Guilt

by Barbara D'Amato


From my living room window, I can look out at Lake Michigan. In many ways this is very, very nice. I enjoy seeing the clouds and seagulls. The colors of Lake Michigan change as the sun moves. It’s never the same and always interesting.

However, I also see people jogging, rollerblading, racing, power-walking, and bicycling on the esplanade. And swimming until a week or so ago. Whether I’ve been slothful, hanging around the house, or have just come in from a two-mile walk, watching them makes me feel lazy.

I realize the ones I saw jogging or bicycling this morning are not the same ones running, rollerblading, or skateboarding at noon or in the evening—or if they are, they’re nuts. But they make me feel like a lazy slob, whoever they are.

The same thing happens with writing.

I asked one of my writing friends some years ago whether she subscribed to Publishers Weekly. She said, “Absolutely not! All those reviews would make me feel I wasn’t working fast enough.”

I have other writing friends who say either that they never read online reviews, writers' gossip sites, or other sites about new books that have come out, or that they read them only right after they’ve sent their book to their publisher.

When I read review publications, it seems like everyone in the world has a new book out. I should be working faster, working harder, working smarter. Even bookstores, which I love, make me feel like a lazy slob. They are a reproach to me.

Why am I still on page 129? I’ve been on 129 for three days.

Why did I just waste half an hour playing two games of computer crossword? Why do I keep going to the anacrostic site when I should be writing? Why did anybody invent online jigsaw puzzles?

Do you writers out there feel the same?

I should get to work right now. But maybe just a short round of drop quotes to wind down.

Sidetracked...

by Michael Dymmoch




Saw this sign on a gas pump recently and I had to take a photo. (With a digital camera, photos are quicker than notes and proof of things you’d have to see to believe.)

Anyway, I shot the sign because I was under the impression that trafficking blood was illegal in Illinois. And I wanted to verify or disabuse my assumption. Because I’ve spent too much time in the last year waiting on hold and stumbling through phone mazes, I thought I’d try looking up the Ilinois statute on blood donation before trying to find a government employee familiar with blood donation laws. (Yeah, I could have just called a blood bank, but what would I blog about?) And I guess I like to do things the hard way. So….

I started with the Illinois Department of Health website…

And immediately got detoured by the law requiring that traumatic injuries be reported (and to whom). Now I have a copy of the law and the form reporters are supposed to use sitting on my desktop. The form consists of two full pages of boxes to check or fill. (No wonder hospital visits cost so much.)


The blood-law information that was easily located in the Illinois Compiled Statutes* site seemed to be limited:



The public Health laws also contained (410 ILCS 535/) Vital Records Act, which distracted me again because a recent trip to the Lake County (IL) Coroner’s Office for an autopsy report (a public record that anyone can get for $30 since the dead have no right to privacy) and a toxicology report (ditto; $15) had made me wonder whether just anyone could get your birth or death certificate. (Short answer, not legally.)

By this time at least an hour had passed and I still didn’t know whether it’s legal to buy and sell blood in Illinois. Since I hadn’t even made it halfway down my day's list of things to do, I gave up and called the Illinois Department of Public Health’s Chicago office. The lady who answered the phone told me to call 217-782-7412, which turned out to be a downstate number for the ILDPH, Division of Healthcare Facilities and Programs. When I dialed the number, I got the division’s office hours and a phone maze, including the suggestion to check the website I had just visited unsuccessfully, and the advice to “stay on the line for an operator.” I did and got an answering machine. I left a message. (I did get a call back, but the woman who returned my call didn’t know the answer. She said she’d ask someone and get back to me. I’m still waiting.)

Since I’d now spent two hours “researching”, I decided to cut to the chase and call Life Source. One phone maze and two live conversations later, I still didn’t know if selling blood is legal. I did know (what I’d known before I called) that Life Source doesn’t pay for blood.

I decide to see if the Illinois Attorney General’s office could answer my question. The website's "Contact us” supplied no phone numbers, just a form to fill out with the following caveat: “E-mail messages are forwarded to the appropriate staff person and will be responded to by regular mail via U.S. Postal Service in the order they are received. Because of the large volume of e-mails received daily, there may be a delay in our responding to your message.” (I’m still not holding my breath.)

So I gave the IL Department of Public Health website one more try and found this:

TITLE 77: PUBLIC HEALTH
CHAPTER I: DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH
SUBCHAPTER d: LABORATORIES AND BLOOD BANKS


Which answers one of my origingal questions: “Is it leagal to use purchased blood in Illinois?” But it raises another: “Is the ad legal and the company that placed it on the up and up?” I don’t have the time to pursue it any further. And I’m beginning to see why lawyers can get so much for their services.




* An explanation of how ILCS--the Illinois Compiled Statutes--are organized, takes up several pages at http://www.ilga.gov/commission/lrb/lrbnew.htm#ILCS .

My Brain Hurts!

-Sean Chercover

NOTE: To those of you attending (and you should) Murder & Mayhem In Muskego this coming weekend ... rest assured, I'm headed to the doc in the morning, so if I'm there, I'm not contagious.

Okay, so I'm sick. Had this stupid cold for a few days, no big deal, but now I've got a fever...



...and a monster headache...



...and other symptoms too unpleasant to report here, so it seems to have turned from a stupid cold into a stupid flu.

Anyway. My brain is addled, and I can't think of a damn thing to blog about.

Tomorrow morning, after the doctor tells me I just have the regular flu and not the piggy flu (knock on wood), I plan to curl up in bed and drink Neo Citran and watch movies all day.

Got any recommendations for me?

The happiest place on earth

By David Heinzmann

Whenever I walk up the sprawling front steps of the Cook County Criminal Courts Building, I murmur to myself that this is the happiest place on earth. That’s stolen from my friend Jeff Coen who would call it that whenever something particularly medieval happened within the walls of that giant meatgrinder of American justice in the years that he covered 26th and Cal for the Tribune. Then I remove my belt, empty my pockets and make my way through the metal detectors. When I entered last week I headed up to courtroom 301 to check on a case.

The little courtrooms are especially gloomy, with their low ceilings, cramped rows of gallery benches and tinted glass walling off the public from the actual court proceedings. I sat down among a dozen Hispanic and black women who were waiting for a glimpse of their sons and boyfriends in custody. On the other side of the aisle were several people in bright blue t-shirts emblazoned with some kind of Chicago Police Department logo. One of the women, a middle-aged blond who sounded like she was used to running an office, seemed to be in charge.

Every so often a deferential young prosecutor would step through the glass doors and say, “Now, you know this is just a status date? Nothing will really happen today.”

The blond woman kept answering knowingly. “Yes, we know. We’ve been following this from the beginning.”

It turned out they were there for two young women charged with defacing the police memorial near Soldier Field, and this crowd was coming to every court date to make sure the judge saw them out there, standing up against any disrespect shown their fallen brethren. When the case was called, all the people in blue t-shirts stood up, as if to testify themselves. The prosecutor was right, nothing happened and the case was bumped to a new date sometime early next year. The blue t-shirt brigade gathered up their things and trooped out of the courtroom, leaving behind a lone man who had been sitting quietly behind them. Late forties, paunchy, bald, wearing a camel hair jacket and a tie.

They had a lot in common with the guy, but the police supporters would not be there when Officer John Haleas’ case was called. He was, however, the reason I was there. Once the cop who made more DUI arrests than anybody else in Illinois, Haleas produced headlines last year when he was charged with lying on police reports to make his questionable drunken driving busts stick in court. What was worse, the case had come to light because he had brazenly done it in front of two assistant state’s attorneys, who rode in his squad car one night to see how traffic arrests are made.

Haleas was in court trying to get his case dismissed and Judge James Obbish was ready to announce his ruling. The defense lawyer argued that the investigation had been tainted by prosecutors using forbidden evidence. Early in the case, Haleas had been required to give internal affairs a statement about the accusations as part of a police department administrative probe. Refusing to give such a statement is grounds for firing but a U.S. Supreme Court ruling holds that using such forced statements for criminal charges would violate the officer’s 5th Amendment rights. So it’s off limits to prosecutors.

The prosecutor involved specialized in police misconduct and insisted he treated the Haleas case like all his other cases over the years, carefully avoiding the compelled statement. But the internal affairs investigator involved claimed that, for some reason, he had told the prosecutor all about Haleas’ compelled statement, thereby poisoning the prosecution with the taint of the forbidden fruit.

Judge Obbish sided with the internal affairs version, declared the case compromised and threw out Haleas’ indictment. Prosecutors will appeal, but Haleas, who had become a pariah over the last year, walked out of the courtroom a free man.

I immediately stepped into the hallway and thumbed out a quick and dirty version of the story on my BlackBerry for the Trib’s online breaking news page. The story was up in minutes, while I was still in the hallway talking to lawyers, and soon readers were posting comments.

Most of the comments expressed outrage of the something fishy here bent. The alleged dirty cop gets off on a technicality because of a bush-league investigative error. Cops looking out for their own, the fix was in, etc.

I don’t check the infamous cop blog all that often, but sometimes I can’t resist. Especially on a story like this. As I had expected, cops saw things very differently. There was a chorus of rejoicing, applause for the judge “following the law,” and congratulations to Haleas for beating the rap.

The difference in perspective between cops and civilians struck me, though I’m more than a little familiar with it.

In a city as corrupt as Chicago, many people fear the power of the police. And the Haleas accusations seemed to tap right into the disastrous run-in with a bad cop nightmare for many people.

On the other hand, in a city of such polar extremes, so cosmopolitan and beautiful in some quarters but so bloody and vicious in others, a lot of cops feel beaten up an abandoned by the politicians they obey and the citizens they protect.

Some people believe the system will always protect cops. Some cops believe the system is always out to get them.

It wasn’t quite an OJ-verdict moment, but as I left the happiest place on earth I did wonder how the folks in the blue t-shirts would have reacted if they had stuck around to see the Haleas case go down the drain.

And the Winner Is...

I'm reading short stories for the Edgars, and I confess that I'm dismayed by the amount of graphic and degrading sex contributors use. Eight-year-old girls are abused by sexual predators and no detail is omitted. Beautiful rich girls are decapitated in technicolor.

Time Magazine's October 14 issue proclaimed that women have more power but are unhappy. Maybe because we're being raped and decapitated in record numbers in film and fiction.

Sarah Weinman, one of the most thoughtful writers in the blogosphere, has an interesting post on this called "Getting Re-Sensitized to Violence."

Weinman starts the post with a quote from Jessica Mann:

When a female corpse appeared on the jacket of a crime-writing colleague's new book, she pointed out to her publisher that the victim in the story was actually a man. Never mind that, came the reply, dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don't. Nor do dead children or geriatrics. Which explains why an increasing proportion of the crime fiction I am sent to review features male perpetrators and almost invariably female victims — series of them. Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims' sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or buried alive.

Side-by-side with this comes PW's list of the 10 best books of 2009. It's not just that all ten were written by men, but many of them were tired old paeans to male sexual fantasies. Jeff in Venice, for instance, takes place in two sections. In the first, set at among academics at the Venice Biennale, we get pages and pages of the hero doing lines (under a Tintoretto ceiling, among other places), while having sex with a predatory American art historian. David Lodge did a better job of sending up the academy decades ago, and, well, Portnoy's Complaint isn't exactly news these days.

What gives with this? Why, when women's wages have reached the heady historic high of 77 cents on the dollar paid to men, when three of the last four Secretaries of State have been women, and even one or two Fortune 500 companies have women chairs, why are women being raped and beaten into oblivion?

What's in a Title? Everything (a/k/a Help, please)

by Laura Caldwell

Titles are the one of trickiest parts of writing a book. I learned that years ago with a novel of mine that was, ultimately, called The Night I Got Lucky. Originally, the book had been named What You Wish For. It was about a woman who got everything she ever wanted overnight and not only has to deal with the consequences but with the feeling of not having contributed to her life. Ultimately, I hoped the book was an essay on the tests of marriage. But the original title wasn't working for a number of people on my team, and so we went back to the drawing board. What should we call it? We came up with hundreds of titles in the next few weeks, but none of them seemed right. I’d written three women’s fiction novels (“chick lit,” if you will), and everyone thought we needed a title in that vein, something sassy, beguiling. We went round and round. Finally, still no perfect title in sight, we settled on The Night I Got Lucky, a (hopefully) catchy reminder that the character, in one night, had gotten it all. Of course, the title had a sexier implication. And that’s the way most readers saw that title. I have to admit, I’ve never liked it, never been comfortable with it, although I love the book and I’m immensely proud of it.

This summer my Izzy McNeil trilogy was released. I know y’all are sick of hearing about it, but just as a reminder for the purposes of this blog, the titles were Red Hot Lies, Red Blooded Murder, and Red White and Dead. I'm now writing four more Izzy novels, and we're trying to decide again about the titles. Should we stick with the red theme? Izzy is, after all, a redhead and red is a powerful burst of the word with lots of mysterious implications. But I'm afraid readers might get confused. They might wonder, did I read that red one or that other red one? I know this confusion because the same thing happened to me with Robert Ludlum’s books featuring Jason Bourne. I couldn't distinguish between the The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Ultimatum or The Bourne Hell (was that one of them? Kinda like that title). So, now we're trying to decide whether to move onto another color. A blue series perhaps? Something like, (just tossing these out there) - The Blue Room, The Blue Hat, The Blue Diamonds? Is that too simplistic? Maybe we should stick with red albeit in a different way, maybe using synonyms like ‘crimson’ or ‘scarlet’? And if we were to cast aside the red, how could we keep that theme in there somewhere? Perhaps have my name in red? Or have a red icon on each cover? We're all brainstorming over here. If you have any thoughts, we'd love to hear 'em.

What Are You Trying To Say?

by Marcus Sakey

I do maybe 30% of my writing on a laptop from various locations: in front of the window, standing at the counter, on the porch with a cigar. The remainder I do in the second bedroom we've rigged as a den. The split system works for me; mobility shakes me up when necessary, but generally, what I need is a room with a door that closes and a window that looks out onto a brick wall.

As a fringe benefit, this means that most of my writing is done facing a proper desktop monitor. And like any proper monitor, I’ve covered it with scraps of paper.

I started this back when I was freelancing as a copywriter. Sometimes the work is about headlines and campaigns, but more often, especially when freelancing, the work is body copy, which is essentially the text inside the brochure. It’s considered less glamorous, but—no surprise—I always liked it, because done well, that’s the part that is really going to sell someone.

I don’t remember the specific project I was working on, but it was something lengthy and detailed, with lots of information that needed to be conveyed without boring the reader. And so I found I kept repeating one of my writing mantras to myself. It’s a line I go to all the time when trying to trying to craft an argument, formulate a tricky sentence, or organize my thoughts:

What are you trying to say?

Simplistic, I know, but it’s one of the all-time great clarifiers.

Find yourself bound up? What are you trying to say?

Can’t figure out which information you need to include? What are you trying to say?

Wondering how to structure an essay? Well, what are you…you get the point.

Anyway, I was repeating it aloud so much that I printed it out and taped it to my monitor, front and center, so that every time my eyes and attention drifted, I was reminded of a first principle.

As you can see, one thing led to another.

The quotes framing my monitor have been collected over years, and each had to grab me, shake me, and, most important, help me. Real estate is at a premium, so it's a zero-sum game; for a new ont to go up, an old one has to come down. Some are my ideas; some are from other people. But even after staring at them for years, I still find them helpful, so I thought I’d share them. If you're a writer, these are gold:

“The Ideas aren’t the hard bit. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you’re trying to build. My idea of hell is a blank screen. And me, staring at it, unable to think of a single thing worth saying, a single character that people could believe in, a single story that hasn’t been told before.”
-Neil Gaiman


“There is a wall that I hit during the writing of every book. It’s usually around the halfway stage. I start to doubt the plot, the characters, the ideas underpinning it, my own writing, in fact every element involved in the process. Progress slows.

There is always the fear that this book, this story, is the one that should not have been started. The idea here isn’t strong enough. The plot is going nowhere, I’ve taken a wrong turn.”
-John Connolly


“If you don’t feel that you are on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital. If you don’t have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you are not trying to tell enough.”
-John Irving


“There are very few mistakes in life that can’t be corrected if you got the guts.”
-Richard Price

“I half commit myself to some distant future date. But most of the intervening period disappears in a kind of anxious state of walking about. You cannot start until you know what you want to do, and you do not know what you want to do until you start. Panic breaks that cycle. Finally a certain force in the accumulated material begins to form a pattern.”
-Tom Stoppard


“Get the story launched at full gallop. Introduce characters who are, if not completely likable, at least people with a core sense of integrity. Keep the plot complex enough so that there’s always a twist coming. Pay attention to your character’s emotional lives. Learn to introduce conflict in every chapter.”
-Tess Gerritsen


“The best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius, there is always craftsmanship.”
-Robert Harris

I've got three lines of my own up there, reminders of my own personal foibles:

“What are you trying to say?”

“You are hereby released from writing the perfect novel.”

“Terror is better than ennui.”

Oh, and there's also a cartoon of a naked woman drawn by my wife. That doesn’t really help with the writing, but does make me smile.

So what about you? Anything you’ve read or heard that helps with your own creative process? Anything taped to your monitor?

Trust and Hope

by David Ellis

Yesterday on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Peggy Noonan wrote that Americans no longer have hope, that they no longer think their leaders can solve the problems facing them. She made the point that during the economic troubles of the 70s and early 80s, Americans still had optimism that things would turn around; today, she argued, they do not have such hope.

I suppose the fashionable thing here would be to say that I disagree. But I think she may be right. I look at some of the problems we face and wonder whether the word solution even applies to them.

Will we ever settle the debate about free markets versus governmental regulation? No, because we never have a serious enough discussion about it. Politicians will throw out bromides and the robotic media will lap them up and then talk about the latest sex scandal. We’ll regulate the hell out of business until … well, until it hurts our economy enough that we de-regulate … and then that will work out just fine (see Reagan administration, second term) until the investor class and the Fortune 500 companies have ripped off and hurt people enough that we have no choice but to regulate them again (see Obama). And we will overreact, of course, every single time. We will regulate way too much and then we’ll de-regulate way too much. But will we ever get it right? No, because there is no “right,” and even if there were, who would say so? Politicians? No, they’ll never say, “Y’know, things are just perfect right now, so let that incumbent stay in office.” The media? Please. “Things are working out just fine” is not a headline you see a lot. Doesn’t sell a lot of newspapers, does it?

Terrorism. Do we think our leaders will solve that problem? And first off—what is the problem? How is it defined? I think most Americans define the problem as wanting to feel safe. But what we really mean is we want to feel safe while continuing to have the same liberties and freedom we previously enjoyed. That’s the catch, of course. So we react and overreact. We go too far with a Patriot Act after 9/11 and then, after we’re feeling safer many years later, we overreact the other way and talk about repealing the Act in its entirety and closing Gitmo and holding civilian trials for terrorists. These issues are way too complicated to be settled during campaign season in sound bites, as President Obama is surely discovering. The bigger point is that we’ll never feel entirely safe. What about safer? Well, what does that really mean? Either you’re surprise-attacked or you’re not, and you never know when it’s coming. Safer? I don’t think the concept even makes sense.

Is Peggy Noonan right that we no longer believe our leaders can solve the problems? There is no perfect answer, of course, but I think that, by and large, she is correct. I think people are realizing that many of these problems just don’t get solved. We just see-saw back and forth, too extreme on one side, too extreme on the other, with our leaders whispering sweet nothings, their challengers shouting doom-and-gloom, the media just along for the ride (especially if there’s sex or corruption involved). We have stopped trying to solve anything and moved toward simply trying to mitigate our problems as much as possible, and I’m not sure the public trusts their leaders even to do that much anymore.

On The Road

by Libby Hellmann

I'm still on the road with DOUBLEBACK, and my mind is mush. The highlight so far has been Sedona, AZ, which I'd never visited before. I did a workshop at Kris Neri's wonderful Well Red Coyote Bookstore (Thanks again Kris and Joe). Btw, Kris has a new book out, too.

So I used the event as an excuse to spend the night in Sedona. My friend Terry and I went hiking the next morning, then drove through Jerome-- which is like entering a time warp -- on our way back to Scottsdale.

For those of you who already know the beauty of that part of the country, enjoy the pictures. For those of you who don't, get yourself out there. It's majestic... and humbling. And there might be something to all those vortexes. I really did feel calmer driving through certain parts of town.

There’s a Kind of Hush

By Kevin Guilfoile

Two weeks ago I posted about little coincidences outside of your reading that often increase your appreciation of a novel. I talked about it with respect to Theresa Schwegel's great new book, Last Known Address, but I also mentioned that I had just finished reading our own Sara Paretsky's outstanding new novel Hardball. And son of a gun if it didn't happen to me again.

In Hardball, VI Warshawski is investigating the disappearance of a young man from Chicago's South Side more than 40 years ago. In fact the last time anyone saw Lamont Gadsden was on January 25, 1967. That's significant because on January 26, the worst snow storm in Chicago history hit the city. Vic, who grew up on the Southeast side, remembers the day well, and she describes it in the book this way:

Oh yes, the big storm of 'sixty-seven. I'd been ten then, and it seemed like a winter fairyland to me. Two feet of snow fell; drifts rose to the height of buildings. The blizzard briefly covered the yellow stains that the steel mills left on our car and house, painting everything a dazzling white. For adults, it had been a nightmare. My dad was stuck at the station for the better part of two days while my mother and I struggled to clean the walks and get to a grocery store. Of course, the mills didn't shut down, and within a day the mounds of snow looked dirty, old, dreary.

I've been engaged in a fun, year-long project of digitizing and editing dozens of 8mm reels, home movies taken by my wife's family from about 1935 to 1975. They also lived on the South Side. And shortly after I read Hardball, I came across the following video, taken by my father-in-law, of the aftermath of the 1967 storm. By itself, it's a pretty typical home movie. But having just read Sara's book, it was almost like a DVD extra, like evidence in Lamont Gadsden's disappearance.



Well, in the context of Sara's book, I thought it was cool. But here's where I confess that I showed you that video just so I would have an excuse to show you this next one. It's also from my in-laws' 8mm archive, and it's also of a snow storm, but it's a lot less typical. This was taken in January of 1939 (during the seventh-largest snowfall in Chicago history) and this time my wife's grandfather actually got his camera out in the storm. In addition to family and dogs playing in the snow, he filmed the wreckage of two El trains which had crashed on the Garfield Park Line. And in the final frames you can see the horse drawn carriages that were used to haul the snow away from Crawford Avenue (now called Pulaski). The footage is in excellent condition and pretty remarkable, I think, as a snapshot of one Chicago neighborhood on an historic day more than 70 years ago. No one has even looked at it for probably half a century. I haven't seen too many videos quite like it.



Anyway, if you want to set your next novel during Chicago's Storm of the Century of 1939, there's your reference. And while you wonder with the fellows in that video how they are ever going to get that train off the elevated tracks, here's an outstanding story about how the CTA rail lines got their color-coded names.

Follow Kevin on Twitter.

Winter's Coming! Whee!

by Barbara D'Amato

I get exasperated with TV news anchors who turn to the meteorologist and say, “Don’t tell me we’re going to get any of that nasty white stuff.” I like snow.

No, I don’t ski. Not downhill and not cross-country. You might as well nail boards to my feet.

But I like things to happen. The glory of Chicago weather is that it’s always changing. It’s not boring.

When I was a child, we used to visit my mother’s uncle and aunt in Florida. No matter what time of year we went, it was always the same. Warm, maybe afternoon rain. Warm, maybe afternoon rain. Warmmaybeafternoonrainwarmmaybeaft— Okay, in the summer I guess it was warmer and buggier. With maybe afternoon rain. It was boring.

The upper Midwest is the hardest place on earth to predict the weather.

I’m not a masochist. I have memories of going to classes at Northwestern in Evanston, parking the car on the lakefront in blizzards and walking to campus in sleet storms. I’d get there with a turtleshell of ice on my back. It wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t boring, either.

Now that I don’t go out to work, I can choose my weather to walk in, but there is still nothing as wonderful as walking in that first fat falling snow.

Ninety degree days with hundred per cent humidity are less fun. They make me feel sluggish and stupid, but they are a change.

The only weather that actually frightens me is the occasional extremely high wind. Jeanne Dams, Mark Zubro and I were walking back from the Newberry Library when that big wind hit—the wind that blew the scaffolding off the Hancock Building and killed several people. There was siding and glass and insulation shooting past, and we huddled in a hotel lobby for a while.

Some years ago I was out walking in a very high wind and foolishly had my jacket open. The wind picked it and me up like a sail and dropped me on my back.

But still it was an event.

Chicagoans –you who complain about the weather—is Chicago compulsory? Or do you really like our weather? My guess is that most Chicagoans have a sneaking affection for it that they don’t want to admit to.

Tell the truth, now. Do you HAVE to live in Chicago?

Windy City Metals

by Michael Dymmoch
Great thing about being a writer is you get to use things you stumble across in your everyday life—sort of like getting free materials when you manufacture widgets. I discovered Windy City Metals (4617 W Division St) when someone in my building threw out a 60 pound compressor. I didn’t want to see it buried in a landfill, but it wasn’t on Waste Management’s approved recyclables list. And my building regulations don’t allow me to leave stuff in the alley for Laura Caldwell’s Shopping Cart Guy. I recalled seeing an ad for WCM on one of their trucks. It turned out to be a pretty cool place (and clean, relatively speaking), populated by real characters.



Like Gerardo, who started to sway, then two-step, and finally sing along with the salsa music that employees were playing at disco volume. Gerardo got me smiling, and tapping my foot. Which prompted me to ask his name. Which prompted him to ask me, “Queres bailar?” I noticed he was entertaining several of the other customers as well. Actually, some of the other customers were pretty entertaining too—at least for a geek like me.

A couple of them backed their truck up near the waiting line and pulled an enormous metal frame off the back, onto the concrete floor. The frame supported two— I don’t know what they were called—some kind of motors or compressors. The guys proceeded to beat the frame apart with a sledgehammer (components sell for more if separated).





Even in line, one of them was dismantling while he waited his turn.






As the recycling volunteer for my building, I visit WCM at least once a month, and I’ve started carrying my camera because, frankly, some of the stuff I notice while I’m out are unbelievable. Like the guy entering the yard on his bike, towing a bike trailer, with a shopping cart full of assorted junk attached to the rear. (Didn’t get my camera out fast enough to get that one.) Or the fuzzy trailer I spotted along Division Street on the way to WCM.


I’ve been recycling things since my conversion on Earth Day 1970. When I was a single mom, a trip to the junk yard with aluminum chairs I’d scavenged, helped me out when the money ran out before the month did. Now, I donate my proceeds to the employees' holiday fund and just keep the characters, the locations and the things you couldn’t make up.

Writing Spaces . . . George Foreman . . . Prizes!

by Sean Chercover

I'm insanely jealous of writers who can work on planes and buses, in coffee shops, and so on. I see you people at the neighborhood Caribou Coffee (or Timothy's, in Toronto) and on buses and in airplanes (or, in Laura's case, poolside in Vegas), happily tapping away on your keyboards, oblivious to all the people flapping around clucking at each other, unfazed by the insipid muzak or the squeal of the milk-frother.

I can't do it. I can write in dingy bars, but once in a dingy bar, I start drinking, and my writing goes to hell. I enjoy working in coffee shops with notebook and pen, but for me, longhand is mostly about brainstorming.

When it comes down to writing the actual prose of the book, I have to retreat to my own cave.

And I have a new cave

I recently rented a place above a vacant storefront.

It's walking distance (a mere 6 minutes) from my house.














My office isn't quite set up. Boxes everywhere, some walls still bare, I haven't unpacked my Ernie Banks and Incredible Hulk bobbleheads, and I'm still looking for my Page Points. But my desk area is up and running.

The reason I've not finished unpacking is ... I'm busy writing. The phone doesn't ring 367 times a day, and there's no tug-of-war in my head between family time and work time. When I'm at the office, I'm at work. When I'm home, I'm not at work.

Easy to understand, even for a simple man like me. No confusion. As a result, my productivity (read: word-count) is way, way up.

I also dig the atmosphere.

The stairway features cracked linoleum, peeling paint, and naked lightbulbs. Sets the mood perfectly as I arrive to work.















Across the street, a convenience store and a Chinese take-out joint (bedsheets seem to be very popular window-dressing on this street).














When Agent 99 and I first moved to the neighborhood, we ordered dinner from this place (undoubtedly sold by their claim of "Famous" Chinese Food).

We both got sick.

So I won't be picking up lunch at the joint, but as atmospheric set-dressing, something to gaze upon when I look out my office window, it's perfect.

Oh, and did I mention that my office has a small kitchen?

It does. And that's important, since I'm now renting an office, and do not have money to spend on take-out, famous or otherwise.

The oven and two of the stove-top burners don't work, but two burners is plenty for a guy alone in an office, right?

Besides, my dad gave me an office-warming gift that renders such last-century cooking appliances obsolete.

I am now the very proud owner of the greatest kitchen appliance since the spatula.

Yes, it is a George Foreman Grill. And I love it.

Now, if you've read this far, bless you. This post was sparked by the awesome Writer's Rooms series that the Guardian has been running for some time. Check it out, it's addictive.

And if you'd like to win prizes (yea! prizes!) then take a pic of your own writing space and send it to me (email link on my website). Include a word or two about what makes the space work for you.

I'll collect photos for a couple weeks, then post an assortment here.

Let's share...

...Son, always be a good boy; don't ever play with guns

By David Heinzmann

In the little central-Illinois town where I grew up just about everybody I knew kept firearms. Our own home was loaded with them.

We had an old gun cabinet with brittle glass doors in our basement that contained four or five shotguns, a .22-caliber lever-action rifle that looked like it had been drawn directly from the saddle scabbard on John Wayne’s horse, as well as a .22 Ruger revolver that also looked like a cowboy gun.

On the top shelf of the cabinet behind the boxes of shotgun shells, there was a badly tarnished, nickel-plated .32-caliber revolver that no longer fired, though my father kept it around for some unexplained sentimental reason. That one also looked like it came from the movies, but something starring Humphrey Bogart instead of the Duke.

Then there was the loaded Smith & Wesson .38 that my dad kept in his top dresser drawer for protection. I know, to urban and suburban sensibilities it probably sounds absurd, but it was a one-cop town, the middle of a recession, and, well, who knows. All I can say is that my dad was an educated and reasonable man of his time who worried about the well-being of his family. Anyway, it was heavy and black, well-oiled, and definitely serious business.

I learned early the basics of handling a gun, where the safety was, and how to always be conscious of where you’re pointing the thing. My dad would occasionally take me out into a ravine in the woods and set up a few soda can targets. I’d shoot the little .22 revolver, which made a sound like firecrackers and compressed air. And then that big, heavy .38 that always sounded like a bomb going off to my tender ears.

My dad hunted and by the time I was an adolescent, my older brother was an avid hunter, as well. I never took to it, but weekends in the fall I usually accompanied them to a friend’s small farm on the edge of town where we’d shoot trap with shotguns. They were practicing to down pheasants and geese. I was just tagging along.

Five or six of us would stand in a line with this spring-loaded throwing contraption set in the dirt in the middle of us. Pulling a cord would release the arm and send clay pigeons, these little Frisbees made of crude, lightweight ceramic, spinning into the sky. I could probably hit six out of ten on a really good day.

But one afternoon I was waiting my turn, standing next to the guy who owned the farm, a .20-guage shotgun under my arm pointed at the ground. All of the sudden my gun went off, shredding the long grass and sending a cloud of dust into the air about ten feet in front of the man next to me. His name was Dick Herring. Everybody looked around, and Dick gave me an easy-going, “Careful there, David.” I think it was my brother who said, what the hell?, and in the moment, I couldn’t explain why the gun had gone off, though I’m sure my finger was on the trigger when it shouldn’t have been.

Nobody was hurt, but I had a what in God’s name am I doing here? moment. I’m not a hunter; I’m not much of a shot. All I’m really doing is spending time with my old man and my brother. As I look back, that was a pretty good reason. My father would be dead of cancer less than five years later, and I cherish all the time I spent with him. And the camaraderie and amiable bullshitting of those afternoons are part of a why I loved growing up in a small town. But that was the beginning of the end of my time playing with guns.

It was a good lesson. You really don’t want to be careless for even a second with a loaded gun in your hand.

I think of this 25-year-old episode fairly often. I thought of it a few weeks ago when my mother shared the news that Dick Herring—in his 70s—had died. And I thought of it again last week when a cop friend was recounting how he had to tell a writer acquaintance of his that the elaborate and technical gun stuff in her book was all wrong. None of that stuff matters to me.

In my own novel, A Word to the Wise, I put a sawed-off shotgun in a villain’s hands at one point. When a gun-nut friend read it, he questioned whether I had the bad guy using it correctly. I thought I did, but in the end I just took the technical stuff out. It didn’t matter a bit to the drama of the moment.

As far as I’m concerned, guns are either big or little; long or short. And people either know how to use them, or they don’t.