Notes About Articles in “Kansas City Voices”
(November 21, 2006)

            There is a contribution by Warren Bull in the November 2005 issue found on page 59.  His comments about his submission to this leading periodical follow.

            Kansas City Voices, November, 2006 has my essay, “The Church with a Mezuzah.”  Writing this article gave me the chance to meet with a warm and welcoming congregation once again.

“The Wrong Man.”
(November 21, 2006)

            On February 28, 2006 Espressofiction.com published my short story, “The Wrong Man.”  You can read my story in their archives.

            I wrote this story initially for a market asking for submissions that included elements from radio detective programs of the 1940s and 50s.  I enjoy those shows and I had fun writing about a protagonist who took over the story and pushed it in a direction I had not anticipated.  Then the market went out of business, which happens all too often.  I thought that was an overreaction.  Lots of places reject my stories and manage to stay in business.  Anyway, I was left with an unusual orphaned story that did not fit the usual mold for short mysteries.

            I submitted it to a number of markets and each time I collected a rejection with positive comments from editors.  It is encouraging to get feedback.  Anyone who takes that time to comment on a rejected story is giving the submitting author a gift.  The great majority of rejections I get are just standard forms.  “The Wrong Man” holds the record among my stories for the most rejections and the most editorial comments.  I was sufficiently encouraged to keep sending it out hoping it would find a home somewhere.

ABA Afraid of Being Sued & Postal Delays
(July 28, 2006)

            Approximately forty lawyers have signed up for the National Lawyers on Longboards Surfing Contest that will take place during the American Bar Association annual meeting scheduled for August 3rd through the 8th of this year in Honolulu, Hawaii.  However, the ABA has cancelled its sponsorship of the event.  Organizers say the ABA is afraid of being sued.

            On a personal note, when I went to pick up a registered letter at the post office today I had to wait about ten minutes before the letter was found.  I didn’t mind the wait.  I spent the time listening to a postal employee who was talking loudly on the phone, complaining to someone on the other end of the line that her mail had not been delivered for more than a week.

Mom Was Right
(May 14, 2006)

            Even if you decide to pursue a life of crime, you should still listen to your mother.

            I recently read about a young man in Australia who decided to pull off a robbery disguised as a Smurf© (a small cartoon character with blue skin).  Not long after the heist, he was arrested.  The arresting officer said that he became suspicious when he spotted blue face paint that the robber had not completely removed.  He did not wash behind his ears.  So you see, mom was right.

Back Story: Writing Lincoln’s Mystery
(May 1, 2006)

            When I wrote my first novel, Abraham Lincoln for the Defense (PublishAmerica 2003) I found that I was writing about Lincoln and writing with him too.  After all, I discovered the Trailor murder case when I read about it in Lincoln’s Collected Works, Rutgers University, 1953-55.  Lincoln wrote a letter to his best friend shortly after the end of the trial.  He laid out the characters, the crime scene, the timeline, the physical evidence, the course of the trial and the verdict.  He mentioned an interesting incident for the back story and used humor that was too good to pass up.  I eventually used all of that in my novel.  When I read about the events, I thought they would make a great mystery except that at that time Lincoln could not say (he did not yet know) who had done what to whom.  Many questions were unanswered.  The trial ended with one side swearing that bloody murder had been committed and the other side swearing that it had not.  Reluctantly, I concluded that there was not enough information available to write a coherent novel, but Lincoln was not done yet.

            I continued to read Lincoln’s collected writings and he next called my attention to the case in a newspaper editorial about the trial that he wrote five years later.  By that time, he was able to resolve some of the mysteries unsolved at the end of the trial.  He let me know who did what to whom but some questions remained unanswered.  The resolution of some mysteries created a greater mystery than before.  Lincoln thoughtfully listed all the issues that had not been explained, which I realized would have to be accounted for in a novel.  Finally, he gave me advice about the novel by writing, “a writer of novels could bring the story to a more perfect climax.”  Of course it was several years and a myriad of revisions before I managed to provide possible explanations for the issues and to invent an ending that tied up all the loose ends.  I think Lincoln would approve.  I certainly hope so.  After all, it is his mystery.

Writing “The Last Word”
(March 30, 2006)

            The historical incident described in this story happened pretty much as I described it.  General Hooker sent away all of his couriers with orders and then noticed that a regiment had stalled in place and was taking fire while its officer dithered about what to do.  Knowing that even veteran soldiers would begin to run if they continued to take casualties without a chance to respond, the general looked around, spotted George Smiley of the New York Tribune, and asked him if he would carry a message to the regiment.  Smiley agreed.  Smiley’s conversation with the commander of the regiment and with Hooker after that in the story are consistent with what Smiley reported at the time.

            Choosing to tell the story from the point of view of the soldiers, made the humor much darker.  Emergency workers, police, military personnel and others who deal with death on an up close and personal basis develop black humor which have them keep their sanity, but doesn’t sound funny at all to people who haven’t shared those experiences.

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Writing the short story, “Beecher’s Bibles,” for the anthology, Manhattan Mysteries
(March 10, 2006)

            The thing I remember most about writing this short story was that it took me nearly as long to write the first sentence as it did to write the rest of the story.  I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get it to come out in the words that I wrote.  I’m not sure that I got the sentence “right” so much as I eliminated successive sentences that did not convey quite what I wanted, coming ever closer until the current first sentence was the last one left.

            When I needed to find out how a breech-loading single shot black powder rifle works, I looked on the internet.  The wonderful thing is that you can find out almost anything on the net.  The terrible thing, of course, is that you can find out almost anything on the net.  As university teachers have told me, the internet is the greatest source of misinformation that we have.  I found three independent sources of information and since the story’s publication black powder shooters have told me that I got it right.