Gravity and Me

 There are a few years in your childhood when you can positively fly. It’s a natural progression, when you think about it. We’re born nailed to the earth. Then we learn to sit up, to crawl, to stand, to run, to dance. I know this program intimately. When I had my stroke seven years ago, I had to repeat the program, every step of the way. And every night in my bed I dreamed of running.

After you learn to run, you know you can fly. You just need to learn the trick of it. Build up momentum. Flap your arms. Fly. You’re small and light. Gravity might take its eyes off you for just a second. That’s all the time you need to break free.

Or maybe you need an equalizer.

When I was in third grade, my sister’s high school put on a production of Peter Pan. She smuggled home the Peter Pan hat. Mind you, it was made of folded-up newspaper, painted green. But it had obviously been sprayed with pixie dust. 

That was the edge we needed. We’d take turns mounting the porch railing with the hat on, myself, my brother, and the Burns boys. There was an oleander bush standing guard in the yard between our apartment and the neighbor’s. We figured if we could clear the oleander bush, we could officially fly.

That bush took a lot of punishment. We’d fling ourselves toward it, hoping to catch an updraft. Gravity usually grabbed us by the ankle just before we took off. None of us actually flew, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Rex Stout on character

Rex Stout was prolific--he claimed it took between 35 and 41 days to write a novel, as long as he wasn't drinking. He wrote 33 novels and I won't get into the number of stories. His best-known as the creator of Nero Wolfe--the genius detective with the too too solid flesh.

"A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat."

I won't pretend to have read more than about a dozen of his books so far, but these are three of my favorites so far:

The Silent Speaker

The Golden Spiders

Not Quite Dead Enough

Here's a bonus quote:

"There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living cook books and detective stories."

Not to Diss Gruntle

 

Gruntled to the dis-

Would you like to be gruntled? On the face of it, probably not. It doesn't sound like much fun.

But we know for sure that no one likes to be disgruntled.

So what's our option?

It turns out, "gruntle" is a very old English word (1682) that means to grumble or complain. But "disgruntled," rather than the opposite, means even more gruntled, a real complainy-face, and probably comes from an Old English word meaning "grunt.".

Because the English language has no actual rules.

"Gruntled" went out of style for a few centuries, till it was revived by some nameless writer (according to Merriam-Webster) back in the Twenties to mean, humorously, very pleased indeed.

(I'm betting it was Damon Runyon or Ogden Nash, although I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of Dorothy Parker.)

Our gruntled suspects

The Cookie or the Cigarette?

 This is why I so enjoy going down the rabbit hole of research.

In my work in progress, one of my characters, Lawrence, third footman, started out as a Welshman with a lilting voice, in his mid-20s.

A problem arose. I had set my story in Sussex, England in the year 1917.
England was in the middle of WW1. And draft age was between 18--41. So why wasn't Lawrence off in the trenches?

(I had to raise and lower the ages of several other male characters.)
I chose asthma. That was one of the few ailments that would keep him out of the war.
So much for the lilt. But I could work with the short breath and wheezing of an asthmatic. He's an excitable boy, prone to conspiracy theories.

But then I thought: how did people treat asthma in 1917, well before modern inhalers?
I researched, and found an answer: CIGARETTES.