Not All Lawyers Are Like This

New York is more than the colossus on the Hudson River. It occupies its own universe, overwhelmed by hubris and unimpressed by authority. Nowhere is it more evidenced than by lawyers. Well, if not in fact, then legend.

And I contributed to their legendary hubris by writing “Day of Moving Hell,” published July 19 by Every Day Fiction, http://www.everydayfiction.com/day-of-moving-hell-by-walt-giersbach/. It dissects the relationships that try one’s soul—even my own at times. Enjoy.

Oh, and regarding estoppels. Watch what you promise someone. I had this point of law checked by a practicing lawyer.

A Brit Fighting for Seccession?

My article on Henry Morton Stanley, "An Improbable 'Indiana Jones,' is now up at Military History Online (http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/civilwar/articles/stanleyatshiloh.aspx). The Civil War is writ large in terms of battles, strategy and politics, but its human dimension often is made clear by the events of a single man like Stanley. This struck me most about Stanley (not his real name), not an American either, who went on to become one of the leading 19th century explorers. Aren't accidental heroes the stuff of drama in any age?

Summertine, and the Livin' Is Easy

I usually write, rewrite and polish a blog until it feels right, but now myPC has crashed with all my documents, memos, pix and notes. So, let's wing it on my netbook because the summer is rolling on.

News notes: Every Day Fiction will publish "The Day of Moving Hell" on July 19. This story (link to come) was generated by hearing about a legal "estoppel." A young lawyer friend hipped me to this take on verbal contracts and I applied it to an ambulance chaser who hates hippies and artists when one gets the better of him.

Bewildering Stories will publish "Angel in My Coffee Cup" on Aug. 2. This flash piece started eight or nine months ago as a prompt on Wordtrip's "Fast Fiction Friday" challenge. Normally, I'm skeptical of inspirational stories as being as charged with false emotion as nostalgia is. They're set to play on our hardwired emotions in the way that producers of Lassie movies jerked our strings to make us laugh and cry. But, I hope you enjoy "Angel" as much as I liked writing it. If you did, ask to read my serious, literary antecedent story about Gramps and the kid that I'm still shopping around to editors.

Kicking Out the Words

A good week and it’s not over yet. Bewildering Stories accepted “Angel in My Coffee Cup” after a rewrite—and I didn’t even follow my advice about narrative hooks. (Hamlet wasn’t talking about angels when he said, “There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The phrase kept going through my head as my granddaughter, Morgan, sat across from me at breakfast.) Maybe my magic realism got to their flash fiction editor.

I sent my “Henry Morton Stanley at Shiloh” article off to Military History Online, but no word back. Yeah, I guess I could polish it some more, but let’s see what happens.

The Asbury Park Press invites reader book reviews. Last Sunday, they picked up mine for Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire. (“…Unmasks the sanctimonious Swedish society and the murderous tendencies buried in mystery. And what a superb heroine the tattooed, dyslexic hacker Lisabeth Sander is!”)

There’s still a wealth of material for my Holling Clancy Holling blog (at http://hollingcholling.blogspot.com/) and I finished off the Web site for our writing group at the Manchester public library (http://sites.google.com/site/manchesterwriters/home).

I think I could be at Antarctica or Armpit, Ohio. as long as the party continues in my head.

Grab the Reader in 30 Words

News writing is excellent training. I took journalism classes when I was 19 or 20, then really learned to write on the Hinsdale (Illinois) Doings. I had to get the who, what, where, when and why down in the 30-word “lede” (spelled that way so’s not to confuse it with Linotype “lead.”). Tough job. Try it.

Then news writing leaped back a hundred years. The soft and fuzzy lede would begin something like, “It was an idyllic day in June when nine-year-old Tabitha and her perky terrier, Mikey, romped down the sidewalk. Unbeknownst to them, Charles Meriwether left the bar inebriated and got into his buggy. The Gods must have cried in anguish as Meriwether’s buggy approached the corner where little Tabitha….” Well, you get the drift.

Now we’re back to requiring a narrative hook—the first handful of words that will capture the reader at his screen, make him click through to another Web site, and continue reading. Tough job. I began looking at leads from the RSS feeds that pour into my mailbox each morning. What I found is a picture of how short our attention span is—and how readers can be manipulated to click on links. Read more of how to “Hook Your Readers” at http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/hook-your-readers/#comments.

Oh, Tabitha? Along about the 10th paragraph you learn she'll be okay. But the dog is dead.

Everything Old Is New Again

The score in 1675 was Indians-1, English-0. My article on America's most devastating war was just reprinted in American Museum Magazine, at http://www.theamericanmuseum.org/may.10.first.html. I had four ancestors in the conflict; some lived to tell about it.

The story originally ran in Military History Online and was perhaps my first foray into early American History since I had never heard of King Philip’s War. This was followed by pieces on the first shots fired in the Civil War—at Barrancas, Fla., not Fort Sumter; Nieuw Amsterdam’s notorious Gov. Willem Kieft who slaughtered area tribes people; and Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia a hundred years before the American Revolution.

Why can’t history be made more interesting to school kids? I would have been fascinated, but it took me half a century to come around and learn the hard way.

The New Yorker Suffering Alzheimer’s?

It had to happen, that one of the New Yorker’s fabled proofreaders missed a diacritical mark. If you don’t know it, this magazine is the last hold-out for spelling co-op with an umlaut, but no hyphen. Coöp. And, actors who rôle play.

So I nearly coughed up my lunch when I read [Apr. 26, p. 20] “Obama’s terminally naive 'engagement' has achieved nothing but the loss or 15 months.” NO! It’s naïve with an umlaut—those two little German dots on a French word that changes the pronunciation.

But, the New Yorker can’t claim to have misplaced its pocketbook full of punctuation following an afternoon of sherry tippling, because in the next column we see Richard Perle, “the Reagan Administration’s über-hawk.” For a moment, I thought I saw the sun setting on the tidal flats of American civilization, but it really was a lapse caused by age. Don’t we all forget where we put our accent marks now and then?