What the Color of your Vehicle Says About You (Or the Character in Your Book)

In my green article for St. Patrick’s Day, I wrote, “Owning a dark green vehicle supposedly means that you are traditional, trusty, and well balanced, but what it really means is that you are thrifty. Who makes dark green cars anymore? If you own one, it’s probably been a while since you bought a new vehicle.”

So for all you smug people who don’t own a green vehicle, I thought I’d tell you what the color of your car says about you.

Yes, your fiery orange-red sports car says exactly what you think it does: you’re sexy, speedy, high-energy, dynamic. Before you preen, go out and look at your red car. Most red cars on the road are more of a kidney bean color. Is yours? If so, it means you are dynamic and energetic but are losing your fire. You really want to be have that orange-red sports car personality, but you just can’t quite make it. You’re too busy, too old, or too tired. For all the good your red car does you, it might as well be brown.

A silver car supposedly says that you are cool and elegant. The only problem is that since silver was the most popular car color for several years, almost everyone owns one, like your neighbors who don’t mow their lawns and don’t put their garbage cans away after the garbage has been picked up. Real cool. Very elegant.

White supposedly means you are fastidious, but what it really means is that you wanted that fiery orange-red sports car, but you drive like a bat out of hell or like batman in his batmobile, (depending on your age group) and you were afraid that you’d get too many tickets so you chose the less conspicuous white. Good thinking. On average, while drivers in red cars do not get more tickets than anyone else, orange-red sports car drivers do, and let’s face it, they deserve them. Who drives the speed limit in a car like that?

A light blue vehicle supposedly means that you’re calm and quiet, but what it really means is that you went to the showroom to buy a sunshine yellow car to show how joyful and young-at-heart you are, but they only had marine blue, and since you really are a calm, quiet person who doesn’t like to make waves, you bought it.

A purple vehicle means you are creative, individualistic, original, and perhaps it does. It could also mean you’re too old to care what anyone thinks of you.

A black vehicle says you are empowered, not easily manipulated, love elegance, and you appreciate the classics. It’s also says that you are mysterious or that you have two sides to your personality; it’s the favored car of both clergy and gangsters.

A dark blue vehicle says you are credible, confident, dependable. And you drive too much because you always get stuck with the carpool.

A gray vehicle says you are sober, corporate, practical. Boring.

An orange vehicle says you are fun loving, talkative, fickle, trendy. A yellow-green one says you are trendy, whimsical, lively. And you know it’s true. Only fun and whimsical cars come in these colors: Volkswagen bugs and little sportscars.

A tan vehicle means that you’re timeless, basic, simple, but it also means you have something to hide. Maybe bad driving habits? Or that you never wash your car?

A gold vehicle says is that you love comfort and will pay for it; it also says that you’re intelligent, and you must be — you were smart enough to come read my article!

And a brown vehicle supposedly means you’re down-to-earth but who are you trying to kid? If you really cared about the earth, you wouldn’t have bought that big old gas-guzzler.

So what color of car do I drive? I’m sorry, but I don’t know you well enough to answer such a personal question.

Not Exactly a Rave Review, But a Fair Assessment

Well, here it is. The Publishers Weekly review of my Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award entry Daughter Am I:

A group of spunky octogenarians joins a woman on a search to discover the truth about the grandparents she never knew she had. After inheriting the farm of her estranged, murdered grandparents, Mary Louise Stuart discovers photos and an address book in the Colorado farmhouse and becomes obsessed with finding out who her grandparents were and who would want them dead. With each question, another senior citizen joins the quest — former friends and gangsters with names like Crunchy, Iron Sam, Happy, Lila Lorraine. The mystery deepens with each stop in their whirlwind tour of the Midwest: who’s following them? A love interest ensues between Mary and Tim Olsen, whose grandpa was good friends with her great-grandfather. While the author certainly researched the history of the Mafia, too many of the numerous historical asides — and subplots — are tacked on under the guise of story time, making the story drag with detail abut Wyatt Earp, the JFK assassination and bootleggers. But underneath the relentless bouts of story time is a delightful treasure-hunting tale of finding one’s self in a most unlikely way.

Not exactly a rave review, but a fair assessment.

I can understand why the reviewer didn’t like my “relentless bouts of story time,” but the whole purpose of my writing the story was to debunk the myths about the so-called Mafia in this country. The Mafia as we know it is a figment of Hollywood. Teach, a con man and the storyteller in my novel, says, “People talk as if the Mafia and the Syndicate are still active today, but the Syndicate phased out the American Mafia, wealth phased out the Syndicate, and now new gangs of all races and nationalities have taken their place.”

I wanted a framework for telling the history of gangsterism in this country, and I decided on a mythic journey using aged gangsters for the archetypal figures. As the hero’s journey progresses, her mentors tell stories of the old days. Listening to the stories and putting all the pieces together, she learns who her grandparents were and who she is.

I suppose I could take out some of the stories to make the novel more publishable (which I will do if an agent or editor ever requests it) but for now they stay. Until I read this review, I hadn’t realized how much I miss the all those novelists who did tack on historical asides. In fact, I used to seek out books by authors such as Taylor Caldwell and Noel Barber for that very reason.

So, if that’s the only thing the reviewer objected to, I have no objection to the review.

You can take a look at my entry here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00121WDKQ

The Origin of the Grim Reaper

It’s amazing to me the bits and pieces of information I collect while researching a book. Most of the information never ends up in the manuscript, but I keep the notes in case I ever find a use for them.

Yesterday somebody asked me if I had an Internet link to the origin of the grim reaper. I didn’t have the link, but I had something better: my notes.

According to William Bramley, author of The Gods of Eden: in 1559 in Brandenburg, Germany, there appeared fifteen men with “fearful faces and long scythes, with which they cut the oats, so that the swish could be heard at great distance, but the oats remained standing. The visit of these men was followed immediately by a severe outbreak of plague in Brandenburg. Were the ‘scythes’ long instruments designed to spray poison or germ-laden gases?

“Strange men in black, demons, and other terrifying figures were observed in other European communities carrying ‘brooms’ or ‘scythes’ or ‘swords’ that were used to sweep or knock at people’s doors. The inhabitants of these houses fell ill with plague afterwards. It is from these reports that people created the popular image of death as a skeleton, a demon, a man in a black robe carrying a scythe.”

So there you have it, the origin of the grim reaper.

And me? I found a use for my notes.

The Slang Game

Well cut off my legs and call me shorty! That particular bit of slang came from the 1940s. Can you guess what decades the rest of these came from?

1. Heave, meaning to vomit
2. Bitch, meaning to gripe
3. Having the hots for someone
4. To finger someone
5. To come clean
6. Groovy
7. Sore, meaning angry
8. Babe, meaning an attractive female
9. Broad, meaning a woman
10. A scream, meaning something hilarious
11. Teenager
12. Dough, meaning money
13. Beef, meaning complaint
14. Baby, meaning one’s sweetheart
15. Bull, meaning bull crap
16. Joe, meaning coffee
17. John, meaning bathroom
18. Hip, meaning cool
19. Double-cross
20. Dick, meaning private detective
21. “What’s eating you?”

Okey-doke. Don’t get in a lather. I’m a hep-cat and won’t take a powder before I give you the poop. 1-3 are from the 1940s. 4-11 all date back to the 1930s. 12-17 are from the 1920s. 18 dates back to 1915. and 19-21 were used as early as 1900.

Now I have to go see a man about a dog.

A secret agent so secret even he does not know he is a secret agent.

Speechifying is not the way to tell a story, but somehow I always end up with one know-it-all character who cannot keep his mouth shut. I do, however, manage to get rid of some speeches during the rewrites. This is an outtake from my novel More Deaths Than One. 

 

          “In a book I wrote,” Harrison said, “one of my characters was hypnotized by the CIA, then sent to wait tables at a very important, highly secret and secure dinner for several heads of state and other key figures. In his hypnotic state, the waiter was able to remember everything that was said and done, and parrot it back later. Afterward, his memory was erased, he was brought out of his hypnotic trance, and he resumed his normal life, none the wiser. I thought the idea of a secret agent who was so secret he himself didn’t know he was an agent was very clever. I just recently found out that the military had used that very same technique in Vietnam, Korea, and perhaps even during World War II.

          “I also discovered that they had once developed a program to desensitize service men to the act of killing. One problem soldiers have, even those with no moral objection to taking lives, is that they reach a saturation point. After a while, the killing seeps into their heads and into their dreams, and they begin to hesitate when it comes time to pull the trigger. Because of this, a tour of duty in a combat zone is limited to twelve or thirteen months; experienced fighting men are constantly being replaced by neophytes. Not a very efficient way to run a war. Ultimately, the program was abandoned. Desensitizing soldiers beyond the point of saturation was very expensive and time-consuming, to say nothing of inhumanly brutal, and after all that, those soldiers often died in battle before they ever reached that point anyway.”

Bucketeers, scams, conmen

Researching a novel can become addictive. Like with money, you feel as if you never have enough background information. You tell yourself you need one more piece before you can sit down and begin creating your opus, but as the days, weeks, months go by, the pieces pile up. Eventually, however, even the most exhaustive research ends, and you begin writing. Now what do you do with all that background information? You use, it of course. You earned it, right?

If you’re smart, or lucky, or have a good writing coach, you discover that all those facts sink the story, and you jettison most of them during the rewrites. You hoard those facts, though, and later add them to your blog.

Among my jetsam is this piece about Jacob Simon Herzig, (AKA George Graham Rice) one of the most successful bucket shop operators in history.

A bucket shop was an ostensibly legal brokerage firm. Some of the firms operated within the law, but most did not. They cheated their customers, stole from them, misused their money. In New York State, in one five-year period early in the twentieth century, bucket shops went into bankruptcy owing their customers more that two hundred twelve million dollars, the equivalent of several billion in today’s dollars.

Originally, bucket shops were markets where flour and grain were sold by the bucket to poor people. The wealthy, of course, did not patronize those places since they could afford to buy in larger amounts. The modern equivalent of a bucket shop began soon after the Civil War when railroad stocks were placed on the market and sold in small lots to investors who didn’t normally buy stocks. Financiers like Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, and Jim Fisk were all early bucketeers; in fact, they set the standard. They created artificial markets, issued false proclamations concerning the value of the stock, kept printing fresh stock as long as there was a demand. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the early bucket shops had grown into rich, powerful brokerage houses, they attacked the bucketeers. It took three decades, but these so-called legitimate brokerage houses, the New York Stock Exchange, and the big bankers managed to put the bucketeers out of business, though there was a reincarnation of them in the penny-stocks of the l980s.

George Graham Rice sold a great deal of stock, milking each scheme as long as he could then moving on to a new venture. He began to print a financial newspaper called The Iconoclast. The Iconoclast lambasted the financial powers of the country, blaming Wall Street for all the ills that affected the people. It claimed that the multi-millionaires and insiders were using the Stock Exchange to cheat hundreds of thousands of innocent people out of millions of dollars, which they were. He promised his subscribers that he’d help even the score by disclosing his own private information. His daily circulation grew to over 300,000 subscribers nationwide, giving him the biggest sucker list in America. He sold parts of his list to other bucket shops, but only after he’d squeezed some money out of the people on that partial list. One of his scams was the Columbia Emerald Company. According to The Iconoclast, the mine was operating and producing emeralds valued in the millions, and he bilked people out of half a million dollars before anyone discovered there were no emeralds. As long as there was actually a mine in South America, however (which Rice had purchased for eight hundred dollars) Rice was not liable to prosecution.

Rice also owned almost a million and a half shares of Idaho Copper Mine, for which he paid ten thousand dollars total, almost eight cents a share. Though the mine had not been worked in twenty years, was in fact completely flooded, it had two big assets: it actually existed and it was listed on the Boston Curb Exchange. The Iconoclast touted the stock, and it went up to $6.25 a share as thousands of suckers rushed to get in on the ground floor. The whole thing eventually fell through, but Rice walked away with millions.

The Fickle Gods of Fashion

I’ve written before about darlings, those bits of our own rhetoric we love but that serve no purpose in our novels. This speech, orated by the verbose character Harrison, is another of my darlings from More Deaths Than One. By the time I got rid of all his unnecessary speeches, he went from being a major character to a minor one. 

 

          “All through history, people made clothes to fit their bodies, but with the advent of ready-to-wear in the twentieth century, people now make their bodies to fit their clothes. This aberrant behavior has become so ingrained that everyone takes it for granted, as if it has always been so. In fact, women take great pride in being a perfect size zero or four or whatever.

          “I was strolling down a street in mid-town Manhattan not too long ago, watching the power-suited, whippet-thin young men and women hurry by, and it occurred to me that the sign of a prosperous and pampered nation is this fashionable gauntness rather than corpulence, as is commonly believed. Only in a country assured of an ample and continuous food supply can its citizens starve themselves to the point of emaciation simply to serve the fickle gods of fashion.

          “But perhaps it’s not their fault. Advertising is a powerful behavior modification tool. Take the story of the match king.

          “In the early part of the twentieth century, Ivar Kreuger, a match manufacturer, managed to corner the match market. Through various deals, he ended up with the exclusive rights to sell matches in many countries, including most of Europe, but this monopoly was not enough for him. Back then, it was a common practice for two or three people to light their cigarettes from the same match. Ivar realized that if he could somehow keep that third person from using the match, he could greatly increase his sales, so he had his advertising department start the rumor that it was unlucky to light three cigarettes from the same match. Tales were told of dreadful things happening to the third person who used a match, like the bride who had been left at the altar and the soldier who was killed after each had lit a cigarette from a match which two others had already used. Even today, though most people use lighters, the superstition that it’s unlucky to light three cigarettes from the same match still persists. That’s the power of advertising: the ability to control the behavior of vast numbers of people.”

Unkilling another darling

Originally, in More Deaths Than One, I had a war correspondent tell  Bob some of his experiences. Since the speech did not add to the story, I killed it, but I am unkilling it here. 

 

          “I came here to Vietnam so early in the war that no American flags were being flown anywhere in the country; they were still keeping up the pretense that the United States was merely an advisor to the ARVN, in what was primarily a civil war.

          “I was sending out competent, if uninspired articles, when I stumbled upon the story of a lifetime—the CSG was involved in the drug trade! The Combined Studies Group, as I’m sure you know, Bob, is the front under which the CIA is operating.

          “I carefully researched the story, and discovered that the drug dealing had started out innocently enough, but that over the years the Agency’s role had increased dramatically.

          “It all began when the Agency started to enlist the indigenous hill peoples, the Montagnards, in the fight against the North Vietnamese.

          “The Montagnards hated all Vietnamese, who treated them as if they were less than human, but they had a special hatred for the Viet Cong, who demanded that they pay taxes, forced their young men to join their army, and stole their cash crop—opium.

          “They were eager for the opportunity to kill the VC, but first they had to work their poppy fields and sell the crop. When the Agency agreed to buy their opium, saving them the trouble of smuggling it out of the country, the Montagnards agreed to join the South Vietnamese Army.

          “The Agency sold the raw opium to the Union Corse—a world-wide crime syndicate from the island of Corsica, not far from Sicily. The Union Corse had massive refineries in Marseilles for turning the raw opium into heroin, and a vast network, probably the greatest in the world, for distributing the final product.

         “Much of the Agency’s heroin found its way onto college campuses in the United States. Don’t you find it ironic, Bob, that those anti-war activists who think taking heroin is so hip and anti-establishment are, in actuality, funding the CIA’s clandestine operations around the world?”

 

Kill your darlings

Our darlings are all those bits that we hate to part with. We think they add to the story, but in reality all they do is slow it down. In my novel, More Deaths Than One, I had my hero Bob going to a Vietnam Vet support group and listening in, but I had to kill the discussion because it served no purpose. So here, for you, I am unkilling it:

 

          Marvin’s voice rose in anger. “My kid came home from school the other day and told me we lost in Vietnam because the American military did not know jungle warfare.”

          “Horseshit,” Frank said. “We didn’t lose. We left.”

          “After winning every major battle,” Dolph added. “But, like Korea, it was not a war. We were only supposed to be there, a presence, until the people who make those kinds of decisions got what they wanted.”

          Gaston leaned forward. “Even if you Yanks didn’t know jungle warfare, we Australians did. We’re tough and well trained, and are some of the best jungle fighters in the world. Everyone seems to have forgotten we were in Vietnam, too. So were thirty thousand Canadians, though I’m not sure how much they knew about jungle warfare.”

          “But the South Koreans did,” Dolph said. “Man, those guys were really good at hand-to-hand combat. I’m glad they were on our side. So were the Chinese mercenaries, the Nungs, and they definitely knew jungle warfare. There were also some French soldiers who remained after France pulled out of the country.”

          “That’s beside the point. We Americans”—Frank pounded the air using his fist as a hammer—“know jungle warfare. What the hell do they think we were doing in World War Two? Much of that action took place in jungles—Burma, the Philippines, the South Pacific, to name a few. And the OSS was already in Vietnam back then, helping the Viet Minh fight the Japanese. While the OSS was teaching the Viet Minh modern warfare, the Viet Minh were teaching the OSS their way of fighting. So anyone who says we lost because we didn’t know jungle warfare is full of shit.”

          Marvin made balloons of his cheeks, then blew out the air. “I tried telling my kid that, but he wouldn’t believe me. I hate to think what other crap they’re teaching him.”

The Match King

Early in the twentieth century, Ivar Kreuger, a match manufacturer, managed to corner the match market. Through various deals, he ended up with the exclusive rights to sell matches in many countries, including most of Europe, but this monopoly was not enough for him. Back then, it was a common practice for two or three people to light their cigarettes from the same match. Ivar realized that if he could somehow keep that third person from using the match, he could greatly increase his sales, so he had his advertising department start the rumor that it was unlucky to light three cigarettes from the same match. Tales were told of dreadful things happening to the third person who used a match, like the bride who had been left at the altar and the soldier who was killed after each had lit a cigarette from a match which two others had already used. Even today, though most people use lighters, the superstition that it’s unlucky to light three cigarettes from the same match still persists. 

That’s the power of words. How many of us bloggers and writers use them wisely?