Easy, To Die For Butternut Squash Soup

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I can’t get enough of this stuff.

One of my favorite things to eat is butternut squash soup. Trouble is, when I have a flavor in your mind and I find myself eating something that just isn’t quite as good, I get seriously disappointed. You know what they say: If you want something done right, yadda yadda yadda.

Here’s the recipe I like. It’s remarkably easy to make, but in case you have a serious case of lazy bones, I’ve included a few shortcuts to make it even easier.

Ingredients

  • 1 medium onion, chopped. I use sweet onions. Lazy? You can buy them pre-chopped in most supermarket produce departments or the freezer section.
  • 2 tablespoons margarine or butter.
  • 2 cups chicken broth. I use canned. Although one can is 15 ounces (I think), that’s close enough.
  • 1 pound butternut squash, pared, seeded and cut into 1-inch cubes. This is probably the most labor-intensive part of the process. Those squash are a real pain to pare. And where have you ever found one less than 2 pounds in size? I usually do it the hard way, but today I stopped off at Trader Joe’s and picked up a 2-pound bag of butternut squash already prepared. (So, of course, I made a double-batch of soup.) You might be able to use frozen squash if it is unseasoned; I’ll leave that up to the seriously lazy cooks to experiment with.
  • 2 pears, pared and sliced. I use fresh pears whenever possible, but I suspect that you could get away with canned pears, as long as you rinse off the sugary syrup they insist on canning them with.
  • 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves. Yeah, like I’ll find fresh thyme in Wickenburg. I use dried but only half as much.
  • 1/4 teaspoon of salt. I usually omit this, especially if the broth does not have reduced salt. You can always add salt later; you can never take it away.
  • 1/4 teaspoon white pepper. I use regular pepper, which I grind as I need it.
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground coriander.
  • 1 cup whipping cream. This is killer stuff and makes the soup very rich. I suspect you could use half and half to make it a little less deadly.

Cooking Instructions

  1. Cook and stir onion in margarine in a medium pot until tender.
  2. Butternut Squash SoupStir in broth, squash, pears, thyme, salt, pepper, and coriander.
  3. Heat to boiling; reduce heat heat and cover.
  4. Simmer until squash is tender, 10 to 15 minutes.
  5. Puree soup in a food processor or blender. You may have to do this in batches. You might also want to wait until the soup has cooled a bit; I cracked my food processor bowl by processing hot soup. I now use my glass blender.
  6. Return pureed soup to pot.
  7. Stir in whipping cream and heat until hot.
  8. Garnish with pear slices and toasted pecans if desired.

Yields 6 1-cup servings.

This is a great soup for Thanksgiving. The squash and pears are in season right now so it’s the perfect time of year to make this. Treat yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

The Golf Ball Drop

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Good thing I don’t play golf.

Yesterday at about noon, I did another golf ball drop from my helicopter. It was my second ever. The first didn’t come off all that well.

The event was at a golf course about 3 miles off the approach end of Phoenix Sky Harbor runways 25 L/R. I’d called the tower the day before to tell them what I’d be up to and make sure it wouldn’t be a problem. (The ATC folks at Sky Harbor tower are great.) At the time of the event, planes were taking off on runway 8 (north side of the airport, farthest runway from where I was) and landing on runways 7 L/R. I was cleared to cross the extended centerline and then let the tower controller know when I was landing, doing the drop (low level), and ready to depart again. The whole time I was flying, I was listening to airliners departing from the runway; I was never told to switch to the south tower frequency.

Golf Course Location

Golf Ball Drop

Hovering over the drop zone.

I did much better at this drop than the last one. The conditions were good. The drop zone was on the driving range for a golf course in Tempe. Although there were some serious wires to the north, there were no obstructions near where I had to drop. That means I didn’t have to climb above any obstructions for the drop (which is what messed me up last time). Winds were light out of the east, so there was no pedal dancing — I was able to point the helicopter’s nose right toward the spectators for the entire flight.

Although I’d originally been told to expect 900-1100 golf balls, we only had about 400 on board. They all fit in a box. We cut three of the box’s four flaps off, leaving the drop guy, who was provided by the client, with a handle he could use to hold the box while dropping. (This was the drop guy’s first time in a helicopter. Too bad it was such a short and boring flight.)

This time, we dropped out of the door behind mine. This made it possible for me to see exactly where the balls were falling. (Duh.)

My instructions were to drop between a big red flag and a smaller red flag at the cup. The folks who ran the show expected the balls to roll down the hill from the big flag toward the cup.

Golf Ball Drop

Dropping golf balls over a driving range in Tempe.

I was in about a 150-foot hover over the drop zone. When it looked as if the balls weren’t going to roll, I hovered sideways, right over the cup. The shower of balls came much closer. I didn’t see any balls go in, but a bunch of them gathered around the cup. One sat right on its lip. There would be a winner but no in-the-cup winner.

Afterwards, I landed and exchanged the ball dropper guy for my ground crew helper, a Black Hawk pilot named Jonathan who’d come along for the ride. Jonathan took the in-flight photos you see here.

Next time, I’m sure I’ll make the hole.

Hello, Safeway? What’s with the three prices?

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Fantasy pricing and imaginary savings assault the senses and insult shoppers’ intelligence.

Wickenburg has two supermarkets: a Basha’s and a Safeway. Safeway is newer, better stocked, generally cleaner, and closer to my house. It’s also generally more expensive. I deal with it.

KleenexBut what has started to seriously bug me is the price tags Safeway has littered its stores with. If you’ve shopped in a Safeway or Vons, you know exactly what I mean. Half the merchandise in the store has three different prices on it: the “old price,” the “low price,” and the “club price.”

The old price is clearly bullshit. There’s no way in hell that a box of 200 Kleenex ever sold for $2.99 in our Safeway store. It’s clearly a fantasy price dreamed up by the folks in marketing. Say it cost a bunch of money and now it’s a whole bunch less! Customers are saving $1/box, right?

Wrong, if it never cost $2.99.

Then there’s the club price. If you join “the club” and submit your club card or phone number each time you shop, you get an even lower price. Of course, you also let the folks in the Safeway home office know every single thing you buy there. What do they do with this information? One thing they do is spit out coupons at checkout for items you’re most likely to buy. That’s not terribly harmful. But what else do they do with this information? Perhaps share it with other organizations so they also know what you buy? So they can target you with their marketing, too?

Do you really want people to know if you buy things like laxatives, hemorrhoid creme, or adult diapers?

Yet providing your magic club card number knocks another 49¢ off the box of tissues. That number is part of what’s tallied up as your savings at the bottom of your long receipt.

Spring MixI’m guessing, however, that they don’t expect people to really stop and think about it. Or do the math. Instead, they expect us to simply react to the yellow tags.

What else could explain this image? Look carefully. The club price saves you a whole penny over the supposed low price. This isn’t higher math, folks. $5 ÷ 2 = $2.50. The club price is $2.49. $2.50 – $2.49 = 1¢.

It’s bullshit, all of it. Yellow tags all over the place with fantasy prices and imaginary savings.

Why do they do this? It’s simple. They’re betting that people are too stupid or lazy to do real comparison shopping. They concoct in-store savings, conning people into thinking they’re really saving money. But are they?

In reality, if shoppers went to another store, that store’s regular price may be the same or less than Safeway’s “low price” or “club price.”

Mind games, that’s what it is.

And that’s what bothers me. These yellow tags all over the place make shopping confusing. They make the store an ugly mess. They sully the supermarket shopping experience — as bad as it already is.

You can’t just go into a supermarket and pick up the groceries you need. Instead, you have to face wall after wall of ugly yellow price tags that insult your intelligence with their fantasy pricing and imaginary savings.

Why? I call it bullshit.

Jack the Dog

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The best dog.

Our first exposure to Jack was in mid 2001. The year before, we’d put our 14-year-old Dalmation to rest after a life of controllable health problems became uncontrollable with age. He was my third dog — my family always had dogs — and my husband’s first. His loss was shattering and we took some time off to see if we could live without a dog in our lives.

Nine months later, we were thinking of trying again. We’d decided that we wanted a smart dog. While Spot had been smart enough to fetch the newspaper from the curb, fetch my slippers, and distinguish one toy from another by name, he wasn’t quite smart enough to stay out of the Arizona sun or avoid the back end of a protective mare when a newborn filly was in the area. I didn’t think Dalmatians could fly, but ours did. He was never quite the same after that, either.

Jack in the PaperWe’d been talking to people about dogs and learning about different breeds well-suited for ranches. I’d decided that something like a border collie or Australian shepherd would be a good breed. So when the newspaper mentioned a border collie/Australian shepherd mix up for adoption, we decided to take a look.

Understand that Wickenburg is a small town and nothing much happens. In order to fill the pages of the local weekly rag they call a newspaper, they’d often show photos of pets up for adoption. (I don’t know if they still do this. We stopped reading the crap they printed when they became the propaganda arm for a corrupt mayor and Chamber of Commerce.) The town didn’t have a Humane Society back then, so all unwanted pets were brought to Bar S Animal Clinic, which happened to be the vet we used for Spot and our horses.

The story we got about the dog — who was already named Jack — was that he’d been owned by a family that neglected him. He was frequently out loose and had been picked up by the local dog catcher at least three times. The first few times, the family paid the fee and picked him up. But the last time, they’d decided not to. He was up for grabs. They figured he was 9 to 12 months old.

The newspaper clipping completely understated his personality. When they brought him out to the waiting area at Bar S for us to meet him, they practically had to drag him out on a leash. He was terrified. He didn’t want to come to either one of us.

Although he looked like a nice enough dog, I had doubts. I didn’t want a dog that was afraid of his own shadow. Mike and I talked it over and then talked to the folks at Bar S. I distinctly remember asking if we could bring him back if it didn’t work out. They told us we could, so we coaxed him outside to the car.

That’s when we noticed Jack was really different. He wouldn’t get in the car — it was like he didn’t know how. Finally, I sat in the front seat and Mike put him on my lap. He closed the door and we headed back to the office in town.

In those days, I owned a condo in downtown Wickenburg. After dealing with the last set of abusive and destructive tenants, I’d decided to turn the place into an office for us. I had the living room, Mike had the master bedroom. Our home was across town, about 5 miles away by car.

The condo was on the second floor. That’s when we discovered that Jack didn’t know how to climb steps.

His first gift to us was a big poop on the living room carpet.

He started coming around to us very quickly and that scaredy-dog personality faded away. He listened, came when we called him, and didn’t need to be on a leash around the yard. He also seemed to get along fine with the horses. And he understood what shade was.

Jack and MikeHe bonded to me — probably because he’d been sitting on my lap on that car ride. This was not ideal. I’d planned to get a parrot in a month or so and Jack was supposed to be mostly my husband’s dog. So for the first few days, I began ignoring him and Mike started lavishing him with attention. After a few days of that, he was Mike’s dog, although he responded to me equally well. But when we were together, it was always Mike that he went to first. That was fine with me.

We’d had him about a month when he fell out of the back of Mike’s pickup on the way to the office. It wasn’t light yet — Mike was telecommuting for a job on the east coast back then and would routinely get to the office around 6 AM local time. He wasn’t sure where Jack had fallen out, but he was able to narrow it down to a 1/2 mile stretch of road about a mile from our house.

We spent the entire day looking for him, calling the dog catcher, Bar S, and any other group that might know something about a found dog. I used my Jeep to drive up and down all the sandy washes in the area, calling him by name. We were convinced that he’d been injured and was hiding in the bushes somewhere, possibly dying.

When night fell, we knew the coyotes would get him. We were shattered. In just a month, we’d grown to love him.

At 3 AM, Mike climbed out of bed, unable to sleep. He came downstairs to get a glass of water. And who was at the back door, waiting to be let in? Jack. I don’t know how he spent his day, but he found his way home, safe and sound.

The next nine and a half years left indelible memories on my mind:

  • Jack and Mike at ParkerJack sitting on the edge of the back patio, watching the road that leads down to our house, racing around to the front when Mike’s car or truck rolled down.
  • Jack barking at the UPS truck or FedEx truck before it even came into sight, climbing into the open UPS truck door as I chatted with the driver and he fetched my package, accepting cookies from our mail carrier.
  • Jack at Howard MesaJack running around on our 40 acres in northern Arizona, chasing rabbits, crawling under the shed, looking for mice and rats.
  • Jack barking at the sound of coyotes, close or far, sometimes in the middle of the night.
  • Jack chasing lizards in the backyard and, more than once, catching them.
  • Jack riding in the back of my Jeep as we explored the old forest roads just south of the Grand Canyon or out in the desert along Constellation Road or up in the Bradshaw Mountains.
  • Jack “herding” the horses up the driveway at the end of the day, dodging Jake’s hoofs as he tried to kick him.
  • Jack in the ForestJack hiking with us up Vulture Peak, through the Hassayampa River bed, at Granite Mountain, inside Red Mountain, at the Grand Canyon, in the forest at Mount Humphreys, in countless other places.
  • Jack in the back of my helicopter, looking out the window as we flew over town.
  • Jack on the trail in the desert as we followed on horseback, watching him take off with high pitched yipping sounds as he closed in on a jackrabbit or cottontail.
  • Jack with Lee and Sharon PearsonJack riding in the back of the pickup, his head out in the slipstream as we drove around town. (He only fell out of the pickup that one time, although he did fall out of my Jeep twice.)
  • Jack playing with my neighbor’s dogs, who used to come visit for cookies and attention.
  • Jack racing around the side of the house when he knew we’d be coming out the front, looking at us with the “Can I please come?” face and racing to the truck when we said yes.
  • Jack whining when we prepared to leave and told him he’d have to stay in. It’s that whine that Alex the Bird picked up and mimics to this day.
  • Jack meeting us at the door as if he hadn’t seen us for years when we came home from a day out.
  • Jack ignoring Alex the Bird when he whistled Mike’s whistle or issued commands: “Hey, Jack!” “Go lie down!” “Go outside!”
  • Jack on his dog bed at the foot of the bed, or by the open french doors in our bedroom, or on a rug on the floor of our cabin or RV while we slept.
  • Jack trotting along ahead of us, on his extension leash, as we walked the few blocks from our Phoenix condo to Wildflower Bakery for morning coffee and breakfast croissant.

I could go on all day, listing the snapshots in my mind. Jack didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Everyone loved him.

He never seemed to slow down — until recently. In the 20-20 vision of hindsight, I should have realized there was a problem. I noticed about a month ago that he seemed to be breathing heavily, even at rest, once in a while. I mentioned it to Mike, but he didn’t notice.

Last weekend, he seemed a bit under the weather, spending more than the usual amount of time just lying around. We thought it had something to do with his food; Mike had bought something new. Jack had a sensitive digestive system and could only eat dog food. (People food literally made him sick — even good stuff like steak!) But by Sunday, he was back to his old self.

On Monday morning, Mike went on a business trip to Georgia.

Jack stopped eating on Tuesday. I took him to the local vet on Wednesday and Thursday mornings. He had blood work. He spent Thursday at the vet. His labored breathing prompted the vet to take an X-ray. That’s when he saw the fluid around his lungs.

I took him to another vet in Peoria for an ultrasound on Friday morning. By that time, he had to be carried everywhere. He was alert but weak, struggling to breathe.

The ultrasound picture made the problem obvious. The doctor was able to diagnose in less than a minute. Jack had a large tumor on his heart. It looked to be about 1/5 the size of his heart, so it had obviously been growing there for a while. The tumor was causing fluid to leak into the sac around his heart. That fluid was crowding out his lungs, making it difficult to breathe.

The tumor, because of its placement, was inoperable. Chemotherapy was not usually effective — although I admit that I don’t think we would have gone that route. Draining the fluid could buy him a few hours or days, but his condition would come right back to the way it was. There was even a chance that the fluid could fill as quickly as it was drained.

In other words, Jack was terminally ill and likely had a very short time to live.

Jack the Desert DogThe decision wasn’t hard. The worst thing you can do for an animal is try to keep it alive when it’s suffering. Jack, although maybe not in pain (yet), was laboring to breathe. It was taking everything he had. He couldn’t even walk anymore. He hadn’t eaten in more than three days. His condition was deteriorating quickly. I wasn’t even sure if he’d be alive when my husband came home that night.

After breaking the news to my husband, I did what I needed to do. The folks at Bar S Animal Clinic were unbelievably kind to both Jack and me. I cannot thank them enough.

Jack’s gone now and we’ll miss him. He was the best dog ever.

Note: I’ve closed the comments on this post in an effort to head off condolences, etc. While I appreciate any kind thoughts you might have in this difficult time, I believe that reading them will only prolong my grief. If you want to leave a comment, instead consider a small donation to your local Humane Society. And the next time you want to add a pet to your life, visit the local pound or Humane Society first. If you’re as lucky as we were, you’ll get to take home a pet as wonderful as Jack was.

On Bad Fiction

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Practice before you publish.

I read some very bad fiction today. It reminded me why so many writers can’t seem to get published.

They suck.

The story was a short mystery in a magazine I downloaded into my iPad from MagCloud. I blogged about the free content there just the other day. Now I feel as if I should add a disclaimer to that post: Some content may not be worth the time it takes to download.

The thing you need to know about MagCloud is that it’s a tool sometimes used by self-publishers to get their content published. In this case, someone had put together an anthology of short fiction in a “Special Short Story Edition” of their magazine. The magazine itself is poorly designed, featuring dense lines of tiny print and low resolution images — yes, I do mean pixelated images; you know resolution has to be very low if a photo doesn’t look good on an iPad. The images have nothing to do with the stories. Not at all. Well, I should amend that description. Not all of the stories were dense lines of small type. Some were rather spacious. There was really no consistency in the magazine’s layout. It was the most amateurish thing I’ve seen since the days of typewriters and wax pasteups.

I don’t know where the editor got the stories he put in the magazine. Maybe he created a contest. Maybe these people actually paid an entry fee to “win” a place in the 60-page PDF that would cost a whopping $13.95 plus shipping to get in print. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that I read one short story and it was bad. Very bad.

There are three points that made the story bad and they repeated themselves throughout the story: author voice, missing information, and factual inaccuracies. Let’s take a look at each.

Author Voice

I am a huge believer that the author’s voice should not distract the reader from the story. The author is narrating — telling the reader what’s going on. She’s setting a scene, describing action, reporting dialog. As you read the author’s words, you should be able to step into the page (so to speak) and see and hear what’s going on.

Good writers can do this. Great writers can do this even when editorializing along the way.

But bad writers absolutely suck at doing this. They’re so hung up on writing the descriptions, using the right words, reporting the things they think will bring the scene alive. They so obviously write with a thesaurus nearby.

Take this opening passage:

Detective Emma Knightwood sighed heavily as she stared at the body lying only inches in front of her sensible brown shoes. Emma was a petite woman of fifty-four, with salt and pepper black hair and green eyes. Although it was nearly midnight, her ivory silk blouse with the elaborate lace bow looked as fresh as when she’d put it on that morning and she never would have admitted that she was perspiring beneath her brown tweed suit. Emma was as frugal and exacting as a miser slowly counting his piles of gold and her support hose had been carefully darned several times over, rather than being replaced with a new pair.

This is the opening paragraph of the story. The paragraph that’s supposed to be “the hook.” I’m not hooked. I’m turned off by a cheap spinster detective wearing brown and darned support hose.

But here are some specific problems:

  • The first sentence mentions that Emma was looking at the body that lay at her feet, but the remaining lines of the paragraph don’t mention the body again at all.
  • Is her hair salt and pepper or black?
  • How is it that her silk blouse can look fresh at midnight if she put it on that morning and she’s sweating?
  • Why wouldn’t she admit she’s sweating? Is that a character trait?
  • What’s with the miser counting gold? That run-on sentence takes the reader away from the character and the story before bringing the reader back to the character.
  • This is the opening paragraph of the story. Do we really need to know all these details about this main character now? Or ever? Nothing else that comes later in the story refers to any of this.

Here’s a bit more, with dialog. It comes after a few paragraphs about the victim, the fact that there have been multiple murders lately, and an introduction to Emma’s partner, Detective Stanton Reynolds. Reynolds has just asked Emma what she thinks.

Emma straightened and pushed her wire rimmed glasses up her small nose. “I don’t know. Read me the summary of the victims again.”

“Okay,” Stanton replied, flipping through the pages in his small blue book. “The first victim was Ophelia Danworthy, age sixty-eight, married with four children, retired. The second and third victims, Candace Winters and Henry Simpson, worked together in the same jewelry story and were killed while attempting to make the store’s nightly deposit at a bank. Ms. Winters was single, unmarried and Mr. Simpson was a bachelor, nearing retirement.”

“No signs or a robbery attempt on the store employees?” Emma queried.

“None. The bag of money and deposits was found with the bodies. Victim number four was Sophie French, age thrity-four, a successful businesswoman, unmarried and no children.”

“And now Rachel Zerinsky,” Detective Knightwood sadly mused aloud.

This, like most of the rest of the story, is screaming at me in the author’s amateurish voice, preventing me from getting into the story, forcing me to nitpick every sentence.

  • Emma’s nose is small here, but it’s also slender a few paragraphs later when she does the glasses poke again.
  • Ophelia Danworthy? Rachel Zerinsky? Oddball names for no reason can be distracting, too.
  • Ophelia was 68 and she had four “children”? I hope they were grown children.
  • Emma’s “query” about signs of robbery is so obviously contrived as a way to pass information to the reader using dialog. Emma would have to be a pretty crappy detective to forget that the jewelry store employees were not robbed when a “bag of money” was found with them.
  • “Queried” and “sadly mused aloud” are two examples of overstated dialog attribution. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, Google “dialog attribution” and see what comes up. Although I don’t completely subscribe to the “he said,” “she said” school of dialog attribution, I agree that using an excess of odd attributions — especially combined with adverbs — is extremely distracting. (Stephen King’s On Writing goes into this in a good amount of detail.)

The author attempts a lot of character development through dialog and by telling the reader about the characters. In doing so, she inserts so much of her voice that the reader can’t get into the story. She needs to learn more about what some people call the first rule of writing: Show, don’t tell. According to Wikipedia,

Show, don’t tell is an admonition to fiction writers to write in a manner that allows the reader to experience the story through a character’s action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the narrator’s exposition, summarization, and description. The advice is not to be heavy-handed, but to allow issues to emerge from the text instead, applies to non-fiction writing too.

Heavy-handed is the phrase I’d use for this author’s work.

Missing Information

One of the rules of mystery writing is called “fair play.” Fair play means that the reader gets all the clues the detective has. This is so the reader can solve the mystery or at least understand how the detective solved the mystery.

This author fails at fair play.

  • In the beginning of the story, she mentions “strange clues” left behind at the scene of each crime but never details what these clues are.
  • Later, when a diamond is found at the murder scene, she talks with her partner about the “stones found at the scene of the crime.” Are those the strange clues?
  • The analysis of the clues are far beyond the capabilities of an average person.
  • The murderer is identified during a dialog that presents new information unavailable to the reader. A name is thrown out as they race to the next victim’s apartment and, sure enough, he’s the killer.

To make matters worse, there are no real red herrings — clues that lead to false conclusions. There’s no challenge to the story, nothing to make it interesting.

Factual Inaccuracies

This story has more than its share of factual inaccuracies.

  • The murder victim described at the beginning of the story was supposedly bruised from being beaten with a strand of pearls after death. Although the story does not mention how long the victim had been dead, bruises for injuries inflicted before death can appear as red or blue flesh for the first five or so days after death. Bruises for injuries inflicted after death do not appear in color. This is likely due to the lack of blood flow after death. This document explains. (It took 10 minutes for me to confirm this using Google.)
  • Another police officer calls out to the detectives: “Mr Reynolds? Miss Knightwood?” If they are detectives — as they were both introduced to the reader earlier in the story — they would be addressed by fellow police officers as “Detective Reynolds” and “Detective Knightwood.” Even television can teach you that.
  • A diamond in the story is referred to as huge. Emma says, “It must be at least three carats, maybe more.” Sorry, Emma. Three carats is not “huge.” I wear a full carat on my finger and it’s smaller than the size of a pea. Two carats would be a fat pea. Three would still be smaller than a chick pea (aka garbanzo bean). Now if you were talking ten carats — well that would start getting closer to huge — for a diamond, anyway.
  • When a set of clues resolves into a series of numbers — 878910 — the detectives automatically assume they’re “latitude or longitude in hours, degrees and minutes.” Whoa. First of all, no latitude or longitude in the U.S. starts with 8 or 87. While it’s true that the coordinates could refer to a place in another country, that’s a pretty far leap for the detectives — especially ones who refer to coordinates in terms of hours. Latitude and longitude is measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds. There are no hours.
  • Here’s where the author’s spelling checker failed her: “Devon held Miss Barron in front of him like a shield, pressing the point of a long butcher knife over her juggler vein as his brown eyes shifted from one officer to the other.” [Emphasis added.] I think she means jugular vein. Oops. At least I got a good laugh.
  • Back to the diamond. Emma taunts the murderer by insulting the way he cut the diamond. (He’s supposedly an expert diamond cutter.) She says, in part: “Some of the facets are incorrect and you’ll have to admit, your cut is a little shallow, as well.” Huh? Putting that aside, she goes on to say, “You can always break it and try again.” Break a diamond to recut it? What the hell is she talking about? She then tosses the diamond into the air and the murderer lunges for it — apparently to prevent it from breaking. The diamond bounces on the “hardwood floor” and is unharmed. What else would we expect? A diamond is one of the hardest substances known to man. It isn’t going to break by being dropped on a hardwood floor. An expert diamond cutter would certainly know that, so why is it that he “lunged sideways to catch the diamond before it hit the floor”? Could it be that the author hasn’t got a clue about diamonds?

Bad is Bad

I could continue tearing this story apart, but I think I’ve done enough to make my point. This author:

  • Does not have good writing skills.
  • Is not true to her genre.
  • Does not know how to do research (or is too lazy to do it).

The resulting story is amateurish, almost to the point of being funny. In all honestly, the only pleasure I got from it was tearing it apart as a lesson to myself and anyone who might be interested in writing quality fiction. It’s a perfect example of how not to write a story.

I know I’ve quoted a lot of text from the story, but I’ve done so under the guidelines of fair use, presenting the material in an editorial manner. I have not mentioned the name of the author or the publication so as not to embarrass either one. If the author or publisher read this and want to be mentioned by name, please let me know and I’ll do so. Just don’t expect me to modify this post beyond that. There are lessons to be learned here.

Now excuse me while I purge this crap from my iPad.