Wednesday Reviews: Iguana Love by Vicki Hendricks

Iguana Love

Vicki Hendricks

Vicki Hendricks is often compared to James M. Cain. In here stories, it’s the woman who is led astray sexually or romantically into a dark and dangerous world while the man plays the seducer. Of course, Hendricks’ world is much more violent.

And interesting. Iguana Love, however, differs from Miami Purity in that it’s more an erotic tale than a crime fiction story. In fact, the crime fiction takes up only the back quarter of the story. Ramona Romano, a woman whose mother probably got naming tips from the father of Ed McBain’s Meyer Meyer, is bored with her marriage. She is bored with her body. She craves adventure. She craves sex. She craves making herself into a muscled goddess. Ramona dumps her husband Gary and begins hanging out with a pair of divers, Charlie and Enzo. Both want Ramona, and she takes them, along with a few of the other divers in her rescue class. Meanwhile, she decides to bulk up with steroids as she begins body building. This is a woman who wants to take control. Eventually, she settles on Enzo, but discovers that his way to make money is by running drugs from the Bahamas to Miami, using his diving skills to discreetly retrieve product.

As I said, the book is more erotic than criminal. Three fourths of the book concerns Ramona’s physical and sexual experimentation, as well as her goal to become a rescue diver. The last fourth is almost a short story unto itself with Ramona willingly trapped in her relationship with Enzo. This being noir, at least in name, it does not end well. For the characters, that is. For the reader, the ending is bizarrely ambiguous.

Ronald Reagan

Our 40th president is easily the most popular president since World War II, even among his detractors. It’s easy to see why. More conservative than predecessors Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (not to mention his vice president, George H.W. Bush), his roots actually lay in the New Deal. In his diary, he even laments how the press has painted him as trying to undo the New Deal when he felt it was Johnson’s Great Society that needed to be dismantled.

The America Reagan presided over in 1981 was broke, exhausted, and self-loathing. Vietnam, Watergate, and a stagnant economy combined to batter the population and convince most Americans that we were in severe decline. (Sounds a bit like today, doesn’t it?) Reagan knew the nation needed a shake-up to get things going again. His role models?

From a leadership perspective, Reagan turned to FDR, a man he voted for in all four elections, along with Harry Truman in 1948. Roosevelt might have been opposite in ideology to Reagan, but he had many things to teach Reagan about uniting a divided and demoralized population. Having good working relationships with opponents helped. His relationship with Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil is well-documented. There are numerous entries in his diary where he accuses O’Neil of playing games or obstructing his agenda, then, on the same day, has dinner or cocktails with O’Neil. What many fail to understand about the presidency and Congressional leadership is that it bears more resemblance to the old Warner Brothers cartoon featuring Sam the Sheep Dog and Ralph Wolf than most of the nonsensical pap spewed by radio talkshow hosts and demagogic pundits.

Reagan did something that had not been done since Andrew Jackson in 1835. He survived getting shot by a would-be assassin. John Hinkley’s bullet did far more damage to Reagan than Charles Giteau’s did to James Garfield in 1881, but better security, better medical techniques, and, the advent of antibiotics saved Reagan. It’s highly likely Garfield might have lived had he been shot 100 years later, but had Reagan been in his place, even the best efforts of doctors in 1881 would not save him.

One of the things that is pointed out about Reagan is his hands-off approach to management. Reagan would give orders and expect it to be carried out. Unlike, say, Richard Nixon, who elevated micromanagement to an art form, this tended to separate Reagan from his subordinates. It allowed Reagan to have a broader focus as president, but it also got him into trouble when those under him, such as Attorney General Edwin Meese or Lt. Col. Oliver North, went out on their own on the assumption the president wanted plausible deniability.

Many of Reagan’s policies and views painted him as a racist and hostile to the poor. His diary reveals the opposite, though while he decries a biased press, he concedes that, by not following the herd on solving race problems or continuing the top-down approach begun under LBJ, he did indeed look like he was pandering to rich, white men. Compounding this were some hardline views on drugs and on abortion. Indeed, a more nuanced view of abortion common today had yet to evolve during Reagan’s term.

In foreign policy, Reagan’s twin triumphs involved standing up to the Soviets, particularly as he found himself dealing with a fractured Politburo propping up three dying neo-Bolsheviks, and developing rapport with Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan was a staunch anti-communist, and this often put the US in an embarrassing position. As long as the Cold War raged, the United States took the approach of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” which meant friendship with the repressive government of El Salvador and with brutal dictator Ferdinand Marcos of The Philippines. But Reagan had excellent relationships with the leaders of Canada, France, Italy, West Germany, Japan, and, in particular, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher. Thanks to Reagan’s efforts, Russian became part of what’s now called the G20. This goodwill extended to China, which recently formalized relations with the US when Reagan took office, and even saw a near thaw in relations with Cuba. Reagan did not see enemies, a flaw Nixon could never overcome. Reagan saw rivals. You can respect and deal with a rival. It’s one of the reasons the Cold War ended in 1990 and not 2010.

It’s the economy that leaves Reagan still controversial among Americans. If FDR showed Reagan how to lead, Calvin Coolidge showed him what the agenda would be. Coolidge was a small-government fiscal conservative whose policies appealed to Reagan. He saw the tax code as punishing the rich for being rich and choking businesses from investing. Did it work? In the high-tax atmosphere of 1981, slashing the tax brackets and simplifying the tax code was a no-brainer. The irony lies in the same thing that has plagued pro-small government presidents for the last half-century: It resulted in deficit spending.

What mars Reagan’s legacy with the working class is the switch to a free trade policy as opposed to fair trade. In the long run, free trade has been a boon to the American economy, but early on, it devastated the auto, rubber, and steel industries. Pittsburgh will never again be a steel town, and Detroit is a shell of its former self. In another irony, it took a New Deal-style bailout to rid General Motors and Chrysler of the mismanagement that kept both companies from adapting to compete with Japanese auto makers. Then again, like the New Deal coalition, the current conservative bloc suffers from the same inertia that keeps it from adapting to new problems and a new generation of voters.

I recall not liking Reagan very much in high school. I was a child of the Steel Belt. There was supposed to be a factory job waiting for me after high school, maybe even at General Motors or Ford. Indeed, my first election was 1984, and I voted for Mondale. (The more I learn about Carter as president, the more I regret that vote.) But four years later, I saw Reagan, President-elect Bush, and Mikhail Gorbachev standing in New York looking out at the Statue of Liberty, smiling and shaking hands. Yeah, the President of the United States was genuinely friendly to the President of the Soviet Union. We had no idea the Berlin Wall or the failed putsch or the breakup of the Soviet Union was coming. But we knew it was a lot less likely that our lives would end like something out of The Day After. My opinion of Reagan changed over time, much as it has for Bill Clinton and will likely change for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Reagan saw a nation in need of shaking up and a boost in confidence. When he left office in January of 1989, it felt good to be an American again.

Space Stuff: The Search For Plot

Source: Warner Brothers

Finally into the the middle act. It’s slow-going, but I put two of my characters at odds over each other. Then, just to keep it interesting, I had a giant saucer like the ones in V zoom in overhead. It’s taken an interest in the city the aliens recently nuked, which suggests the bomb is a bit cleaner than one would expect. I actually worked out the physics of how that would work with my SF writers group. We still don’t have the aliens and the surviving humans in direct conflict yet.

Instead, I’ve had a summary execution (You shoot civilians trying to steal their food, they shoot you.) and my two male rivals out in the woods confronting something similar to a werewolf. Not a humanoid that transforms into a wolf-like being, this is a canine-like predator that can walk on its hind legs. I like to start small and work my way up.

In the meantime, I need to map out the “premium” content. The short story this novel is based on is out making rounds. There are some background stories I want to send out as well.

The next thing I have to do is to get “Dick’s” web presence up and running. I’m going to have to differentiate between Jim Winter and my Dick Bachman. Different clothing styles, maybe different backgrounds for the photos. The blogs will have to have little overlap. Once I get “outted,” it won’t matter. At that point, I can merge the two brands, but for now…

It’s like when Stephen King put out novels as Richard Bachman. He wanted to see if he could do it again. Interesting note on that: When “Bachman’s” Thinner was revealed to have been a Stephen King novel, it had already sold 10,000 copies, not bad for a little known novel. If the guy who tried to get King to pay him for his silence had himself kept his mouth shut, Misery would have been the next Bachman novel, and quite likely his “breakout.”

I would just think it was funny if “Dick” became more famous than me. Not that I remotely qualify as anything resembling famous.

You Know I’m Worth It

For the past ten years, I’ve been willing to give my work to non-paying markets. It’s called paying your dues. It’s put me with some really good editors: Anthony Neil Smith at the original Plots With Guns, Gerald So and Kevin Burton Smith at Thrilling Detective (who eventually started paying), and even an anthology edited by Jochem Vandersteen, a long-time fan of Kepler.

But there comes a time when you have to ask if it’s worth it to give it way. At what point is it no longer enough to write for the credit? I have been paid. Thrilling Detective, Futures, Spinetingler, and the anthology West Coast Crime Wave all paid. That last one paid nicely.

And yet for crime fiction, there are really only four paying markets: Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Spinetingler, and All Due Respect. Beyond that, you need an anthology credit, and those, even when they don’t pay, almost always require an editor invite.

As ebooks have gone mainstream and made self-publishing respectable (since it doesn’t cost you the amount of a Bouchercon trip to get into print now), we have the option of putting out short stories or groups of short stories cheaply and easily accessible.

So I’ve decided, with two exceptions, no longer submitting to non-paying markets. If I’m going to be a professional, that implies I want to be paid.

I’m not sure why I didn’t reach this decision years ago. I do know the recent link to a Harlan Ellison rant about not giving it away caught my attention. It’s certainly not that I regret placing my work where I did. It just seems to be time to ask for compensation for my time. Why shouldn’t a writer ask for that?

I Think I Found My New Crush…

Thursday Reviews: Henry VI, Part 2 by William Shakespeare; The Green Mile by Stephen King

Henry VI, Part 2
William Shakespeare

Last time I looked at Shakespeare, it was part one of his Henry VI trilogy (with Richard III, my favorite Shakespeare play, btw, part of the War of the Roses tetrology). Henry VI was a very early play of Shakespeare’s, though he had two comedies under his belt when Part I debuted. The reason Part I was so weak was that the central character, Henry VI himself, was such a weak character, and the story involved the loss of England’s French territories, including the royal family’s ancestral home of Normandy. Historically, Henry was an infant during all this. It was as though Shakespeare (and, as some scholars believe, his collaborator) had a hard time getting a handle on such a weak and ineffectual ruler. Consider Shakespeare’s later historical work, Julius Caesar, Richard III, Henry V. Shakespeare invented the modern political thriller and the action movie template. Ian McKellan even directed Richard III as an action movie.

But if Part I fails to show what Shakespeare could do with political intrigue and larger-than-life characters, Part II remedies that. It’s pretty clear already that Henry VI is not his famous father, nor the scheming son of York from Richard III (who makes a cameo as York’s younger son.) He is a whiny, easily manipulated wimp, and there’s no shortage of manipulators: His Sicilian bride Queen Margaret, his Lord Protector Gloucester, the Duke of York who believes he is the rightful king. History is corrected in Part II, as Henry actually notes that he was “but an infant” when he came to the throne. Margaret resents Gloucester’s role as Lord Protector as Henry is an adult now. (Never mind that he was somehow an adult in Part I, which opens with news of Henry V’s sudden death.) She schemes with York to remove Gloucester. When Lady Gloucester is condemned for consorting with seers and witches behind Henry’s back, the Queen and York make their move. Soon, Gloucester, popular with “the commons”, is killed, and a civil war ensues. First, Henry finds himself besieged by John Cade, a “common” who claims to be descended from King John and thus the rightful heir. Though one of Henry’s allies manages to turn the rioting commons against Cade, Henry is then faced with York and his Irish troops, come to claim what he believes is rightfully his. In modern terms, this is The Empire Strikes Back, with the heroes sent on the run while the forces of darkness triumph in a three-part story. Of course, Shakespeare depended on patronage from a Tudor queen, one whose grandfather killed the last York king at Bosworth Field. So naturally, York and his sons are the forces of darkness.

This is not as strong as the later works (Julius Caesar, Richard III, King Lear), but it’s quite good. It’s less surprising that the writer of Part II became the English language’s most important writer than the writer of Part I. Though even scholars acknowledge the Bard wrote a few stinkers over the years.

The Green Mile

Stephen King

This is probably one of King’s best works. If you’ve seen the Tom Hanks movie, you know this story already. A giant of a man named John Coffey is brought to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, condemned to die. He will spend his final days on “The Green Mile,” what passes for death row at Cold Mountain. Paul Edgecombe, the lead “screw” on the Mile, gets to know Coffey and learns that he is not just another killer. He is something quite special. None of the guards, except mean, dimwitted Percy, can figure out how such a gentle, tormented, and slow-witted man could have raped and killed two young girls. The truth emerges as does Coffey’s special talent: Coffey can heal with touch.

King released this originally as a serial novel. The single-volume version remains relatively intact, though King acknowledges tweaking a continuity error that bugged him. The movie is pretty faithful to this novel, though it dispenses with a parallel plot about Edgecombe’s life at a Georgia nursing home in 1996, where he eventually reveals to his girlfriend that he is 104 and likely to live for a long time to come, the effects of his association with John Coffey. The movie also is more chronological than the book, a function of its serial origins. Nonetheless, the emotional punch in this story is one thing that translated loud and clear into the movie. Coffey’s supernatural gift is a plot point, but it’s not the center of the story. It demonstrates why King is more highly regarded than virtually any other horror author since Poe. It’s pretty clear he could step away from the horror genre and still execute with as much skill and style as he did when he made The Stand an American classic.

Space Stuff: Kids In Spaaaaaaaaace!

Source: Henson Associates

Yes, Dick (as in my Dick Bachman to the Steve King that is Jim Winter) is going YA with the SF project. And last week, as I started Part 2, I ran into some problems. Like I said last week, I know how it ends. I wasn’t sure how to get there.

Then a CNN article on YA popped up on my Twitter feed. I have to give a shout-out to Ashley Strickland, who wrote the article. There were three components to the best-known YA.

First, there is a clear line between good vs. evil. OK, that’s covered. Big, mean, human-like things drop out of the sky and start shooting the place up and even drop a couple of tactical nukes. If that’s not evil, it’s at least not very nice. So we were already covered. Harry had his Death Eaters. Katniss has the Capitol and the Game Makers. My kids have aliens with all the charm and etiquette of a lesser biker gang on crystal meth.

Second, the protags learn they have powers, they have skills they did not know they had, or they learn skills they never thought they’d need. Check. All the teens in this story are becoming soldiers at an age when they should be fighting acne, getting into gaming, and telling their parents “You’re not the boss of me!” My main male protag, out of sheer luck, has killed nine of the invaders. The main female protag has wandered for hours in a dark subway tunnel to flee an atomic blast. So, check.

Third, they have love triangles.

Um…

The male protag and the farmer’s daughter had just become an item when stuff in the sky started blowing up. My female protag has four friends with her, but given that a mushroom cloud erupted some twelve miles away, giving them barely enough time to run into the subway system, nobody’s really thinking about prom dates right about now.

So how did I handle it? Well, assuming this gets picked up as a series, my male and female protags have to start interacting. So, taking a page from Battlestar Galactica and jumping ahead a few weeks, I have my runaway showing the Girl Who Fell to Earth how to use the aliens’ favorite hand weapon. (Second favorite. They seem to like knives best.) This makes the Girl’s soldier boy friend jealous. Eventually, it will make the farmer’s daughter jealous. So now I have two love triangles, both of which my main protags were unaware of.

OK, I know how to get to the end. Back to work.

Adventures In Gutter Cleaning

Photo: Gavin Brett, used under Creative Commons

Just over a week ago, my wife went on a cleaning jag. It was one of those moments where you realize you’ve been putting off a major cleaning project and can’t stand it anymore. In this case, it was our bedroom. We live in a four-room postwar cottage. Our bed takes up most of the room, and my wife keeps most of her clothes in the basement near the laundry room. I offered to do this as I don’t mind the idea of dressing in my office, but she gave me the closet when we got married and hasn’t complained once. I’m pretty sure this girl loves me.

At the same time, it means that laundry tends to pile up in a room that is already hard to navigate. As long as we have room for sleep and sex, the room is liveable.

Finally, my wife had had it. She went through the room, shifted some furniture, and managed to organize the laundry so the clothes go back down to the her closet same day rather than weeks later. During this project, she discovered we had a damp corner behind a chest of drawers. I thought this might have been left over from when we had the leaky inlet to the toilet. The problem with that theory is that 1.) there was a mold trail from the ceiling down to the floor in that corner and 2.) we replaced the toilet last February.

“It’s the gutters. I bet they haven’t been cleaned in years.”

“Define years,” I said.

“I think [ex-husband] might have done it before the divorce.” Nita got divorced almost nine years ago.

“So that water has been…”

“Since before Katrina.”

“Damn.”

Guess who had a project this past weekend.

Actually, I’d cleaned the front gutter back in the spring. And I did them right before we had the roof replaced three years ago. But the front gutters are easy. The flower beds raise the ladder two feet so that the gutter is less than ten feet off the ground. Doable. Just don’t ask me to go up on the roof. The back gutter?

Um…

It’s a good twenty feet up from the patio. Our ladder is not designed to go that high. Get about 2/3 of the way up when it’s extended to reach the gutter and things get shaky. But I promised. I always try before punting and calling a contractor. I even tried to fix the fence once before deciding to let the professionals do it. Still, Friday night came, and up I went. I’d like to say it wasn’t too bad. As for heights, it wasn’t. And if I could anticipate the ladder wobbling, I could tolerate. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that the back corner, that same corner where the water leaked into our room, was full of years of decomposed leaves that oozed black sludge and I pulled it out. Yes, I covered my hands. No gutter is worth a repeat trip to the hospital. As I moved toward the downspout (cruelly on the other side of the metal awning), I discovered the gutters had been cleaned since my arrival. The roofers did it three years ago.

Bastards just left all that crap in the back corner.

Thanks, guys.

Time To Lay Off 535 People

Let’s be honest. The government shutdown should not have happened. There is no excuse for it. Not. A single. One. The Tea Party’s true believers will howl with agony when I say this, but it really is their fault. When you do not represent the majority of Americans, yet you want to throw the economy into chaos until you get your way, you have ceased to be a solution and become a problem to be solved.

Still, Congress consists of 432 representatives (There are currently 3 vacancies) and 100 Senators. Add Vice President Biden to this list, who Constitutionally serves as president of the Senate and is also a point man for the president, and you have 533 people who must be denied any further role in elected national government as of this month. They’re all complicit in this failure. They all must be held accountable. That means they all must lose their jobs.

So beginning in 2014, we, the people, should decide as a whole to remove all 432 sitting members of the House and 33 senators up for reelection. In 2016, not only should no currently sitting senator or congress person be permitted to win election to Congress or the presidency, but the 34 currently sitting senators up for reelection should be removed by the electorate. We then finish the job in 2018 by removing the remaining 33 currently sitting senators.

For those of you in districts where your representative runs unopposed in the general election (I’m looking at you people north of here in Butler County and in Dayton. Time for John Boehner to come home.), you have an opportunity in the coming primaries to use your own party to remove that person. If that doesn’t work, hold your nose and vote for the other guy. You’ll be doing the nation a favor.

It’s time. It’s time to eliminate this most useless bunch of legislators this country has ever had. It’s time to bring up governors, mayors, state legislators, city council members, school board members, local police chiefs and sheriffs, and even the odd whackjob with a bullhorn. When 2016 comes, just say no to senators and representatives. Governors only. Or mayors. Or maybe a really smart business person. Where’s Ross Perot when you need him? If they sat in Congress in October of 2013, they should never hold elected office again.

Ever.

Will it happen?

Even if it doesn’t, I want to scare the hell out of them.

Here’s another idea I’ll leave you with. Vote only for Greens and Libertarians for secretary of state in your state. Wanna really scare the hell out of the major parties? That would do it.

The 2013 Rock Hall Nominees

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its ballot for induction this year. It’s a pretty impressive list: Nirvana, Hall & Oates, Deep Purple, NWA, Chic, Linda Rondstadt, KISS, Cat Stevens, LL Cool J, Peter Gabriel, The Zombies, The Replacements, Yes, The Meters, Link Wray, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

That’s an impressive and extremely eclectic list. A couple of these have me scratching my head as to why they aren’t already in. The Hall is letting people vote on their choices through December 10. The top five vote getters will have their tallies factored into the final decision by the Hall. Fans can only vote for five each. I voted. I’m not happy I can only do five because really, 3/4 of them deserve it, and the rest all have reputations that make a case for inclusion. So who did I vote for?

Source: MTV

NIRVANA

This one is kind of a no-brainer, one of those bands that should get in on the first ballot. Nevermind was one of those watershed moments in rock when the music changed. Grunge was coming. No doubt about it. But Alice in Chains tried to be a heavy metal band before Nirvana exploded, and Pearl Jam’s label marketed them as hair metal. The combination of moody Kurt Cobain’s song writing, the frenetic drumming of Dave Grohl, and the calm center of the storm that was Krist Novocelic caused an earthquake in rock music. Add to that Pat Smear of The Germs at the end of the band’s career, and you have a revolutionary band that dragged punk kicking and screaming and into the mainstream.

The music died with Cobain, but it freed up future Hall of Famer Grohl to create The Foo Fighters with Smear, members of Sunny Day Real Estate, and Dave’s blonde, bearded clone Taylor Hawkins.

Llan We, used under Creative Commons

KISS

Rock as theater taken to the nth degree. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley have kept the hell fire burning since 1973 with an impressive line-up of side players, current drummer Eric Singer the longest lasting member.

The band went hair metal in the 1980’s after ditching the make-up, but came roaring back with the original line-up for a time, returning to their grease paint ways. KISS is definitely a marketing machine, but how many kids picked up a guitar because Paul was the Star Child, Gene was the Demon, and the rest played a whole host of other comic book-inspired characters? They might be a money-making juggernaut, but they definitely impacted rock and roll in a big way.

Source: EMI (?)

NWA

Okay, I admit it. I’m not a fan. But I’m not much of a hip hop fan to begin with. But like their contemporaries, Nirvana, they caused an earthquake in music. And they weren’t shy with the lyrics. Their classic Straight Outta Compton scared the hell out of people.

Though Easy E died in the early 1990’s, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre went on to be giants in hip hop. Dre would discover Snoop Dogg, stare down thuggish impresario Shug Knight, and do what Knight couldn’t do: Bring the world a white rapper with cred, in this case, Eminem. Before NWA, I said, “What the hell is rap?” Since NWA has faded into history, I’ve said, “What the hell happened to rap?”

Photo: Jonas Rogowski, used under Creative Commons

Deep Purple

Geddy Lee of called out the Hall for overlooking Deep Purple again when Rush was inducted into the Hall of Fame. At one time rivaling Led Zeppelin, Purple has one of the largest family trees in rock. Ritchie Blackmore is cited as a major influence by a majority of rock guitarists, including his two replacements in Purple, Steve Morse and the late Tommy Bolin. The band overlapped Black Sabbath, giving that band two of its post-Ozzy lead singers, and spawned Rainbow and Whitesnake. Plus how can you go wrong when you’ve created one of the most memorable riffs in rock history? You know. Da da dah! Da da du-Dah!

Photo: Gary Harris, used under Creative Commons

Daryl Hall and John Oates

This is one duo that, like Deep Purple, should have been in long ago. They came out of Philadelphia around the same time as prog pop artist Todd Rundgren, and there’s a similarity between the sound of the two acts that’s hard to define.

But Hall & Oates were all about blue-eyed soul. “Sara Smile” is a seventies classic, but then there’s that string of eighties tunes starting with “Kiss on my List” and going all the way through “One on One.” The videos might have been silly, but the sound was real in a way many R&B artists have forgotten how to make happen.

Their approach is on display on Hall’s show Live from Daryl’s House. The music is played live, using the room (until this coming season, a restored colonial house Hall owned) as an instrument unto itself, with all the imperfections and happy accidents left intact. This is how he and John Oates have made music since 1973.