Real-Life Plot Holes and Fake Narrative

I have a policy that my politics and religious beliefs should not be part of my platform as a writer, but with the fuss Donald Trump's comments on immigration created when he first threw his hat in the ring, it got me thinking about the issue of illegal immigration again. I've always felt there was something a little dicey about the entire issue, but this time, I must have had my writer's hat on because I realized that there's a plot hole in the narrative.

So before I really dig into this, let me make a couple of things clear. I am by training, a cynic. (Thanks, Mom and Dad, for making me a critical thinker.) I don't trust either political party. I don't trust individual politician. Too often, they say one thing in public but their votes say something else. The Democratic party gets heat from me because for most of the last sixty years or so, they've been the dominant party in congress and the country is a mess. The Republican party gets heat from me because, when they do come to power, they mill around like idiots who never expected to win and have no game plan, and then when they do settle in, they're no better at solving problems than the democrats. At the voting booth, it makes me feel as though I'm picking between Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.

I'm also a contrarian, which means I tend to lean away from popular explanations.

So don't think I'm coming down on the Democrats here because of party affiliation. I'm coming down on them because they've had the power to fix this problem (hey, they passed the Affordable Health Care Act [aka Obamacare] without a single Republican vote). So why couldn't they fix the immigration problem? The obvious answer is: they didn't want to.

So how does this become a plot hole?

Well, that boils down to the word "illegal."

What makes something illegal? That's simple. It's against the law. Who makes the laws? Congress.

For as long as this has been an issue, I've heard a number of argument for these people being here. The big one seems to be that they do work Americans won't. That farmers need the migrant workers to pick their crops. There are probably others, but I stopped listening to them ages ago. I'm not going to argue whether the reasons are legitimate because it's a complex issue and it has nothing to do with plot holes. But my logic says if Congress believes there are good reasons to allow these people into the country, they should hammer out an immigration policy that allows them to come here LEGALLY. (Remember, they're the ones who have the power of defining what's legal and what isn't.)

So the second question becomes WHY haven't they?

Again, the obvious answer is: because they don't want to.

So Congress wants the people here, and they want them here as illegals.

If I read that in a book, their motives would be suspect.

Here's another plot hole.

I recently read The Demon You Know: A Demon Hunting Soccer Mom Short Story (Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom)
by Julie Kenner

. Here's a summary of the book:

The Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom series features Kate Connor, a retired demon hunter and mom of two forced back into business when a demon crashes through her kitchen window.

Now Mom has been retired for several years and is out of practice, so she signs up for a self-defense course to sharpen her skills. She also signs up her fourteen year old daughter, but it's almost an afterthought. Really? This is a woman who knows there are demons out there and didn't put her daughter in some kind of self-defense course long ago?

Now there aren't demons in our world, but according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 23% of women who have "experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, first experienced some form of partner violence between 11 and 17 years of age." (http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/intimatepartnerviolence/teen_dating_violence.html) And that's statistic doesn't even count violence from a stranger.

And yet girls aren't routinely taught self defense.

What does that tell us about how deeply we as a society really believe "our children are our future."

Lip service is what I call it.

It would be so easy to integrate self defense into PE classes and it would certainly be more useful than playing girls' basketball which is what I remember from eight grade PE.

Trust me. The youngest generation in my immediate family is going to be better prepared. I've already looked into it and you can enroll four year olds in Tai Kwan Do.

Which brings up what our farce of a justice system does with offenders.

I have a friend in Washington whose second husband molested her eleven year old daughter. Bless her, the moment my friend found out, she booted him. And then she pressed charges. His sentence? Probation. And he was told to stay away from minors. Yeah, that should teach him. But then he started dating a woman with a young daughter. They did catch him and haul him back to court, but all they did was scold him. Yes, our children are our future. And if you believe that, I have a lovely bridge in Brooklyn you can buy cheap.

Good News, Bad News

The bad news is simple and straight forward: I had hoped to release Sol's story, A Dark & Stormy Knight, in December. That's not going to happen. 


The why is the good news. Or at least, it leads to the good news. 

Instead of releasing a new book, I'm planning to put my house on the market in December. Yeah, it seems like an odd time of year for that to me too, but the Seattle Times says there are more buyers here than houses on the market. The local realtor I spoke to swears it's true. In fact, he says if we price it right, I should have multiple offers inside of a week.

This is good news since I'm constitutionally incapable of keeping a house in show condition for an extended period of time. (An affliction many writers suffer.)

I've also been in this house for 20 years, and in keeping with my pack rat genes, a three bedroom house with a garage has offered me the opportunity to keep far too much stuff, so I've been going through everything, deciding what to get rid of and what to keep, and packing the keepers (20+ boxes of books now sit in the garage), listing a few things on Craig's List (like my 20' ladder because I will never again own a two-story house), donating what I can, and tossing the rest.

Argh.

This is such a big job.

The living room is a disaster as we speak.Mostly because everything passes through it either on the way to the garage our out the door. At the moment, it's dominated by empty boxes. I actually think I have more of those than I need. Sort of an embarrassment of riches. In a strange way.

Decisions weigh me down. When to schedule the handy man? And the window washers (courtesy of Living Social)? Will the house show better if I vacate?  In spite of what the realtor says, I suspect so, since a single chair in the living room doesn't exactly scream "homey." If I do vacate, where would I stay? And it's winter. My move will take me over two mountain passes. Very possibly two snowy mountain passes. Should I pay a moving company or just rent a large U-haul? If it were summer, I'd do the latter, but driving a big truck on slick, snowy roads? Yeah, not my idea of a good time. When I finally get to Boise, where will I stay while I find my own place? And that's just a sampling of the decisions that need to be made.

Sometimes all these decisions bear down on me, and I feel like it's all too much to coordinate. 

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Once it's all done and I'm ensconced in Boise, if things work out as I'm hoping they will, I'll be writing nearly full-time. Which is wonderful for my productivity. Knowing from experience as I do that, if I can eat, sleep, breath in my story world without the distractions of a 40-hour a week job, I write better stories and I write them faster. And I have so many stories to tell.

So if my McKnight fans can be patient now, it will pay off later.

And if anyone has any tips or thoughts about making a move like this, I'd be delighted to hear them.

A Thanksgiving Tale

With fiction, I generally read one book at a time. Nonfiction is different; I might have half a dozen (or more) books going at once. One of the books I'm currently reading is Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs.

It's a collection of essays by famous chefs about occasions when things went terribly wrong in their kitchens and restaurants. Many of the stories end happily with the chef pulling off a victory of which they're justifiably proud.

I'm reading it because there's a story idea about a food critic percolating in the back of my brain that I need to feed, but as I'm reading, I realize that I have my own near-disaster culinary story that I thought I'd share with you. And Thanksgiving being just past, it's the right time of year.

So...


When I was 19, I wanted to get out into that wide world, but I wasn't brave enough back then to just pack up and go someplace new without a job waiting for me so, much to my mother's dismay, I joined the Army. (In retrospect, this was the best decision of my life.) To my dismay at the time, as soon as I finished training, I got orders sending me to Europe. (I wanted to experience the world but I wasn't sure I was ready to go that far afield.) Again, in retrospect, this was a great adventure and built my confidence beyond anything else I can imagine doing.

I was stationed in the small berg of Baumholder, Germany. I say "small" because if it weren't for the military base, that's what it would have been--a little German town--but it was also one of the largest U.S. troop concentrations in Europe. I have no doubt that Americans troops and their dependents easily outnumbered the German residents. Just as the single men outnumbered the single women there by an insane ratio. I arrived there in May. By October, my boyfriend and I had moved out of the barracks and into an apartment onto "the economy." (Also, on our dimes.) With Thanksgiving coming up, we decided to invite several of the single guys from his artillery unit who had no place special to go for dinner.

Now I have to tell you that as far as my culinary skills went, every meal was a first for me. The first meal I made for my boyfriend and me was chili, and I made enough to feed the entire 8th Army. We ate chili for a couple week, and bless his heart, he never complained. He also never figured out what a guinea pig he was.

As you've guessed by now, I had never cooked a turkey in my life, but it looked easy. Unfortunately, I waited too long to buy it. With no turkeys left on base, I had to buy our sacrificial bird in a German store. The weight was in kilos. (I don't remember how many kilos, but the bird was HUGE.) My cookbook was in pounds. My oven was centigrade. My cookbook was in Fahrenheit. Everything was a guessing game.

Thanksgiving morning, I got up at 6 am, stuffed the bird, put it in the oven, and went back to bed. A couple of hours later I got up to check on it only to discover I'd forgotten to turn on the oven.

Oy vey!

It's true. God takes care of children and fools. Never since have I made a more perfect turkey. The skin was beautifully browned and crisp. It was still huge, however, and when the six of us were kicking back and surreptitiously unbuttoning our jeans, you could turn the cut side of the bird away and it looked like it hadn't been touched.

And yes, my boyfriend and I were eating Thanksgiving leftovers for weeks.

And God bless him, he didn't complain about that either.

Hope everyone had a fantastic Turkey Day, and I'd love to hear about any culinary disasters (or near-disasters) you've had.

You Don't Have to Live This Way

Most writers have day jobs. Even if your day job is staying home with the kids, most of us have other things we must get done. It's not all champagne and keyboards.

When we get home from our day jobs, we have laundry, cooking, and housework that needs to get done. We have to renew our driver's license, pay the bills, replace the computer that just crashed, shop for clothes and groceries, and all the other mundane tasks that are part of life. And then we have to find the time and energy to write.

How do we do it? Well, sometimes we don't. Sometimes those other things in our lives sap us of all our energy.

That's what I want to talk about today because that's where I've been living for the last several years and I know the odds are good that some of you out there also struggle with this, so I thought I'd share my story because I want you to know that, if you're in a similar situation, you have options.

First, I want to say that I love writing stories. I love sharing the characters in my head. If I could write for a living, retirement would be something other people think about. I'd write until senility sets in. And who knows? Maybe that would unlock even more interesting stories.

But for the last several years, the environment at my day job has been redlining my stress levels. It's not the work. I've been doing that long enough that it's gotten a little boring. It's a couple of the people, one of whom, sadly, is our department manager. I could go into how narcissistic and insecure he is, how he'll throw his staff under the bus to avoid blame, how he'll stand outside a cubicle to eavesdrop on conversations, but what it all comes down to is that none of the staff feels safe at work. We constantly have to watch our backs. Most of us also cover each others' backs, but it's unfortunate that we need to. The real problem is that the unrelenting vigilance has a price. When you walk out of the office at the end of the day, you're exhausted. 

I have no doubt that my problem isn't unique. It doesn't matter if the stress comes from your work environment or if it comes from financial strain or from difficult personal relationships. The effects of excessive stress are cumulative. Even if the stress level remains constant, the longer you live with it, the worse its impact becomes. Some people get weepy. Others drink. Some get angry. Some eventually become suicidal. I'm one of the angry ones.

So I've been walking around, feeling trapped by the economy and angry at my boss for making me feel this way, and it slopped over onto other aspects of my life. I became pessimistic and cynical about everything. I wanted to come home and work on my current story but I didn't have the oomph to write more than a few lines at a time. Instead, I'd play mindless, repetitive games on the computer, trying to anesthetize my emotions. It didn't work worth a crap. I was angry ALL the time.

The final straw was when I realized that the idea of walking out of that office for the last time, even if I only had unemployment to fall back on, caused a bubble of joy to rise up in my chest. The feeling of joy had become so unfamiliar that it shocked me.

I spent about three minutes marveling over this strange emotion before I picked up the phone and made an appointment with my doctor. He gave me a prescription for antidepressants. Now I've never been a fan of "better living through chemistry"  but I have to say, "God bless my doctor." After a minor adjustment to the dosage, life is worth living again. I'm coping with work. I'm working on the first round of editor requested revisions, and I'm finally starting to get excited about becoming a published author.

The point of all this is that if you're in a toxic environment, if you possibly can, get out. If it's not possible, understand that you don't have to live with the emotions you're feeling. There is help, but you're going to have to reach out for it. It's not ideal. You shouldn't have to medicate yourself to get through the day, but sometimes you need a life preserver to get your head above water.