Dot Dead Diary

Two Crime Flicks, A Visit to Kate's, Good Food & Lots More

#1 did not come home for Thanksgiving.  My godson was having an engagement party five miles from #1's dorm this past Saturday night.  Time to hop on a plane, don't you think?  There was a small logistical problem.  Of course, I had to be in town for Thanksgiving at my sister's.  And I didn't want to skip out early on my brother, sister-in-law, and two nephews who were in town for the holiday.  The upshot was that, despite vowing to never take another red-eye to the East Coast, after shabbat dinner Friday night, I drove to Oakland and left on a JetBlue flight at 11.45PM.  I did manage to sleep for a few hours.  Good thing, too.  #1 and I had a busy Saturday.

We breakfasted at a local diner and then checked out the art at the Gardner and MFA.  #1 loved the sense the Gardner gave her of being in a villa.  As always, I feasted my eyes on the Sargents including the MFA's wondrous "An Artist in His Studio."  We then made it to the Brattle to see the William Powell-Myrna Low 1934 mystery classic, The Thin Man, one of #1's all-time favorites.  I think I caught a fifteen minute catnap which was the freshening I needed before heading to the country club for the engagement party.

Couper and Julia's wedding is in just a few weeks, which means they're in the home stretch.  The party was great, especially toward the end when we had time to catch up with   Couper and Julia (on the left with me) and we had a chance to meet Julia's parents.  I knew a fair amount about them since I'd read Julia's mom's witty, nostalgic, and perceptive memoir.  Couper's mom regaled the attendees with the true story of how the couple's paternal grandfathers had lived on the same block as grad students in the 1930's.  BTW, it was Couper who generated the all-time busy day for this blog when he linked my posting on Mel Gibson and Hebrew National to defamer.com.  Julia's blog attracts plenty of hits on its own.

Sunday morning #1 and I did the crossword puzzle over breakfast in a cafe and then strolled over to Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge.  Proprietor Kate Mattes and I shmoozed about books, California, publishing, and such for an hour or so.  I walked out with two mysteries set in Turkey (The Janissary Tree and Belshazzar's Daughter) with nary a clue that her store would be named a winner of MWA's Raven Award the very next day.

Monday and Tuesday I checked out three of #1's classes including the Cuban Revolution (the Castroites were not nice to the opposition), Introduction to History of Science (heard a lecture on Darwin), and Introduction to Comparative Politics (learned lots about how countries regard their constitutions -- I think the professor said Bolivia has had 18).

I ate awfully well, too.  For dinner we hit the extremes from Oleana, a yummy and not cheap Mediterrenean restaurant where I had fish in a claypot, to Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage, whose fare was called out in a Wall Street Journal article last spring as among the best in the nation.  I made friends with the server at Hi-Rise where #1 and I had breakfast one morning and I met Couper's parents, Bill and Susan, my treasured friends from grad school days, for tea another afternoon.

#1 and I also managed to fit in another mystery film, Gone Baby Gone which, like last year's Oscar-winner The Departed, was set in South Boston amidst police corruption. It was also the better movie.  Critics must not have noticed or perhaps been a little reluctant to say a film directed by Ben Affleck is superior to the one Martin Scorsese finally won an Oscar for.  Monday and Tuesday we checked out other museums and other cafes.  Along the way, I met a lot of #1's classmates. 

All in all, one great trip. It did end on a bit of a sour note, though.  The winds were blowing so hard that our plane (manufactured by Airbus) could not make it all the way across the country.  We stopped to refuel in Denver which meant I got home at 1.30 AM.  I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep tonight.

Drug-Enhanced Writing and the Day of Atonement

     A college friend of mine wrote two critically acclaimed mysteries. Then he had a kid and so stopped smoking. It turns out that the smoking was an integral part of his creative process. He's published no novels since.
     I myself write at a local café. My brain's gears are lubricated by pot after pot of green tea. In fact, when I try to write without sipping, my brain is like a car engine without oil. I crunch to a halt, just as my college friend did when he forswore smoking.

     So, I confess. I am a tea addict. As sure as some people need nicotine, cocaine, or alcohol to function or to make it through the day, I need caffeine. Every word I write is drug-enhanced. William Burroughs (using the pen name William Lee) wrote Junky addled by morphine, and I finished my manuscript of Two Graves floating on green tea.

     What does this matter? Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, starts this evening. Nu? Well, you see, from sundown tonight till three stars appear in the sky Saturday night, I'm supposed to refrain from eating and drinking. (Sex, too, by the way.) That way I can devote all my attention to a review of my transgressions over the past year and how I intend to improve myself over the next one. (Let me tell you, twenty-five hours is not enough for that double task. And by the way, I ask your pardon, dear reader, if I offended you in the past year.)

     Some time Saturday morning, I'll feel that a belt is being tightened around my forehead. Kinda the tea DT's. Well, I've decided to cheat. Yesterday I bought a bottle of Excedrin which is a combination of aspirin, acetaminophen, and caffeine. When the headache starts, I'm going to pop a few. That way I can focus on my wanderings from the path of righteousness and the route back to it, rather than the little gremlins jackhammering inside my head.
     First caffeine and now Excedrin. Seems almost like the Valley of the Dolls, doesn't it?

     Here's what I would like to know. What habits, drug-related or not, help you get your writing done?

     This posting also published on Inkspot, the blog by Midnight Ink authors.

Let's Celebrate - Burns Night Tomorrow

I've always felt a kinship with the Scots through my first name, a Scottish name if ever there was one.  The motto of the Keith clan is "veritas vincit," or "truth conquers," perfect for a writer, don't you think?  The Keiths were a powerful clan indeed around the time of Robert the Bruce.  According to legend, in a feud with the Gunns, the Keiths swooped down and killed the Gunn warriors while they were at prayer.  The Gunns got even over the next century.  Backing the Jacobites did not really pay off for the Keith Clan either.  Anyway, to further celebrate my faux Scottish ancestry, the hero of Dot Dead was given a good Scottish name.  The great love of Ivanhoe in the Sir Walter Scott classic was Rowena, a name I borrowed for Dot Dead as well.  Dorothy Dunnett wrote my favorite historical novels, the Francis of Lymond series, set in the time of Mary, Queen of Scots.  The female protagonist of the last few volumes in the series served as at least partial inspiration for the name of my #3.  And like all mystery writers, I am a literary descendant of the Scot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, progenitor of the greatest of all fictional detectives. 

When I lived in the U.K., I remember my friend Dave organizing a Burns Night party on the traditional January 25, the great poet's birthday.  What happens at a Burns Night gathering?  if memory serves, the two essential requirements are a bottle of good single malt and haggis, the stuffed sheep's stomach that Mr. Burns deemed the "great chieftain o' the pudding-race."  I'll see if I can get my wife and kids interested in some Scottish food and poetry tomorrow night to celebrate our Scottish roots, such as they are.  In any case, I'll be toasting with the Scottish motto, "Nemo me impune lacessit " or in modern English, "Mess with me and you'll be sorry."

Robert Burns

Keith family crest

Success through Addiction

I need to write about 5000 words per week to finish the first draft of Book 2 by Valentine's Day.  Just now I completed that quota for the latest seven days.  (My weeks run Saturday through Friday).  But here's the price I pay.  On the way home from work, I stop at a local cafe and write.  Etiquette requires that I buy something, and this establishment can conjure up a pot of green tea that's quite delicious.  One problem -- it's caffeinated.  After a few days of drinking anything caffeinated, I'm addicted.  What do I mean by addicted?  I mean I like it and if I don't have it, I suffer withdrawal systems.  I started writing a little later than usual yesterday, and I felt as though two invisible hands were tightening a belt around my head.  A couple of Tylenol and a glass of caffeinated chai, and I was okay.  I'd given up caffeine some years ago if for no other reason that the fasting on Yom Kippur was torturous.  Now I'm hooked again, but productive.  Is it worth the occasional headache worth it?  You bet.  Gotta suffer for your craft.

A Cure for Internet ADD

I wrote last week about my Internet ADD -- how I start looking something up on the Net, like at Wikipedia, and I follow one link to another leading to random education and less fiction writing.  Then yesterday over at Murderati, Pari Noskin Taichert asked:  "How do you create, nurture, and maintain the mental space for your imagination to thrive?"  Several commenters suggested writing in a coffee shop. 

So this is what I did after work today.  I stopped at the coffee area in a fancy hotel near my house and ordered up a green tea.  Logging on the Internet there cost $10 -- fuggedaboutit.  So I had no Net.  When I needed to look up some information about the FDR Memorial, I just highlighted it and wrote on.  My waitress generously kept refilling my teapot with hot water.  After a little bit, I called #1, my high school senior, who skipped a pre-dinner stop at her normal café in downtown Palo Alto and studied math over coffee with me.  (All around us SIlicon Valley types were interviewing, putting together deals, and such.  No one else was writing a novel nor using a graphing calculator.)

Bottom line is this:  I had my most productive day in a month!  I've got the recipe now.  Green tea, nice surroundings, accommodating staff, familial support, and no Internet!

FDR Memorial, Washington, DC