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Some folks just hate to say goodbye. We all understand. We’ve been there. Separation brings tears when your baby gets on the school bus for first time. When your best friend moves across the country.
When children go to college - Wait. No. Most of us throw a secret party when that happens. We love our teenagers, but by the time eighteen rolls around, everybody needs a break. I remember thinking, don’t let the door hit you in the patookie on the way out. He knew everything, and I knew nothing. Boy, did he need to get out in the world. Of course, the final goodbye is the hardest. And there are some who simply can’t handle the departure. Will never handle it. I like to think that those who have passed on to their soul’s next phase are at peace, maybe at long last. We who are left behind are the ones who endure the pain of loss. But for a strange demented few, they do pretty bizarre things - as I’ll explain in a bit. It’s October. Halloween month. Creepy stuff displays are in the stores. Some of it way too icky for me. Especially the pretend corpses shown in various states of decay. I know lots of people who love that sort of thing as Halloween décor, but I am not one of them. How in the world did the idea of displaying fake ‘dug up’ corpses ever become a thing? Well . . . it stems from real life episodes over the centuries where people did exactly that. Dug up their deceased loved ones and moved them back into the house. Yes, really. There are references all through our history of folks doing it. Not a lot, thank God, but enough to make it not unheard of. Now, why the people way-back-when did it isn’t really explained, but the knowledge that they did do it was passed on. And on. And on. And now it’s a decorating thing in the age of glorified zombies. Granted, a person would have to be missing more than one belt loop to even imagine committing such a gross act for real. But the human population has always had its percentage of loopers, hasn’t it? A Detroit man moved his father’s body into a basement freezer because he was convinced Dad would come back to life. Ickier was a woman named Jean. Jean and her twin sister, June, were very close. When June passed away from cancer in 2009, Jean had her dug up after a few days and placed in a spare bedroom. But they weren’t alone. Jean had also been living with her husband’s corpse propped up on a couch for ten years. Ultra-ickier still, a man in Vietnam slept in his wife’s grave for years, until his kids made him stop. So he moved her into his bed, where he slept with her for another five years. It’s not an ‘only lately’ kind of quirk. Nor is it limited to western nut jobs. There’s an island in Indonesia where the locals exhume their ancestors’ mummified remains every year. It’s like a holiday. They clean out their graves, put new clothes on them, take them for a pleasant walk about the village, then place them back underground. The kicker is, from the pictures I saw, the poor dead people are at the mercy of their descendants’ fashion sense. This one poor old man got paraded around in a suit with a Hawaiian-print shirt and a red, green & white plaid tie. Lesson? Throw out your ugly clothes you kept meaning to give away before you kick that final bucket. Yes, some folks just can’t bear to say goodbye. And if your skin isn’t crawling at the thought of these stories, it’s time to check your belt loops.
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POV stands for Point of View.
It's writing/viewing the scene from inside the head of a particular character. Usually, the deeper you can get into a POV, the more connected a reader feels to that character. Obviously, the writer doesn't always want you to know what's in every character's mind, so part of the creation process is deciding how many, and whose, POVs to write from for the story. It's not always easy to determine, either. I know lots of authors who have gotten halfway through a manuscript before it dawns on them that the POV should be from a different character. Here are the basics: First person POV - is when the main character refers to themselves as 'I'. The story is viewed/experienced from that one character's point of view. Sometimes an author will do a 2nd or 3rd POV in combination with that - either from the first person or the third person. Diana Gabaldon does that in her Outlander series. Claire is always written in the first person, and Jamie - her husband - and all other characters - are written in the third person. Example of first person from my book, Blinke It Away - When Bess Blinke is up on Mount Kaala The air smelled sweet and clean. I picked up the scent of something earthy and - apples? Hawaii didn't have regular apple trees, but rose and mountain apples grew there. I climbed and searched for them. Soon, a group of mountain apple trees were within sight, bursting with massive clusters of the small, red fruit. Smashed ones lay on the ground under and surrounding them. I hurried closer, hit something slick, slid downhill, and landed when my back slammed into a tree trunk. The impact made the pain in my head throb all over again. Third Person POV - is when the 'narrator' (the author) tells you what a character is thinking or doing. Example of third person from my book, Alias: Mitzi & Mack - From Stanley & Catherine's first meeting. It's in Stanley's POV. Notice that, although I'm telling you both characters' actions and words, you only know Stanley's thoughts, not hers. If she wanted sympathy from him, she wasn't going to get it. "Just the same, I don't like being treated like that. I still think we should forget the whole thing. Don't worry. I'll never tell a soul I was here." "Please don't go." She stood, then approached him. "I'd like to find out more about you. I'll pay you a thousand dollars if you'll simply sit once more." A thousand dollars to sit? "Okay." As he sat, he wondered if she also threw money from the car windows for the fun of watching poor people fight for it. I have a workshop presentation for POV that goes into much further detail. Contact me if you'd like me to present it for your group. I'm a little late to the Billy Boyle party. Just finished book one in the series. There are ten more, if I've counted right, and I'm looking forward to all of them.
James R. Benn created a delightful character in Billy. He's a young man - early twenties - thrust into WWII and trying to survive the best he can. He was a newly minted detective with the Boston police when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Military service was inevitable, and his family scrambled to use any avenue they had to get Billy a good posting. Fast forward to England, and Billy's been assigned to Gen. Eisenhower. He's expected to use his detective skills. He fakes it till he makes it - does the best he can. He reminded me so much of my sons in their early twenties. A very charming character. Benn does a terrific job conveying both England and the era, as well as the military brass. I'm not thrilled with the fate of some of my favorite characters, but hey - it was wartime. Read the book(s.) You'll love them. |
Author noteI believe the only way to get through the slings and arrows life throws at all of us is to find the humor. Archive
January 2020
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