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.

Review of a Very Very Very Very Very Good Book

I’m rereading novelist Nancy Peacock’s memoir, A Broom of One’s Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning & Life. I liked the book when I read it the first time, sixteen years ago, and I like it even more now.

I posted the following review on my personal blog in 2009. The disclaimer preceding it is a reference to a recent FTC rule designed to “provide a robust framework that curbs unscrupulous practices in the book publishing industry. By prohibiting the creation, sale, or procurement of fictitious reviews, the FTC discourages the manipulation of the book review ecosystem.” Bloggers who occasionally posted reviews—”small-time” reviewers (like me), as it were—sometimes fulfilled their obligation by observing the letter of the law while frolicking with the spirit.

Where small-timers are concerned, the rule seems to have fallen by the wayside, and that’s a shame. It stimulated creativity.

***

The backstory:

I wrote the following review to answer a “challenge.” I intended to post it at the end of September 2009. But in the process of writing, I got all tangled up in words and couldn’t finish even the first sentence.

I intended to post it at the end of October. I still couldn’t write it.

Finally, after telling myself I didn’t care, I managed to write it after the October deadline.*

In the middle of the “process,” I considered posting the following review: “I like Nancy Peacock’s A Broom of One’s Own very very very very very much.”

But the challenge specified a four-sentence review, and that was only one, and I didn’t want to repeat it three times.

So there’s the background.

I must also add this disclaimer: I bought my copy of A Broom of One’s Own myself, with my own money. No one told, asked, or paid me to write this review. No one told, asked, or paid me to say I like the book. No one told, asked, or paid me to like it. No one offered me tickets to Rio or a week’s lodging in Venice, more’s the pity. I decided to read the book, to like it, and to write this review all by myself, at the invitation of Story Circle Book Review Challenge. Nobody paid them either. Amen.

*********************************************

The review:

I like Nancy Peacock’s A Broom of One’s Own: Words About Writing, Housecleaning & Life so much that it’s taken me over two months and two missed deadlines to untangle my thoughts and write this four-sentence review, an irony Peacock, author of two critically acclaimed novels, would no doubt address were I in one of her writing classes.

She would probably tell me that there is no perfect writing life; that her job as a part-time house cleaner, begun when full-time writing wouldn’t pay the bills, afforded time, solitude, and the “foundation of regular work” she needed; that engaging in physical labor allowed her unconscious mind to “kick into gear,” so she became not the writer but the “receiver” of her stories.

She’d probably say that writing is hard; that sitting at a desk doesn’t automatically bring brilliance; that writers have to work with what they have; that “if I don’t have the pages I hate I will never have the pages I love”; that there are a million “saner” things to do and a “million good reasons to quit” and that the only good reason to continue is, “This is what I want.”

So, having composed at least two dozen subordinated, coordinated, appositived, participial-phrase-stuffed first sentences and discarding them before completion; having practically memorized the text searching for the perfect quotation to end with; and having once again stayed awake into the night, racing another deadline well past the due date, I am completing this review—because I value Nancy Peacock’s advice; and because I love A Broom of One’s Own; and because I consider it the equal of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird; and because I want other readers to know about it; and because this is what I want.

*Not caring is often the key to cracking writer’s block. Nancy Peacock probably would say that, too.

Where Did This Come From?

Today’s post is by our friend and former Austin Mystery Writer Kaye George, author of several successful mystery series. When I asked Kaye to do a guest post, I told her to pick her own topic. She’s chosen to write about her newest project, a departure from the mystery.

***

Kathy Waller gave me free rein, so I can write whatever I want here, right? Okay, okay, I’ll stick to writing about writing.

My latest project is foremost in my mind. SOMEONE IS OUT THERE came out in April, but it’s still getting noticed, which makes me so happy. I’ve done several mystery series, cozies and traditional, but got it into my head one day that I could write a suspense novel. It does kinda make sense, since I love to read them.

I’m trying to remember where the first seed for this came from, but I don’t really know, now that it’s done. I do know what went into it. I wanted to use a disaster that occurred in Ohio when we lived there. We lived in Dayton for about six years and, one day when the sky looked ominous and my husband was on the golf course, a disaster struck Xenia, a small town nearby—a town we used to drive to for chopping down our Christmas trees on a farm nearby. A vicious tornado struck the town in 1974, killing and injuring many, and wiping out, obliterating at least half of that town. That year they had what they called the 1974 Super Outbreak, one of the worst tornado seasons in US history. I figured it would make a good backdrop to a tense story.

To be honest, I also fed in some of the stories the people in Wichita Falls told me about the similar disaster they had there in 1979. We lived outside that town in Holliday years after that, but they people who had gone through it had vivid memories of every second. We had our own experiences there, too. Our second night in Holliday, there was a straight line windstorm with 90 mph winds that took off many roofs and caved in the school gymnasium, which had just been evacuated, fortunately. The night we moved out, a tornado touched down a mile away.

Anyway, enough about storms. I also needed to work up some stormy characters. I used my knowledge of nursing (from my mother, who was a nurse, and from my nurses’ aide experience) to create my main character. Unbeknownst to me, I used subconscious knowledge to create her name, Darla Taylor. I had a good portion of the book written when I realized I have a Facebook friend named Darla Taylor! I had used her name! I was mortified, and messaged her about it. She was actually okay with that, so I kept going. And gave her a copy when the book was finished. She liked it and reviewed it! Whew!

Stalking seemed like a scary thing to build the plot on, so I did that, keeping the identity of the stalker hidden until the end. I threw in my son’s family dog, Henry, a big chocolate lab (and renamed him Moose), and gave Darla a hobby of archery, since I used to love doing that.

You can see that so much of the book came from my life, because, where else would it come from? Although I have never been stalked. And hope it never happens.

This site at Rowan Prose Publishing has links to the great trailer they made and places to get the book. https://www.rowanprosepublishing.com/kaye-george

And didn’t they do a great cover?

Thanks for having me here!

***

Kaye George is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer. She writes cozy and traditional mysteries, a prehistory series, and one suspense novel, which is her seventeenth book. Over fifty short stories have been published, mostly in anthologies and magazines. A horror story will come out in 2026. With family scattered all over the globe, she makes her home in Knoxville TN. You can find out more here: http://kayegeorge.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

JUST LOOK AROUND!

by HELEN CURRIE FOSTER

Not enough rain fell this year to allow the brilliant cerulean fields of Hill Country bluebonnets we usually expect, but the hardy lupines are busy making seedpods. “Maybe next year,” they say. Now instead we have the bright yellow coreopsis lanceolata, nodding their heads with any breeze,

the wine-cups with their indescribable color—a member of the mallow family, not quite fuchsia, not maroon, just—heart-stopping,

the milkweed flower globes beloved of monarch butter-flies, and others. Heaven includes a few prairie celestials, magically opening in early in the afternoon, then vanishing by dusk.

Also, “Sweet Mademoiselle,” planted a couple of years ago, and who has never bloomed, produced her first rose!

Meanwhile, the ever-interloping cactus hope to assuage my fury at them (remember those secretly spreading roots and the huge basal “plates” that help the Cactus Conspiracy spread?) by popping open their yellow flowers. I am not fooled. I’ll continue to battle them with shovel and hoe. And a picker-upper.

Now for some Hill Country facts.

BIG CATS? Just in case you thought the animal that appears in my mystery Ghost Cat was, perhaps, unrealistic? Over-the-top? Mere fantasy? Couldn’t have played a part at beginning and end? Not so! https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2025/04/21/mountain-lion-san-marcos-trail-texas-sightings/83194256007/

See? Perfectly possible. It’s still wild out here in the Hill Country, even as suburbs press upon us. At dusk I often find myself glancing at the edge of the drop-off behind the house, wondering if I’ll see a pair of ears. You can say mountain lion, puma, cougar…they’re secretive, strong, and active in the spring.

But the big cat I once saw on Bell Springs Road west of here was likely a large bobcat. I was alone, driving home from the post office. Up ahead a golden vision, spotted, walked slowly to the edge of the asphalt. I stopped. The cat stood, gazed at me, and after a breathless (for me) interval, gracefully turned and vanished through a fence into thick cedar. A magical moment. Every time I drive that road, I hold my breath, longing for one more sighting of something looking like this:

https://images.app.goo.gl/K9VMv8bW92CpoSacA

ANCIENT BONES? I wrote about old bones in my Ghost Bones (2024)—and now have learned that our Hays County police deal with ancient bones more often than you’d think. One resident recently called to report she’d found a skull in her firepit. The skull, with its lower jaw present, was obviously fairly old, but in an unexplained death Hays County is not permitted to send a body to the Travis County Medical Examiner without including the name of the person whose skull it is. (Hays County doesn’t have its own medical examiner.) So this skull traveled instead to Texas State anthropologists who reported, after testing, that the skull apparently belonged to a long, long-ago teenager who’d gone through hard times, as was evident from the “enamel lines” (a bit like tree rings) in the teeth.

But how it wound up in that firepit? So far as I know, that’s still a mystery. We forget—until reminded by a skull in a firepit—how long humans have roamed these hills, drawn by hunger and thirst to spring water and the hunt for food.

We also forget the age and history of this landscape. Some trees have sheltered native Americans, deer, and buffalo. The Columbus Live Oak near the Colorado River in Columbus is estimated to be over 500 years old. Others may be as old as 1,000 years.

https://tfsweb.tamu.edu/websites/FamousTreesOfTexas/TreeLayout.aspx?pageid=26882; https://goodcalculators.com/tree-age-calculator/

I revere the live oak in our front yard as if it were a beloved ancient relative and a symbol of stability and the power of trees. If anything were to happen to it—woe! I tried to estimate its age—using the calculator instruction to measure girth in inches at 4.5 feet, divide by pi, then multiply by a “growth factor” of 4, which gave me 127 years old. Perhaps this tree was a sapling in 1900, before either World War, before the Viet Nam war, before our current fraught politics. On a nearby hill there’s an ancient patch of even bigger live oaks. Perhaps those particular oaks depend on the odd little ribbon of wet white clay that lies about five feet underground and has been there—who knows how long. But the feeling of walking in beneath these old live oaks can confer a sense of being in the protection of one’s elders.

So, welcome to the Hill Country in spring—southeasterly winds from the Gulf, blowing the flowers back and forth; reasonably moderate temperatures; fields and trees as green as green, as far as you can see. At the bird feeder, more color! Purple house finch, yellow-throated vireo, lesser goldfinch with brilliant gold breasts, vermilion cardinals, black-crested titmouse, white-winged dove—and the shy and tiny, but utterly gorgeous, painted bunting. (Reportedly it loves millet.) They provide not just color but music, from the titmouse, the tiny but high-volume Carolina wren, plaintive doves, whistling cardinals, and, at night, chuck-will’s-widow.

Not for long, of course. In winter ice can wreak havoc on trees and people. Summer sun? Scorching. Autumn? Nothing like the colors of New England, but hey—the sumac turns red. So welcome, Spring, with your bluebonnets and live oaks, with bird music and color, and with your reminder of the power and beauty of nature!

Progress report: madly working on Book 10 of the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, set in the Hill Country. Have ordered “Forest Bathing” by Dr. Qing Li. Would enjoy hearing what you all are reading too, and any reports of “forest bathing”!

Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by 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 the party.

Follow Helen at http://www.helencurriefoster.com.

My Keys Won’ Work

by Kathy Waller

It’s been quite a while since I posted,* and I should wait until my turn rolls around again. But today a fellow Wretch shared something that had happened to her, and that reminded me of something that happened to me, and this is an Open week on ISW, so I decided to share what my friend’s remark reminded me of. Right now. Before I forget.

This is a repost of a repost of a post I wrote for Telling the Truth, Mainly in 2010, using my first laptop. A monster Dell, it weighed at least fifty pounds, or seemed to at the time, but I loved it and lugged it everywhere. My introduction to coffee-shop writing, it was a sort of movable feast. But—there was one little problem. Two or three times. Read on.

INTRO, PART 2

While I was writing a post one evening, my laptop keys stopped working–one at a time, in no particular order. No matter how hard or in which direction I tapped, they didn’t depress, and nothing appeared on the screen. I considered giving up, then decided to keep a-goin’. The next day, I called technical service, was told I could replace the keyboard myself, visited Radio Shack for tools, used them, nearly stripped a screw, called tech service, received a visit from a tech, and got a quick fix.

An easily replaceable keyboard isn’t usually much to worry about, but in my keyboard’s case, there were extenuating circumstances. I was afraid something beneath the keyboard might be causing the malfunction, and that the tech might think so too. He might know how it got there and give me a look of reproof, possibly a mild reprimand. He might even sneer.

I would have to stand there, blushing, and take it. My innate honesty would prevent me from saying my husband did it.

To learn why I would have blushed, you’ll have to read to the end.

Hint #1 : A single e might mean tech. But it might not. An a might mean a, or not.

Hint #2: The thing I was afraid was under the keyboard–it wasn’t cat hair. Cat hair wouldn’t have made me blush.

Hint #3: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Whatever you don’t get is small stuff. You’ll get the drift.

Hint #4: If you’re tempted to stop, please, at least skim to the end. I’ve added a translation of the last few lines. Last lines are usually important, and I’d like these to be understood. In addition, I managed to throw in a couple of words from Hamlet.

Well, finally, here’s the post.

*****

THE POST

Wa do you do wen your keyboard malfunions?

Wen my spae bar sopped working, I aed online wi Dell e suppor. e e old me I would reeie a new keyboard in e mail. I was supposed o insall i.

“Me?” I said. “Insall a keyboard?”

e e said i would be a snap. If I needed elp, e would walk me roug i.

I go e keyboard and looked up e insruions, wi said I ad o unsrew e bak. I jus knew I would be eleroued.

Bu I boug a se of srewdriers a RadioSak and flipped e lapop oer, remoed e baery, and aaked e srews.

e srews wouldn’ budge. I exanged a srewdrier for anoer srewdrier. I used all six. None of em worked.

I wen online again o a wi Dell. e e lisened, en old me o ry again.

I oug abou e definiion aribued o Einsein: Insaniy is doing e same ing oer and oer and expeing a differen resul.

“I wouldn’ urn,” I old e e.

He said e would send a e ou o e ouse o insall e keyboard for me. (I’m no dummy. Wen I boug e lapop, I boug a e o go wi i.)

Anyway, e nex day a e ame. He go ou is se of 3500 srewdriers, remoed e srews, ook off e old keyboard, and insalled e new one. He said I didn’ ave e rig size srewdrier. en e asked wa else I needed.

“I know you don’ ae an order for is, bu ould you wa me insall is exra memory a Dell e said I’m ompenen o insall myself?” He said e’d o i for me. I oug a was ery swee.

Anyway, i’s appened again, exep is ime i’s more an e spaebar. I’s e , , , and keys.

I’e used anned air. So far all i’s done is make ings worse. Wen I began, only e key was ou.

How an I wrie wiou a keyboard?

So tomorrow I’ll chat with my Dell tech and—

Well, mercy me. I took a half-hour break and now all the keys are working again. I wonder what that was all about.

Nevertheless, I shall report the anomaly. Call me an alarmist, but I don’t want this to happen a third time. I might be preparing a manuscript for submission. I’m being proactive.

But still—I’m torn. If I do need a another new keyboard, I want a tech to make a house call. I don’t have the proper screwdriver, I don’t know what size screwdriver to buy, and I don’t want to tamper with something that is still under warranty.

On the other hand, I have to consider the worst-case scenario: The tech takes out his screwdriver, loosens the screws, turns the laptop over, removes the keyboard, and sees lurking there beneath the metal and plastic plate the reason for my current technical distress: crumbs.

And—sneer—”Been eating Oreos while you type, huh?”

e same, e earae, e disgrae a being found guily of su a soleism. e prospe is oo illing o spell ou.**

Bu for the sake of ar, I sall submi myself o e proud man’s onumely. omorrow I sall a wi Dell.***

[TRANSLATION OF ** and ***, ABOVE}

The shame, the heartache, the disgrace at being found guilty of such a solecism. The prospect is too chilling to spell out.

But for the sake of art, I shall submit myself to the proud man’s contumely. Tomorrow I shall chat with Dell.

***

I intended to wrap things up with a brief book review, but enough is enough. I’ll save the review for next time. Anyway, the book is too good to be an add-on. It deserves to have a space all to itself.

***

Image of keyboard by Simon from Pixabay

Image by Michael Schwarzenberger from Pixabay

Image of William Davis playing Bookworm by MKW

Kathy Waller (aka M.K. Waller) writes crime/suspense fiction, literary fiction, humor, and whatever else comes to mind. Her stories appear in anthologies and online. She’s co-author of the novella STABBED, written with Manning Wolfe. Currently, she’s working on a who-dun-it set in small-town Texas. A native of such a town (minus murders, of course), she lives in Austin. She no longer has two cats but is happy to still have one husband.

*Kathy wishes she could say she’s been too busy doing Good Works to post, but she hasn’t, and she doesn’t believe in telling fibs, and nobody who knows her would believe the Good Works story anyway. She’ll say only that she’s been on hiatus.

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

EQUINOX!

by Helen Currie Foster

March 14, 2025

“An excess of animal spirits”–springtime! Really? Molly Ivins was right as usual when she wrote, “Texas–land of wretched excess!” We’ve had ridiculous lows, unseen for decades. Early daffodils and hyacinths came, shivered, and shriveled in the unholy cold winds roaring across the plains. But we’ve also had the earliest 90 degrees in decades! Wretched excess indeed!

Just two days until the vernal equinox on March 19, and spring. What makes us wander outside, searching for the first bluebonnet, the first violet? What makes us huddle outside the garden store, searching through the little plants shivering in the breeze, fingering seed packets, carrying home small pots of basil and blue salvia even though the weather’s far too untrustworthy for planting? What is this proto-agricultural spirit that makes us lug home the potting soil, hoe the garden bed? More sunlight? Cabin fever? Some early human gene? We, the Animal Kingdom, working with the Plant Kingdom?

I’m rereading Barry Cunliffe’s Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000 (https://amzn.to/3RfJzj6), a book I value not just for the stunning photographs of prehistoric sites and art, but for describing a history of human inventiveness. Cunliffe, Oxford Professor Emeritus of Archeology since 2007 (many books–– https://bit.ly/3XZkmNA), says “massive transformation” occurred in Europe between 1300-800 BC. Population growth required developing more crops than wheat and barley, including lentils, peas and—“the celtic bean (Vicia faba).”

Immediately I ordered a giant pack of fava bean seeds.

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Then I read the label: they’re mostly a winter crop–but this year I’m desperate. With last year’s blistering hot drought, I wound up with only one pot of cherry tomatoes on the porch and a dozen wilting jalapeno plants in the garden. Cunliffe’s reference to Vicia faba fired my imagination—envisioning myself harvesting large fuzzy green pods, containing delectable beans, and adding a little vinaigrette…olive oil (since 4000 BC) and vinegar (3000 BC). Using an ancient bean and ancient vinaigrette recipe! Possibly those beans were harvested, and the vinaigrette shaken, by some long-ago ancestor 3000 years ago, making me wonder if we have genetic preferences, genetic recipe roots? After all, we of the Animal Kingdom depend on the Plant Kingdom (oxygen, vinaigrette, and wine!).

Mysteries offer escape—a protagonist we like, an intriguing plot, a vivid setting. Like plants, favorite old mysteries offer much when we revisit. Mystery writers? They’re good to “talk to.” This morning I discovered on the shelf my dad’s 1934 Modern Library edition of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, with a brief bio and the “new introduction” by Hammett.

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I didn’t know Hammett had worked as an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency before he started writing! “Drifting through a miscellany of ill-paid jobs, he found a temporary solution to his economic problem by shadowing real malefactors with what might be called conspicuous success.” Then came the World War: “He won a sergeantcy and lost his health.”

Hammett can remember where he got his characters. Here’s a snippet of what he says about The Maltese Falcon:

“Dundy’s prototype I worked with in a North Carolina railroad yard; Cairo’s I picked up on a forgery charge in Pasco, Washington, in 1920; Polhous’s was a former captain of detectives…Effie’s once asked me to go into the narcotic smuggling business with her in San Diego…”

Hammett then muses about his own protagonist. “Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not—or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague—want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”

What a great description, and didn’t Humphrey Bogart nail it?

It strikes me that this new character of his upended the vision of the members of the London 1930 Detectives Club—Hammett gave the wide-eyed mystery audience a protagonist who is not a secret member of the aristocracy (Albert Campion) or a perfect gentleman (Roderick Alleyn) or a hyper-particular French veteran drinking tea and waxing his moustache (Hercule Poirot)…but a “hard and shifty fellow…able to get the best of anybody.” Welcome to the New World’s new-style mystery protagonists, the children of Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Sara Paretzky and others…including that hybrid protagonist, Mary Russell, in Laurie King’s Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series.

For Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, the scent of honey is a repeat theme (her Holmes is a beekeeper). I like her Holmes, I like her Russell, and just finished her Garment of Shadows (2012). https://bit.ly/4iTwmYZ King has chosen a fascinating and ambitious setting: the 1920’s, with Spain and France fighting for control of Morocco, each coveting its crucial strategic location at Gibraltar, while various Moroccan groups—Berber and otherwise—fight for independence. King uses first person point of view for Mary Russell, who’s suffering from acute amnesia—forgetting her childhood and even her marriage––but uses third person POV for Holmes’s chapters. Those shifts sometimes confused me. But her depth of history and geography, and her vivid descriptions of the magical city of Fez with its souk, bring the setting alive. Mary Russell herself has become quite a protagonist, with linguistic skills—including Arabic––and the imagination and drive to devise a daring escape from a horrible prison. I’d like to learn knife-throwing like Mary Russell (she keeps one in her boot) but the likelihood seems dim.

Writer/theologian Bruce Reyes-Chow mentioned how, when stuck, he’d “talk through ideas with myself, my plants…” I intend to follow his lead. On our deck sit five jasmine plants we’ve toted around since the seventies. I think they sometimes do communicate with me—“I’m dry-y-y-y!” But from now on, when I’m stuck on a plot, I’ll go consult them. Every spring, those jasmine produce tiny white flowers with an unmatchable scent. In search of even more scent, this year I’ve planted another mix of old and new. Rose de Recht is a fragrant pink heirloom damask, Fragrant Blush promises pink perfume, and Star of the Republic is tough, like her name, but delicate pink with exquisite fragrance.

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And now suddenly the redbuds, with their irresistible yet evanescent fuchsia buds, are blooming. I’ve seen our first bluebonnet,

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and the first purple prairie verbena. The live oaks know it’s almost the equinox—they’ve flung down their old leaves (aided by the fierce winds) and are preparing their catkins and baby leaves. The cedar elms have put out tiny chartreuse leaves just in the last two days.

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So it’s spring! Grab that trowel! And after all your work, you deserve to loll on the couch at night with a good mystery. I’m halfway through the tenth book in my Hill Country murder mystery series. This one raises a question I find intriguing and difficult. Can justice be served when, unauthorized to pronounce justice, we take justice into our own hands? Is that still justice? I’m discussing it with the plants. More to come….

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Here are Helen, Noreen Cedeno, and Juanita Houston at the Texas Book Festival!–Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime

Award-winning Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series (9 volumes so far) north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s working on Book 10. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party.

Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com and at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Helen-Currie-Foster/author/B00R1X9RXK?https://www.facebook.com/helencurriefoster

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

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