Category Archives: Writing

In which the narrator of Dover Beach comes up with a title for the book — and it isn’t “Dover Beach”

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Here is our first exciting excerpt from Dover Beach, and it’s apropos of this discussion of titles.

It’s early in the novel.  The narrator, Walter Sands, has a strange desire to become a private eye — strange, because he lives in a world that has been devastated by some kind of catastrophe.  At this point, we’re not quite sure what that catastrophe was, but it’s beginning to look like some kind of limited nuclear war.  Walter has a job offer to become a hired gun for a black-market operation, but prefers to pursue his  dream–no longer entirely a dream, however, since he has gotten his first case.  A man has come to him believing he is the cloned offspring of a scientist from MIT, back before the catastrophe.  He wants to track down his “father” and find out why someone is trying to murder him.

Walter is a bookish sort, we are learning, and so he feels the need to come up with a name for his case.  The name, it turns out, is based on an old mystery–Trent’s Last Case.  You probably haven’t heard of it.  But you can download it for free thanks to the nice folks at Project Gutenberg.  (There’s an obscure movie version starring Orson Welles that I have never seen.)  Walter likes the first line of the novel.  So do I; so much so that I made it the epigraph for Dover Beach:

Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?

Not that Walter knows it just yet, but this is whatDover Beachturns out to be all about.

Anyway, here he is, back from a trip to the wilds of New Hampshire with his black-market friend Bobby, where they traded scavenged antiques for computer parts.  He lives with his girlfriend Gwen and a couple of other people, holding onto each other in the darkness of their fallen world.  He helps Gwen sleep, but he is unable to sleep much himself.

***********

Gwen was waiting for me in the front parlor when I arrived. She was wearing her patched blue robe and a couple pairs of woolen socks. “How did it go?” she asked.

“Oh, fine.”

“No problems?”

I shook my head. “I think I’ll have a glass of cider.” We went out to the kitchen. With Gwen, I was never sure if my lies were successful. I always had the feeling that she understood everything, and that sometimes she just decided to let me get away with one.

She poured us each some cider, and we sat at the table. I told her all about the farm and Lavinia and Mr. Fitch and the electric lights and the tapestries on the wall. And then I remembered something. “I brought you a present.” I reached into my pocket and took out a piece of cake I had grabbed from the Rose Medallion plate.

“Oh, Walter. Thank you.”

“It was either this or a hard disk, and I figured you had more use for cake.”

She smiled and ate the cake.

“Bobby wants me to go to work for him full-time,” I said.

I waited for a response, but none came. She looked at me and sipped her cider.

“I told him to forget it. I’m a private eye now. No time for stuff like that. ”

She nodded, “You must feel good about getting that case.”

“Yeah. Well.” No sense going into it. She knew how good I felt. I finished my cider and stood up. “You should get some sleep,” I said.

Gwen stood up too. She took the lamp in one hand, and my hand in the other, and we went upstairs. We paused as we passed Linc’s bedroom. He was breathing heavily; he muttered something unintelligible in his sleep. Gwen’s hand squeezed mine. We went into our bedroom.

She set the lamp on the night table and pulled the bedcovers down. I took off my shoes. We got into bed, and she put out the lamp.

The darkness was total. We pulled up the covers. I put my arm around Gwen, and she snuggled into the crook of my shoulder. “Do you feel like it?” I asked.

“I guess not,” she said.

“Okay.”

We were silent for a while. The darkness became less total. I could make out the looming bulk of the dresser, the elegant curves of the escritoire, the useless outline of the useless radiator.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” Gwen said.

“So am I,” I said. Glad to see the dresser and the escritoire for another day. Glad to see her. Across the hall, Linc snorted and groaned.

“Someday,” I murmured, “sleep will come easy.”

“And dreams will come true,” Gwen replied.

“Someday.”

We didn’t say anything then. I stroked her hair, and we breathed together, and eventually her breathing became deep and regular. I listened to it for a long while, and then carefully pulled my arm from beneath her head. She settled herself onto the pillow, still asleep. I got out of bed, groped for the lamp, found it, and made my way out into the hall. I was an old hand at this. I lit the lamp in the darkness and walked slowly up the creaking stairs to the third floor. The lamp threw spooky shadows against the walls. I wasn’t afraid of spooks, though; there was too much else to be afraid of in this world. At the top of the stairs, I turned right. More shadows, more spooks, beckoning to me in the dim light, writhing in their lust for life, for freedom. The room reeked of the past, overpowered me with the musty odor of lives lived, of genius spent. It was an odor as exciting as any perfume. I entered the room.

Too many books, Bobby had said. An accusation.

Guilty. I stared at them:

Confess, Fletch

The Dreadful Lemon Sky

The Good-bye Look

Ten Little Indians

The Case of the Amorous Aunt

Green with mildew, brown and brittle with age, dying but not dead yet. Not dead yet.

It occurred to me that I needed a title. What good was a case without a title? Confess, Clone. The Case of the Confused Clone. I was new at this.

The Godwulf Manuscript

God Save the Child

Early Autumn

In those books Spenser was still alive. Still working out at the health club, drinking beer, listening to the Red Sox. Ah, would that it were not fiction. That way madness lies, as Mr. Fitch would say. But maybe you had to be mad to stay alive nowadays. God Save the Clone. Early Winter. No, try again.

Farewell, My Lovely

The Maltese Falcon

Penance for Jerry Kennedy

The Big Sleep

Trent‘s Last Case

Trent’s Last Case. An old, old British mystery with a couple of twists at the end. I took it off the shelf and glanced through it. Private eyes were nowhere to be found, although I liked the first sentence.

Sands’s First Case. The possessive sounded ugly.

Sandman. That was Linc’s nickname for me. I didn’t like it. The Sandman went around putting people to sleep, and I—I only did that for Gwen.

I smiled.

The Sandman’s First Case.

It would have to do, until I came up with something better.

I rummaged through a rotting carton of textbooks until I found one on cellular biology. I took it out, sat in my old, overstuffed armchair, and read by lamplight until dawn. Then I tiptoed back downstairs and got back into the warm bed beside Gwen.

I shut my eyes and snuggled up to Gwen, and after a while sleep came for the Sandman—short and troubled as always, but enough to let him make it through another day.

Why “Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies” is a better title than “Dover Beach”

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I’m not the best guy to offer advice on titles, so I won’t.  Most of my titles are single-word descriptive titles: Senator is about a senator; Pontiff is about a pontiff.  Shorter is, I think, better than longer, but then again, I really like the title The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  The problem with shorter titles is that they can tend to mislead.  Pontiff is about more than a pontiff; Summit is about more than a summit.  But, when combined with the cover, they do the trick.

Titles get easier if the book is part of a series, like A is for Alibi.  Funny books should have funny titles.  The best title I’ve ever been involved with is Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies by the great Craig Shaw Gardner.  I recall a good bit of discussion about just what adjective should be applied to those bunnies.  Having arrived at fluffy, I can’t imagine what other words could possibly have been considered.

Titles serve two purposes. The obvious purpose is to make a reader want to buy the book (or read the story, or click on the blog post).  Like the cover, they’re part of the way you market the thing. Who wouldn’t want to read a book called Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies? (Well, if that’s not the kind of book you want to read, the title will do a great job of steering you away from it.)

But titles are also part of the aesthetic experience of the text, if I can get high-falutin’ for a minute.  The title Gravity’s Rainbow means nothing by itself; its significance grows out of the novel to which it’s attached.  Same with Ulysses.  Same with A Canticle for Leibowitz. You don’t come up with titles like that to sell books.  You come up with them because they grow organically out of the story you’re telling.

This brings us to Dover Beach, which is going to show up as an ebook before very long.  The title was suggested by my editor at Bantam, and I loved it.  The novel is about love and loyalty in a grim world after a limited nuclear war, and I liked the way the title brought out the connections with the themes of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem.

Which is to say, the title works really well in the “part of the aesthetic experience” department.  But Dover Beach was a mass-market science fiction paperback.  The title also needed to move product, as they say.  And that product didn’t move–at least, not compared to its predecessor Replica.  I think the title must have had something to do with it.  If the average science fiction reader read Arnold’s poem at all, it was probably because he was forced to in sophomore English class, and who wants to be reminded of sophomore English class?

For good or ill, the title is Dover Beach, and I’m sticking with it.

Here is the last stanza of “Dover Beach”, which is still moving a hundred and fifty years after first publication:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In regards to the language wars

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So a woman is applying for a writing job, and we ask her for additional samples. She sends an email that begins:

In regards to your request . . .

I wanted to pound my head against my monitor.  She’s a graduate of an Ivy League university, with years of experience in the writing biz.  But she never got the memo that in regards to is nonstandard.  Of course, plenty of other people haven’t gotten the memo. The usage started taking off around 1990; it’s still in the statistical noise compared to in regard to, but maybe that’s in the process of changing.

Language changes.  People who get too far out in front of the changes may sound illiterate; people who don’t keep up with the changes may sound like pedants.  At work we have our own style guide, where we have to make judgments about this sort of thing.  We certainly wouldn’t allow in regards to, but we’d probably deprecate in regard to as sounding too stuffy and prolix; why not just say concerning or about?  Every company I’ve worked for has preferred data is to data are, in spite of the grammarians’ insistence that data is the plural of datum.  Data are still wins the Ngram Viewer war, but the trend is clearly in favor of data is.

Anyway, what are we to make of The Language Wars, which is clearly on the descriptivist side of the prescriptivist/descriptivist divide?  The New Yorker writer slams the book, but I have a hard time following her argument.  At times, she seems to have read a different book from the one I read.  She says, for example, that Hitchings deplores Modern English Usage, but he does nothing of the sort.  Here is his nuanced judgment:

But while some parts of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage possess an air of both Oxonian grandeur and sub-molecular pedantry, others manifest a striking reasonableness.  He is much more flexible in his thinking than many of his admirers have seemed to imagine…. Many would demur, but Fowler enjoyable comments that ‘good writing is surely difficult enough without the forbidding of things that historical grammar, & present intelligibility, & obvious convenience on their side, & lack only–starch.’

He also quotes at length from Fowler’s wonderful discussion of split infinitives. His judgment of Strunk & White seems equally apt.

My judgment of Hitchings: his book gives a useful historical perspective on usage debates, and his opinions seem reasonable (although see my strongly worded dissent here).  My problem with the book is that it was often too detailed for my taste, or talked about stuff I already knew; so I ended up skimming a lot.

Hitchings is a descriptivist, in the reductive sense that he is describing something.  But theNew Yorkerwriter accuses him of some kind of hypocrisy because he knows and uses the rules he describes:

Having written chapter after chapter attacking the rules, he decides, at the end, that maybe he doesn’t mind them after all: “There are rules, which are really mental mechanisms that carry out operations to combine words into meaningful arrangements.” We should learn them. He has. He thinks that the “who”/“whom” distinction may be on its way out. Funny, how we never see any confusion over these pronouns in his book, which is written in largely impeccable English.

Why is this “funny”?  The rules of English usage are historically contingent; many of them will disappear over time, and new rules will take their place.  But that hardly means that a professional writer can ignore the current state of play.

Self-plagiarism: mortal sin, venial sin, or huh?–who cares?

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Jonah Lehrer of the New Yorker has been caught recycling old material for his new blog Frontal Cortex. The New Yorker has had to add editor’s notes to all the blog entries in which they “regret the duplication of material.”

I haven’t read Lehrer’s books, but his blog shows him to be a fine writer working the Malcolm Gladwell vein — giving an entertaining layman’s spin on findings from social psychology, neuroscience, and the like.  Good stuff!

The Slate writer seems to have put his finger on at least part of Lehrer’s problem: it’s just to hard to keep coming up with new material.

Given that continuous cycle of creation and reuse, blogging seems to have been a bad idea for Jonah Lehrer. A blog is merciless, requiring constant bursts of insight. In populating his New Yorker blog with large swaths of his old work, Lehrer didn’t just break a rule of journalism. By repurposing an old post on why we don’t believe in science, he also unscrewed the cap on his brain, revealing that it’s currently running on the fumes emitted by back issues of Wired. For Lehrer and The New Yorker, the best prescription is to shut down Frontal Cortex and give him some time to come up with some fresh ideas. The man’s brain clearly needs a break.

That sounds about right.  Between June 5 (when the blog apparently started) and June 13, Lehrer put up five blog posts — each of which was the equivalent of a nicely crafted magazine-quality column.  It’s not surprising that he cut some corners.

Part of the problem has to be that Lehrer is trying to make a living from his blog (among other things).  Blogs have no deadlines (unless the New Yorker imposes them), but there are expectations associated with them.  There are plenty of blogs that I don’t frequent any more because the author updates them too infrequently.  If you want traffic, you need content.  Lehrer was trying to feed the beast and decided he needed to use leftovers.

And what kind of sin has Lehrer committed?  Mostly a sin of stupidity, I’d say.  You can’t expect to get away with self-plagiarism on the Internet, and you can’t expect some people not to gloat at a misstep from a young hotshot.  A little note at the end of each post saying what the editor’s note now says at the top of the post would have sufficed, I think.

But wait!  This blog is about me, not Jonah Lehrer!  Please note that today is my six-month blogging anniversary, and I haven’t been caught self-plagiarizing once! (I’ve quoted extensively from my novels, but I believe blogging etiquette allows this.)  I’ve tried to follow my own writerly advice and make blogging a habit, so I’ve averaged about a post a day — although, granted, some of them consisted mainly of YouTube videos.  I guess I cut corners, too.

Anyway, advice about how to improve the blog would be gratefully received.

Life is stupider than fiction: The Pope’s butler did it; Fox news reporter hired to help Vatican improve its image

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I have alluded to this Vatican scandal before: The pope’s personal butler has been arrested for passing secret documents to some journalist.  The head of the Vatican bank has been fired:

The Holy See’s travails became clearly evident on May 17, with the publication of a book, Your Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI, in which the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi reproduced dozens of leaked letters, memos and cables, many of them from within the office of the Pope. Then came the ouster of the head of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who on Thursday received a vote of no confidence from the bank’s overseers, in part because he was suspected of passing on confidential documents. Finally, there was the arrest the next day of one of the men closest to the pontiff, his personal butler, Paolo Gabriele, who was caught with sensitive papers in his possession.

And this all presumably has to do with a power struggle within the Vatican:

Many Vatican watchers have speculated that the drama is the fall out of a struggle for power between Pope Benedict XVI’s second-in-command, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and rival cardinals and the Vatican’s veteran diplomatic staff, which has resented him since his arrival. “Bertone is effectively under fire,” says Magister. “If the government of the church is in such disastrous condition, then it’s clear that the head of the state needs to answer for these.”

So yesterday the pope came up with a strong response to the scandal: he hired someone from Fox News to be the Vatican’s media adviser.  Smart move!  The Vatican will become fair and balanced!  It reports, you decide!  Here are the other kinds of things this guy will deal with:

Benedict’s now-infamous speech about Muslims and violence, his 2009 decision to rehabilitate a schismatic bishop who denied the Holocaust, and the Vatican’s response to the 2010 explosion of the sex abuse scandal are just a few of the blunders that have tarnished Benedict’s papacy.

Of course, there is no indication that the Vatican will actually change its beliefs or practices as a result of this move.  The Vatican will do what it does; Benedict will believe what he believes; things will presumably just be messaged more smoothly.

Here, by the way, is an exhaustive Wikipedia article about Benedict’s speech that caused such problems with Muslims.  Good job promoting religious dialogue, Benedict!

Anyway, let me just remind folks that Pontiff numbers among its many characters the Vatican secretary of state, the head of the Vatican bank, and the pope’s butler (really, his personal aide).  Plus scenes of Fenway Park!  And it’s currently available for the astonishingly low price of $0.99!

Where should you write?

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I was reminded of this question when I viewed this troubling video from John Klobucher, who has started an interesting writing project at his very fine blog Lore of the Underlings:

If I correctly understand this video, he writes his novel while he’s driving his car.  How does he pull that off?  Does he encounter a lot of red lights?  Or empty stretches of highway? Should we find out what his route is so we can avoid it?

So that’s deeply concerning from the perspective of automotive safety.  But on the other hand, good for him!  This is one man’s approach to following Rule 0.  If the only time you have to write is while you’re driving, just make it work. I wrote a good chunk of Senator while commuting on a subway train.  If I couldn’t find a seat, I would stand at the end of the car so that I could lean against the emergency door and have both hands free to hold my notebook and scribble.  I remember reading about Joseph Conrad finishing Lord Jim or some other novel while watching over his daughter as she recovered from a disease.  I’ve heard of people writing while waiting for their kids to finish soccer practice. You do what you have to do.

So now on to Aristotle.  (I don’t know where he wrote, but he sure managed to write a lot.)

Readers of this dispiriting blog may recall that while I drive I listen to online courses downloaded from iTunes University.  Lately I’ve been listening to an Open Yale course called The Philosophy and Science of Human Nature. I recommend it!  The professor is currently doing a deep dive into Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics.  (I don’t know much about the Nichomachean Ethics, but I love saying the words out loud.)  Anyway, one of Aristotle’s points is that virtue is a matter of habit.  If you want to be just, get in the habit of doing just things.  If you want to be a harpist, practice playing the harp — over and over again. As Wikipedia puts it:

People become habituated well by first performing actions which are virtuous, possibly because of the guidance of teachers or experience, and in turn these habitual actions then become real virtue where we choose good actions deliberately.

Seems to me that this applies to writing, too.  (Whether writing itself is virtuous is a whole nuther question.)  You become a writer by writing; everything else (reading, research, note-taking, making up great stories in your head, talking to your friends about those great stories) is beside the point.  In my long-running writing group, we once had a come-to-Jesus meeting to try to help the folks in the group who weren’t producing anything to get started.  This had the predictable effect of making some people feel really bad about themselves.  One of them said, “You know, my whole life I’ve thought of myself as a writer, but I’ve never really written anything.”  This has always struck me as a desperately sad statement.  What, after all, was stopping him?  It wasn’t like he wanted to become an astronaut.  All he had to do was pick up a pen and start writing. This wouldn’t have made him a published writer, but none of us have much control over that.

So don’t be like him.  Be like John Klobucher instead.  Get in your car and start writing!

Did Shakespeare revise his plays?

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We should all revise our work.  And we shouldn’t spend too much time feeling sorry for ourselves because Shakespeare didn’t have to revise his work.  His plays, we are told, are all inspired first drafts.  At least, that’s what Heminge and Condell said in their “Epistle to the Great Variety of Readers” of the First Folio:

His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers.

This has become part of the enduring image of Shakespeare — so supreme a genius that he he didn’t even have to labor over his masterpieces, like Mozart interrupting a game of billiards to jot down a movement in a string quartet. And, of course, this image is always paired with Ben Jonson’s envious comment:

“The Players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, ‘would he had blotted a thousand.'”

There was only one Shakespeare, and we’re not him.  And neither was Ben Jonson.

This image is under attack from modern critics.  Here is Stephen Greenblatt, interrupting his writing of The Swerve to write in the Wall Street Journal:

A number of Shakespeare’s plays survive in both the small quarto editions, inexpensively published during his lifetime, and in the first folio. Comparing versions of the same play, I and other scholars have concluded that many of the differences are probably due to Shakespeare’s own obsessive fiddling.

The Quarto

A particularly significant amount of fiddling occurred in King Lear, where there are extensive changes between the quarto edition and the First Folio.  As a result, some modern editions include both versions, instead of presenting a single edition that conflates both versions.  The Arden edition I own is of the conflated school.  It uses F and Q superscripts to indicate words that are only found in one version or the other.  Lear’s final line in the play, spoken over the dead body of Cordelia, appears only in the folio version:

Do you see this?  Look on her; look, her lips,
Look there, look there!   He dies.

Does he die joyfully, thinking Cordelia is really alive?  What was Shakespeare up to when he added the line?  Who knows?

Of course, there is no real evidence of revision, just of differences.  Maybe both the quarto and the folio are simply different versions of a lost original manuscript.  Maybe some of the differences are due to lines that were added by actors during rehearsals.  Greenblatt and others are convinced that Shakespeare fiddled, but that’s based on interpretation, not evidence.  The next generation of scholars may come up with some other interpretation — or decide that Heminge and Condell knew what they were talking about.

Still, it’s nice to think that Shakespeare was like the rest of us, adding words and taking them out and moving them around, trying to achieve some kind of perfection that is always just out of our reach.

Rules for Writing — Rule 2: Revise

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Here’s another in an intermittent series of my randomly (and repetitively) numbered rules for fiction writers who aren’t quite good enough to get away with breaking all the rules.  If you’re reading this post, I’m talking about you.

First, let’s distinguish revising from rewriting.  The distinction is a little arbitrary, but for my purposes, revising is taking what you’ve written and making it better; rewriting is taking what you’ve written and writing it all over again.  On a computer, when you revise, you’re working on the same file; when you rewrite, you’re opening a new file and labeling it “Chapter 1 Draft 2” or something.

I’m inclined to believe that everyone revises; I’m not so sure that professional authors cranking out multiple books per year are doing much rewriting.  But anyway, in my opinion, revising is the most fun you can have as a writer.  Staring at a blank screen can be intimidating and discouraging; the blinking cursor seems to tick away the seconds of your life.  But once that screen is filled with words, it’s much easier, and more satisfying, to mess with those words and make them better.

As I mentioned in my post on Rule 0, it’s helpful to begin a writing session by revising your previous day’s output.  But there’s really no bad time to revise; it’s just a question of deciding when to stop.  Somebody once said that he knew he was done with a story when he’d go through it and take out some commas, and then he’d go through it again and start putting the commas back in.

Revising is mostly about style; rewriting is mostly about plot and characterization.  So revising involves applying all them grammer and spelling rules that you learned in Rule 7, but it also involves going beyond them; you want to make your prose sing (or, at least, to keep it from wandering off key).  How do you do that?  A good place to start is with George Orwell’s rules for writing (from his essay “Politics and the English Language“):

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I don’t know to what extent Orwell intended these rules to apply to fiction, but I’d say that Rule 6 is even more applicable to a novelist than it is to a non-fiction writer.  There are times when you’re striving for an effect that may require the passive voice, or a foreign phrase, or a cliché, particularly in dialog or a first-person narrative.  But it’s a good idea to be aware of Orwell’s rules, even if you decide to break them.

Orwell’s rules don’t cover something that is central to revision but that’s hard to put into into a rule: the rhythm of your words.  Sometimes, for example, you want to repeat a word for an effect; sometimes the repetition just sounds stupid or awkward.  Sometimes you want to start a bunch of consecutive sentences in the same way; sometimes that’s just an oversight that needs fixing.  I’ve heard of writers who read their words aloud to check how they sound — that’s certainly a good idea for dialog.  I don’t do it, but I sound out everything in my mind.

And there’s a related rule that I’ll talk about more someday: Show your work to someone else. Sometimes the words that sound just right to you will provoke a violent allergic reaction in your friends. Better to know that before you’re finished than after.

“If I had a sister like you, I would have killed myself, too.”

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Those South Boston folks have a way of cutting to the heart of the matter.

However, with Connors’s reference to the 1984 death of her brother, David, Greig’s composure crumpled. She gasped when Connors spoke and then put her hands to her face and mouth – and started to cry. It took her several minutes to regain her composure.

In March, Greig said in open court that she had sought psychiatric counseling after her brother shot himself to death.

This was the only remark from the victims that caused Catherine Greig any visible emotion at her sentencing yesterday.

The mugshot

The whole Whitey Bulger saga is too improbable for fiction, but Greig is one of the most improbable characters in it.  She was Bulger’s second choice to accompany him in his life on the lam.  He first left town with his “common-law wife,” Theresa Stanley.  But Stanley decided she’d rather be with her children, so Bulger turned to Greig, his emergency backup girlfriend.  And she apparently didn’t give a second thought to dropping the rest of her life so that she could go on the run with the mobster.  She took  care of him for 16 years.  And now she doesn’t even get her on Wikipedia page, only a section in Bulger‘s.  And eight years in prison in which to reminisce about all the good times she had with her man:

The man once suspected of gallivanting through Europe had been holed up in the same rent-controlled apartment for at least 13 years, staying up late into the night watching television in his living room with black curtains drawn. When he finally went to bed, the aging gangster slept alone in the master bedroom – windows covered in opaque plastic sheeting – while his girlfriend used the guest room.

I dipped into this world just a little bit in Senator (did I mention that the ebook is now available?).  The IRA gun-running subplot is loosely based on the story of the Valhalla, recounted here. The book I read about the Valhalla suggested that a young guy who was a member of Valhalla’s crew and later disappeared had been murdered by British spies.  We now know he was tortured and killed by Bulger and his cronies because he was a snitch.

Great guys.

Bradbury and Believability

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The death of Ray Bradbury reminded me that he was among the least believable of science fiction writers. (See my discussion of believability.)  I couldn’t find the quote online, but I recall him saying that he gave up science fiction after a nine-year-old wrote him to complain about the science in one of his stories (“The Golden Apples of the Sun”, maybe?).

Like most people I came across online who talked about Bradbury in the past day, I haven’t read him in decades.  I have a feeling that his work hasn’t aged well — except for Fahrenheit 451, I suppose, which is the perfect novel to assign to schoolkids.  Science fiction as a genre, of course, has a tendency not to age well.  Here is an excerpt from an essay about Bradbury by Damon Knight from 1967 that sounds about right.  He says:

Although [Bradbury] has a large following among science fiction readers, there is at least an equally large contingent of people who cannot stomach his work at all; they say he has no respect for the medium; that he does not even trouble to make his scientific double-talk convincing; that—worst crime of all—he fears and distrusts science.

For better or worse, I think he helped give me the courage to imagine that I could write science fiction.  Also, I remain spooked by Something Wicked This Way Comes.