March 2023 – Ink-Stained Wretches

Writing “Disappearance of A Serial Spouse”

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, submitting short stories to markets and getting the right story in the hands of the right editor at the right publisher to fit with other stories in a given anthology or magazine is like tossing dice. Or maybe I’m throwing proverbial spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. No matter the figure of speech, only a few of my stories have been accepted on their first submission. Many are submitted and resubmitted several times before they are accepted for publication. Such is the nature of the short story world. As a result, I may write a story for one call for submissions only to have it published somewhere else.

“Disappearance of a Serial Spouse” is one of those stories written for a specific anthology call, but published somewhere else. So what was the initial call that inspired this story? Way back in the middle of the of the pandemic, a slew of short mystery fiction writers were discussing the many anthologies inspired by music on a groups.io list. (In case you weren’t aware, you can purchase crime fiction inspired by the music of Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Buffet, Paul Simon, and many, many more.) Someone suggested the need for an anthology based on one hit wonders. An editor liked the idea, and soon a call for submissions appeared. (Yes, this is unusual. Remember there was a pandemic on.)

I loved the idea of the anthology and went to work quickly to find a song that might inspire a story. And I found a song, one that played over and over on the radio around the time I got married. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that the DJ played the song at my wedding reception. I had my song, next I needed a protagonist.

The protagonist ended up being inspired by the news. I had read story after story on cold-cases being closed by genetic genealogy work. A serial killer was caught because of his daughter’s DNA. Bodies long-buried as John Doe and Jane Doe are finally being identified thanks to genetic database comparisons. Families are getting closure, finally learning that a missing loved one is dead, finally knowing their relative’s burial place. All of these cases inspired an idea for a new detective, someone who used genetic genealogy to solve cases. And so Maya Laster, a chocoholic, former school teacher and genealogy hobbyist turned genetic genealogist detective was born.

In my story, a client comes to Maya seeking family connections and hoping to discover why her father vanished during her childhood in the 1970s. Maya quickly discovers the client’s father was not who he seemed to be and that he had a very long history as a bigamist. Determining what became of the man required far more than Maya’s usual archival research.

The story also required research into 1970s era matters, since the disappearance happened then. I blogged about the research in a previous post.

I completed the story and submitted it to the anthology call, hoping for an acceptance. But then life troubles, business challenges, illness, and other complications interfered with the editor and the publishing company. Those who submitted stories were told that the anthology was delayed and that we were welcome to submit the stories elsewhere, but to let the editor know if it was accepted anywhere. Still I waited on resubmitting, hoping that the situation would resolve as the editor hoped it would. I heard nothing for months. The story had been submitted for over 500 days before I decided I should submit it elsewhere. So I sent it off again. And it got rejected. So I submitted it again. And it was accepted for Black Cat Weekly #79. AND it’s the “featured story” mentioned on the cover!

What one hit wonder song inspired my story? Mambo #5 by Lou Bega.

A note: I heard recently that the one hit wonder anthology is still pending. I’m hoping it gets published eventually. I’d love to see which songs inspired crime stories for other authors.

***

N. M. Cedeño is a short story writer and novelist living in Texas. She is active in Sisters in Crime- Heart of Texas Chapter and is a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Find out more at nmcedeno.com

March Madness?!

by Helen Currie Foster

“MARCH MADNESS”? In the Texas Hill Country, “March Madness” doesn’t only mean NCAA basketball. Its alternate form: Demented Spring Gardening. Too early, you say? Well, according to the snakes, spring’s already here.

Of course it’s not officially spring yet. Just three weeks ago, here north of Dripping Springs, Texas, the entire landscape—every tree, every leaf–was shrouded in solid ice. But this week, well before the equinox, beneath the oaks you’ll spot the amazing heartbreakingly beautiful fuchsia of the redbuds.

And roses! The tender yellow flowers of the Lady Banksia rose are cascading from the oak tree that serves as her trellis.

On other branches you can see the first luxurious pink buds of Souvenir de Malmaison, named for Empress Josephine’s rose garden, beginning to open.

In the garden the ineffably fragrant Zephirine Drouhin is performing her slow tease, loosening the green sepals, delicately unveiling her bright pink petals.

I’ve already planted two new and reputedly very fragrant roses––Madame Plantier, and Cramoisi Superieur. (What a name!) And I replanted Buff Beauty, which produces buff and yellow and apricot blooms. Still waiting for two more—Savannah and Sweet Mademoiselle, both promising strong fragrance. Seriously, a rose without fragrance? Isn’t it disappointing to lean forward into a rose, inhale…and…nothing? As Shakespeare points out in Sonnet 56:

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

For that sweet odour which doth in it live.

But for sheer fragrant spring bravado, tinged with peril, what about the ridiculous grape Kool-Aid smell of Texas mountain laurel? Intoxicating and loopy. The plant—sophora secundifolia–– isn’t called “Texas mescal bean” for nothing. https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=sose3: “The brilliant red seeds contain the highly poisonous alkaloid cytisine (or sophorine) – this substance is related to nicotine and is widely cited as a narcotic and hallucinogen.”

Poets give us strong language for the power of spring. From Dylan Thomas: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…” https://poets.org/poem/force-through-green-fuse-drives-flower

From “in-Just” by e.e. cummings:

in Just-

spring when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

“Mud-luscious!” Cummings captures the joys of digging, planting, splashing—of being a child in spring. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47247/in-just

“A Light exists in Spring” by Emily Dickinson was new to me. I treasure her recognition, her human diagnosis, of that first moment when we notice the magical presence of spring. It begins:

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

bit.ly/420VlSC

More symptoms of March Madness? The powerful, even uncontrollable, urge to fill your cart full of geraniums, dirt, mulch, annuals, perennials, unknown roses, tomato plants, new trees… Trudging a quarter mile from the local native plants emporium to your car, lugging a red wagon full of blue sage, lantana, and other plants hopefully accurate in describing themselves as “deer-resistant”… Other symptoms include impassioned online review of rose varieties, frantic ripping open of seed packets and daily watering of small unlabeled pots, then staring at tiny emerging seedlings and wondering—what are you? Is that the fennel or the Aji Crystal Pepper or the Mexican plum?

I’d never heard of Mexican plum until a friend gave me a jar of her amazing Mexican plum jam. She described the trees as small, with fragrant white blossoms. So I ordered seeds. The very small print on the seed packet required “stratification” in the refrigerator. Well, I tried. Every morning I peer at the still-empty pots of dirt… little plants, where are you? Can you live in the Hill Country?

Also—perhaps prematurely—we dragged hay bales into the garden and embarked on the great Haybale Tomato experiment:

Supposedly, according to our favorite local well-driller, this approach produces for one local rancher “the most beautiful tomatoes in the Hill Country.” Our donkeys kept sticking their muzzles through the fence, trying to eat the bales. Watch this space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2jjIHgmypM

Gardens can be perilous. Think of Eden. But how many murder mysteries are set in gardens, or involve garden poisons? If you haven’t already become a fan of Reginald Hill, you might try Deadheads. Dalziel and Pascoe solve virtually every murder presented to them in their Yorkshire police headquarters. In this one, roses abound, beginning on the first page. And rose culture. And… murder. bit.ly/3Fgce23

Texas author Susan Wittig Albert knows her way around poisonous plants, in Texas or elsewhere. I just finished her Hemlock, Book 28 in her China Bayles series. This mystery—impressively researched, and fast-moving–takes the reader to the Blue Ridge mountains and theft of a rare botanical book, with deft historical backstory. https://susanalbert.com/hemlock-book-28/

For more on Texas mountain laurel, its power and peril – see Ghost Dog, Book 2 in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series. bit.ly/3YIotv5

The weather report threatens another cold snap this week—even (gasp!) a possible freeze. But right now it’s 74 degrees. Geraniums to plant. Blue sage. Tomatoes to water. Yes, it’s hubris, exposing these tender plants so early to the vagaries of Hill Country weather, but—I can’t help it. I just saw a big bud on Star of the Republic! I swear it wasn’t there yesterday. March Madness reigns!

Find Helen Currie Foster on Facebook or at http://www.helencurriefoster.com. The eight books of the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, including the most recent, Ghosted, amzn.to/3YrJBXf, are available at Austin’s BookPeople as well as on Amazon (Kindle and Paperback).

Dream of Mystery, Mnemosyne, and Miserable Truth

by M.K. Waller

You had a dream
Well, I had one too . . .
You tell me your dream
And I’ll tell you mine.
—Albert H. Brown, Charles N. Daniels, Seymour Rice,
“You Tell Me Your Dream”

Remorse–is Memory–Awake
—Emily Dickinson

British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a dream. In October of 1797, after reading about the summer capital of the Yuan dynasty of China founded by Kubla Khan, he had an “opium-influenced dream.” When he woke, he immediately wrote down the lines of the poem he’d dreamed:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea. . . .

An excerpt from the second stanza:

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And the entire third:

A damsel with a dulcimer
   In a vision once I saw:
   It was an Abyssinian maid
   And on her dulcimer she played,
   Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
   Her symphony and song,
   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

What a dream!

But there “Kubla Khan” ends. While the poet was working, a “person from Porlock” knocked at the door–a bill collector, as it happened–and by the time the person left, Coleridge’s dream had vanished.

The person from Porlock has much to answer for. I mean that sincerely.

I had a dream, too.

Here, a brief digression: Everything you read here is the Truth. The Absolute, Out-and-out, Embarrassing Truth.

My dream wasn’t opium-induced. At my last physical examination, my doctor noted that my level of B-12 was “off the bottom of the chart”–his words–and said I should take a supplement. He said I would see “improved cognitive function.” But I’m seeing something else.

Years ago, I read that people low on B-12 don’t remember their dreams. Sure enough, now I’m remembering them.

So here’s my mystery dream:

I was on a literary pilgrimage–probably driving around New England, since that’s where my literary pilgrimages take place–visiting authors’ homes, when I came upon a large white stone building set well back from the street, surrounded by a manicured lawn: a Sherlock Holmes Museum.

I browsed through the exhibits, but the highlight lay behind the building: a faux graveyard with a white marble tombstone for each victim of murder or general misadventure appearing in a Sherlock Holmes story or novel: terrified Sir Charles Baskerville, convict Selden, murderous stepfather Dr. Grimesby Roylott, innocent Mormon John Ferrier, abusive husband Sir Eustace Brackenstall. Even Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime.

Then the Muse descended! I would take another literary journey to research every single Sherlock Holmes Museum and Victim Graveyard in the United States, and surely in England, possibly in France, and then I would write a book about them. A massive undertaking, but I was up to the task.

When I got home, I told my mother. She thought it was a good idea. Or said she did. Her face said she was thinking she would end up having to proofread the manuscript(s) and, remembering her multiple proofings of my master’s thesis, was also thinking about going missing.

Then I woke up, and the B-12 kicked in. I remembered. And I came to my senses.

How many Sherlock Holmes Museums/Graveyards are there? Anywhere?

And if there are any–who cares?

I’ve had it with Muses. That kind of inspiration I do not need.

I want a dream like Coleridge had. Not with opium, but there must be something better than B-12.

Because B-12 doesn’t stimulate inspiration. It stimulates memory.

The Nine Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne, Goddess of Memory.

Dreams like this I prefer to forget.

Read about productive dreaming at “Waking or Sleeping?” by Ink-Stained Wretch Helen Currie Foster.

Errata

*Let me be clear. Coleridge was addicted to opium. As a boy he’d been treated with laudanum, a tincture of opium, for rheumatic fever and “other childhood diseases”–English professor Dr. Thomas L. Brasher points to tuberculosis of the bone–which grew into a lifelong addiction. Laudanum was frequently prescribed at that time and was sold without prescription at pharmacies, not the best conditions under which to break a drug habit formed in childhood. In later life, the addiction broke his health and affected him socially and professionally–including a break with longtime friend, poet William Wordsworth–and has tarnished his reputation to the present day.

To that tarnishment, I say, Pish-tosh. Coleridge was not only a major poet–the 1798 publication of Biographia Literaria, written with William Wordsworth, ushered in the Romantic Movement in British poetry–he was a “literary critic, philosopher, and theologian.” And I refuse to allow him to be turned into a druggie hippie opium-eater, not in one of my posts.

“Remorse–is Memory–Awake

Image of “Kubla Khan” manuscript Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Image of Mnemosyne (aka Lamp of Memory or Ricordanza) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti via Wikimedia Commons

Image of Coleridge, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Vision of Sir Launfal (by Coleridge and James Russell Lowell), published by Sampson Low, 1906. Artist unidentified, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

M.K. (Kathy) Waller blogs at Telling the Truth, Mainly. The blog might disappear briefly for a facelift, but it will return. The picture in the sidebar is not M.K., but it’s as close to a facelift as she she can manage.