Reading Sherlock Holmes

Somehow, in all my youthful reading, I missed Sherlock Holmes. I read one of the short stories, I think, while I was in high school, but nothing more. In my adult years, perhaps ten years ago, I bought a paperback volume of Sherlock Holmes stories at a used bookstore. Read two short stories in it and laid it aside.

A few years ago I read about the Norton Publishing version of the "Sherlock Holmes Canon", as they called it. It was in three volumes, with the stories extensively collated and footnoted. I believe, though I'm not sure, the stories were put in chronological order in which they would have taken place, not when they were written or published. A. Conan Doyle did a lot of backtracking in the stories. In 1904 he published some of Holmes' cases that were earlier in Holmes' career than were the ones he published in 1894.  Reading about this set got me interested in Holmes. The Norton books were much too expensive, so I waited. Barnes & Noble came out with a two volume hardback set, minus all the footnoting and ordering. When it went on the remainders table, I bought it.

That was a year or two ago. Recently Lynda and I finished our the series we were reading aloud in and were ready for something else. I suggested Holmes, and she agreed. She's always liked crime books and mysteries. We are now well into the series. Of the four Holmes novels, we've read the first three: A Study in Scarlett, The Sign of the Four, and Hound of the Baskervilles, and two volumes of the short stories and are well into the third. The B&N books are arranged chronologically by date of publication.

So how am I enjoying them? Hmmm, perhaps not as much as I'd hoped, but that's mainly due to the language use. These stories are only 120 years old, yet the English language has changed, as has practice of writing. Some things that readers would turn away from in disgust these days are practiced regularly by Doyle. For example, he constantly repeats the first and last names of people in dialog and speaker tags. That's a no-no drilled into us by writing instructors. He tends to fixate on words. One example is "singular," a word that has gone out of fashion today. He will say, "He was a singular man." Meaning, I guess, he was unique. Actually, in the context it's not always clear exactly what the word singular means. I can see why it's gone out of fashion. One use of it wouldn't be too bad, but when you read three stories in three days and "singular" is in them six or eight times, you notice.

We find we can't read these every day, as we did with our previous series. We read a story one day, and take a day or two break. The writing style is what slows us down, not the story contents. The plots show Doyle's genius. Each of the stories we've read so far is quite unique—dare I say singular? Doyle mixes up the kind of cases. They aren't all murder mysteries. Sometimes they turn out not to be crimes at all, but instead an accident, or something unintentional.

We will persevere in this. Only six more stories in this volume, two more volumes of short stories (as originally published), and one more novel to go—a short-ish one at that. I suspect I'll have another post or two on Sherlock Holmes.

Kicking Stones

Last night I went to a new writers group. Well, it's not new; it's new to me. I heard about it just a little over a week ago. A friend from church told me about them. They meet at a coffee shop less than a mile from my house. Well, I should say they met at a coffee shop not less than a mile from my house. That coffee shop is going to close today due to lack of business, so last night was the last meeting for the writing group in that location. Henceforth they will meet at the Bella Vista Library, shifting the meetings from Thursdays to 2nd/4th Mondays, the only day the library is open late.

This group works differently than the others I've been involved with in the past. Rather than bring your work and read it to the group and have them comment on it, they e-mail their items for critique ahead of the meeting. The others print them and critique the printed copy; or some may make comments on the electronic document, make comments during the meeting, then e-mail the doc back with the comments. I know many groups work this way, and those who do say it's a superior way to do things. Since I entered in the middle of a cycle I can't comment one way or the other.

But I found the group and had the e-mail addresses early enough to make a submission this month. I gave them my short story "Kicking Stones". This is the third story involving Danny Tompkins, a boy who loses his mother when he is 13 years old. The first one was "Mom's Letter", telling about the time that Danny first learned that his mother's death was imminent. The second was "Too Old To Play", where Danny deals with the wake after her death, and especially with all the people who came to the house after the funeral. Each of those stories began with a scene of Danny as a boy, then of him as an adult and his adult memories of those incidents.

This one takes up the story two weeks after his mother's death, when the new school year begins. It's all in the present, the adult Daniel remembering how that first day of eighth grade he began kicking stones on his way to school. He's on a visit to the area and drives by the old house and, full of convention food, decides to walk the mile to his junior high school to get some exercise. The adult Daniel finds a stone on the sidewalk and kicks it, just as he did those many years before. He hasn't kicked stones while walking since he walked to that school. Why not, he wonders.

In this story I try to make metaphors. And I'm shooting for the play on words. "Kicking" can be both a noun and a verb. He's kicking stones down the road, and the stones he kicks are "kicking stones"—stones for the purpose of kicking. The story includes a poem, written by the adult Daniel about those childhood memories. The metaphor and word play feature in the poem as well.

I was thinking I might publish the story this weekend, but may take more time to edit it. In the meeting last night one of the writers said, "You have a great opening paragraph. Unfortunately it's in the middle of page 3." She's right: That particular paragraph is a good one, and with the change of one or two words could be the opening. But then I need to decide what to do with the two and a half pages before it. Do I blow it away, or work it into the latter parts of the story? This will take some time to work out.

But I will work it out, and I'll publish it in a week or so. Then I'll move on to the next story, then the next, or maybe it will be a book. Kind of like Danny repetitiously kicking stones as a schoolboy, I'll knock out story after story, at least for the next few years.,

Thirty Years Ago

I had planned to write this post over the weekend, or even last Wednesday or Thursday, but as usual time got away from me. It was then, just before the Olympics started, that I thought about where I was thirty years ago. No, it wasn't London—but close. We were in Paris, just finishing up the first grand vacation of our lives, as we took our annual leave after a year in Saudi Arabia.

Charles was 3yrs 5 months, and Sara was 1yr 2 months. We were in Europe 28 days, going from Rome to Florence to Lucern to Schaffhausen to Salzburg to Munich to Glottertal to Paris, almost all by Eurail. The things we saw were just amazing. Growing up, Paris had always been my dream city to visit, and I learned that Rome was Lynda's dream city. So we anchored our trip at the dream cities.

While there, we by chance were in Italy when the Italians won the World Cup semifinal. A few days later we were in Germany when the Italians beat the Germans in the finals. That was a study in how seriously those nations take their soccer. We came into Paris on a Saturday night, and the following day the Tour de France finished in Paris. We saw the cyclists go by in front of our hotel.

It all seems a dream to me now, almost unbelievable that we went through Europe with two small children, on our own, with no tour, on a loose itinerary with only one hotel reservation the whole time. We had hotels picked out and had sent ahead for reservations, but had only heard back from one before our trip began. One adventure during that trip was when I was separated from Lynda and the kids when a train pulled out unexpectedly.

Thirty years ago today we were in Rhode Island, celebrating my dad's 66th birthday. He would live another fifteen years and leave an outstanding legacy as a dad and granddad.

I hadn't really had a chance to figure out how to work those years into my writing. Conventional wisdom is that foreign settings don't sell well in the USA, so I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about most of those expatriate years, other than my planned novel China Tour, where I turn our 14 days in China in 1983 into an espionage story.

But the idea came to me that I could use those settings. I plan on using them in a series of short stories. I have a female lead character who will be a CIA operative, with a reputation for rogue tactics, who will be at those places. The first one is started, with other ones in the very early planning stage. I don't know if I'll succeed in this, or whether I'll really turn these into a series of short stories, or whether anyone will be interested. But it's good to have a plan.

And it's good to be able to have been on the grand tour, so many years ago, not knowing that someday I would be a writer and be able to use the experiences in stories.

Too Old To Play

Just a quick announcement that my new short story, "Too Old To Play", went live at the Amazon Kindle store today. It's about 2,300 words, and tells another part of Danny Tompkins dealing with his mother's death, both as a teenager and then years later as an adult.

I hope to have it available soon at Smashwords, and thus for other e-reader formats.