Welcome Back to Pottersville: December 2019

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Gotham City Digest: New Year's Eve edition

(Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.)

It's about time. I was beginning to wonder if these guys even still existed anymore. God knows the NYPD isn't doing shit.

Don't be fooled by the headline. Just give it a read.

"Hearts and prayers"? Weren't those people praying to begin with?

Gee, then why couldn't God do something to prevent the 3-5 million illegal aliens who supposedly voted for Hillary?

Well, it looks as if the neolib/right wing super delegates are up to their old tricks and are in the tank for anyone whose name isn't #BernieSanders. #FeeltheBern, motherfuckers. We're wise to your tricks.

After killing 300 unarmed Native Americans 129 years ago, about two dozen of their murderers got the Medal of Honor.

Jesus Christ, this sucks. First Elijah Cummings, now John Lewis.

Blame the parents, I always say. White babies aren't born hating any religious or ethnic group. Bigotry is taught and once it's taught to the young and impressionable, it's very difficult to unteach.

Just another wonderful day in Mr. Trump's neighborhood.

Of all the books Trump recommended this year, 11 have titles that either reference him by name or job title.

Shocking, I know.

This is what the 1% think of us, people. This cunt Sharon Osbourne is a fucking monster. I don't give a shit if their son Jack died young. This woman just isn't human.

Yeah, Machine Democrats have a hard time dealing with popularity. Someone draft another unelectable corporate Democrat to fuck up 2020, stat

Ken Coochie Coochie simply isn't a well man. The stabber's a US citizen.

As New Year's approaches, let us fondly remember the right wing scumbags we've lost in 2019 and the ones we're about to lose in 2020.

Meme intermission.

I see what this guy's saying and I've been saying much the same things for the last four years. Yet I have to push back against his contempt for the left. We don't all want to pack the courts with ideologues as that's more of a right wing thing. And doing away with the Electoral College only makes sense as it was adopted in the 18th century to appease the slave states to ensure they had an equal voice in Congress.

THIS is why we need witnesses and documents at the trial.

I love watching Republican scum eat each other then try to deal with the ugly aftertaste.

It started in Bristol, England in the 60's, then migrated to Taos, NM in the 80's. Only a very small percentage of humans can hear it. Have you heard "The Hum"?

Before this came out last year, Putin openly said that Alaska was too cold to annex. Can you imagine how things would have worked out if Trump was in charge during the Cuban Missile Crisis? "Nikita, I gotta deal for you, the greatest deal ever..." "I'm listening, Mr. President... (chortle)..."

So, two years ago, the Republican Party was poised to give scumbag corporations and the rest of the 1% $1.4 trillion they didn't need... but then they wanted MORE. So they sent an army of lobbyists to DC to demand it. Obviously, they got it.

It makes me sick that these fascist arrests are happening anywhere but especially in CT, so far from the southern border. But good on this kid for staying caught up on his studies and his school for helping him when and where it mattered most.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Mr. Trump's Neighborhood...

Remember Bush's multi billion dollar embassy in Baghdad that was built with slave labor? The ones with the machine guns on the roof? Well, the Iraqis just occupied it. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

Everybody but yours truly is surprised by this executive scumbag Carlos Ghosn fleeing justice. Every time one of these rat fucks gets caught in their criminal activities, the system's "rigged" against them.

Stop me if this is starting to sound familiar.

White justice in America. Good thing her judge wasn't black. She would've screamed about the 93 days in jail, called him the N word, then slapped him, too.

An innocent man wouldn't try to corrupt his own trial, prevent witnesses who can exonerate him from testifying, use deflection and distraction to remove attention from himself and whine so much about how unfair the process is after getting unprecedented privileges.

Wow, Sarah Palin's a snowflake, Go figure.

I think Corey Lewandowski scuttling off into that good night is somewhere between a chortle and a guffaw. It's just the laugh we needed to end this otherwise trying year.

A simple majority is all that's needed to force witnesses to testify. And we possibly already have those four Republican votes in Collins, Gardner, Romney and Murkowski.

We should be paying more attention to Rosemary T. Vrablic, Trump's money girl at Douche Bank.

"The jig is up," says Jennifer Rubin. And finally...

Can we make a New Year's resolution to please stop pretending the police serve the public trust and, instead, violate it with impunity?

Monday, December 30, 2019

Good Times at Gotham City: Hindsight is 2020 edition

Good Times at Gotham City: Syrianus edition

Sunday, December 29, 2019

Interview with Phyllis Entis

“Celine Sutherland’s body is discovered half-hidden under the Atlantic City Boardwalk, and Damien Dickens, PI is the prime suspect in his client’s murder. Detective Lt. James Holmes finds Damien’s gun and wallet near the crime scene, and a search of Damien’s apartment unearths Celine’s cash-filled, emerald-studded evening bag. Sylvia Sutherland, Celine’s older sister and CEO of the family’s tobacco empire, insists that Dickens pulled the trigger. And the Sutherlands carry a lot of influence in Atlantic City. Even Damien’s secretary has deserted him; gone to work for the Sutherlands. Only Celine’s younger sister, Susan, believes Damien is innocent.” Such is the blurb for Canadian mystery author Phyllis Entis’ first entry in the Damien Dickens mystery series, The Green Pearl Caper.

15) Phyllis, long before you made the transition to mystery fiction, you were a food safety microbiologist. Has that career helped inform your mysteries? Like, had any of your characters been deliberately poisoned from tainted food?

I’ve used a food safety plot element in two of the novels: THE CHOCOLATE LABRADOODLE CAPER and THE BLUE MOON CAPER.

In THE CHOCOLATE LABRADOODLE CAPER, Millie and Damien are engaged by their client to run a background check on a Canadian chocolate company, which the US client intends to acquire. Without giving away too much of the plot, all is not well at that chocolate company, and their products are contaminated. I based the plot element on a true story of a 1970s-era Salmonella outbreak that was traced back to contaminated chocolate, but also borrowed some other elements from my own experience in dealing with the food industry.

The food-related plot in THE BLUE MOON CAPER was drawn from some instances of contaminated pet foods that I reported on in eFoodAlert (yes, I still maintain that food safety blog) in the last couple of years. Hershey, the chocolate labradoodle who is first introduced in the third book, is accidentally fed some tainted meat by Millie and almost dies. Part of the novel deals with her determination to track down the source of the bad meat.

14) Damien Dickens is an odd duck. He’s straight out of a Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe novel yet he plies his trade in the late 70’s-early 80’s from the Jersey shore to California. How did you, a native Canadian, arrive at that combination?

I love watching noir movies and listening to the old-time radio programs - so easy to do these days with them streaming over the internet. Also, I grew up reading mysteries of all sorts. When I was a tween and young teen, I used to babysit my kid sister and my kid cousin. When both sets of parents had Saturday-night plans, my sister and I would have a sleep-over at my cousin’s house. One evening, to entertain the youngsters, I proposed we play ‘Dick Tracy.’ I prepared a set of cryptic clues, which I hid in various places in the house. The first clue led to the location of the second one, and so forth, with the final clue leading to my hiding place. The game was such a hit that it became our regular pastime.

When I was thirteen and my sister was nine, my parents took my sister and me to Atlantic City for a couple of weeks. We stayed at the Imperial Hotel, about a block or two away from the Boardwalk, spent time on the beach, on the Steel Pier, and walking the Boardwalk. I retained an image of Atlantic City as a slightly seedy, just over-the-hill kind of place, the perfect locale to situate a down-at-the-heel private detective. I even set a couple of the scenes at the Imperial.

Atlantic City had its limitations, though, and I decided to expand the geographic horizons of the novels. I selected South Florida, notably the area in and around Hollywood, as the location for most of the second book, as it was an area I knew. My in-laws retired to Hollywood, Florida in the 1970s and we visited them every year. I went north to Montreal for the third book. This was a natural, as I was born, raised and educated in that wonderful city. Then, with the fourth book, I decided to start moving the action westward, where my husband and I lived. So Damien and Millie ended up in Carmel, California.

No sooner had I moved them to California than my husband and I decided to return to Canada. We are now living in Victoria, British Columbia. Will Damien and Millie follow us? I have no idea - they haven’t told me yet.

13) I noted every entry in the Damien Dickens series is color-coded. Was that simply a branding technique or was there another reason for using a different color in each title?

It was an accident, at least at first.

I never planned to write a novel, much less a series. In 2011, after a seven-year exile in Stowe, Vermont, my husband and I returned to the San Diego area, settling in La Jolla. I had spent the previous three years writing my food safety blog, eFoodAlert, and was feeling the need to stretch my brain in a different direction.

Learning that the La Jolla library branch hosted a weekly drop-in writing group, I decided to give it a try. Pen to Paper turned out to be a write-to-a-prompt group. Each week, our moderator, Diane, would start the session by offering a prompt - usually verbal, sometimes visual, occasionally tactile. We would all write at a frenzied pace for 15 or 20 minutes (depending on the size of the group that week and the complexity of the prompt), shutting off our internal editors and simply getting our ideas down on paper. Yes, we used pens and paper; laptops were verboten. Once time was up, we would take turns reading our creations aloud to the group.

The purpose of the weekly session was to liberate the creative side of our brains. There was no critique. The fascinating thing for me was how a single prompt could trigger a dozen very different stories (or more, if we had a particularly large group that week). I learned an awful lot from listening to those stories!

One week, Diane arrived with an armload of brown 10 x 12 envelopes, each one containing a different object. She handed out the envelopes and, at her signal, we withdrew the objects and used them as our prompts. The object I was given was a string of green, plastic carnival beads. Instantly, the image of a slinky, buxom blonde wearing a rope of green pearls flashed into my mind. I imagined her walking down a hallway, her stiletto heels clicking on the bare floor, and her rope of pearls swishing back and forth across her chest. I saw her entering the office of a private investigator to solicit his help in finding her wayward sister.

Somehow, that scene remained with me. I few weeks later, my husband and I went on a winter vacation. I took along a pen and notepad just in case. I wrote a few more scenes, read them to my husband, and THE GREEN PEARL CAPER was born.

Even then, I hadn’t thought about writing a series. But, the characters of Damien and Millie stayed with me. I wanted to know what happened to their relationship. I wanted to learn about their pasts, about their futures. So I began the second book. When I was thinking about a title for the sequel, the idea of using a color in the title as a branding tool led me to THE WHITE RUSSIAN CAPER.

Now it’s like eating Lay’s potato chips. Once I’ve started, I can’t seem to stop.

12) Meryl Streep once said she created a secret for every character she played that was never revealed in the movie. Tell the readers at home something about Damien Dickens that was never mentioned in the novels.

This is a tough question to answer. Every time Damien tells me something about himself that I didn’t know beforehand, I include it in the work-in-progress. Likewise with Millie. I’m sure they both still have a few secrets; however, they haven’t shared them with me yet.

11) You’d just launched THE BLUE MOON CAPER last December 8^th, I believe it was. Tell us a bit about what that’s about.

Millie and Damien are engaged in separate investigations in this book. Damien is called back to Atlantic City to help an old friend, Bruno, who has confessed to a murder he didn’t commit. Millie is on the trail of tainted meat, thanks to a Carmel resident who believes her son is trying to poison her, and has engaged Team Dickens to uncover the proof.

However, if you scratch below the surface of THE BLUE MOON CAPER, you will discover that it is about relationships: between Millie and Damien, between Millie and her brother/son (trying to avoid a spoiler here), between Bruno and his mother. Ultimately, it is a love story.

10) I assume you’re chugging away on Book Six of the Damien Dickens series. But are you planning on writing standalones, spinoffs in the future?

I have started thinking about Book Six. I even have a tentative title (which I am not ready to share yet), and a basic idea for one of the plot elements. If my idea proves practical, I shall need to do more than the usual amount of research before I start writing the first draft.

My next project is a non-fiction. In my guise as the FoodBugLady on eFoodAlert, I have learned more than I cared to know about the foibles and fumbles of the pet food industry. I have been researching this over the last year, and plan to begin writing A DOG’S BREAKFAST in January.

I have thought about writing a standalone, but haven’t pursued that idea as yet. The last year was filled with distractions relating to our move from California back to Canada. I am hoping to scrape together larger swatches of creative time now that we are mostly settled in place. One concept that has been running through my mind is to base a story on my own family history, which I have researched off and on over the last several years.

9) Describe your typical writing day. Do you use a laptop or notebooks exclusively, both and do you set daily word goals? If so, how many a day?

It’s confession time. I don’t have a typical writing day; I don’t set goals. And (gasp!) I don’t write every day (or even every week when I’m between projects). Sometimes I write in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, and sometimes in the evening. It depends on what else is going on in our lives on any given day.

When I started to write the first book, I scribbled in a notebook and then transcribed to my desktop computer. As I get older, I find that my writing becomes ever more difficult to read, even for me. If I’m at home, I write directly on my desktop computer. I’m hoping that we’ll have some time before spring to acquire some comfortable patio furniture. If so, when the weather is fine, I might work outdoors on my laptop computer.

I never set word count goals. If I’m in the midst of a first draft, I might set a long-range goal (first draft complete by the end of July, for example). Usually, when I sit down to work, I try to complete a scene. This might take half a chapter or even a complete chapter, depending on the scene. That’s about as serious as I get regarding goals.

I’m the same way when it comes to reading goals. What difference how many books I read in a given month or year? What is important is whether or not I am enjoying my leisure reading, not how many books I push myself to plow through.

8) What do you see for the future of mystery fiction? Does it have room for new tropes and conceits or do you think the old ones should just be reinvented as you’ve done?

There’s always room for something new. Something creative. I wish I could be the one who comes up with it. Failing that, I shall just muddle along with the old tried-and-true.

I think that fiction, like fashion, goes through cycles of popularity. Some years, romance is all the rage; other years, it’s the turn of mystery, science fiction, paranormal fiction, or fantasy. I believe there will always be a solid core of fans for each of these genres.

7) You’re obviously very enamored of your pooch, Shalom. Has she made her way into your series or will she make an appearance in the future?

You’re asking whether Hershey will find himself with a baby sister one day. I really don’t know. Hershey is modeled on our first dog, a chocolate Australian Labradoodle named Quintzy, who died suddenly just as I was starting to write the third book. I hadn’t planned on introducing a dog into the series; THE CHOCOLATE LABRADOODLE CAPER became a sort of memorial to him. The cover image for the book was one taken of Quintzy just a few days after he joined our family, and I use the name Quintzy Press for my self-publishing activities.

Shalom, who is an Australian Cobberdog from the same breeder (in fact, Quintzy and she are distant cousins), joined our family about three months after Quintzy’s death. Some of her mannerisms and activities (the head tilt, the beach romps) have found their way into descriptions of Hershey’s behaviors, but I have no plans to add her into the character mix. At least, not today.

6) Considering the similarity in climates, do you see Canadian noir one day becoming as prominent in world fiction as Scandinavian noir?

I doubt that climate has anything to do with the popularity of a particular series. I think there needs to be a certain critical mass of writers for a “regional sub-genre” to develop.

My exposure to Scandinavian noir is limited to Stieg Larssons’s Dragon Tattoo series. Although well-written, I found his books too violent and gory for my taste. Having moved back to Canada relatively recently, I would be hard-pressed to point to a Canadian noir writer of note. The Canadian mystery writers I have enjoyed the most are Louise Penny, whose Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series is phenomenal, and Maureen Jennings. Her Inspector Murdoch series is a police procedural set in Toronto in the 1890s. I’m hoping to expand my exposure to Canadian mystery and noir writers (if the latter even exists) now that I have access to a Canadian library.

5) Among mystery writers, who were your biggest influences while growing up?

As was the case for many girls of my generation, I cut my teeth on Nancy Drew. I devoured that entire series, reading the books over and over again. I graduated from Carolyn Keene to Agatha Christie (both the Miss Marple and the Hercule Poirot series) and Ngaio Marsh. At the time, while I loved to read mysteries, I had no thought of writing them. That came much later.

You haven’t asked the question, but the current (or recent) mystery writers who have influenced me the most are Sue Grafton and Louise Penny. My narrative style and my decision to set my books in the early 1980s owe a lot to Grafton. However, as the years have passed and I have developed and improved my skills, I find myself absorbing more and more from Louise Penny’s work. She has a wonderful ability to create three-dimensional characters and to bring their emotions and motivations to life. Every time I find myself trying to figure out how to do something I haven’t tried before, I go back to Penny’s books for advice and inspiration. I have never met her (that would be a top item on my bucket list if I had one), but she has been my teacher, my mentor and my muse.

4) Are there any No no’s that you would never put into your fiction? If so, what are they?

There are several items on my TO-DON’T list. I do not include erotic love scenes, although I have some romantic passages, mainly between Damien and Millie. I do not write serial killers. I do not rely heavily on swear words (although I throw in the occasional cuss where the situation warrants). While my books are (except for the third book) murder mysteries, I do not subscribe to gratuitous violence or gore. I go only as far as the story demands. And I never, never leave the reader dangling on the edge of a cliff at the end of the book. There is usually a transition at the end that leads to an opening for the next book, but each novel is complete in itself.

3) Does your training as a professional scientist help you in your fiction-writing?

Aside from using some of my experiences to generate plot lines, there are two aspects of my science training that help me in my writing: attention to detail and clarity of presentation of information.

Over the years - the decades, actually - of my scientific activities, I have written hundreds of reports, some for internal use when I worked for the Canadian government, and others for publication in scientific journals. I also served as a peer reviewer and was on the editorial board of one journal for a couple of years. I have been taught - and also have trained myself - to read with a critical eye, which is a big help when I am revising my early drafts, and to support conclusions with evidence, a useful talent when writing a mystery.

My science writing also has trained me to ‘write lean’—to avoid flowery phrases, passive speech, and unnecessary adverbs. As a result, my first drafts tend to be heavy on dialogue and action, and light on scene-setting. I beef up the latter during the course of my second and third drafts. I believe this approach has helped me to keep the story flowing at a brisk pace, especially in my last couple of books as I’ve become more adept at writing fiction.

2) Plotter, pantser or plantser?

Pantster, mostly. I start a new project with a couple of plot elements in mind, or an idea for a pivotal scene. While I have an idea of where I want to go, I usually don’t know how I’m going to get there. Therefore, I don’t try to prepare a chapter outline.

When I started to write THE WHITE RUSSIAN CAPER and decided to set part of the story in Florida, I had in mind a climactic scene on one of the drawbridges over the IntraCoastal Waterway. I didn’t know which characters would be involved in that scene or how they would find themselves at the top of a raised drawbridge; I just knew I needed to work that into the story.

This approach has benefits, but can be risky, too. I like working alongside Damien and Millie as they pursue their investigations. They often surprise me with their findings and their actions. On the other hand, I have written my way into a dead end on more than one occasion. In THE GOLD DRAGON CAPER, I reached one of those impasses about 10,000 words into the first draft. I had to backtrack about half that distance to the fork in the plot road and take the other path. Fortunately, I was able to use some of the discarded material later on in the book.

1) What’s next for Phyllis Entis?

Book 6 in the Damien Dickens series, of course. Also, an exposé of pet food industry practices, which I have been researching for the last year or two. I am hoping to release at least one of these two books by the end of 2020.

In addition, I plan to continue my eFoodAlert food safety blog, which I typically update twice weekly with links to human and pet food recalls, and occasional opinion pieces or background pieces on food safety.

If you’re interested, Phyllis’ books are available from Amazon in ebook (including Kindle Unlimited), paperback and audiobook.

THE GREEN PEARL CAPER: https://www.amazon.com/GREEN-PEARL-CAPER-DICKENS-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00VF7YF5S/

THE WHITE RUSSIAN CAPER: https://www.amazon.com/WHITE-RUSSIAN-CAPER-DICKENS-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B014Z8IJLY/

THE CHOCOLATE LABRADOODLE CAPER: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LYFJBB3

THE GOLD DRAGON CAPER: https://www.amazon.com/Gold-Dragon-Caper-Dickens-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B07C9WY152/

THE BLUE MOON CAPER: https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Moon-Caper-Dickens-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B07ZBT2G4H/

As for her website and social media accounts, here are links to each of the individual ones:

Phyllis’ blog: https://phyllisentis.wordpress.com/home/

Amazon Author Page

Facebook Author Page

Facebook Damien Dickens series Page

Twitter handle: @PromptProse