A strong verb can do a lot for your story.

Every Word’s a Choice – Part 3

Part 4: More about the importance of colorful verbs.

Every Word’s a Choice – Part 4

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

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Virginia Feito’s new gothic thriller, Victorian Psycho, has attracted the attention of readers and commentators for its originality, as well as for its in-your-face macabre violence. It’s graphic. It’s bloody. And in this book, the first-person narrator is the serial killer. She doesn’t murder at a discreet distance, either. No poison here. When toward the end of this short book (190 pages) she tells you she’s holding a cleaver, well, you know . . .

It’s also worth saying that much of it is highly comic, poking fun at the aristocracy and its Victorian-era pretensions. The heroine, Winifred Notty (which I invariably read as “naughty”) is posing as a governess and was hired to deal with the two children of the Pound family: Drusilla, an angsty teenager, and the young heir, William, insufferably puffed up with his future importance.

Their mother, a faded woman imprisoned by the constraints of her social situation, is unable to think beyond them. Though she senses something off about Miss Notty, she grabs hold of the wrong end of the stick when she believes the governess is trying to seduce her husband. Mr. Pound may actually be interested in being seduced—something you justknow won’t turn out well.

You gradually assemble a sort of understanding of Winifred’s background. She was illegitimate; her father refused to marry her mother. Her mother moved to another town and passed herself off as a widow, marrying a local Reverend who grew to think of his stepdaughter as the incarnation of evil. She was sent to a girls’ school, but after The Incident (which I’ll leave you to discover on your own), she was returned home.

The foods the Pound family is served are described in sometimes lascivious detail, as the governess perceives them. But then she has something of an oral fixation—prone to biting or licking or sucking on various objects and people.

I came to think of this story as akin to a gruesome fairy tale, in which all sorts of outlandish and grotesque occurrences are possible. You must decide for yourself how much is literally true and how much is in Miss Notty’s mind. It’s gory, but good. The book is being made into a feature film, scheduled for release next year, starring Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jason Isaacs.

Merging Media Streams

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An article by John Koblin in yesterday’s New York Times says the days of separate subscriptions to multiple tv streaming service are waning. It’s just too complicated, too many passwords, too much keeping track. As a result, the bigger players are bundling popular services. Viewers need only one interface to find shows and movies on many different channels. For example, Amazon Prime Video users can watch HBO Max, Paramount+, etc.; Apple and other services are riding the aggregating train too.

According to research Koblin cites, nearly a third of all new streaming subscriptions are bought in bundles. So? And this will come as no surprise—media, tech, and cable companies are fighting to be the preferred one-stop shop. Media companies can offload marketing and other costs to the bundler. But they get smaller revenues because of the bundler’s cut. Amazon, for example, keeps from thirty to fifty percent of the subscription revenue. Netflix, as the largest subscription-supported company, with a wide variety of its own content, hasn’t needed to play with the bundlers so far.

I’ll have my eye out for where the streaming service MHz may land. We subscribe to it directly (along with a number of unbundled others, probably insanely duplicative). MHz offers foreign and international films and television series, usually with subtitles. We joined because it carries the whole Detective Montalbano series, set in Sicily. If you’ve missed this show, I’m sorry. A digression here: the producers scoured Sicily’s community theaters for good character actors. As a result, all the small parts (the landlady, the vamp, the car mechanic) are brilliant additions to the recurring cast.

We’ve watched the detective show Makari (Sicily again), and have started Imma Tataranni about a female deputy prosecutor in Calabria. All three shows have some over-the-top characters. They do involve murders but aren’t especially gory, and they include a fair bit of humor, created mostly by human ridiculousness, not snarky one-liners.

Another favorite is the French show, The Art of Crime, featuring a young Parisian police detective in the art crimes unit. He knows nothing about art (and cares less) and is teamed up with a young woman who works at the Louvre who knows everything and cares passionately. In a clever move, the artist involved (Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, etc.) “visits” the woman and they have interesting conversations. Weirdly charming. Her father is an eccentric Andy Warhol look-alike. We watched two episodes of the UK knock-off, Art Detectives, and weren’t impressed. In that one, the man is the art expert and the woman a former patrol officer. She’s smart, but most definitely second-fiddle. (Says a lot, right there.) No humor to speak of. We’re cutting our losses.

Whether you regard your televiewing as a buffet—one of this, one of that—or a full course meal of bundled choices, happy watching!

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