Demons, Funnels, and an Empty Checking Account: Why I Decided to Sell Short Fiction

In 2010, I had an idea for a short story about the lost colony of Roanoke. My first love is historical fiction and I've always been tormented by the idea of unsolved mysteries, so it seemed like a natural fit for me. Still, my writer's brain wanted more. It wanted to put a supernatural twist on the story. What better way to explain the strange disappearance of the colonists than by introducing something creepy and otherworldly? Namely, a demon named Croatoa. I know, I know...there are actual scientific theories about what happened to the colonists. But that's not nearly as much fun as a long-fingered black-haired demon.  

But I digress. It was a cold December and I was about to finish my first semester of grad school. It was time to write the final story for my first graduate-level creative writing class. I'd already turned in one historical fiction story, and one story about a talking dog who was really the devil. To reveal my amazing depth and breadth as a writer, logic dictated that I avoid (a) history and (b) the supernatural.

But since when have I done anything the way I'm supposed to?

I wrote the Roanoke story anyway.  Whether it risked my grade or not, it was the story I wanted to write. That's how I roll. 

I wrote it from the point of view of Eleanor Dare, the mother of the first English baby born in the New World. I wrote about the last days of the colony, when hunger and cold and starvation and drought and attacks by Native Americans had taken their toll. I wrote about a demon named Croatoa, who offered Eleanor Dare a terrifying bargain. I wrote about Manteo, the Croatoan man who had already been to England twice by the time the last, doomed Roanoke colonization party arrived. And I turned it in for my final: 20 pages of brutal, bloody, tragic prose.  I don't know what my grade on that particular story ended up being, since the professor said he would read our finals over a fire and burn them before assigning our final grades. But my grade in the class was an A, so I'm guessing it didn't suck too hard.

This is pretty much how I write
 most of my non-literary short stories.

Being in grad school led to a burst of creativity for the next 16 months that resulted in me having quite a few short stories, mostly written for creative writing classes. I submitted almost all of them to journals and anthologies. Quite a few of them actually made it in and have been published. As is the case with most journals and anthologies, they requested only first North American rights, which meant that once the story had been published, all rights reverted to me.

Until recently, I thought of my short stories as a means to an end: a way to get better at writing. A way to rack up a few publishing credits for this here "Awards & Publications" page. A way to earn backlinks for this blog. But I never thought of them as anything else.

Then I read a blog post on Anne R. Allen's blog.  Writers, if you're not reading her blog, you're missing out. I only discovered it recently, but every post is chock-full of helpful and interesting information. The post I read was called, "Why You Should be Writing Short Fiction." In it, Anne writes, "What--short stories? Aren't they just for writing classes?" She had my attention right away, since that's what I'd always thought. She said she knew of a bestselling writer who put a bunch of her older short stories up for sale on Amazon (under non-famous name, of course) and ended up making $500 a month. People found them, bought them, and liked them. 

Hmm, I thought. I have folders of short stories, all just sitting there.

But I still didn't do anything about it. I was working on marketing my books and getting my website up and running, and I didn't want to think about it yet.

Then, Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant released Write, Publish, Repeat. Their advice is to create a marketing funnel, with short stories, novellas, and books in tiered pricing layers that draw browsers in and convert casual readers into repeat buyers and (hopefully) fans.

Hmm, I thought. I don't have shit for a funnel.

That's when I started thinking of ways to use my short stories as part of my marketing funnel. The book I want to write next is historical fiction (both of them, actually). I have several historical fiction short stories, including Croatoa. Why not put out some of the short stories and try to use them to generate interest in my historical fiction? 

So here's what I did:

1. Dug out my old manuscript.
2. Polished it up. Added some stuff. Took a few awkward lines away.
3. Made a cover. (Deepest apologies to my fantastic cover artist, but with a dead laptop and an empty propane tank, money is allergic to me right now.)
4. Popped the completed manuscript into my eBook template.
5. Added two bonus features to the end of the story: a historical note on Manteo, and a detailed timeline of the Roanoke Colony. I wanted to make sure the reader had a bit more than just the story, so I used the idea of a DVD's special features and came up with the timeline/historical note idea.
6. Added a brief excerpt from my vampire book at the very end, with the cover art and a buy link. The idea here is that someone interested in a historical fiction story with a hint of the supernatural might also really like my vampire book, which also hits both of these genre's high notes. 
7. Priced it at .99c. My books are all $2.99, and since this story is much shorter, the price needs to reflect that. Maybe when I have more items up for sale, I can make one of my funnel items permafree, but for now, I chose the entry-level price point of .99c.
8. Published through Amazon KDP and Smashwords. Since I don't plan on doing a ton of promotion for the story, I didn't make it exclusive to KDP. I want the max amount of exposure for the minimum amount of effort, which means more venues = more eyeballs. 

So this is now the beginning of a grand experiment in which I see if I can replicate other authors' success selling short fiction. I haven't publicized the release much, since I had an interview that went live at the same time and I can only stand so much of myself. In general, my books make very little money and this story likely will, too. As of now, it's sold one copy through Smashwords and made me .73c. But that's .73c I didn't have yesterday, so that's cool with me.

I don't think I'll be one of the lucky few making $500 a month off of it, but I also know I have a dozen more than can follow. It's the production time that's going to slow me down. I am writing two books right now, and don't have much time left over to market the older books plus edit, format, produce, and publish a buttload of short stories. But I'm going to try because, well, Protestant work ethic bequeathed to me by my Swedish and Scottish ancestors just will not quit. Why watch TV at night when you could work on 800 projects all at once?

That's one thing about being a one-woman indie author show. You have to love it in order to live it. So here I am, loving it and living it, and wanting to help you do the same. I'll post updates here as needed to let you know how my short story experiment goes.

If you want to check out Croatoa, you can get it from Amazon or Smashwords.

To learn more about how I researched and wrote the story itself, check out this post on my website:

Croatoa: How I Turned the Lost Colony of Roanoke into a Short Story

8 Things I Never Knew about the Donner Party

I spent this weekend doing nothing but reading Ordeal by Hunger, by George R. Stewart. It sat on my shelf for 10 years after a chance purchase in a Truckee bookstore. Now, I live about 70 miles from Donner Lake and can see that forbidding ridge of the Sierras from my living room. Then, a couple weeks ago, we had snow. This is not supposed to happen--we're only at 1,500 feet. But it did happen, and our pipes froze and our driveway iced, which is why I think I finally plucked this one off the shelf.

Going in, I knew what most people know: they were pioneers en route to California, got snowed in at Donner Lake, and died. I think at some point I must have known there was cannibalism involved. I was under no illusion that this was going to have a happy ending, but holy mother of God, I had no idea it was this bad. There's a lot I didn't know or didn't remember.

There's a lot no one tells you.

This is by no means an exhaustive summary. It's more a jumbled recollection of the moments that pierced the cold, cold veil of my shriveled heart.

1. They were pretty much beaten before they ever reached the Sierra. Just getting to California had exhausted them in every way. To get their wagons over the Wasatch mountains, they had to stand in front of the wagons with axes in their hands, making the damn road yard by yard. They had to cross the desert beneath the Great Salt Lake, a more fucked up route than other travelers because the Donner party took an ill-advised southern cutoff that wasted a shit-ton of time. Suffice to say, when someone tells you the next water is three days away but really it's seven, you're going to have a bad time. Blame that douche-bag Hastings, who told them, "No sweat. My cut-off is a piece of cake," and then ditched them, leaving behind notes that lied to them about how far away the next water was.

2.  They didn't like each other very much. It would have been a shit trip under any circumstances. But in addition to the navigation issues, they also lost a bunch of cattle to the Paiutes, both through thievery and general marauding. No blame, just a statement of fact. All told, by the time they got to the eastern slope of the Sierra, they were tired, hungry, in need of supplies, and lacking tolerance for each other. If you and your sibling got on each other's nerves in the car as kids, imagine going on a six-month car ride where you had to build the road for the car by working in harmony with said sibling.  I'm pretty sure Mother Teresa would have needed at least one time out.

3.  They weren't all stuck in one cabin, tent, or even general area. There were three distinct cabins, with the two Donner families a whopping five miles behind them. When they got to Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake), it was about Halloween...and it started snowing like a mother-you-know-what. It didn't stop. They tried twice to get those big-ass wagons up and over the pass, but it just didn't happen. So they dropped back down on November 4 and realized they had to make camp on the eastern side of the pass until spring.

They set up some primitive cabins along the lake, with the Jacob and George Donner family groups about five miles back.  The party had always been segregated by family groups (the Breens, the Donners, the Reeds, the Murphys, the Kesebergs, etc.), but now those segregations etched themselves in stone. Contact between family groups was generally limited to requests for help, which were usually ignored or fulfilled only grudgingly. There were 60 people: 19 men, 12 women, and 29 children, including toddlers. The men bore the brunt of the work--gathering firewood, attempting to hunt, etc. Suffice to say, it fucking sucked.

At first, they had some food: a bear, a few remaining cattle, mice, and hides they boiled and used for soup. But when that runs out, what happens? Can you sit around a dank, dismal cabin full of sick and malnourished people, including your own children, and tell them they're going to die because there's nothing to eat? The first person to die was Baylis Williams. It was December 15, a month after making camp.

4. One group escaped on foot. On December 16, a group of 15 snow-shoed out, trying to cross the pass on foot. They were headed for Sutter's Fort in what would become Sacramento to beg for help and organize relief. But there was hardly any food left for those staying behind, let alone extra to send along with the people fleeing.

On the first day, they went four miles...all still on the eastern side of the pass, and still able to see the smoke from their families' cabins.  The snow was so damn high and so damn soft that it took a long time to cross, even with the snowshoes.

They had each taken six days' rations. Every person had a strip of jerky as long as two fingers, three times a day. That's it. Now go walk miles in a ferocious snowstorm and climb the parts of the mountain that snow won't stick to and don't forget to gather firewood and take turns maintaining it at night and generally try to give a shit so much that your mind wills your body not to die. I'm not sure I could have done it. When Eddy, one of the men, found a half pound of bear meat in his pack that his wife had hoarded and packed in secret with a love note, I almost cried.

Four days out, they were exhausted, malnourished, snow-blind, and subject to hallucinations. One man lasted six days. On the sixth, he sat down, smoked his pipe, told the others he was coming soon, and waited to die.

The seventh day, they shared the bear meat.

The eighth day, they had nothing.

The ninth day, they had nothing. And it started to snow again. They were all skeletal, malnourished, weak, and frozen. What were the options? Finally, they broached the subject: draw lots to see who dies and who lives? Fight to the death, so at least whoever went down went down swinging? They decided it was too horrible, and they had to wait. It wasn't a long wait. That night, a man named Antonio died. A few hours later, Billy Graves died.  A third man, Patrick Dolan, died a day later while they paused for Christmas Day. They waited another day. On the eleventh day, they did what they had to do. Two Indian guides and Eddy at first refused to eat. They trudged down the mountain, up and down canyons, through storms and conditions that make a Hieronymus Bosch painting look like Club Med. More dead than alive, they stumbled into a ranch on January 17. They'd started with 15 people, five women and ten men. Only two men made it out. All five women survived. (Yay, ladies.)


5. There was gallows humor. Back in the lake camp, things went from bad to worse. Terrible weather, vermin, sickness, malnutrition, starvation...you name it, it happened. George Donner had sliced his hand with a chisel. The wound festered and he didn't have the strength to fight the infection off. He also didn't have the strength to die. Old Mrs. Murphy went blind. A bunch of kids died. To keep the remaining ones alive, some of the corpses were dug up. Jacob Donner's wife, Elizabeth, said to her sister, "Guess what I cooked this morning? Shoemaker's arm."

6. Rescue came in waves, organized and orchestrated poorly and often by people with little or no snow/mountaineering experience. The snowshoers managed to send back several waves of rescuers, some more willing and able than others. The first wave of rescuers crossed the pass and realized what a terrible state everyone was in. They brought out everyone who was able to walk and not needed to care for the ones left behind--23 people, with 17 staying behind. The walkers included three children three years old. Tommy Reed was one of them. He made it two miles before it became painfully obvious that he couldn't keep stepping through the enormous drifts.  His sister, Patty, was also doing poorly. They were holding up the rest of the group. The rescue coordinator Glover, told the childrens' mother the two little ones had to go back to camp. No one had enough strength to carry the two children (the rescuers had run into storm and supply troubles of their own). Their mother sent them back to the camp and continued on with the rescue party. "Well, mother," Patty said, "if you never see me again, do the best you can." Oh holy Jesus, tear my heart out, why don't you...

A second rescue party included two men who had already escaped with the snowshoe party, Reed and McCutchen. They both had kids still starving at the camp and had to go back. Their party rescued the Breen family, the Graves family, a couple of the Donner kids, and Reed's two kids who had been sent back. As they struggled down the mountain on the other side of the pass, the Breens and the Graves could go no further. The rest pressed on. I've seen the word "abandoned" used to describe the Breens and Graves after the others marched on. I don't think you can use this word in that context. It seems too cruel. It was what it was. No one can pass judgment who didn't go through it.

A third rescue party, including Eddy and Foster (both escapees via snowshoe), went back into hell to try and save their children, both too young to have made it out with the other parties. But by the time they got there on March 13, Eddy's wife and child were already dead. A man named Keseberg seems to have eaten them. Elizabeth Donner was dead. Her husband, Jacob Donner, was dead...and partially eaten. George Donner was ill but clinging to life. His wife, Tamsen, refused to leave him. Rescuers told her they weren't sure if and when a third rescue party would make it. She stayed.

7. One of the survivors was accused of murdering Tamsen Donner. This is weird, you guys. So Keseberg was one of the last left in the camp. When the third rescue party arrived, they found him alone with a pot of what might have been human entrails and/or blood. They asked where everyone was, but Keseberg said they were all dead. They checked the Donner tents five miles away and found George Donner dead and wrapped in a sheet--obviously Tamsen had outlived him. They found no sign of her body, though. They went back and asked Keseberg where she was. He said Tamsen appeared at his cabin one night, drenched to the bone from a fall in the creek. She said George had died and she now wanted to cross the pass on foot to get to her children. He bundled her up for the night, but she was dead by morning. This didn't jive with the rescuers, who had seen Tamsen on rescue waves one and two. The healthiest of all the settlers, she didn't seem likely to die after one cold night. But they couldn't find a body anywhere. Keseberg said he'd eaten her--that she was the best-tasting of them all because she still had a little fat. However, if this was true, where were the remains? The head, for example? Jacob Donner's split skull had been recovered, even after the brains were eaten. Where was Tamsen? Was Keseberg lying? If so, why?

It struck some of the rescuers that Keseberg might have killed her. The Donners were wealthy, and maybe he thought he could scrounge their belongings to find cash or valuables. They got him out of that horrible death camp and tried him when they'd made it to safety. He was acquitted, but made to pay all the costs of the trial. Keseberg seems to have changed his story later in life, saying he did not participate in cannibalism. No one will ever know.

8. Some of the survivors ended up near where I grew up. It's not all doom and gloom, which is why I saved this point for last. The entire Breen family survived, 7 kids and 2 parents. They settled in San Juan Bautista, in an adobe near the mission I've seen a dozen times. I never knew. The entire Reed family survived, 3 kids and 2 parents. They settled in San Jose. I never knew. There are still Donner descendants in the state. Even Keseberg has at least one descendant in the state.

This is one of those stories that hits you in the nuts and the guts. I read this book faster than any fiction I've read in the past two years. I couldn't do anything else afterward but keep looking for more information on this event and these people. I just sat back, breathless, in awe of what these people went through. I could not have done it. Their will to live was so much stronger than anything I've felt in my entire life. That is both my shame and their honor.

Merry Christmas

When I was little, my mom made me write thank-you notes for any birthday, Christmas, or graduation gifts I received. I hated it at the time, but now I understand that it's one of those niceties that makes the world go around.

This post is a thank-you to everyone who has read the blog this year. To everyone who has commented, thank you. To everyone who lurks, thank you.

I hope you have a chance to reconnect with friends and family over the next few days. (Writers: even if they drive you bonkers, this is valuable material. Keep a notebook handy.)  I've got some cool things planned for 2014 that will help all of us become better writers, better readers, and hopefully, better people. I'd love to have you along for the journey.

If, like my husband, you're about to be dragged through a family circus that isn't what you really want to be doing, remember: your attendance and your smile is a gift to the person who brought you. As Bill and Ted said, "Be excellent to each other."

May your eggnog be spiked...with love or whiskey, whichever you prefer.  

Book Review: Inferno by Dan Brown

Inferno by Dan Brown.
It's ablaze, all right, but with what?
That's up for debate.

Note: This post is being sponsored by Grammarly. I used Grammarly's plagiarism detector because I wanted to watch it have a conniption fit over Inferno's purple prose.
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I'm not normally at a loss for words when it comes to talking about books. But Dan Brown's Inferno might have gotten the best of me.

I just can't think of anything to say.

It's a book.

It's not good.

Can we just call it a night?

No?

Damn it. I should have known you'd expect more of me, dear readers. Inferno is not a good book. It's also not hate-worthy in the manner of some of the other books I've blogged about here. It doesn't inspire vitriol. It doesn't inspire anything at all. Perhaps that's the whole problem.

Confession Bear says, "Don't be a book snob."

Great Expectations
Let me start by saying I loved The DaVinci Code. Yes, the insults hurled at the book by book snobs are probably mostly true. But applying literary fiction's criteria to Dan Brown is like cursing at an apple because it isn't round and orange and you can't remove the peel in one of those nifty spirals. If you didn't know that going in, you're either blind or humorless or both.

Being a page-turner is an accomplishment. Books that make you stay up late at night to find out what happens next are, by definition, good books. You have another option--going to sleep at a normal hour, like a sane person--but you choose the book. If you have another option but you choose the book, the book is doing something right. For me, The DaVinci Code was crack...or whichever potato chips have the slogan, "Bet you can't eat just one."  I couldn't read just one page. I couldn't turn out the light.

TL;DR: It's a good fucking book.

Dante's Pique
Inferno is not a good fucking book. It's even worse than a bad book. It's a boring book.

It's like when you're in college and your professor is talking, and you try to listen, but he's off on a tangent about some facet of his grad school research that matters only to him. It's 2:15 in the afternoon and his voice drones on like that guy who says, "Bueller?" You listen for an hour, but your watch says it's only 2:18. You start fidgeting to try and not fall asleep. But that gets boring, too. And then you get a little angry. You're paying for this class, after all. By the time 3:00 actually rolls around, you're not glad to be alive. You're pissed at the professor (for wasting everyone's time) and the university (for throwing away the student evaluations that say how boring he is). You would rather have been in the library doing research for your Victorian Lit paper. At least you'd have checked something off your to-do list that way.

That's Inferno in a nutshell. This Twitter account would have been a better use of your time:

10 Things I Hate about You +1, for a Grand Total of 11...Because I'm Feeling Bitchy that Way
When I started reading, I took notes on things I thought I'd blog about...but I stopped caring about 150 pages in. Then I started counting the number of times I fell asleep while reading it and got close to double digits. In order not to waste the time I spent making the list, here's a few of the things that ticked me off before page 150:

• Adverbs
• "Langdon battled the sedatives and awkwardly hoisted himself upright in his bed."
• Because when I've been shot in the head and wake up groggy with amnesia, it really needs to be specified that my first movement is an awkward one. 
• Exclamation point
• "A ray of hope cut through Langdon's grogginess.  'That's good news! Maybe this person knows what happened to me!'" 
• Because when I've been shot in the head and wake up groggy with amnesia, the first thing I do is make nothing but excited declarative statements. 
• Statements of things that make no sense
• "Who are you!? he called out in silence." 
• If only someone had invented a word that meant having words go through your head without speaking them. Someone get the call-out-in-silence tank on the phone and ask them about it. 
• Repetition for no point whatsoever
• "...every operative on board sensed there was some kind of high-stakes operation going on. The stakes are inconceivably high, and Vayentha had better get it right this time." 
• I don't know about you, but I never believe the stakes are high unless I'm told twice in rapid succession using a variety of typefaces. 
• Way too many uses of "?!"     
• "I beg your pardon!?" 
• Using this redundant form of punctuation makes it look like Brown doesn't know the difference between a statement and a question. I'm at a loss here, folks. I have never seen so many uses of "?!" in my life. I'm convinced Dan Brown has a "thou shalt not edit me" clause in his contract. This had me tearing out my hair, and with a 500 page book, that's a lot of hair. I'm bald now, actually. Thanks, Dan Brown. Thanks a lot.
• Moments where the characters say really dumb things
• "Langdon teetered on the brink of consciousness. Someone is trying to kill me?"
• No shit, Sherlock. That's probably a reasonable conclusion when someone comes into your hospital wing, shoots your doctor right in front of you, and then takes aim. This is a character with a PhD who has been through this drill in three prior books. Is it really such a big surprise when it happens again? 
• Moments where the characters do really dumb things
• In the book, while on the run from people trying to kill him, Langdon checks his Harvard email. I literally screamed at the book: "You stupid fuck! You've been on three adventures where people are hunting you the way fat kids hunt cake, where your survival hinges on hiding your location. You STILL haven't learned what an IP address is?"

• A disturbing lack of useful history and symbology
• They play so much less of a role in this book than in The DaVinci Code. There's one moderately intriguing art world mystery raised (cerca trova), but it's not solved or referred to again after it points the characters toward the villain's plot. Never mind the rest of us who find the historical mystery more intriguing.   
• Dante seems integral to the story, but he's not
• He's a set piece. At its heart, nothing about the main conflict has a damn thing to do with Dante. The main conflict could have happened in any country, with any author who ever wrote a poem about death. It could have easily been T.S. Eliot, with The Waste Land standing in for the Inferno. Dante's just a red herring, a fancy set piece. Malthus is doing the heavy lifting here, but no one gives a crap about Malthus, so they needed Dante to bring sexy back.  
• The main conflict isn't even resolved, despite nearly 500 pages
• The book ends with a huge problem looming. We, the reader, knew what the problem was from the very beginning. We just had to wait for the characters to catch up. And then they do. And then nothing else happens. Seeing that the crisis looming is a big one, this seems either like a sequel setup (please, no) or a writer who's too bored with his own story to wrap it up. SPOILER ALERT: the looming problem is that humanity will be destroyed within a couple generations by a secret virus. What are the good people of the world doing about it? We don't know. The book's over. Have a nice day.
• Everything is boring
• The chase scenes are so long-winded you forget who and what the characters are running from. There's no historical mystery that you'd bite your own fingers off to solve. It's all about some stupid modern-day plague. The suspense is supposed to be in whether Langdon can stop it. But didn't they already do this in Mission Impossible 2? With better actors? I'll take Tom Cruise over Tom Hanks any day.

If I tried, I could probably come up with a few more things to say. But what's the point?

Go read a good book instead.

Happy Thanksgiving, Y'all: Here's the Story of My Ancestor Who Was Hung as a Witch

My 10th great-grandmother was hung as a witch in Connecticut. You've probably heard of the Salem Witch Trials, which took place in the early 1690s. Well, my homegirl beat them to it by getting herself hung in 1663.

As we're eating turkey and giving thanks for how awesome things are in our country and our lives, don't forget that the path to all-American awesomeness is strewn with bodies: Native Americans, mostly, but also some white people other white people didn't like very much.

We're not really sure what her maiden name was, but her first name was Rebecca. (My middle name, in case you were wondering.) She married a man named Abraham Elson, and had a daughter named Sarah who is my 9th great-grandmother. Abraham died, and Rebecca married a man named Jarvis Mudge. He died, too, and she married a third time to a man named Nathaniel Greensmith. Rebecca Greensmith is the name she died with.

She and Nathaniel lived in Hartford, Connecticut. They were not liked. Nathaniel had been in trouble with the law at least three times, once for stealing wheat, once for stealing a hoe, and once for battery. A local reverend, John Whiting, called Rebecca "a lewd, ignorant and considerably aged woman." Because everyone knows being an "aged woman" is some intolerable shit for Puritans.  

People had been on the lookout for witches for awhile--the very first suspected witch in the colonies was hung in Hartford in 1647. But now, in 1662, shit really hit the fan. It started, as it did in Salem, with the accusations of a girl. Before she died, John Kelley's 8-year-old daughter Elizabeth cried out in her delirium that her neighbor, Goodwife Ayres, was "tormenting her."

Not long afterward, John Cole's daughter, Anne, freaked the fuck out. She started having "fits" and said Satan's minions were messing with her. She named Elizabeth Seager as a witch, and someone (it might have been Anne) said Rebecca was a witch, too. Nathaniel and Rebecca were already disliked within the community, so it's not hard to see how they fell under suspicion. Rebecca was arrested in late 1662.

Hard-ass Puritan ministers took control of the situation, interrogating the accused. Reverend Samuel Stone, Reverend Joseph Haynes, and Reverend Samuel Hooker played bad cop/worse cop/abysmal cop, and Rebecca admitted that under Haynes's questioning, she could have "torn him in pieces." Satanic strength notwithstanding, Haynes survived unscathed.

Under interrogation, Rebecca confessed to witchcraft. She said she and some other folks used to meet out in the fields at night to booze it up. One of the women present said she would do bad things to the town marshal if she could. That's all the evidence they needed back in the day. Empty field + night time + booze + (heaven forbid) dancing = a genuine goddamn coven. Increase Mather took Rebecca's confession as definitive proof that witches were real.

Anxious for all the dirty details, her interrogators asked her whether she made a covenant with the devil. She said no, but that she had promised to go with him when he called. He was supposed to be back on Christmas, and that's when the covenant would be signed. She said the devil first appeared to her as a deer, and other times as a crow. Lord knows you can't trust animals. Not even once.

On December 30, 1662, both Rebecca and Nathaniel were indicted on charges of witchcraft.

On January 8, 1663, Rebecca said that although he hadn't confessed, she had doubts about Nathaniel's innocence. She said he was pretty old and weak, but that he somehow did lots of chores and outdoor work. Plus, it was pretty damn suspicious that he was friendly with some foxes and other woodland creatures.

The jury found them both guilty.

On January 25, 1662, Nathaniel and Rebecca were hung on "Gallows Hill," the present site of Trinity College.

"Witches" were also hung in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Virginia. Their names have all since been legally cleared, not helpful at all to the victims but somewhat helpful for the families and descendants. Not so in Connecticut. All of these folks are still officially on record as being guilty.

Even if the genealogical research that seems to link me to this woman proves to be faulty (as so much of it is), I'll always remember her story...and the dark side of what we celebrate every Thanksgiving.

Why I Won't Watch The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

I hated the first Hunger Games movie. Like, hated it. It was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. My husband walked out (well, walked out of our living room, where I'd paid $1 to Redbox it). I used the fast-forward button to get through the last 20-30 minutes of the movie because I couldn't take it anymore.  Hate me, flame me, put vitriolic in the comments, but I just don't see what the big deal is with this franchise.

Bear with me, because I'm trying to remember exactly why I disliked this movie so much based on a single viewing of almost a year ago. Here's the list, as best I can reconstruct it, in no particular order:

1. I expected more in the romance department. The Hunger Games is often touted as a superior alternative to Twilight, which is nothing but romance (creepy romance, supernatural romance, high school romance, call it what you will, but it's a romance). I failed to find a smidgen of comparable romance in this movie.  Was there any shadow of real human emotion between any of the three characters supposedly involved in this love triangle?  Can it even be called a triangle when one of the participants (played by Liam Hemsworth) was in the movie for all of five minutes?  That's not a triangle. It's a straight line with a wart on it.

That leaves us with Peeta and Katniss, a couple with the worst on-screen chemistry since Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant in that horrible witness protection program movie, or Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in Australia.  He passes out in a cave, and she loves him?  Or pretends to love him for the cameras?  I'm not sure and I don't care.  The concept of someone faking a relationship for publicity's sake was beaten to death during Kim Kardashian's first marriage. Better actors don't improve the storyline for me. 

2. The names. I'm not even going to talk about how ridiculous I feel typing the word "Peeta."  It's like "Pee," but it just keeps going.  Names are important.  I do not care for these. Give me Benjen Stark or Darth Maul or Gandalf the Grey. Peeta does not merit further discussion. Katniss sounds like tarted-up catnip. Everdeen is a line of non-stick cookware sold by Paula Deen.

3. I don't care about the main character.  Like, at all.  Katniss is more than flat--she's borderline dislikable for me.  Sure, she's meant to be introspective and self-reliant and brave, all admirable qualities, but also boring to watch. Most of the time, we're staring at J Law's blank face.  I hoped she'd get angry. Get upset. Reveal something. Do something interesting. I got bored by how capable she was at keeping her emotions under wraps. No one wants to watch Michelangelo paint an apartment wall white.  

For comparison's sake, I thought about a prickly-loner character that I did care about:  Rambo. Similar setup--a person alone, manipulated by governments and superiors into situations that risk life and limb. He doesn't talk much, doesn't like people, and yet I root for the guy. I want to watch him triumph.  I want him to get the pat on the back that no one else has ever given him.  He wants something good, and everything bad that he does is in service of his goal. I get that Katniss volunteered to save her sister. It was noble, and it should have had the same effect on me as Rambo's sacrifices, but it just didn't. I also hate kids.  

Another Stallone comparison springs to mind: his lone-wolf rock climber in Cliffhanger. Stallone is either much better than J-Law at using his face to reveal enough emotion to make you care, or his director gives him more leeway to do so. His features can fall, perk up, or reveal anger with no words written into the script.  Does he look cheesy doing so? Sure. But it's entertaining. If J-Law can do these things, the director needs to start asking her to.  She has an Oscar now. Forced heavy breathing and a blank-faced stare are no longer sufficient. 

If you say, "Sure, but Stallone is ridiculous and Jennifer Lawrence is an actress with a capital A," I say, "Stallone is ridiculous to the tune of $1,861,069,518 box office dollars and counting. Plus, he's Rocky." And don't tell me this movie is afraid of ridiculous. It has Woody Harrelson as a role model. 

4. The suspense was flat. Obviously, Katniss isn't going to die.  There are more books, which means there are more movies. Seeing her in a life-and-death situation is only going to end one way.  So what else am I supposed to give a crap about? I want to see her tested or changed or humbled.  None of those things happened.  She climbed some trees and shot some things.  Great.  Thanks for the memories.

5. Those stupid dog-like things chasing them at the end. The interwebs tell me they are called "muttations," which is another name that makes me want to listen to nails on a chalkboard. The interwebs also tell me that the creatures were used differently in the movie than in the book. The movie is my only reference here, and as far as the creepy-creature-chasing-the-hero concept goes, I've been there, done that...they're called hell-hounds, and they're in Supernatural. Want to see that stuff done right? Check out season 5, episode 10 ("Abandon All Hope...") where Jo and Ellen buy the farm to give Sam and Dean a snowball's chance of stopping Lucifer from launching the apocalypse.  I cry every time. More suspense, better tragedy, better character development, better everything.

6. I felt nothing while watching it. Except a profound longing for it to end. Yeah, it was sad when Rue died. But one tender moment didn't redeem the movie as a whole. I get the feeling I was supposed to be frightened, sad, horrified, excited, worried, and a whole bunch of other things that never crossed my mind. But everything was strangely antiseptic. I can't be worried for a character who is part of a trilogy. Everyone in the city is a dick. Half of the other kids in the games were dicks. I don't care about the downtrodden losers Katniss left behind. Want to see real suffering? Read about Russians during the first half of World War II. 

7. I did not like the world-building. I just didn't buy that part of the U.S. looks like an Andrew Wyeth painting circa 1940, while the other part looked like humans impersonating Muppets among the sets from Death Race. I couldn't believe that this is what happened to our country, that the world we live in now became the world I saw on that screen. And if I couldn't believe that, I couldn't believe anything else that happened, either.  Maybe more of this is explained in the book, which I have NOT read, but it was NOT explained in the film.  Let me attempt to summarize what I saw:  part of the U.S. rebelled against some future government, things went horribly awry, the place is now called Panem, and parts of it got sent back to the stone age.  What happened to electronics?  Where are things like power poles? And cars? And paved roads? Did every piece of technology invented after WWII just vanish from particular areas? Did fashion revert to the 1940s, too? I'm confused. 

8.  A dress that's on fire? You have to be kidding me.  The Golden Gate Bridge couldn't suspend my disbelief that far. Also, where are the jet packs and the holodeck? Why do they have flaming dresses but no jet packs? I'm confused.

I have never read the books.  I'm not planning on reading the books. The first movie made me want to run screaming in the other direction from the entire franchise. This is not meant to be a critique of the book(s), since it's entirely possible all my objections are addressed there. This is a critique of the film itself, for someone who came to it without the background (or the suspension of disbelief) provided by the books. It failed. These people think so, too:

#hungergames #catchingfire 

Strong Female Characters Are a Cop-Out

Witness the awesomeness
of my photo editing skills.

About two months ago, there was a lot of chatter about this article on NewStatesman.com--an essay on why the author hates the label "strong female character."

Here's the gist: "strong" has become another label that female characters now need to fit into. Princesses who know kung-fu, smart female characters who need to beat up a man for the audience to buy them as a bad-ass...it's become a trend, which devalues the whole idea.

The One with the Chinese Food
I hate the phrase "strong female character." It implies most women aren't strong, that there are so few strong ones we have to designate them with signs, like an endangered species. We call Chinese food Chinese food because it's different, not normal. In China, as the old joke on Friends goes, they just call it food.

It's hard to keep this discussion from devolving into semantics, the way it would in a grad school lit class ("Who defines 'strong'? Isn't 'strong' just another construct created by the existing power structure?"). I hate those kinds of discussions because they ignore what's real and here and now. It doesn't matter who defined it if the thing is what it is, and the "is" is what we all have to deal with.

Is she a strong female?
Or does she need nunchaku?

Dealing with the "Is"
Let's get back to the idea of a "strong female character."  What the hell does that even mean? Who is this bastion of female badassery?  Does she have physical prowess, a la Lara Croft? Is she scheming, like Cersei Lannister? Or does she have a spirit of adventure, like Amelia Earhart? If a character has all of these, she's too good to be true. If a character only has one, does it mean she's 2/3 weak? Which of these traits most conveys strength? Is it even possible to decide?

The recent flurry over "strong" female characters focuses on physical strength and mastery of the male characters. That's fine. I have no problem with that. If that's the tale those writers want to tell, they should arm their characters, male and female, with the resources needed to survive in that world. They'd be dead otherwise, and being dead would suck.

I do have a problem when female characters who don't know kung-fu or how to fire a 12-gauge aren't deemed strong. What if they can't do a single pull-up? What if they've lost every race they've ever run? It doesn't mean they can't fuck your shit up. It doesn't mean they're not strong within the world that author has created.

Examples, You Ask?
Let's look at two Disney villains. Would anyone say Maleficent is NOT a strong female character? I doubt it. She's intuitive. She's manipulative. She's regal. She delegates. She remembers shit. She can get her hands dirty when the situation calls for it. But she performs no special feats of strength. She has magic and minions to do her dirty work. Does that mean she isn't strong? Of course not. She's fearsome.

Ursula is a similar character of undeniable strength. She rules her under-the-sea kingdom with an iron fist. She's also intuitive and manipulative. She delegates . She remembers shit, too. But she's not going to do any pull-ups. She's not going to fire a gun. She does not know kung-fu. She's powered by rage, if anything. Does it mean she's not strong? I don't think so. She's a pretty powerful enemy.

So are these "strong female characters"? Or are they just characters?

What about Examples from Actual Books?

A Chuck Norris meme.
You had to know this was coming.

When I think of strong female characters I've admired, they were all off-kilter in a way:

• Turtle, from The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. A 12-year old who packed her cavities with bourbon-soaked cotton balls. Who learned to play the stock market to try and win old man Westing's fortune. Who kicked the shin of anyone who messed with her. But was she physically strong? No. She was a girl.
• Princess Eilonwy, from Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. She was kind of a tomboy, preferring pants to petticoats. She wanted to go on adventures with the boys. She wanted to rough people up when they pissed her off, but wanting didn't always match her abilities. She talked a tough game, but it was just a game. She wasn't actually going to take on the Cauldron-Born herself. She couldn't.
• Amelia Peabody, from Elizabeth Peters's series of mysteries. Ah, Amelia. She also wasn't physically strong, no more than an average woman who gets out of the house and is active, hence her need for an iron-shafted parasol to bonk people on the head. But she was smart, funny, crafty, daring, and ferociously protective of the people she loved. She explored pyramids in an age when most women got winded dusting an endtable.
• Honor Harris, from The King's General by Daphne du Maurier. Holy crap. This woman survived a revolution using her wits alone. She was paralyzed from the waist down, which means she couldn't even move under her own power. There is nothing physical she could do to defeat an enemy. Yet she survived when lots of the other characters didn't. 
• Arya Stark, from Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin and whoever writes all the TV show episodes. True, her character wants to learn to fight and wield a sword. But she kind of sucks at it. She's disarmed pretty much every time she tries to take someone on with her sword. But she's still alive when a hell of a lot of her family isn't. She's crafty. She's smart. She listens. She sticks up for her friends, at great peril to herself. She isn't afraid to say what she thinks, especially when she insists The Hound should die for killing her friend, a low-born butcher's boy. Any of the sword-wielding male characters could off her with a single stroke just to shut her up. But they don't. Does that mean she isn't strong? (Full disclosure: I've watched the show. I have not read the books yet.)

I want to see more characters like these. They're not perfect. They're not brilliant Harvard-educated astrophysicists who also look like Eastern European supermodels and who also have black belt kung-fu skills and who also like to wear black leather and get freaky in the bedroom. Too often, writers mistake "perfect" for "strong." At least until these "perfect" "strong" women have to be rescued by the hero. Then all that perfection just goes to waste.

That's right.
The queen's a badass.

Hell, Turtle Wexler doesn't even have basic oral hygiene down. But she won a fortune and beat out an apartment building full of adults, all theoretically older, wiser, and more experienced in the ways of the world. NO guns. NO kung-fu. NO physical skill of any kind. Honor Harris doesn't even have the use of her legs, and she cares for her lover when he's wounded in the English Civil War.

Strong is not muscle. Strong is not weapons. I am so tired of these two things being conflated with "strong" when it comes to discussing female characters. Can Joss Whedon write a strong female character without giving her strength or weapons?

"Strong" can't be taken out of the context of the work in which those female characters appear. It ruins everything to take a fictional character and hold her up to the same sunlight that illuminates my crows-feet. She's not next to me. She doesn't even exist. It can't and shouldn't be done.

She can only be judged on her strength in the world she lives in. How does she fare, mentally and physically, against other women and men? If she's only stronger than other women, how strong is that, really? If she's strong than some men and some women, she's doing slightly better than average. If she has the guts and smarts to beat out men and women and be the top dog in her book's world, she's a strong female character. Even if she can only do two push-ups, has never fired a gun, and flames don't shoot out of her eyes.

Why Having a Day Job Is Good for the Creativity

Ruth Brown Snyder. In the electric chair.
If this doesn't creep you out,
I don't know what will.

Have you ever seen a photo of a woman being executed in the electric chair? You have now. But what do this woman, a day job, and the life of a working writer have in common?

I'll tell you.

I work full time, with an hour commute each way. All told, my time is not my own from 6:40 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. 

That's a lot of time that I can't control or do anything with. 

So when I start complaining, it's almost always about not having enough time to write new books and market existing books. I'm deeply, deeply jealous of writer friends who don't work and can spend all day toiling over marketing plans and promoting their books. I can't. And while this feels like a huge disadvantage most days, I'm trying to look on the bright side. 

So I found three ways my day job makes me a better writer.

1. Money. As Dean Koontz wrote in How to Write Best Selling Fiction, "Money is freedom; money is time; money is fame; money is respect; money is a yardstick of many things, but most of all, money is money." I have bills. Lots of them. So devoting 11+ hours a day to being able to pay them is not only necessary, but it helps my mental state remain unstressed and clear for writing. 

If all I'm doing is worrying about the electricity getting shut off or the car repossessed, I'm not going to give a crap about made-up people or worlds. In that respect, having a day job makes my non-office time all about what I want to do. I'm not looking for a job, stressing out, or drifting between friends, hoping someone will feed me for free. Every minute off the clock is spent planning, dreaming, or doing. Yes, you could argue that a true writer writes no matter what. But even true writers really need to eat. Plus, getting foreclosed would make it really hard to charge my laptop. 

2. SEO and social media knowledge. I'm a writer. But I also know a bit about SEO. And a bit about social media. I read most of the big SEO blogs and have two monitors at work, where the good folks of Google+ scroll by all day long, presenting helpful insider tips for me on marketing, social media, writing, self-publishing, and of course, life insurance. I file all that knowledge away in my brain (and, if my brain fails, Evernote) for the day when I have the time to unleash it. 

I wouldn't have been forced to learn as much about social media as I have without this job. I resisted it pretty heavily until my paycheck became partly dependent on it. I still resist it in part...I refuse to get a smartphone (no Instagram for me, folks). At the same time, I have license to check every network there is, absorb as much knowledge as I can, and learn as much as I can to deploy on command and for my own benefit (after hours, of course). I have more weapons at my disposal than I did before I had this job. In this world, marketing is everything. And I'm so much better at it now than I was before, when I thought marketing was posting a new book on this blog.

3. The occasional stranger-than-fiction story that falls in my lap. I write about life insurance, all day every day. To make sure I have something new to say, I have to dig into some pretty weird stories. One weird story involves the woman in the picture, Ruth Brown Snyder. I was writing a blog post about the movie Double Indemnity, where life insurance fraud is a plot point. Come to find out, the movie is based on a novella by James M. Cain, who based the story on a real-life insurance fraud case.

Check this shit out. 

Ruth Brown Snyder was married to Albert Snyder, but having an affair with Henry Judd Gray. She told Gray that she wanted to convince her husband to get a life insurance policy and then kill him. Getting the husband to get a policy worked just fine. But she made seven (count 'em!) unsuccessful attempts to kill Albert before she and Gray decided to try something different. They garrotted Albert and made it look like a home invasion robbery. 

But there's some backstory you also need to know before we proceed. Why did Ruth want to kill Albert? It might have been because he made no secret of his real love, a woman named Jessie Guishard who died before she and Albert could be married. He loved her for years, which, you know, probably made Ruth feel awesome about herself. This guy talked about Jessie, kept her portrait on the wall, named his boat after her, and referred to her as "the finest woman I have ever met." I kinda feel for Ruth on this one. 

Anyway, so the cops are investigating this supposed home invasion gone wrong. They think it's kind of weird that nothing actually went missing. When they found a paper with "J.G." on it, they asked Ruth who "J.G." was. Ruth asks them what Judd Gray (her lover) has to do with anything. But the cops weren't referring to Gray. They were referring to one of Albert's papers with "J.G." on it--Jesse Guishard. So Ruth just handed them her lover's name. (Way to go, Ruth.) Once the cops started looking at the name Ruth dropped, they put two and two together.

Ruth and Gray were arrested, tried, and found guilty of murder. Both were sentenced to death via the electric chair. Of course, all photography of the execution was forbidden. But reporter Tom Howard was from Chicago (not New York) and knew he wouldn't be recognized as a reporter on the scene. He rigged up a weird leg camera that would take pictures without anyone knowing. He snapped his shot, and it was plastered all over the front page of newspapers the next day. The photo was described as one of the most famous images of the 1920s. The camera Howard used to take the shot is now in the Smithsonian.

James M. Cain was a reporter at the time of this trial. He wasn't covering it, but it was big news at the time. (Who did cover it? Mary Roberts Rinehart, D.W. Griffith, and Damon Runyan). When he wrote his novella, Double Indemnity, he interviewed some insurance agents in L.A. One told him,  "All the big crime mysteries in this country are locked up in insurance company files, and the writer that gets wise to that...is going to make himself rich."

Guess I'll keep the day job.
Until the whole money tree thing happens.

So, not only did I find this incredible quote and this wacked-out story, I now have an idea for a short story of my own. And I got it because of my day job. 

Serendipitous, yes? 

The lesson here is that no matter how unrelated your day job seems, if you're a writer, it's feeding your brain. It's feeding your bank account. It's putting ideas and experiences in front of you that you might not have otherwise. Process them, and then use them in the work you want to do.

5 Lessons Writers Can Learn from Pancho and Lefty

I grew up on country music. This was the late '70s and early '80s, so we're talking real country. Outlaw country.

Country that would duct-tape Taylor Swift's mouth shut, take away all Brantley Gilbert's jewelry, and tell Keith Urban that rehab is for quitters.

One of my all-time favorite songs is "Pancho and Lefty," made famous by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. It's a story song, written by Townes Van Zandt. I still hang on every word like there's a secret nugget of truth waiting to be discovered.

How is there so much embedded in one sub-five-minute song? Have a listen and we'll find out.




Now, how can writers learn to tell a story so simply, with so much depth? Let's take a look.

1. A first-person narrator telling a story about someone else can be really effective.

No less a writer than Jonathan Franzen tells us that we should write in third person. This is one of those "establishment" rules for serious literary works. The reasoning? Third person is more remote (read: mysterious), which makes the reader work harder. It's also less limiting if you want to explore multiple characters. Plus, you get to create both the narrator's persona and your main character's (note: these are NOT the same thing).

"Pancho and Lefty" doesn't follow the third-person rule. It has a first-person narrator; however, the narrator isn't the subject of the song. This accomplishes two things:

True story.

(1) it creates immediacy with the use of the "I" voice, which is why many writers use first-person voice
(2) it generates mystery since the "I" voice isn't the subject of the song.

Our narrator probably knows Pancho and Lefty, and might have witnessed the events in the song. But we don't know. (Mystery? Check.) Our narrator says, "Livin' on the road, my friend, is gonna keep you free and clean." Who is the "friend"? Is it the generic use of "friend" that he's using to tell a campfire story? Or is he singing to an actual friend, maybe Lefty himself, after the events of the song? The narrator holds himself back from us, not making this clear. (Remote? Check.)

2. The right similes can set a tone without a single adjective.

In the first verse, we get two similes in a one-two punch: "Now you wear your skin like iron / Your breath as hard as kerosene."

Think about that. What does it mean to wear skin like iron? It means you think you're invincible. You think you can take a licking and keep on ticking. Or it means you've hardened yourself to the outside world so it can't reach you, no matter how hard it tries. (Unless you rust...that would suck.)  Each of these meanings make the simile richer. And here's the kicker: who is the singer talking to? Who wears his skin like iron? A man listening to the story? Lefty? Is he talking about himself in some weird reflective way? We don't know. But we do know this song is going to be about a mysterious bad-ass. This simile sets a mood, which is what all good storytellers must do.

And what the hell does it mean to have breath as hard as kerosene? Kerosene's a liquid. Liquid, by definition, isn't hard. Or is he referring to its scent, its noxious fumes? Those things are gases, which also by definition, are not hard. We're taking a trip through the three stages of matter here, just working on an interpretation of a single simile. Using "hard" to describe something that isn't hard works well here, especially following on the heels of the "skin like iron" simile. Skin is not like iron, and breath is not hard. But isn't that so much more effective than saying, "This is a song about some hardened criminals?"

3. Using action as a form of characterization works really well.

Also a true story.

It's pretty boring when someone says, "John was a good man" or "John was a bad man." What does "good" or "bad" mean? These aren't absolutes, especially in fiction. It's far more effective to say, "John rescued the cat in the tree because it belonged to the little girl down the block" or "John skinned the neighbor's cat in retribution for the loud party three nights back." This lets the reader place John appropriately on the scale of goodness and badness.

That's what our narrator is doing in this song. Pancho "wore his gun outside his pants / For all the honest world to feel."  I think "feel" should be "fear" here, but that's just me. In any case, the narrator isn't saying, "Pancho was really good at shooting people" or "Pancho had a death wish." No. He's telling us something about Pancho that's revealed through his action. What does it mean to wear a gun outside one's pants? Several things: Pancho means business. Pancho isn't afraid of conflict. Pancho is confident in his abilities. Pancho wants you to stay the fuck out of his way. So simple, yet so effective.

Lefty gets the same kind of characterization in the beginning of the next verse. "Lefty he can't sing the blues / all night long like he used to / The dust that Pancho bit down south / ended up in Lefty's mouth."

That's a powerful way of saying, "Lefty feels like shit for the role he played in Pancho's death." Instead of using the most obvious word on the planet ("guilt"), the narrator ties Lefty to Pancho's death using setting and figurative language. Lefty doesn't have a literal mouthful of dirt. But he's carrying a crap-ton of baggage that has to do with Pancho's death, so much baggage that he can't even sing anymore. We're left to wonder...is that how Lefty earns a living? Is he so broken up over his buddy's death that can't earn a living? This image conveys emotion and suggests conflict in a few simple words. Damn.

4. Be specific with names and places.

There's a beautiful juxtaposition in this song between the vagueness of the story itself and the concrete setting. We don't know who the narrator is. We don't know if he's talking to Lefty or about him. We don't know for sure what went down between Pancho and Lefty (although we can guess). But we do know Pancho died in Mexico. And we know Lefty "split for Ohio." Later, we get more detail: Cleveland's cold. Even here, we have layers. No shit, Cleveland is cold. The average temperature in January is about 28 degrees Fahrenheit. But is it also cold because Lefty lacks Pancho's companionship?

What I love here is the specificity of "Cleveland." Lefty didn't go "out west" or "down south." There's something so much more pathetic about him shacking up in Cleveland, a non-glamorous city that's stuck between the midwest and the east. With all apologies to Cleveland, perhaps the idea here is Lefty's in nowheresville. But rather than say it, the narrator uses a specific place that plants that idea in our heads.

5. Leave a little (or a lot) to the reader's imagination.

Probably not a true story.

One of the best parts of this song is its mystery. The narrator doesn't tell us exactly what happened. How did the Federales finally get Pancho? Why did Lefty split on the day he died, with a mysterious sum of money? Did Lefty sell Pancho out? Probably. Why did Lefty do it? We have no idea. A secret dream of making it big as a singer someday? The need to get out of a life of crime? Why didn't he have the balls to say, "Hey, Pancho, I'm gonna hang up the old gun belt now and start singing showtunes for tips. You're cool with that, right?" Is it really a commentary on friendship, on weakness of character, or misguided loyalty? Or all these things? Or none of them?

We don't know, and that's the way it should be. That's why this song needs a narrator who isn't Pancho or Lefty. That's why it's so much more powerful when we hear about Lefty's inability to sing anymore. That's why it's still moving at the end of the song, when not only Lefty but the Federales are old and gray. Everyone involved still remembers, still feels bad, still has some regrets. It's that important to them. And now it's that important to me, because I've just written 1,500 damn words about an old-ass country song.