craft of writing – Ink-Stained Wretches

Naming Characters: Steve Dauchy MacCaskill

I’m working on a mystery novel—I’ve been working on it for years, but am now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel—and am faced with dilemmas too numerous to whine about in only one post, so I’ll move along.

I will instead write about the one pleasure of the writing life: creating and naming characters.

My novel is set in a little town very like my own hometown. I don’t base my plot on real events, and I don’t use real people as characters—with one exception: Steve Dauchy.

Note: One of my readers, Dr. Cullen Dauchy, knows more about Steve than I do, especially about his early life, and I hope he’ll feel free to correct any errors.

Steve Dauchy was a career blood donor at Katy Veterinary Clinic in Katy, Texas. On retirement he moved to Fentress, where he lived with his veterinarian-owner’s parents, Joe and Norma Dauchy. Joe and Norma lived next door to me; in local terms, next door meant that my house was on one corner, then there was a half-acre “patch” of pecan and peach trees and grass and weeds, then a street, and then on the next corner, the Dauchy yard and their house. The point being that when Steve visited me, he didn’t just stroll across a driveway.

Joe was my dad’s first cousin, so I guess that makes Steve and me second cousins. I have a lot of cousins on that side of the family, although most are human.

Steve is a family name, with a story behind it. As I understand it, back in the ’20s or ’30s, my Great-uncle Cull (Joseph Cullen Dauchy, Sr.), enjoyed listening to a radio program about a Greek character who frequently spoke of “my cat Steve and her little cattens.” Uncle Cull was so amused by the phrase that he named a cat—probably one of the barn cats—Steve. And for the next forty or so years, he always had a cat named Steve.

*Uncle Cull and Aunt Myrtle Dauchy’s house, home of the first Steves*

So when the clinic cat became part of the Uncle Cull’s son and daughter-in-law’s family, he became the latest in a long line of Steves.

How to describe Steve? He was a fine figure of a cat: a big tabby, deep orange, with an expression of perpetual boredom. His reaction to nearly everything translated as, “Meh.” I’ve heard that’s common among clinic cats.

Once when Steve was standing on my front porch, the neighbor’s Great Dane got loose and charged over. I was frantic, shouting at the dog, shouting at Steve. But when the dog hit the porch, Steve just looked up at him. Dog turned around and trotted home.

Some would say Steve was brave, and I’m sure he was. But I believe his grace under pressure had their roots elsewhere.

First, he had experience. He knew dogs. In his former employment, he’d observed the breed: big, little, yappy, whining, growling, howling, cringing, confined to carriers, restrained by leashes, sporting harnesses and rhinestone collars, hair wild and matted, sculpted ‘dos and toenails glistening pink from the OPI Neon Collection. He’d seen them all. He was not impressed.

Facing down a Great Dane, however, took more than experience. There was something in Steve’s character, an inborn trait that marked him for greatness: his overarching sense of entitlement. He was never in the wrong place at the wrong time. My porch was his porch. The world was his sardine.

Except for the kitchen counter. Steve thought kitchen counters were for sleeping, but Joe and Norma’s maid didn’t. Consequently, he stayed outside a lot. He took ostracism in stride and used his freedom to range far and wide. Far and wide meant my yard.

At that time I had three indoor cats—Christabel, Chloe, and Alice B. Toeclaws—and a raft of outdoor cats. The outdoor cats started as strays, but I made the mistake of naming them, which meant I had to feed them, which meant they were mine. Chief among them was Bunny, a black cat who had arrived as a teenager with his gray-tabby mother, Edith.

One day Bunny, Edith, and I were out picking up pecans when Steve wandered over to pay his respects, or, more likely, to allow us to pay our respects to him. Bunny perked up, put on his dangerous expression, and walked out to meet the interloper. It was like watching the opening face-off in Gunsmoke.

But instead of scrapping, they stopped and sat down, face to face, only inches apart. Each raised his right paw above his head and held it there a moment. Next, simultaneously, they bopped each other on the top of the head about ten times. Then they toppled over onto their sides, got up, and walked away.

That happened every time they met. Maybe it was just a cat thing, a neighborly greeting, something like a Masonic handshake. But I’ve wondered if it might have had religious significance. Bunny was a Presbyterian, and Steve was a Methodist, and both had strong Baptist roots, and although none of those denominations is big on ritual, who knows what a feline sect might entail?

Steve had a Macavity-like talent for making himself invisible. Occasionally when I opened my front door, he slipped past and hid in a chair at the dining room table, veiled by the tablecloth. When he was ready to leave, he would hunt me down—Surprise!—and lead me to the door. Once, during an extended stay, he used the litter box. Christabel, Chloe, and Alice B. Toeclaws were not amused.

*Distance Steve traveled between his house and mine. His house is way over there behind the trees.*

Invisibility could work against him, though. Backing out of the driveway one morning, I saw in the rearview mirror a flash streaking across the yard. I got out and looked around but found nothing and so decided I’d imagined it. When I got home from work, I made a thorough search and located Steve under my house, just out of reach. I called, coaxed, cajoled. He stared. It was clear: he’d been behind the car when I backed out, I’d hit him, and he was either too hurt to move or too disgusted to give me the time of day.

It took a long time and a can of sardines to get him out. I delivered him to the veterinarian in Lockhart; she advised leaving him for observation. A couple of days later, I picked him up. Everything was in working order, she said, cracked pelvis, nothing to do but let him get over it.

“Ordinarily,” said the vet, “I would have examined him and sent him home with you the first day. I could tell he was okay. But you told me his owner’s son is a vet, and I was afraid I’d get it wrong.”

Although he was an indoor-outdoor cat, Steve managed plenty of indoor time at his own house, too, especially in winter, and when the maid wasn’t there. One cold day, the family smelled something burning. They found Steve snoozing atop the propane space heater in the kitchen. His tail hung down the side, in front of the vent. The burning smell was the hair on his tail singeing. They moved him to a safer location. I presume he woke up during relocation.

At night, he had his own bedroom, a little garden shed in the back yard. He slept on the seat of the lawnmower, snuggled down on a cushion. Except when he didn’t.

One extremely cold night, I was piled up in bed under an extra blanket and three cats. About two a.m., I woke up to turn over—sleeping under three cats requires you to wake up to turn over—and in the process, reached down and touched one of the cats. It was not my cat.

I cannot describe the wave of fear that swept over me. It sounds ridiculous now, but finding myself in the dark with an unidentified beast, and unable to jump and run without first extricating myself from bedding and forty pounds of cat—I lay there paralyzed.

Unnecessarily, of course. The extra cat was Steve. He’s sneaked in and, considering the weather forecast, decided that sleeping with a human and three other cats in a bed would be superior to hunkering down on a lawnmower.

Steve’s full name was, of course, Steve Dauchy. In my book, he will be Steve MacCaskill. MacCaskill was the name of a family who lived next door to my Aunt Bettie and Uncle Maurice. Their children were friends of my father and his brothers and their many cousins. They were a happy family.

“My family had to plan everything,” my dad’s cousin Lucyle Dauchy Meadows (Steve’s aunt) told me, “but the MacCaskills were spontaneous. If they decided they wanted to go to a movie, they just got into the car and went to a movie.” When Lucyle and the other girls helped their friend Mary Burns MacCaskill tidy her room before the Home Demonstration Agent came to examine it, one of the first things they did was to remove the alligator from the bathtub.

I heard so many delightful stories about the MacCaskill family that I decided they were too good to be true. Then, at Aunt Bettie’s 100th birthday party, my mother introduced me to Mary Burns MacCaskill, who had traveled from Ohio for the party.

So as an homage to that family, I’ve named my main character Molly MacCaskill. And when choosing a pet for Molly, I couldn’t choose a finer beast than Steve.

Note: Cullen Dauchy no longer owns Katy Veterinary Clinic, but he did when Steve worked there, and the clinic was Steve’s first home, so I’m leaving the link.

And I’m so glad the Home Demonstration agent didn’t inspect bedrooms when I was a girl. I didn’t have an alligator, but she might have thought I had something worse.

***

This post first appeared in Ink-Stained Wretches in 2021.

***

Kathy Waller blogs at Telling the Truth, Mainly. She has published short stories, and a novella co-written with Manning Wolfe. She is perpetually working on a novel.

The Research Rabbit Hole: Jewel Theft 1950s-1960s

I’ve been researching background for another story featuring my character Jerry Milam, a World War II veteran and ex-cop turned PI. In looking for crimes for my detective to solve, I started digging into old newspapers for information on jewel thefts. I chose the topic because I’d read about the robbery of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1964. While the robbers were later caught, only ten of the twenty-four stolen gems were recovered. In researching that theft, I discovered that the Witte Museum in San Antonio was robbed in 1969, with a thief smashing a glass display case in order to snatch the forty-nine carat McFarlin Diamond, a canary yellow, emerald cut stone described as being the size of a hen’s egg, which was also never recovered.

Then, I fell down the rabbit hole.

Back in the days when J. Edgar Hoover was still in charge of the FBI, jewel thefts were all the rage in crime. Jewels, once removed from their settings, were impossible to identify because, unlike today, they had no microscopic serial numbers etched on them. Etching of jewels for identification purposes began in 1983. While watches had serial numbers, most people didn’t bother to make a note of theirs. Fences were happy to purchase stolen jewels and watches because they were so hard to link back to the original owners. Most gem stones were easily recut or reset and resold, vanishing forever.

Most jewel robberies in the 1950s and 1960s were committed by stealth, leading to the image of the lithe cat burglar crawling over rooftops firing the popular imagination. Alfred Hitchcock even made the movie To Catch a Thief, released in 1955, with Cary Grant playing a retired jewel thief known as the Cat.

Between 1959 and 1967, Lauren Bacall, Winston Churchill, Sophia Loren, Eva Gabor, and Yul Brenner, along with other famous and wealthy people, were relieved of their jewels by thieves. With the exception of Eva Gabor, none were present at the time of the theft. Thieves, likely the same ones who robbed the American Museum of Natural History’s gemological exhibit a few months later, waited for Eva Gabor and her husband to return to their hotel room in order to steal her twenty-five-thousand-dollar diamond ring, which they had been unable to locate while she was away from the room. They pistol whipped and bound Ms. Gabor and forced her husband to retrieve the ring from the hotel safe before making their getaway.

If you are wondering why one ring was enough for the thieves to risk adding armed robbery and kidnapping to the charges against them, consider that the average income in 1965 was less than seven thousand dollars a year. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar ring was worth several years income to most people.

My research led me to realize that even without serial numbers and etched identification codes, certain jewels would be easier to trace than others. Which jewels might be more traceable? Cabochon star rubies and sapphires. A rounded, polished shape, called a cabochon, was how all jewels were prepared before cutting was developed for gemstones. Opals are still prepared and set as cabochons.

Star rubies and star sapphires exhibit a phenomenon called asterism, a star pattern visible when light hits the stone. The star is created by long inclusions inside the stone. Stones with asterism are rounded and polished as cabochons, not cut, to preserve the star within them.

The Edith Haggin DeLong Star Ruby
By Vicpeters – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=165353250

Star rubies and star sapphires are valued based on the clarity and size of their stars, the color saturation and transparency of the stone, by their shape, and by their inclusions and cloudy areas. These same features make the stones more easily traceable and identifiable. While other gems can be recut and reset to disguise them, star rubies and star sapphires can’t be cut because the rounded shape is what allows the star to be seen.

Is it any surprise that the most valuable stones recovered from the American Museum of Natural History robbery were the Star of India, one of the largest blue star sapphires in the world, and the DeLong Star Ruby, while the Eagle Diamond was never found?

That’s enough rantings from the rabbit hole.

*****

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.

A Well. A Story.

By Dixie Evatt

I recognize that sometimes I can be excessively literal. That’s why when Julia Cameron reminds us to make time to fill our creative well, I picture an actual old-timely water well. In my mind’s eye, ideas, quotes, games, puzzles, cartoons, pictures, and music pour into the well from every direction – a rainstorm of colors, smells and sounds.

I was first introduced to the concept when I joined an Austin creative community, led by the inestimable Ann Ciccoletta, Artistic Director of Austin Shakespeare. The group draws inspiration from Cameron’s self-help classic, The Artist’s Way – A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Since its initial publication in 1992 it has been reprinted more than forty times and served as a catalyst for dozens of other inspirational works by Cameron. Her message is intended for everyone– writers, artists, photographers, actors, composers, dancers, poets, musicians, singers, and everyday folks alike alike — who want to unlock their inner creative self. Her advice:

Filling the well involves the active pursuit of images to refresh our artistic reservoirs. Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail… In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do …Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery. A mystery draws us in, leads us on, lures us.

Once married to Martin Scorsese, Cameron’s life was a rollercoaster of good times-bad times-terrible times until she ultimately found sobriety. In an article about the 30^th anniversary of her landmark book, The Guardian says:

Inspired by the Alcoholics Anonymous model, the book offers a programme for “artistic recovery”.

Cameron has benefited from her own advice with twenty-three titles on creativity to her credit along with seven books on spirituality; three works of fiction; one memoir; seven plays; five prayer books; four books of poetry; and one feature film.

The prompt for that bombardment of ideas to “fill the well” is can be the weekly Artist Date – another Cameron recommendation consisting of making an appointment with yourself to intentionally seek out sources of inspiration. In gardens. In museums. In craft stores. In coffee shops. Anyplace that can excite the senses is a destination for a date with oneself.

I find that it’s often a good idea to pair these dates with something to nudge you forward. For instance, I subscribe to Austin Kleon’s weekly newsletter (it drops into my email each Friday). It lists his “ten things worth sharing” with brief commentary and links to articles, songs, books, films, podcasts, events, and other content. Kleon is an Austin-based, best-selling author (Steal Like an Artist) who, like Cameron, writes to inspire others. More can be found at his website: https://austinkleon.com.

I was reminded of these never-ending sources of inspiration when, in late April, I had the good fortune to share a table with Spike Gillespie at the Austin Public Library’s second annual Greater Austin Book Festival (aka GAB Fest). Gillespie is well known in Austin writing circles for her unflinching commentary and multiple books. She lives on a ranch outside the city where she hosts gatherings for writers to find inspiration.

We had a chance to chat as we watched readers and fellow authors mill around the book festival, occasionally dropping by our table to ask about our book displays. Then a little girl – probably no more than seven or eight years old — approached to help herself to our free mints. She kept picking up one after another until her hands couldn’t hold anymore. After she walked away my conversation with Gillespie built on the encounter …and how often desire can exceed capacity. From there we talked about the importance of being a listening writer. To observe. To absorb. To listen.

I thought about this later and remembered what Cameron advised writers in her 2021 book, The Listening Path: The Creative Art of Attention:

We do not struggle to think something up; rather we listen and take something down. Very little effort is required; what we are after is accuracy of listening.

Inspiration can be right under your nose. It can come over the transom unexpectedly. It can spring from an unplanned conversation. It may drop into your email. Watch for it so you can fill the well.

CAPTIONS

Well — AI Generated

Photo — Dixie (L) and Spike (R) 2025 GABFest

The Tincture of Time

By Helen Currie Foster – June 9, 2025

I’ve always loved Guy Clark’s version of “Stuff that Works.” Dublin Blues, 1995.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mprD2MN5vo

Listening, I can just see, just feel, that “old blue shirt” that “suits him just fine.” I can imagine the old boots that let him “work all day” and then go “dance all night.” And of course that friend who “always shows up when the chips are down”––I’m thinking, my bestie. Just hearing about the shirt, the boots, the friend always leaves me with the same settled, restful confidence he’s describing. “Stuff that works!”

“Brown paper packages tied up with string” may have undeniable charm, “stuff that works” means stuff I turn to, go back to, and rely on. Like old travel pants with pockets that zip, soft shirts without a scratchy label, shoes that just carry me along, soles not too thick or thin.

What about you? Things that keep working, that stand the test of time? The pens that always work, the ink you like, the just-right-feel in your hand as you write? The car that always starts, the recipe you can count on?

Part of the charm of “stuff that works” is reliability – working each and every time.

Time, that deep human preoccupation! Is time reliable? Time messes with us. Time stands still. Time passes. Time flies. Time heals. Time runs out. Time grows short. The time changes…and times change. “Time, like an ever-flowing stream…” Sometimes an hour feels interminable; sometimes an hour passes in a flash. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity says that even in the universe, time is not constant, but is influenced by gravity. Yikes! (says the English major).

Writers struggle to analyze time’s impact on us. Just a couple of examples––Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time; Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory;Virginia Woolf, particularly the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse. Historians try to make sense of the impact of events over time, like Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering, on death and the Civil War.

Poets remind us of their mortality—and hence our own. Here’s Robert Frost, in Ten Mills, Part II, THE SPAN OF LIFE, from A Further Range (Henry Holt and Company, 1936):

The old dog barks backward without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup.

Or Billy Collins at the beginning of “Life Expectancy” in Whale Day (2020):

On the morning of a birthday that ended in a zero,

I was looking out at the garden

When it occurred to me that the robin

On her worm-hunt in the dewy grass

Had a good chance of outliving me….

T.S. Eliot begins East Coker : “In my beginning is my end,” then:

…there is a time for building

And a time for living and for generation

And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane

Ad to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots

And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

Sebastian Junger reflects on near-death experiences, including his own: In My Time of Dying (2024).

Of course animals can be aware of time. Right? The three donkeys– Sebastian, Amanda, and Caroline ––appear promptly at the gate in front of the house at 11:30 a.m., and again at 4:30 p.m., which, they are confident, are the hours when carrots ought to be offered. We know animals can mourn the loss of a member of their pod, their herd, their litter. But do they worry about their own mortality? Do our friends the non-human primates? Well, maybe! Um, time will tell! https://bit.ly/4mZqi4k

To be human is to be aware of our own mortality. And for humans, time is both reliable—tick, tock—and unreliable: we cannot know what the future holds. Fiction writers, however, get to make those decisions for their characters. In the mystery genre, we get to decide: who shall live? Who shall die? How, and why?

I’ve wrestled with these questions in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series: what happens next?Should I not have killed a particular character? Should a new character survive and reappear in the next book? It’s a heavy responsibility! We readers can become quite attached to characters. In the last few weeks, finishing Book 10, I took refuge in Laurie King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. She created a character I found particularly appealing in The God of the Hive. https://bit.ly/449Lugn

But then? The book made me revisit the pain of losing a beloved character to—well, literary death. Remember Gus in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove? I still miss Gus… Gus, don’t ride over that hill!

In addition to night-time plunges into Laurie King land, I found banging on the piano a helpful respite from the writing process. But after two broken wrists in the past two years (careless, careless) I’d had to quit the beloved boogie woogie lessons and feared I’d never be able to play those strenuous pieces again.

My brother the physician, when asked by his siblings for advice, often prescribes “a little tincture of time.” It’s amazing how often that prescription works. This past week, after (really quite a lot of) tincture of time, I persuaded our century-old piano once again to play boogie-woogie pieces from the 1942 All Star Boogie Woogie Piano Solos! Pete Johnson, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Pine Top Smith, Hersal Thomas, Albert Ammons. Suddenly—how long is “a little tincture of time”?––finger memory began to return. Not all the way back yet, but still! Maybe I’ll get to resume piano lessons with that Austin treasure of jazz, boogie, country and everything else, Floyd Domino.

Charles Darwin was not known to rush into print. In 1837 in Edinburgh he presented his first paper concerning the action of worms “on the formation of mould,” a topic he studied for over forty years. Not until 1881, after two scientists pooh-poohed his theories, during the Great British Agricultural Depression (1873-1896) he published The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms on the work of earthworms. Curious about their senses, their awarenesss, their work, he studied how worms could tug leaves into their burrows, eat and digest them, and then produce worm casts—millions of tons of richer soil. His query as to whether earthworms were sensitive to light “led me to watch on many successive nights worms kept in pots, which were protected from currents of air by means of glass plates.” His summary after all those years? Darwin doubts “whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world” as earthworms. Producing stuff that works…!

For so many of us, books are the “stuff that works.” Hurrah for reading!

Award-winning author Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by the three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She remains deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing our party. Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com and on Amazon, and find the books at Austin’s BookPeople!

https://www.facebook.com/helencurriefoster

Words, words, words . . .

By Dixie Evatt

Words, words, words . . .
~ Shakespeare

Before we had powerful computers in our pockets or on our laps, we had reference books. . . shelves and shelves of them.

One of my favorite possessions is a vintage Webster’s dictionary, published 1956 – when I was 10 years old. All 11-plus pounds of the five-inch-thick book teeter on a top shelf in my office. I can no longer safely lift it and the pages are laid out in three columns of typeface so tiny that my aging eyes strain to make out the words.

My book is a holdover from the days when library dictionaries were housed and opened on a specialized wooden lectern. I wonder, do libraries still have these throwbacks to that bygone day or have the enormous books all made their way to the shredder?

I never look at mine that I’m not reminded of the 1950s movie, Born Yesterday, starring Judy Holliday. She won an Oscar for her portrayal of the brassy girlfriend of an uncouth tycoon. Her character tries to overcome her limited education and rudimentary vocabulary by reading, among other texts, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. In one of the more humorous scenes, she struggles to make meaning of the archaic text and is advised to simply check the dictionary if she encounters any words she doesn’t understand. The increasingly frustrated Holliday would no more than read a sentence before she is up again, consulting a dictionary. Word by word. Trip by trip. Written today, the scene would surely lose its charm since she would likely be reading Tocqueville on a Kindle where all you must do is press and hold a finger on a word for the meaning to flash before you.

Like Holliday with a Kindle, writers don’t have the need for shelves full of reference books since language prompts are everywhere from the demons in autocorrect to the drop-down menus in word processing programs that produce synonyms.

The 19^th Century French author Jules Renard is credited with saying, “What a vast amount of paper would be saved if there were a law forcing writers to use only the right word.

Yet, finding the right word isn’t always so easy even with all our modern assets. Luckily there are still some reference sources to help. Here are a few:

Evan Esar’s “20,000 Quips & Quotes: A Treasury of Witty Remarks, Comic Proverbs, Wisecracks and Epigrams.” If she’d thumbed through this one, Holliday would have learned that Tocqueville said, “The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.”

“The Allyn & Bacon Handbook” by Leonard J. Rosen and Laurence Behrens. You must love any book that is willing to devote 22 pages to the uses and misuses of the comma alone.

Theodore M. Bernstein’s “Dos, Don’ts & Maybes of English Usage.” For instance, he explains why Mark Antony didn’t say “Friends, Romans, countrymen, loan me your ears.”

“Describer’s Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations,” by David Grambs and Ellen S. Levine. It indexes illustrative passages of more than 600 authors from travel writer Paul Theroux to contemporary British novelist Zadie Smith.

Eli Burnstein’s “Dictionary of Fine Distinction Book,” offering a humorous look at often misused words and phrases. For instance, couch vs. sofa.

Valerie Howard’s “1,000 Helpful Adjectives for Fiction Writers,” promises to spice up characteristics, qualities or attributes of a noun when a writer is having trouble capturing just the right word.”

Bill Bryson’s “Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting it Right” sets out to decipher the idiosyncrasies of the English language. Things such as 126 meanings of “set” when used as a verb and another 58 when used as a noun.

Brian Shawver’s “The Language of Fiction: A Writer’s Stylebook.” Need to be reminded when to use a comma or semicolon? Shawver’s there to help.

Kathy Steinemann’s “The Writer’s Lexicon: Descriptions, Overused Words, and Taboos.” Among other things, she offers writers cures for overused modifiers (I’m talking about you “very”).

John B. Bremner’s “The Columbia Dictionary for Writers: Words on Words.” Here you can learn the history of H. L. Mencken’s inspiration for coining the term “ecdysiast” to replace “striptease.”

Christine Lindberg’s “The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.” Writing about bread? How about a baker’s dozen choices: dal, pita, rye, naan, tortilla, focaccia, ciabatta, challah, corn, sourdough, pumpernickel, baguette, etc.

“Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law” has been found on the desk of every journalist for decades since it dictates uniform rules for grammar, punctuation, style for capitalization and numbers, preferred spelling, abbreviations, acronyms, and such.

“Words, words, words,” is the sarcastic response Hamlet gave when Polonius asked him what he was reading. Fortunately, authors still have no shortage of excellent reference books to help them find the right ones.

***

A former political reporter in Austin, Dixie also taught writing at Syracuse University. When she teamed up with Sue Cleveland to write fiction, they sold a screenplay to a Hollywood producer. Although the movie was never made, the seed money financed ThirtyNineStars, their publishing company. Through it they published two award-winning thrillers (Shrouded and Digging up the Dead) under the pen name, Meredith Lee. Dixie’s first solo mystery was Bloodlines & Fencelines, set in a tiny Texas town near Austin. Kirkus reviews described the book as, “A twisty whodunit that’s crafted with care and saturated with down-home Southern charm.” She is working on second mystery in the series. www.dlsevatt.com

***

Image of dictionary by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Publicity photo of William Holden and Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday via Wikipedia

Image of tablet by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Rain, rain go away. . .

By: Dixie Evatt

It might just be the Texas temperatures that have been rocking from the 20s to the 80s since the first of the new year. Or maybe it’s the ominous news reports about melting ice caps or the drought conditions paired with hurricane-force winds that helped fuel the Los Angeles wildfires. Whatever the case, I find my mind traveling again and again to thoughts of weather and the influence it has on stories, both fictional and real.

As writers we’ve inherited wise advice about incorporating weather into our stories. For instance, Number One in Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules for Good Writing is “never open a book with weather.” While that advice is close to dogma, it has been debated (see: Jo-Anne Richards bit.ly/41a4oCk and Roz Morris bit.ly/3WUcAEk

Richards, an internationally published novelist, says of the admonition to avoid opening your novel with weather isn’t an iron-clad rule. It’s a prompt to the writer to if the story is stronger by opening with a paragraph where you find people doing something. That doesn’t mean a weather opening never works. She gives this example of an opening from Maggie O’Farrell’s “The Hand that First Held Mine.”

Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.

Morris, a former ghost writer who writes the “Nail Your Novel” blog, offers an example of a weather opening that she likes because it is intensely descriptive and the storyteller lures in the reader. Her sample story opening is from “The Rapture” by Liz Jensen.

That summer, the summer all the rules began to change, June seemed to last for a thousand years. The temperatures were merciless …It was heat to die in, to go nuts in or to spawn. Old folk collapsed, dogs were cooked alive in cars…The sky pressed down like a furnace lid, shrinking the subsoil, cracking concrete, killing shrubs from the roots up…

Although the advice about beginning a story with weather can be debated, there’s also the middle and end of the story to consider. Susanne Bennett, a German-American writer, identified seven ways writers can use weather to tell their story in her 2022 post on “Writers Write”: conversation starter; backdrop; sensual experience; foreshadowing; sense of conflict; motif; and acting force. In fact, she advised, the weather can stand as the last word (where it is almost another character). bit.ly/4hSBBYq

Bennett also reminds us that the old saw about showing not telling is likewise true for weather. For example, she edited the sentence, “On a sunny day, Jane went to the public library” to read “A T-shirt is enough,” Jane thought, glad to put her cardigan aside… Who needed extra baggage on a day like this?”

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald is chock full of weather references, many illustrating Bennett’s points. One researcher counted 111 separate weather references, from heat, to wind to sun to rain, most of which can be linked to mood or passion in the story.

Weather can also emerge out of the obscurity of background symbolism to overtly influence action. There’s an oft-cited example of one snow scene in “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger when Holden Caufield makes a snowball but is so conflicted he is unable to throw it. Would Agatha Christie’s closed-room mystery “And Then There Were None” even have been possible if a ferocious storm hadn’t trapped the ten victims on an isolated island off the Devon coast? Or, how about the necessity of a crop-killing drought to cause the Joad family to pick up stakes and abandon their home in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”?

Weather might incite action or prevent it. My book club recently read “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf and one of the most memorable refrains is about weather. In the story, the family plans, again and again, to visit the lighthouse the next day but only if the weather is “fine.” It almost never seems to be.

Would the passionate and cruel relationships in “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë feel the same without a violent storm “rattling over the Heights in full fury,” taking down tree limbs in its wake? Wuthering, after all, means tumultuous storms.

Sometimes weather carries double duty, carrying both mood and action, as in “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne; “Misery” by Stephen King; and “Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard. When the long-suffering Hester Prynne in “The Scarlet Letter” removes her cap and then the scarlet letter she is awash in sunlight.

In “Transit of Venus” you just know Ted Tice is going to have a rough go of it when he arrives, soaked through. “He looked up from his wet shoes and his wet smell and his orange blotch of cheap luggage. And she looked down, high and dry.”

Not unlike Annie Wilkes the weather is unsettling and unpredictable in “Misery.” As the weather changes, she changes, leading Paul Sheldon, the author she holds captive, to conclude, “I am in trouble here. This woman is not right.”

There are so many other memorable weather scenes in literature that Pulitzer Prize winning writer Kathryn Schultz pulled from her almanac of examples in a 2015 article in “New Yorker” magazine. bit.ly/3WVj0D9

And, finally the 2024 Academy-Award nominated movie “The Room Next Door,” brings together all of the advice about injecting weather into a story. We see its use to create mood, develop characters and foreshadow events when the dying Martha (played by Tilda Swinton) recites parts of James Joyce’s “The Dead” to her friend Ingrid (played by Julianne Moore).

It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight..His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Dixie Evatt (DLS Evatt)

A former political reporter in Austin, Dixie also taught writing at Syracuse University. When she teamed up with Sue Cleveland to write fiction, they sold a screenplay to a Hollywood producer. Although the movie was never made, the seed money financed ThirtyNineStars, their publishing company. Through it they published two award-winning thrillers (Shrouded and Digging up the Dead) under the pen name, Meredith Lee. In 2021 Dixie launched a solo mystery (Bloodlines & Fencelines) that Kirkus described as, “A twisty whodunit that’s crafted with care and saturated with down-home Southern charm.” She is working on a prequel (Gravel Roads & Shallow Graves) set to launch in 2025. www.dlsevatt.com

In the Window or On the Table? What I Learned from Amor and Anton

By: Dixie Evatt

Ever since I read A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) I’ve considered Amor Towles writing style to be nearly perfect. So when my niece told me Towles was making an appearance at the Empire Theatre in San Antonio, I booked it. He was there to support the San Antonio Book Festival and to talk about his latest book, Table for Two. It’s a collection of six short stories plus a novella. Unlike some of his other stories, these all take place in the current Millennium.

Over the evening I learned a interesting things about Towles.

I learned that he is what we used to label in the news business, an “easy interview.” Austin’s own Stephen Harrigan (Big Wonderful Thing, 2019) was on the stage with Towles as moderator but he didn’t get to ask many of the questions on his notepad. Towles was in a talkative mood so needed little prompting.

I learned that Towles took up writing full time only after success in his first career at a small Wall Street investment firm.

I learned that once he gets a project in mind, he begins to fill notebook after notebook with hand-written outlines, ideas, scenes, characters. It may take years. He says this process frees his imagination and subconscious to go where beautiful language and the characters’ inner lives take him.

There was more but of the many memorable things I learned about this accomplished author, what I remember best, and took to heart, was his description of his research process. He said that when writing he intentionally postpones what he calls “applied research” until near the end. During this time he is also reading novels written by others that are set in the same historical period as the book he’s working on. His novel is almost written before he begins deep research.

That’s why he waited until A Gentleman in Moscow was almost finished before traveling to Moscow and checking into the Hotel Metropol, the exclusive hotel where his story about Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is set.

Towles advised that details gleaned from this kind of active research should be written into the story much the way one might design the stage for Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1903). Of course Towles would choose this particular play as a point of reference because, like his own novel set in Russia, Chekhov’s tragicomedy also deals with a period of decline for the Russian aristocracy.

He said that when the curtain rises for the play the audience might see only the suggestion of a cherry orchard through large windows as if were rendered by an impressionist such as Claude Monet or Mary Cassatt. The windows might be framed by plywood bookcases painted to resemble mahogany. In the center of the room there would be a table set with a porcelain tea service.

When an author is ready to fold research into the story, Towles said it should be presented with similar layers of reality. Some details are just suggested in the background. Some, like the bookcases, give the scene the appearance of reality but need not be too detailed. Then there are aspects of research that can’t be given short shrift. For these, the author must adhere to absolute authenticity. The audience needs to hear the chair move across the floor and the teacup rattle in the saucer. The challenge for me is where all of the information that I’ve accumulated in my own research belongs – in the window or on the table?

Charles McNulty, theater critic for the Los Angeles Times, said in a June 6, 2022, review of a local revival of The Cherry Orchard, “Big things occur in Chekhov. Houses are lost, guns occasionally go off, and people die. But the focus is on muddling through.”

Much the same might be said about A Gentleman in Moscow and the subtle use of active research by Towles so that his story isn’t swallowed up in the details.

***

Cover of A Gentleman in Moscow via Amazon

Image of Anton Chekov via Wikipedia. Public domain.

Image of stage of The Cherry Orchard via Wikipedia. Public domain.

***

Smiling Damned Villain

by Dixie Evatt

O villain, villain, smiling damned villain. . .
That one may smile, and smile and be a villain.
— William Shakespeare

Lately I’ve felt as if I have a sesame seed stuck between my molars. Except instead of an annoying seed, it’s an idea I can’t let go of. It started when a group of fellow writers were talking about overuse of certain pat descriptors to express emotions. “Smiled” is a common culprit. Now I’m haunted when I read my copy. Why are my characters always smiling? What kind of smile is it? Nervous smile, a smile to mask confusion, fake smile, cold-as-ice smile, snide smile, crooked smile, challenging smile, weak smile, infectious smile or just a plain old vanilla grin?

I can’t unsee the way I fall back on dull and overused expressions such as “she smiled,” instead of taking the time to ask myself, what underlying emotion is the character feeling? How can I describe that emotion so the reader understands it in a precise and fresh way? How can I eliminate all that superfluous smiling that goes on in my copy and instead home in on the intended emotion? In other words, when my characters smile, what emotion am I trying to communicate? Unless writing a picture book an author has only words to create an image in the reader’s mind.

My new-found fixation on smiling is now creeping into not only my writing but also into books I’m reading. Sometimes a smile is understood without the word being used as in The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon. “Good humor stretches out from the corners of Ephraim’s eyes in the form of crow’s feet, and I realize he has lightened my mood on purpose.” Sometimes the smile is expressed unambiguously as in My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. “She made a half smile of contempt that meant: Marcello Solara makes me sick.” Or this from Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto. “They are sort of smiling, but the smiles are heavy and apologetic. . .these aren’t the kind of smiles you give when you have good news to share. They’re the kinds of smiles that know they’re about to ruin someone’s life.”

The scholar Paul Ekman has identified 18 common types of smiles with disparate meanings: the fixed polite smile (I really don’t know what to say); the embarrassed smile (I don’t know anyone); the tight-lipped relieved smile (oops, that was a close call); the exhausted smile (happiness after a long race); the sadistic smile (it particularly exudes evil); the exasperated smile (annoyance); the compliant smile (it will be over soon); the diplomatic smile (a “professional” smile); the ecstatic smile (life is wonderful); the exaggerated smile (imitation of joy, a little forced); the worried smile (the situation is really awkward); the contemptuous smile (one is secretly a bit spiteful); the ironic smile (welcome to sarcasm); the fake smile (to hide an emotion of weakness); the delighted smile (in front of a baby); the warm smile (that of a mother encouraging her child); the meditative smile (Buddha-like, filled with compassion); and the amorous smile (I adore you).

Tim Roth, the lead in Lie to Me, by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Ekman’s work was the basis of the American crime drama Lie to Me, in which an expert in facial expressions, tone of voice and body language uses his skills to help law enforcement uncover the truth.

We have Charles Darwin in his 1872 book (Expressions of the Emotions: Man and Animals) to thank for one of the earliest scientific studies of human emotions. What is important for writers is that he also offered analysis of the body language — facial movements, gestures, sounds, and the physiological changes — that go with different emotions.

Conrad Veidt in character as Gwynplaine from the American film The Man Who Laughs (1928).

William Shakespeare wrote more than two hundred years earlier than Darwin, about the trap of the hidden meanings behind a smile. For instance, Hamlet confronts the lie hidden in a devious smile when he realizes his stepfather, King Claudius, murdered his father, saying “O villain, villain, smiling damned villain. . .That one may smile, and smile and be a villain.” The notion of a misleading smile is something Shakespeare first visited in Act 4 of Julius Caesar, when Octavius says, “And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear. . . millions of mischiefs.”

Fortunately there are any number of guidebooks to help writers navigate this tricky smile business. Among them are S.A. Soule’s The Writer’s Guide to Character Expressions and Emotions; Valerie Howard’s Character Reactions from Head to Toe; Kathy Steinemann’s The Writer’s Lexicon: Body Parts, Action and Expressions; and The Emotion Thesaurus by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman. Jordan McCollum’s three-part posting on the subject of avoiding overused “gesture crutches” is also helpful.

These sources may also help writers avoid a second trap: overdoing tired descriptors to convey emotions. The conversation with other writers that set in motion my fixation on smiles was triggered by an article in which Mark Twain praised his friend, William Dean Howells. Twain minced no words about what he saw as overuse of empty stage directions to convey meaning while praising Howells as a master in the use of body language to describe thoughts and emotions without the need to be repetitive. “Some authors overdo the stage directions, they elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time and take up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing and how he looked and acted when he said it that we get tired and vexed and wish he hadn’t said it at all,” Twain observed. He said directions such as “laughed” are worked to the bone when the author has given the character nothing to laugh about.

The lesson? Be clear about what kind of smile you intend but also give the character something to smile about.

***

Image of cookies by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Image of Tim Roth at the 2015 San Diego Comic Con International in San Diego, California. The Hateful Eight panel by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Image of actor Conrad Veidt in character as Gwynplaine from the American film The Man Who Laughs (1928). Universal Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Image of book cover, Charles Darwin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“Everybody Eats Mushrooms.” Some Live to Tell the Tale.

By M. K. Waller

Today’s post comprises two parts–a bit of fiction followed by a bit of fact–linked by a “fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus” and a mystery writer who used it as a murder weapon–and later confessed to something even worse.

The following flash fiction was inspired by a photo prompt on Friday Fictioneers, a weekly writing challenge sponsored by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.

‘SHROOMS

John ambled into the kitchen. “What’s cooking?”

“Mushroom gravy.” Mary kept stirring.

John frowned. “Toadstools. Fungi. Dorothy Sayers killed someone with Amanita.“

“These are morels.” She added salt. “Everybody eats mushrooms.”

“I don’t.”

“Suit yourself.”

He sat down. “Where’d you buy them?”

“I picked them.”

“You?“

“Aunt Helen helped. She knows ‘shrooms.” Mary held out a spoonful. “Taste.”

“Well . . . ” John tasted. “Mmmm. Seconds?”

“Yoo-hoo.” Aunt Helen bustled in. “See my brand new glasses? Those old ones–yesterday I couldn’t see doodly squat.”

Mary looked at the gravy, then at John. “Maybe you should spit that out.”

II.

The following is a guest post I wrote for Manning Wolfe’s Bullet Books Speed Reads blog. In it, I explain what an author does when she doesn’t have a clue about the subject she’s writing about.

There are many rules for writers. Two of the major ones: Write what you know and Write what you love.

I was pleased that Stabbed, which I co-wrote with Manning Wolfe, was set in Vermont. I love vacationing there: mountains and trees, summer wildflowers and narrow, winding roads, rainstorms and starry nights, white frame churches and village greens.

In Chapter 1, Dr. Blair Cassidy, professor of English, arrives home one dark and stormy night, walks onto her front porch, and trips over the body of her boss, Dr. Justin Capaldi. She locks herself in her car and calls the sheriff. The sheriff arrives and . . .

What happens next? Vermont is a small state. Who takes charge of murder investigations? The sheriff? Or the state police? What do their uniforms look like? Where do major rail lines run? What’s the size of a typical university town? And a typical university? What else had I not noticed while driving through the mountains?

Not knowing the answers, I defaulted to a third rule: Write what you learn. Research. Research. Research. The best mystery authors have been avid researchers.

Agatha Christie, for example, is known for her extensive knowledge of poisons. As a pharmacy technician during World War I, she did most of her research on the job before she became a novelist. Later she dispatched victims with arsenic, strychnine, cyanide, digitalis, belladonna, morphine, phosphorus, veronal (sleeping pills), hemlock, and ricin (never before used in a murder mystery). In The Pale Horse, she used the less commonly known thallium. Christie’s accurate treatment of strychnine was mentioned in a review in the Pharmaceutical Journal.

Francis Iles’ use of a bacterium was integral to the plot in Malice Aforethought. His character, Dr. Bickleigh, serves guests sandwiches of meat paste laced with Clostridium botulinum and waits for them to develop botulism. If Dr. Bickleigh had known as much about poisons as his creator did, he wouldn’t have been so surprised when his best-laid plans went, as Robert Burns might have said, agley.

Among modern authors, P.D. James is known for accuracy. Colleague Ruth Rendell said that James “always took enormous pains to be accurate and research her work with the greatest attention.” Before setting Devices and Desires near a nuclear power station, she visited power plants in England; she even wore a protective suit to stand over a nuclear reactor. Like Christie, James used information acquired on the job—she wrote her early works during her nineteen years with the National Health Service—for mysteries set in hospitals.

Most authors don’t go as far as to stand over nuclear reactors to be sure they get it right, but even the simplest research can be time-consuming.

And no matter how hard they strive for accuracy, even the most meticulous researchers sometimes make errors.

Dorothy L. Sayers was as careful in her fiction as she was in her scholarly writing. But she confessed in a magazine article that The Documents in the Case contained a “first-class howler”: A character dies from eating the mushroom Amanita muscaria, which contains the toxin muscarine. Describing the chemical properties of muscarine, Sayers said it can twist a ray of polarized light. But only the synthetic form can do that—the poison contained in the mushroom can’t.

Considering Sayers’ body of work, this one “howler” seems a very small sin, and quite forgivable.

Most readers, however, don’t forgive big mistakes, and reputable writers don’t expect them to. Thorough research is a mark of respect for readers.

Sometimes, getting the facts straight in fiction has real-life consequences the author can’t predict. Christie’s The Pale Horse is credited with saving two lives: In one case, a reader recognized the symptoms of thallium poisoning Christie had described and saved a woman whose husband was slowly poisoning her; in a second, a nurse who’d read the book diagnosed thallium poisoning in an infant. The novel is also credited with the apprehension of one would-be poisoner.

Back to Stabbed—Well, we don’t expect it to save lives or help catch criminals. But doing my due diligence and reading up on Vermont’s railways, demographics, and criminal procedure set the novella on a sound factual footing.

Unlike Christie, Iles, and Sayers, however, I didn’t have to expend too much effort learning about how the murder weapon worked. One look at the book’s title and–well, d’oh–no research needed.

***

Learn more about Friday Fictioneers at Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ blog and on their Facebook page.

***

M. K. Waller (Kathy) is a former teacher, former librarian, former paralegal, and former pianist at various small churches desperate for someone who could find middle C.

She writes crime fiction, literary fiction, humor, memoir, and whatever else comes to mind.

She grew up in Fentress, population ~ 150 in 1960, on the San Marcos River in Central Texas, the Blackland Prairie, and memories of the time and the place inform much of her fiction.

Except for the part about murders. Fentress didn’t have any murders. At least any that people talked about.

She now lives in Austin.

Submissions and Rejections

By N.M. Cedeño

No one likes rejection. Being rejected certainly doesn’t feel good, but anyone who wants to write (and who isn’t self-publishing their work) has to become inured to receiving rejections. While some of my stories have been accepted on their first submission, the vast majority of my traditionally published work was rejected at least once before it was accepted for publication. If I believed that the rejections were commentaries on the quality of the stories, I might have thrown the stories in a drawer after the first rejection and given up. This post is for everyone out there whose fellow writers and beta readers have told them their work is ready for publication, but who are afraid of rejection or think a single rejection is the end of the line.

Sometimes stories (even phenomenal stories that go on to win awards, so I’ve heard) take multiple submissions to find a publication home. These stories, through no fault of the story or the author, simply have trouble landing at the right market with the right editor at the right moment.

If I was the type of person to give up on a story and forget it after one rejection or even after five rejections, several of my stories would never have been published in magazines or anthologies.

Why do some stories take multiple submissions to be accepted if the story is well-written and ready for publication? Mostly, the story has to land in the right niche.

For example, one of my stories, “The Wrong Side of History,” ended up finding a home after ten submissions in After Dinner Conversation, which publishes stories that examine particular ethical questions. The story contains difficult subject matter that some editors won’t touch. I knew the story would be a hard one to place when I wrote it, so I wasn’t surprised when it wasn’t accepted until its tenth submission. Since the story was partially inspired by a paragraph in an article I read in a bioethics textbook, a magazine devoted to advancing ethical discussions was definitely the best place for it. The story can be found in After Dinner Conversation: Season Five.

Another hard-to-place story, “It Came Upon a Midnight Ice Storm,” was a cozy Christmas mystery. It was accepted on its ninth submission. I can find far more markets right now for dark crime fiction than for cozies, let alone Christmas cozies. Trying to figure out the right time to submit a seasonal story for a particular market is also difficult. Happily, I spotted an open call for cozy mysteries from Black Cat Mystery Magazine and found this story a home in issue #12 Cozies.

Other stories just linger on submission. Who knows why.

Recently another story with a long submission history was published. I wrote the first version of “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” in about 2013, then left it in a file for a while. As near as I can tell, I rewrote a second version of it in 2017 and reviewed the story almost every time I submitted it after that. This was one of those stories that I kept tweaking– a word here, a sentence there, a paragraph added, a paragraph removed– between submissions, as opposed to one that I simply turned around and resubmitted without any changes. While the heart of the story never changed, the details did. On its tenth submission, it finally found a home in the Inkd Publishing anthology Detectives, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors.

My ghost story, “A Lonely Death,” which was published in Noncorporeal II from Inkd Publishing, was accepted on its eleventh submission. Among all my stories, this story has the dubious distinction of having the most submissions before being accepted. I changed a word here and there, but after about the third submission, simply resubmitted it. I had a reader tell me recently that they thought this is one of my best stories ever, which is nice to hear!

A glance through my submission records spreadsheet shows I have two other stories with lengthy submission histories. One story that I particularly like and want to see in publication is on its tenth submission. I’m hopeful that it will be accepted soon. But I know it might take some time to find the right market. The story in question contains difficult material, making it doubly hard to place. If it’s not accepted this time around, then maybe it will tie or set a new “number of submissions before publication” record.

If you want to see one of your stories published in a magazine or anthology, and you receive a rejection, DON’T GIVE UP! Don’t dwell on the rejection. Resubmit. Consider rejections as stepping stones to eventual publication.