An early review in Publisher’s Weekly:

Publishers Weekly,Hall (Blackwater Sound; Buzz Cut; etc.) once again sweeps the sand, surf and swamps of Key Largo, in a hyperdramatic mystery featuring sensitive tough-guy Thorn and his live-in girlfriend, Alexandra Rafferty. Hall sums up the plot nicely at the beginning of the book: “Lunacy and violence. Pirates, pirates, pirates.” Thorn’s long-ago fling with a beautiful woman named Anne Joy comes back to haunt him years later when Anne’s brother, Vic Joy, a modern-day pirate along the Gulf Coast, decides he needs to add Thorn’s five-acre property to his ill-gotten business and real estate empire. Anne and Vic are the damaged products of a dirt-poor Kentucky upbringing overseen by a smalltime dope-dealing father and a deranged mother with an all-consuming passion for pirates. Thorn refuses to sell to Vic, triggering a complicated coercion scheme that eventually includes the kidnapping of the nine-year-old daughter of Thorn’s best friend. The local body count builds until Thorn is in an all-out battle against the deranged Vic, with a complement of U.S. helicopters and a small army of cutthroat international pirates. Hall’s crisp writing, plus the ticking-clock suspense of the child-in-peril subplot and amusing secondary characters like Alexandra’s dotty dad make this an exhilarating addition to the series. (June) Forecast: Hall is generally considered to be the stylist of the South Florida bunch and should be recommended to those fans of Hiassen, Leonard and Standiford.

This is not a memory I like to recall, but even after 20 years the anguish of the moment is still fresh.

In 2004, a year after this book was first published, I was at a writers conference when I was asked by someone in the audience to describe a favorite storyline I’d written. There were a couple of other novelists on the panel that day, both of whom were friends.

I described a plot thread in Off the Chart, one that I worked hard on and that struck me as very original. Sugarman’s nine year old daughter was kidnapped and held hostage in some unknown location. As it turns out that location is somewhere in Central America. The daughter finds a way to communicate with her father but since she doesn’t know her exact location she uses her extensive naturalist knowledge of flora and fauna to help zero in on where she is. Birds and plants and the time of sunset and the prevailing winds and other details she’s able to observe.

Using these bits of information, little by little Sugarman and Thorn are able to circle in on her exact location and rescue her. That use of natural details required a lot of research on my part and a good bit of deductive logic. I was proud of that plot line and had fun detailing it to the assembled audience that morning.

A year or so later one of the novelists on that panel published a novel with the exact same device. Kidnapped child held in an exotic location who is able to guide her savior by observing and relaying natural details.

Now I know that all writers are sponges and that we are all a little amoral when it comes to seizing the next good idea. I’ve been around writers before when a really cool idea crops up in the surroundings and one of the writers will say, “I got dibs on that.” Always a funny moment.

I confronted this writer friend who’d obviously either consciously plagiarized my work or somehow managed to forget where his idea came from and thought it was his own. He denied plagiarizing of course. No apology, no shock. Just denial. After that initial conversation in which he denied stealing the idea I ran back through that day of the panel discussion and recalled that this writer and I had breakfast together before the event. He had a couple of bloody Marys with his toast. And he told me the story of having not slept the night before.

When I talked to him again I reminded him of the bloody Marys and the sleepless night and gave him a chance to own up to copying the idea he’d heard me . Tipsy and groggy from the lack of sleep, a perfect out.

To my disappointment he denied the claim again. I was just looking for even a half-hearted mea culpa. But I got bluster instead. This is a guy I’d spent several very pleasant days with in various situations, and I didn’t want to end our friendship this way.

But sadly the friendship did end.

So when I look back on Off The Chart I’m always plagued by these bittersweet memories. A lost friendship, a deep disappointment and the less important worry that someone will read his novel and mine and without checking the publication dates might think I plagiarized one of the plot lines from him.

All this might register as much ado about nothing to some. But I think most writers would understand that this kind of thing is a red line.

One final note: The word plagiarism originates from the Latin term plagiarius, meaning “kidnapper, seducer, plunderer.” This Latin word is derived from plagium, which means “kidnapping,” and is based on the root plaga, meaning “snare” or “net.”

It’s somewhat fitting that my story about kidnapping would itself be the victim of kidnapping.

Buy it here.

Eighteen years ago I published Magic City. It got some great reviews like the one below.

*Starred Review* Give Thorn credit. He’s trying–trying to make accommodations with the modern world, anything to demonstrate to crime-scene photographer Alexandra Rafferty that he is committed to their relationship. Hence his radical decision to stay with Alex’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted father in Miami while she attends a seminar. But the “ragged, hustling pulse of Miami” does crazy things to Key Largo recluse Thorn, making his “hypersensitive antennae” gyrate like an overheated Geiger counter. It’s not paranoia this time, though, as Thorn stumbles into the middle of a crime spree prompted by a black-and-white photograph taken during the 1964 Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston heavyweight-championship fight in Miami. The bad guys want the photo, a gift from the photographer to Alex’s father, and are willing to do whatever needs doing to get it. Thorn starts out as he always does, merely trying to protect his loved ones, but eventually, inevitably, defense changes to offense: he knew the “feel of the tipping point–when his trot became a gallop, the gallop grew to a crazy, hurtling rush, and by God, once again he found himself sprinting over the suicidal edge.” Hall continues to explore the ever-intriguing psychodynamics of his unconventional hero, but he also adds a new dimension to the series with the fascinating look at Miami in the 1960s. Not since the superb stand-alone thriller Hard Aground (1993) has Hall delved so deeply into the fetid foundation on which contemporary South Florida was built. Another outstanding chapter in one of the genre’s most consistently first-rate series.

Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

In the last few years the original publisher of Magic City reverted the rights of the book back to me. So I’ve been taking the necessary steps to make the books available again, both as ebooks and as paperbacks. (Print on Demand)

It’s an expensive and time-consuming process but also a very satisfying one. Once the book is formatted and a new cover is created (by my amazing designer Lon Shapiro) it achieves a bit of immortality. As long as Amazon exists that book will be floating out on the cyber-shelf in the sky. Or wherever books float. Whether anyone buys it and reads it, well, that’s another story.

It’s kind of an out of body experience to interact with a book that I wrote a couple of decades ago. I wind up reading passages from it and almost always have a couple of competing sensations. For one, I inevitably feel that I used to write a hell of a lot better than I do now. I’ve lost the juice. The poetry has fled these old arthritic fingers.

Two, I also see how flawed that book was, or at least the prose that I manage to read. Yes, it’s full of lyrical energy, the young whippersnapper who composed those sentences was confident and limber fingered, but he was also very wordy. Today I would cut cut cut and delete some more and trim away fat until I’d carved half of the book away. I think that might be a product of my changing taste in reading.

I’m less patient with novels I read than I once was. I recently set aside two different best-selling thrillers I was reading because they had become tedious. Almost every action the main character took was described step-by-step in great detail. The movie equivalent to such writing is to film every step a character takes up a long stairway instead of showing a couple at the bottom and a couple at the top.

I’m afraid I might also put down some of my early books because I used to spend a little too much time on that stairway, not only describing the steps taken but the thoughts of the character at every step and the scent of the air and the heft of the light.

Lyrical yes. And I still value prose that is lush and fresh and challenging. But as I grow older I’ve become an advocate of “get on with it already.” So as I read some random pages of Magic City, I had those competing thoughts. But the overarching feeling I have is one of gratitude. That I was able to tell a story that I cared about deeply that made others feel deeply too and to be paid to do it, well, that’s an amazing bit of luck. There was hard work too, of course, and long hours at the keyboard instead of doing the thousand other things that normal people do to fill their lives.

I’m hoping that Magic City will find a new audience now. But fortunately the demographics of my readers is such that many of them (like me) have such spotty memories that they might buy and read Magic City a second time having totally forgotten that they’d read it before. Yay for that.

Buy it here.

Reversion

A right of reversion is a contractual provision that permits authors to work with their publishers to regain some or all of the rights in their books when certain conditions are met.

A few months ago my former publisher, St. Martin’s Press, reverted to me the rights to 8 Thorn novels which they published years ago. 

This ‘reversion of rights’ as it’s called came after I failed several times to persuade the publisher to return the rights to me.  When my agent, Ann Rittenberg, got involved the publisher finally relented.  Thank you again, Ann.

I now have the right to publish these books myself and reap whatever financial rewards come.

But first:

1.  I have to find someone who can scan the pages of a hardback copy of one of the books.
2. Then proof that file for errors.  (There usually are plenty.)
3. Then I have to find someone to create the cover for the ebook version.
4. And then create the cover, front and back, of the Print on Demand, physical copy.
5. Then I have to fill out several pages on Amazon, deciding on price, the Keywords that will help readers locate that book, and a dozen other variables.
6. Then I upload all the files and the covers, and wait a few days before the book I wrote and that I now own the rights to will magically appear on Amazon.  (possibly to be lost in the swamp of a few million other books)

As you can see, it’s a lengthy and expensive process.  In my case, although the rights were reverted to me a few months ago, I’ve just now completed that process for one book:  Hell’s Bay (the 10^th book in the Thorn series).

When St. Martin’s still owned the rights to that novel, they were charging 12 dollars for the ebook.  I’m charging $3.99.  I make 70% on each book, around $2.80, an amount that is about the same as the royalties I earned on the hardback version of yesteryear when Hell’s Bay was being sold for over $20 and I was earning 10-15% of that.  I figure it’s going to take me most of a year of moderate sales to make back the initial investment of publishing that book.

The next Thorn novel in the works is Blackwater Sound.  I’m hoping it will be available on Amazon in the next few weeks.

I’m sharing these publishing and financial details because I think most readers don’t fully understand the investment of time, money and creative energy involved in bringing a self-published book to the marketplace.  Not to mention the years it took to write the novel in the first place. 

The rest of the Thorn novels will be published on Amazon in the coming year.  But if you haven’t read Hell’s Bay yet, now’s a good time.  And at 3.99 there’s not much to lose.

It’s been two years since the last Thorn novel, Trickster, appeared. I’ve been working hard during those many months on the latest Thorn adventure.

Since I don’t use a road map (outline) , I sometimes make a wrong turn and head down a road that looked pretty at the start but ends up going nowhere. Months of work must all be deleted. And that’s what happened in this case. I was almost a hundred pages down that pretty road when I realized there was a dead end sign up ahead. Save what you can, then delete, delete, delete.

“No thrill for the writer, no thrill for the reader,” said Robert Frost. Although he said “tears” not “thrill.” But that’s my motto as a writer. I’m guided on my journey through each book not by some pre-set destination, but by the tingle of excitement I get as scenes unfold in unexpected directions.

Sometimes that process causes me to waste a lot of time, as was true with Stare Down. Thus the two year gap between this novel and the last. I like to think I gave Thorn a good long break to recuperate from his last beatdown and gave him time to make some new friends since some of his old friends aren’t around anymore.

The image I began with this time was a total solar eclipse that happened years ago. Not the most recent one. My original hometown, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, was one of the places where totality lasted the longest of anywhere in the US. Thousands of people descended on Hopkinsville and the surrounding area, and it was that fact that was on my mind as I began this novel. In one sense, I wanted the chance to write a little bit about my hometown, and I also wanted to tap into the celestial power of that rare event.

The first problem was the one I always wrestle with at the beginning of a Thorn novel. How do I get this agoraphobic, isolationist anti-social hermit out of his stilt house and in motion? In the past I’ve had to kill one of his relatives or friends to get him galvanized and out the door. As a result, I’ve trimmed his friend list way down over the years. This time as I solved that initial problem, a second and far more interesting problem appeared.

Thorn agrees to take his goddaughter to see the solar eclipse way the hell away from Key Largo because he’s trying to satisfy the young lady’s passionate wish to see it. Off they go, Thorn and Stetson to Kentucky, against the wishes of Stetson’s parents (and Thorn’s closest friend). Since the parents are off on a faraway vacation, Thorn figures they’ll never be the wiser.

How wrong he is. But it is that fateful decision that drives the action and Thorn’s emotional journey.

The other challenge I set for myself in this novel is hiding the the killer’s identity. In every past novel, there’s been no mystery about who dun it. The reader sees whodunit when they do it. I’ve never concealed the identity of the killer till the final scenes before. And boy, is that a different writing challenge than any I’ve tackled before. Gives me a whole new respect for the Agatha Christie approach.

So anyway, hoping you enjoy the new one. By the way, I’ve started on the next one already, and still no roadmap.

Lately I’ve been using ChatGPT (an artificial intelligence program) to research some technical issues for my new Thorn novel. (Almost finished.)

It’s very good at answering questions about coding and servers and matters having to do with programming. (At least I think it’s good because I know very little about all that stuff.)

Back in 1966 (yikes) when I was a college student, I had a friend in the dorm who was a computer genius (perfect SAT score at 16 years old–lived in his pajamas like Hugh Hefner.) I asked him once if the college’s computer (which took up an entire room the size of an average college classroom, but had less computing power than my Apple watch), if the computer could write poems. His answer (which I’ve blogged about before) was: If you can tell me what a poem is, I can get the computer to write a million of them.

Of course I couldn’t define a poem, so gave him only a rudimentary set of rules: I broke down a James Dickey poem into various parts of speech: verb, adjective, adverb, noun, article, pronoun, conjunction, interjection, and then gave my computer whiz a vocabulary from Anne Sexton’s poetry. The result was chaos. None of the lines the computer spewed out made much sense.

The only line I remember was “The wrinkled igloo rode its bicycle into the sunset.”

Not bad for a surreal poem, I guess.

Makes as much sense as a VW Beetle surrounded by sharks.

Anyway, in a lull in my writing and researching lately, I decided to see what progress had been made in the 57 years (double yikes) since the wrinkled igloo was riding its bike.

I asked ChatGPT to write romantic scene between Thorn and a woman, mimicking the style of James W. Hall.

All I can say about the following result is that, yes indeed, things have improved in the half century of computers writing fiction and poetry. But not much. I’m not worried about a computer taking my job just yet.

Here’s what AI came up with:

In the soft glow of the Florida moon, Thorn and the woman found themselves on the secluded beach, where the waves whispered secrets to the sand. The air was thick with the scent of salt and passion, as if the very atmosphere conspired to kindle the flames between them.

Thorn, with his weathered demeanor and piercing gaze, stood at the water’s edge. The moonlight played upon his rugged features, casting shadows that danced in harmony with the rolling tide. The woman, her eyes reflecting the infinite depth of the ocean, approached him with a mixture of anticipation and vulnerability.

The distant sounds of the city were but a faint echo, drowned out by the symphony of the sea. Thorn, normally a man of few words, felt an unfamiliar warmth enveloping him. He turned to face the woman, and in that fleeting moment, time seemed to pause.

Their eyes met, a silent exchange of understanding that transcended words. Thorn extended a calloused hand, inviting her to join him in this dance with the night. Without a word, she placed her hand in his, the connection sparking a current that pulsed between them like a secret shared between kindred souls.

They walked along the shoreline, the sand beneath their feet yielding to the rhythm of their steps. The moon cast its silver sheen upon the water, illuminating the path ahead. Thorn stole a glance at the woman, her hair catching the moonlight like strands of spun silver.

As they reached a quiet alcove, Thorn paused, turning to face her. The woman’s eyes, a reflection of the starlit sky, held a mixture of longing and surrender. Thorn, a master of reading the untold stories etched on a person’s face, gently traced the outline of her jaw with his fingertips.

A soft breeze whispered through the palms, as Thorn leaned in, closing the distance between them. The world fell away, leaving only the symphony of the sea and the beating of two hearts entwined. Their lips met in a lingering kiss, a union of souls beneath the canvas of the night.

In that timeless embrace, Thorn and the woman discovered a love that transcended the boundaries of the physical world. The moon bore witness to their silent vows, and the waves carried the echo of their whispered promises into the vast expanse of the ocean. It was a moment suspended in eternity, a chapter written in the language of the heart—a James W. Hall romance unfolding beneath the endless sky.

And if I’d never encountered that murder mystery with that salacious dollop of nudity, I would probably be selling life insurance or real estate and withering away in “quiet desperation” (Thoreau).

Was that librarian in her long blue and white flowered dress in that dusty library in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in the 50’s trying to groom me, seduce me into a life of licentiousness?

Hell, no. Like most librarians I’ve met over the years, her main goal was to foster a love of books and reading because I’m pretty sure she believed, as most other librarians do, that reading books, even mysteries and crime novels, was a reliable way to broaden the horizons of the patrons of her library and introduce them to a range of possibilities they might never have considered.

On her shelves were books whose values and perspectives challenged and enlightened and educated young readers. That was her simple and noble mission. Books that question the status quo, that provoke strong emotions, that force a reader to more deeply consider their own biases and lazy prejudices and intolerance, those are the books that truly enrich us as individuals and as a society.

Restricting the books on library shelves to those which fit the narrow-minded, self-righteous values of a few well-organized sanctimonious zealots could very well groom a generation to the same level of ignorance and intolerance as these Moms For Liberty.

I offer again the following essay–my love letter to libraries.

This is the library of my youth, fallen into disrepair.

This is a view of the ‘restored” library.   To the right is the First Presbyterian Church where I spent Sundays as a kid.

NUDE WOMAN IN THE GRASS

My love affair with books began as most serious romances do, when I was least expecting to fall in love. I was ten years old, maybe eleven, and for years I had dutifully read the required books in school, but because they were required and because I was tested on my comprehension of them, I had decided that reading books ranked alongside long division and penmanship as simply one more bothersome educational duty.

Context is important here, for I was a young male in a southern town of the 1950s. In other words, that I would read a book just for fun was about as likely as my deciding spontaneously to knit a sweater for the football coach. It wasn’t done. At least not by any of the male role models who shaped my thinking at the time.

So when my mother deposited me at the public library that fall afternoon to get me out of her hair while she went about her downtown errands, she might as well have dropped me off in the middle of Death Valley The building was one of those structures built in the dreary style of many other Carnegie libaries of its era. That creaky battleship was piloted by a wispy, white-haired woman in a dark dress and thick glasses, a living cliché who floated noiselessly up and down the stacks replacing volumes in their proper slots and leaving the dry dust of tedium in her wake.

As a young boy who aspired only to muscular achievements on hash-marked fields or gymnasium floors, I was mortified. Frightened out of my skin that I would be spotted by one of my friends in such a place.

To make myself as invisible as possible I moseyed down aisle after aisle studying the titles of those musty tomes, bored to death by the prospect of spending an hour or two in that dismal room. When the passing librarian seemed to sense my discomfort and began to home in on me, a fit of panic spurred me to nab a random book from a shelf, pop it open to the first page, and feign deep interest.

As my eyes ran down the lines of print, I was suddenly breathless. Though my vocabulary was no larger than that of any average ten-year old boy of my place and time, I did know the word nude. It was one of those special, cherished words, not quite a curse, but nonetheless a word loaded with magical potency. And lo and behold that very word leaped out of the first page and seized my full attention. The fact that the word nude turned out to be an adjective modifying the word woman made my knees weak and put a wobble in my pulse.

I looked up, certain that the librarian was about to rip this smutty book from my hand, grab me by the collar, and toss me onto the street. By evening it would be all over town: “Little Jimmy Hall was caught reading that nude woman book in the library.” But magically, the librarian melted back into the stacks, and I was left alone with my first murder mystery novel.

For the nude woman was dead, and it was her corpse that had been found in a field by a man chasing butterflies. How did she get there? Who was she? Who would have done such a thing? I was mesmerized. Weak of breath and nearly fainting from a preadolescent tumult of emotions, I located a private corner near a window I looked around and planned my getaway should my mother suddenly reappear and find me reading that filth. Then I sped through as many pages as I could manage before she returned and called me away.

To my disappointment, there was no graphic description of the woman’s nudity, nor was there any further mention of her appearance in the tall grasses of that field. Nevertheless, I was hooked on the story—the exact condition its author must have hoped to inspire.

So this was why people read! Books were about adult things. Strong emotions, extreme behaviors, the inside stuff of a world I had never imagined existed. In this my first recreational book I suddenly realized that novels could fill one with heart-pounding fear as well as lip-smacking lust. That they could, in fact, suddenly expand the boundaries of the tiny backwater town where I had always lived and where I imagined I would always stay.

Tramping across the bogs of the English countryside in pursuit of the heinous killer of that nude woman, I was suddenly freed of my homebound life. I was set loose in the world and allowed to know every crucial thought of that droll British detective and was just as stumped as he, just as frustrated, and finally just as delighted when the logic of his deductions led him to the surprising culprit.

It took me several more surreptitious visits to the library to finish that novel. Surely my mother and father were deeply puzzled by this new enthusiasm, but they had the good grace not to ask where it was coming from. That might have quashed it all.

The day I finished that first novel, I looked up to find the amiable librarian staring down at me.

I gulped.

“You like mysteries?” she asked.

I gazed at the book in my hand as though it had just materialized there.

“Oh, this?”

“Yes, that. That book you’ve been reading these last few weeks.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Well, so do I.” She beamed. “I just love a good murder story.”

And she gave me a conspiratorial look that still floats into my mind whenever I am feeling isolated from the human race. For as I have come to understand, reading is at once a private and a communal act. While books are savored alone, they grant you membership in the most fascinating club I know: fellow readers. Fellow voyagers into the vast uncharted waters of imaginative literature.

That afternoon the librarian gave me a private tour of that big dusty room and showed me the best mysteries in the house. Hard-boiled, cozies, Sherlock Holmes. She made a pile, got me a library card, helped me fill it out.

“Tell me what you think,” she said.

“Okay,” I said uncertainly.

“Oh, don’t worry, this isn’t school,” she said. “There’s no test when you bring them back. I won’t take your library card away from you if you don’t read one all the way through.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m smart enough to read all these.” I patted the stack of books.

“Oh, my,” she said. “No one starts out smart. That’s why we read.”

Over the next few years I gradually climbed onto the literary high road and read Dickens and Hardy and Joyce, and later I fell in love with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles, Faulkner and Steinbeck, and the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Robert Frost. It came as a shock to learn that sports and reading were not mutually exclusive. In fact, when I discovered Hemingway and began reading about his intense competitive exploits, I started to picture the unspeakable—that I might someday learn the craft of writing well enough to create the very things I so dearly loved to consume.

Though that creaky library has been restored almost beyond recognition, and though I have fled her narrow streets and scrubby fields forever, the largest part of what I am today and what I know about the world and about the affairs of the human heart springs from that one autumn afternoon when I plucked a book from the shelf and encountered that nude woman lying in the grass and I began this long journey, year after year, filling myself beyond the brim with the great accumulated wealth of books.

(This essay is taken from my collection Hot Damn!)

Back in May of 2018, I wrote a blog post on Artificial Intelligence after reading a fascinating article in The New Yorker. That blog post is here.

I’ve had an interest in AI for decades, and have watched with curiosity and a certain amount of dread as long ago prophesies about the future of AI have become more real.

In that blog post years ago, I mentioned a college dorm mate of mine, Alex, who was a boy genius. Back in the mid-sixties Alex (16 years old at the time) was already working on early forms of programming, using the primitive computers of that era. I picture vacuum tubes and transistors, but his equipment was probably a little more sophisticated than that.

I remember seeing the computer room once back then and it was stuffed, wall-to-wall with exotic machinery. I doubt that the computing power in that room could equal my iWatch, but it was as cutting edge as my small liberal arts college could afford at the time.

Alex didn’t have much interest in or respect for the humanities. I imagine he found literature and creative writing as silly and impractical, though he did help me out with an experiment I attempted with poetry writing back then (an early version of what is now available to all interested parties ChatGPT (when it’s not over capacity). You can try it for yourself here.

Anyway, back to Alex. Because he had such disdain for the humanities, he found a wonderful workaround for the weekly papers we all had to write for our Core Curriculum. Alex created a three page paper with a dozen or so blank spaces that would be filled in with the appropriate words to cover any subject we were assigned. Let’s say we had to write a paper on the importance of Greek culture in the shaping of Western aesthetics. All Alex had to do was come up with a dozen or so words that related to Greek culture and Western art or literature. He filled in the blanks in his all-purpose paper with those words, and voila, he had his paper.

Alex coasted through all those Core courses without a problem using that paper for every assignment. Until one day a professor called Alex into his office. Some of his dorm mates knew this was happening and were eagerly waiting for him to return from his meeting. Was this the moment Alex was kicked out of college? Nope. The professor asked Alex if he could possibly bring his future papers down to the professor’s level.

After Alex graduated with the rest of us in 1969, he went to Stanford for a Masters in computer science. And after he finished his Masters, he stayed at Stanford for the next 25 years, working in the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center which is now known as the National Accelerator Laboratory. You can find out more about it here.

If you can decode what exactly they do at the National Accelerator Laboratory, you are a better man than I.

I remember one more thing about Alex from those early years. For his final thesis, he was writing a program that would translate German to English and vice versa. 16 years old.

I played around with the ChatGPT, instructing it to write a scene of a bank robbery in the style of Elmore Leonard, which it did in a very basic and silly style:

Put your hands up, this is a robbery.

Please don’t hurt me, sir.

I won’t hurt you if you do exactly as I say.

Please, don’t hurt me, I’ll give you whatever you want.

Keep your hands up.

After I tried various other scenarios, I couldn’t help thinking that the folks who worked on this project were vastly inferior to my old buddy Alex.

The thing that Alex said to me back in 1967 when I asked him if he could get a computer to write a poem is still the single most profound thing I’ve ever heard about the intersection of poetry and computers: ‘If you can tell me what a poem is, I can get the computer to write a thousand of them.’

Having spent half a century wrestling with that question, I’m convinced it’s ultimately unanswerable.

Maybe some rough facsimile of a poem might be generated by programming a computer to imitate features of Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson. I don’t doubt that. But for a poem or a work of fiction to arise unbidden from the bowels of a machine because that machine had a burning need to understand and capture in words a part of the mysterious universe and render that mystery in a coherent and emotionally affective form…well, “Put your hands up, this is a robbery.”

I’d published two Thorn novels (Under Cover of Daylight and Tropical Freeze) with W.W. Norton in the late 80’s and I was ready to give Thorn a break. I frankly wasn’t sure if a recluse like Thorn was cut out to be a long-term series character. He wasn’t exactly anti-social, but he wasn’t all that receptive to new adventures like a private investigator would be or a cop or even a lawyer or journalist.

To force Thorn out of his cocoon, I’d already killed off two people very close to him, and I didn’t see how doing that again and again was sustainable.

About that same time my wife and I had an opportunity to spend a few months in Key West. A friend managed a rental property in Key West that happened to be available. “Hidden Beach” was owned by Seward Johnson of the Johnson and Johnson family. The house was divided into four units, two downstairs, two up. Evelyn and I got one of the lower units that was normally rented to John Malcolm Brinnin, a poet and critic who spent the summers in cooler climes.

Over the years the house had been the temporary home for numerous novelists, poets, publishers and other ne’er do wells, including Tom McGuane, Jimmy Buffet, Jim Harrison and a host of others. So it had an excellent literary vibe. Plus it was perfectly located on the waterfront between The Reach and Louie’s Backyard. In other words, it was an ideal place to spend a few months relaxing, drinking margaritas, fishing, swimming, and engaging in other indulgent activities.

Like writing Bones of Coral.

We did manage to take our 20 foot Mako out fishing now and then and out to one of the nearby reefs for some snorkeling. And I spent an hour or so every day learning to windsurf. So it wasn’t all work.

I can’t recall each chronological step of the writing process (I mean this was over 30 years ago), but I’ll list a few of the ingredients I started with.

The bad guy: I’ve always tried to find bad guys who for one reason or another scared me. One of the scariest traits I can think of is a total lack of empathy. Someone who simply doesn’t understand or care about other people’s pain can be capable of extreme cruelties that average people find horrendous because they do have empathy.

Evil comes in many forms, of course, and those creatures who actually find pleasure in inflicting pain on others are certainly frightening. Serial killers fall into this general category. But someone who is missing the empathy gene is somehow even scarier to me because their violence can seem innocent. When they hurt someone they may not fully grasp the damage they’ve done because they don’t know what pain is. They don’t enjoy inflicting pain as sadists do; they’re simply neutral.

This is how Dougie Barnes was born. He’s a man who literally has no pain threshold. So his ability to understand the pain of others is severely limited. Dougie may or may not be “on the spectrum.” If he is, it’s a pretty unique spectrum.

Multiple sclerosis: (as this link shows) Key West had a very high incidence of MS. It was mysterious connection that might have had some connection with the large trash dump near downtown Key West, and very near the Key West hospital where numerous nurses had been diagnosed with MS.

In the early stages of researching the book, after deciding I wanted to know about the connection between Key West and multiple sclerosis, I spent an evening with a group of newly diagnosed MS folks in Miami. They were being briefed on the nature of the disease and its possible progression and the doctors who were running the evening’s program answered their questions.

I had only a passing knowledge about MS and had simply chosen it as a possible subject because of the mysterious connection it had to Key West. But that evening was a watershed moment for me. I was deeply moved by the stories I heard, and by the anxiety and in some cases shock that was evident in the room that night.

With a new level of resolve that this was a subject that truly mattered, I spent hours in the bowels of the university library digging through documents to find anything else that might play a role in the Key West/MS subject. Finally, I stumbled on a report from a congressional sub-committee in which Key West figured prominently.

The report described a series of U.S. Army aerial spraying tests that occurred in several U.S. locations in the fifties. The purpose of those tests was to better understand how vulnerable various cities were to a bioweapon attack. That report (which this Wikipedia page link describes) has a small footnote about the ethics of testing unsuspecting civilian populations. The morality of that testing, together with the high incidence of MS in Key West, formed the basis of my story, Bones of Coral.

That ethical issue was what attracted Hugh Hudson (Academy Award director of Chariots of Fire) to sign on the MGM project to bring Bones of Coral to the screen. The history of that project is the subject of another blog post.

That summer in Key West was also marked by a close encounter with crime, Keys style. One night while we slept, our great dane woke us with a loud bark. We shushed her and went back to sleep. She was trying to alert us to a burglar who’d broken into our ground level apartment (we later learned that this apartment was a frequent target for burglars). The next morning I went outside to check the weather and found that all the ballyhoo in the ice chest that we’d used for bait the day before had been stolen. A couple of fishing rods were gone as well and some other fishing supplies. A classic Key West caper. My watch was still sitting on the dresser by the sliding glass door that the burglar had entered, and my wallet was untouched. The guy had just wanted to go fishing.

A few words about the title.

Spanish settlers originally called Key West Cayo Hueso, which translates to bone island, referring to the bones of the Calusa Indians who had once lived in the Florida Keys. English speakers mistook Cayo Hueso, thinking it sounded like Key West and the name stuck.

I put that together with a little Shakespeare and came up with the title.

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

(from The Tempest)

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Below are a few of the covers for the book.

I’ve always liked the original one that Sonny Mehta (my editor at Knopf) presented to me in Coral Gables one sunny afternoon. The slightly deranged looking parrot actually plays a small part in the novel.

The next one is from the paperback version. And the last one is from British edition.

!!! NOTICE: ON DECEMBER 19TH THE ebook of BONES OF CORAL WILL BE FREE ON AMAZON FOR 3 DAYS.

The following 10 commandments are Elmore Leonard’s famous advice. I mostly agree with them, though I do like to write about weather, and creating brief descriptions of characters (especially those things which are choices the characters make about their appearance, like dress, grooming, etc.) seems perfectly okay to me.

The one thing that jumps out at me about Mr. Leonard’s commandments is that they are mostly in the “thou shall not” vein. My list that follows Elmore Leonard’s list are different on that score. From teaching writing for 40 years or so, I collected these eleven things (and more that I won’t list) as signposts that I hope point the way to writing better stories. And having more fun.

Here’s Elmore Leonard’s list.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

 2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

4. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

5. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” …

…he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

6. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

7. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

8. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short storiesClose Range.

9. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

10. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

11. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in Sweet Thursday was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1″ and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2″ as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

Sweet Thursday came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

Here’s my list with a brief explanation of each one.

1. The basics:  Show don’t tell. For illustration purposes I use something I call “the banana ladder.”  The banana ladder goes like this: at the bottom are the most concrete and imagistic words, like banana. On the rung above that is: Fruit. Which is more abstract, or a larger category of things and less concrete and imagistic.

Above that is: Food. An even larger category of things and so abstract it’s pretty vague. And above that is: nourishment. A word that is more an idea than a physical thing. Good fiction is made up of things. Objects that have a sensory presence in the world. Beginning writers tend to use words farther up the list. Good writing is full of bananas. Peel them, smell them, eat them.

2. No bathtub scenes.  Passive writers often create passive heroes, idealizing inactivity and introspection. In all my years of reading student stories, there’s an opening scene that shows up over and over. The main character is sitting somewhere (often in a bathtub, which is strange) and they are thinking. Too much thinking is dull. And too much of it in the first few pages, can doom a story. Get the character up, toweled off and doing something. Action reveals character.

3. Mediocre writers imitate.  Great writers steal.  Use a model as challenge.  I’m not encouraging writers to plagiarize, but believe me, every writer from Hemingway to yours truly, studied a writer they loved and tried to write like them. Long before there were creative writing classes and MFA programs, the world of writing carried on just fine. Writers studied other writers and imitated. Why try to invent the wheel when there are some many very successful wheels rolling along that you can imitate (at least at first until you discover your own voice.)

4. One of the cliches in writer advice is to write what you know. I think that’s silly and not very interesting. I prefer this one. Write what you want to know.  That way writing can help you expand your knowledge and worldview instead of simply restating what you already believe.

5. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.  No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.  Robert Frost said something similar. See the quote below. If you aren’t excited about what you’re writing, it’s almost certain that your reader won’t be either. Sadly, the converse is not also true. Just because you’re excited, doesn’t guarantee that your reader will be. But if you’re bored, there is no doubt your reader will be too.

6. Related to #5, if you don’t discover something in the process of writing, it was a waste of time.

“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.  A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.”  (The Figure a Poem Makes)  Good writing is the history of a writer’s process of discovery.  You start with what you know and work toward the unknown.  No discovery, no story.

7. Your character has to want something, has to struggle to get it, overcome those struggles through some special resource or skill that is anchored in their personality, (better that it’s not physical), and winds up changed in some way, usually not getting what they wanted at the outset, but winding up getting something different and becoming a little sadder but wiser.  And the big stipulation is that what the protagonist wants should be something a reader could care about.  Something whose worth is convincing. But the basic rule is: No trouble, no story. No change, no story.

8. Turn off the Internet. 

9. Floss your teeth, use sunscreen.

10. Quit if you can. This advice comes from Harry Crews. It’s a lot easier to do something else than write. If you can’t quit, if it’s in your blood, then all the difficulties (rejection, writers bloc, self-doubt, etc.) will be irrelevant.

  11. Ignore all these rules, make your own damn list.

Okay, so the movie isn’t great art. Rotten Tomatoes gives it only three stars. And I don’t want to quibble about that.

However, the McGuffin (the plot device that drives the story) is so memorable that I find myself using the movie’s title as shorthand for so many watershed events in my own life. I also hear others use it the same way, so I’d say by that measure alone, the movie deserves at least another star or maybe two.

The McGuffin is simple: What if she’d turned left instead of right? But there are a thousand permutations of this. What if I’d come around that corner two seconds later than I did? What if it had rained and I’d stayed home and never met her. What if I’d left the bar a minute earlier? What if, what if, what if.

So, enough of movies and McGuffins. The point of this post is to describe a sliding door moment of many years ago that had a fundamental impact on my life. Here’s the story.

Back in the 90’s I was finishing up several weeks on the road for a book tour promoting one of my early Thorn novels, when I came aboard my final flight, exhausted but homeward bound, and I found I was assigned a seat in a three-across row.  The other two seats were already taken by a young woman and her two children.  A two year old boy in the woman’s lap, a girl around five in the other in the middle seat beside me.  One look and I sensed a turbulent flight. I almost balked and asked to be moved.

Turned out the kids were great.  And after a while the mother and I started playing the Kevin Bacon seven degrees of separation game.  It didn’t take long to discover that we had Key Largo in common.  She’d lived there for years and knew people I was acquainted with.  And somewhere along the way she revealed that her husband was a fishing guide.  A backcountry guide, meaning he specialized in fishing the shallow waters of the Florida Bay and the southern edge of the Everglades. 

I told her that the character in my novels was also a fishing guide who tied flys and specialized in bonefishing on the flats. Same as her husband. She gave me one of his business cards and suggested I give him a call sometime. I put it in my pocket, then when I got home, I put it in a drawer of my desk and forgot about it.

Until one day I was cleaning out my desk, came across the card and said, what the hell. I gave him a call. The guy’s name, by the way, is Geoff Colmes. Here he is at work.

Geoff and I set up a time to fish and we met up at Papa Joe’s restaurant, bar and marina, where Geoff was launching his boat at the time.

All I remember about that first day of fishing with Geoff was that he poled us all around Nine Mile Bank and tracked down numerous bonefish and gave me many clear shots at them, all of which I missed. I scared away a ton of fish that day, but we had a good time and Geoff wasn’t judgmental. I also remember his patience and gentle coaching.

And I have a vivid memory of the flats boat he was using at the time, a Maverick, that could get into water so skinny I could look straight into the eyes of passing rays skimming along the bottom. Back then I had a 20 foot Mako, a center console. A good all round boat that could go many places in the back country of the Keys where the water got pretty shallow and could also go out into the Atlantic on calm days, to dive on the reefs, fish for dolphin (mahi) and also go on extended trips around the state.

For instance, wife Evelyn and I took the Mako from Miami to Marathon by water once for lobster season and another time from Miami to Merritt Island mostly through the intracoastal. (Some great stories there which I’ll share one day.)

Here’s what the Mako looked like:

It wasn’t long before I was itching to buy a flats boat like Geoff’s. Something I could take into water that over 90 percent of other boats couldn’t reach. I did a lot of research and settled on a Hell’s Bay Whipray, a 16 foot boat that weighed around 500 pounds with the motor. As light as a cork. The Hell’s Bay folks made me a great deal on the boat and I was thrilled to bring it back to Key Largo and work my way out to parts of the backcountry I hadn’t penetrated.

That’s my Whipray, only now it belongs to Geoff. I sold it to him when I left the Keys to live again in Miami. We made a good bargain: he gave me some cash and threw in a bunch of free fishing days. I could go out with him on my old boat and he’d lead us to some good fishing holes and pole us right up to the fish. The truth is, I caught a lot more fish on that Whipray when it was Geoff’s boat than when it was mine. He really knows his way around the backcountry. Here’s a link to Geoff’s website where he makes a few gracious comments about me and my books.

https://floridakeysflyfish.com/en/journal/27-glasser.html

Later, Geoff designed and built a shallow draft houseboat with the intention of using it in the Dry Tortugas and the Everglades as a mothership. The idea was simple. He would tow two or three shallow draft boats like the Whipray behind it and anchor up the houseboat on the edge of great fishing grounds and the skiffs would take clients out for a day of spectacular fishing and instead of having to trek all the way back to a dock in civilization, the skiffs would return to the mothership where the guides would prepare great dinners and tell great stories and everyone could sleep in a comfortable bunk and do it all again the next day.

I went on one of these cruises into the Everglades, and sure enough, with the mothership anchored up in fairly deep water, Geoff took us north into the upper reaches of the glades where the GPS said there was no water at all, but only the southernmost dirt of Florida. Geoff knew better. He turned into a small creek and pushed about a half mile of almost impenetrable mangroves which were full of spiders and other critters which coated our hats and clothes as we pushed deeper and deeper down that grown-over creek until voila, we emerged in a virgin lake that very likely had never been visited by human beings before. We were all reverentially silent as we cast out into these sacred waters, presenting bait to fish that probably had never seen artificial lures before.

In quick succession I landed a tarpon, a redfish, and a snook. A backcountry grand slam. At least for me it was a grand slam. Here’s a shot of the tarpon, small but feisty.

I wound up writing a novel, Hell’s Bay, which featured this trip into the Everglades. Thorn was right at home in that isolated region.

I’ve always felt a certain magical connection with that novel because it never fails to remind me of some of the most extraordinary days of my life. Out in a place where few have ever been surrounded by funny, smart, interesting folks and led by Geoff Colmes and his merry band of fellow guides, folks who I would never have met had I not sat in the window seat next to Geoff’s wife, Liza, and her two young children.