Grocery Store Syndrome by Nancy L. Eady

The writing I do as an attorney creates problems for my fiction writing. The main difficulty, over-explaining things, is compounded by my years as a mathematics teacher at an underprivileged high school. If I wanted my 15- and 16-year-old general math students to hear my instructions, let alone follow them, I had to repeat them.  Many times.  

The combination of attorney and former mathematics teacher is deadly in fiction. I explain inferences most readers understand implicitly. I have to edit out “grocery store” syndrome. And I over-use dialog tags.

          “Hello,” Daphne said.

          “Hello,” John answered, “How are you today?”

          Daphne said, “I’m fine. How are you?”

          “I can’t complain,” John said.

(I’ll stop here to relieve those of you already gritting your teeth in frustration.)

What is “grocery store” syndrome? 

Sometimes, all the reader needs to know is that Jane bought bread on the way home. In my earliest drafts, however, Jane gets in the car, drives to the store, leaves the car, enters the store, goes down aisle one and up aisle two, reaches up to shelf five to select Wonder Bread (Jane not being on a health kick or gluten-free diet), goes to the cashier line, puts the bread on the conveyor belt, pays the cashier, watches the cashier put the bread in the bag, describes the cashier (whom the reader never sees again) in detail, picks up the bag, returns to the car, drives home, enters the house and then either puts the bread away or uses it to make a sandwich. By the time we do that, I’m exhausted, Jane’s exhausted, and those readers persistent enough to stick with me until the end are exhausted.

Have you found any pitfalls in your creative writing stemming from prior experiences?  How do you deal with them?

Complementary Legal and Fiction Writing by Nancy L. Eady

As I explained in a post in 2023, the writing I do as an attorney creates problems for my fiction writing, such as over-explaining matters, overuse of dialog tags, overuse of the word “that” and the dangers of “grocery store syndrome.” However, there are ways in which my legal writing and my fiction writing complement each other, including the use of Microsoft Word, perseverance and engaging summaries. 

Word “secrets” learned in one sphere carry over to the other. The first thing to understand about Word is that it comes loaded with default settings in place. Unfortunately, the person who chose those default settings was most likely a software engineer rather than a writer. The second thing to remember about Word is that it prefers to think for you, so unless you turn certain defaults off, Word does things you never expected or wanted. The third thing to remember about Word is that most of the stuff you want to do with it will never show up unless you click the “more” button. On the toolbar, the “more” button is a boxed in arrow in the lower right corner of each tool bar section, or an upside-down arrow next to a rectangular box or below a label such as “Styles,” “Editor” or “Compare.” The fourth thing to remember about Word is that most functions are never where you expect them to be. 

An example of this is the way you get new sections in a longer work to begin page numbering at “1.” Go to the “Layout” tab, click the little upside-down triangle besides the word “Breaks” and click “Next Page” under section breaks. Doing so places a “section break” in your document, which tells Word it is okay for the numbers to start over if the author wants.

Of course, that information is useless unless you know how to put page numbers in to begin with. Page numbers are under the “Insert” tab about two-thirds of the way across the toolbar in the “Header & Footer” section. Click on the upside-down arrow beside the words “Page Number” and a menu opens up that lets you choose where you want the page numbers to go. 

Another trick you won’t find by accident is centering pages vertically, which you might need for the title page of your manuscript. Click the little arrow symbol in the bottom right of the “Page Setup” box on the “Layout” tab. A “Page Setup” box pops up on your screen with three tabs. Choose the “Layout” tab in the little box, then look towards the center of the box, and you will see the words “vertical alignment” with a box beside it. Click on the little upside-down arrow on the box. One option is “center.” Choose it, and your page will be centered top to bottom. Remember to go back to that tab to reset the vertical alignment when you move on to the next page. A piece of cake, right? Or maybe not. 

Perseverance in writing is something else my legal writing taught me. When the choices are get thrown out of court or get words onto a page, you learn to keep slogging along regardless of your inspiration level so you can meet the deadline. In fiction writing, the words don’t always fly from my fingertips to the keyboard; sometimes each sentence slumps forward at a glacial pace. The perseverance I learned writing briefs is useful then. I usually feel after such a difficult writing session that I have done the worst writing of my life, only to discover days or weeks later that what I wrote was acceptable. 

There is a way in which my fiction writing has helped my legal writing as well. I almost never begin a brief now without giving the judge a few sentences about the case he is deciding in the most professionally dramatic way possible. I do this to help them understand why this case differs from the dozens (or hundreds) of other cases in front of them, and to help them care more about what happens to my client because of the brief. These summaries have benefited greatly from the same skills I learned to create a synopsis of a novel or story. 

Unless you are one of the lucky people who can pursue this profession without a “day job,” how has your day job helped you with your writing or vice versa? 

 

The Covert Rules of Feline Behavior by Martha Reed

I’ll admit right out of the gate that I’m a dog person. My two dogs, Forbes and Murray, were the perfect companions. Warm, loving, personable, friendly, always concerned for my well-being, fearless, and not too needy. We shared a great fifteen years.

Then last August, during another of my national perigrinations, my super generous sister invited me to stay with her until my new apartment was available. She has a lovely home right on the Allegheny River with a spare bedroom and a front porch made for river mist, entrancing bird song, and early morning coffee enjoyment. A writerly ideal of perfection.

And two cats.

Now that I’m six months in, I can look back and realize that Moe and Bailey implemented a cunning let’s-train-the-human plan from Day One. Shy and hesitant at the beginning, they gave it a week of getting to know me before they came up from the basement or out from under the bed and allowed me to give them a quick pat to let me know I had earned their trust. Bailey was easier to please. With Moe, it was (and is) two quick pats before I earn (still) a scary warning (that’s sufficient) hiss.

My sister went out of town for Week Two. That’s when I learned that both cats needed to be fed breakfast precisely at 6:15 a.m. or all hell broke loose. This was not negotiable. At 6:16 a.m., Bailey yowled to the world that he was being held prisoner, abused and dying of hunger while Moe woke the neighborhood with the news that Biblical famine had been loosed in our house.

Both cats upped their tactics when I shut my bedroom door. First, I got the subtle paw under the door (i.e. What Are You Doing Are You Dead Don’t You Hear ME?) maneuver. Moe would start strumming the flexible doorstop (BOING, BOING). Bailey learned to pull on the hallway’s closet door (DOINK, DOINK). I would’ve laughed this off, but I remind you this was at 6:16 a.m.

That’s when I made my fatal mistake. Instead of declaring war, I capitulated.

Stumbling downstairs at 6:17 a.m., bleary-eyed, I held my nose and dished out a can of smoothie cat food. Peace was restored on Day One, but it was a false truce. On Day Two, both cats turned up their noses at my offering and loudly reinstated their verbal protest. Checking the label, I realized that this can contained “Cheddar Chunks.” Desperately gambling on the last can of cat food currently in the house, I opened “Savory Turkey Feast.” Thankfully, the little feline monsters approved this alternative and settled in. My fallback option until I got to the grocery store later in the day was thawing out a ribeye and cooking them a breakfast steak.

They were softening me up. I began to suffer from sleep deprivation and PTSD.

By Week Three, I was thoroughly conditioned by Stockholm syndrome. I knew that Bailey wanted to play Bird on a Stick/Pillow Monster for exactly thirty-two minutes each morning at 10:15 a.m. in the downstairs back bedroom. Moe deigned to eat his six pieces of Temptations Tasty Chicken Cat Snacks at 3:20 p.m. in the kitchen by the tall white table, please. (Moe never said please. That’s me, being all human and polite.)

So what has this cat rule behavior got to do with my writer’s life? This month I moved into my new cat-less digs. It’s the perfect writerly set-up – yet I find I miss the feline distractions. At various times during my previous sacred writing time (i.e. whenever Moe and Bailey let me have it) the cats would settle into a cozy spot in my room (usually on the wooly blanket on the foot of the bed in a shaft of warm sunlight) and nap while I chased the great invisible words, the human/writerly equivalent of Bird on a Stick. I imagined they wondered who I was talking to whenever I verbally tested my draft narrative conversations, but in reality, being cats they probably didn’t care.

And now, honestly, as I looked up from typing that last sentence, there’s a cat, a new cat, a neighborhood cat with a strikingly suspicious look in his golden eyes and sunburnt black fur staring at me from the perimeter of my new patio. And suddenly, just like that, snap, I’m home.

Family Time Versus Writing Time or What I Did on My Summer Vacation by Sam Morton

My wife and I used to watch Criminal Minds. She recorded it and we’d settle onto our plush little corner of the couch, remote in hand, to view it after the kids went to bed. Each episode began and ended with some obscure quote by Yeats or Coleridge or some other literary figure. It set the philosophical tone of the episode.

Here’s an example: “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” Joseph Conrad said that.

I’d like to offer my own quote to set the tone for today’s blog: “Any man who does not embrace death has never been on vacation with his in-laws.”

In every interview with an uber-successful woman I’ve ever seen or read, the interviewer inevitably asks some version of what I believe is a rather insulting question: “How do you balance work and family?” It’s insulting because it’s a question rarely, if ever, asked of a successful man.

Trust me; the battle to earn an income and raise children well is gender neutral. And like most people, I always want what I don’t have. When I’m writing, and writing intensely, that’s when I want to be with family most…until I start spending time with them.

By “them,” I mean my in-laws. I’m not talking about my wife’s immediate family: mom, dad, sister, two brothers and their wives and kids. I’m talking about all them plus close to 50 more relatives. As people all over the world have said, “There ought to be a law.”

My wife and I have had this discussion a number of times. Granted neither one of us is a trained sociologist, but here’s the point I’ve made to her repeatedly (usually during or right after a family vacation): You spend the first 18 years of your life trying to get away from these people. Why, then, do you spend the next 40 trying to “get the family together?” It’s like a forced marriage. No way am I getting my thousand words written today or, most likely, this week.

Her counter is that I’m male, and therefore stupid, and should just shut up.

“It destroys one’s nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.”—Benjamin Disraeli.

The vacation rules, as I understood them, were that we would say, “Tuesday at 10 a.m., we’re going to the Washington Monument.” Others could join us at the monument or not. The choice is entirely theirs.

Seems to me if you’ve thrown the plan out there and all 50 billion of your relatives have traveled from their home galaxy to be with family, we’re likely gonna have a crowd. So here, my friends, is the salient question:

How does one get 50 trillion in-laws to move at the same time, in the same direction, toward the same destination?

The answer: The same way you divide any number by zero: It is a mathematical impossibility. IT CAN’T BE DONE!

My family gatherings are much simpler. First off, as my daughter summed up one day, “So, Daddy, let me get this straight. Other than you, Uncle Mike, and Aunt Cathy, pretty much everybody in your family is dead?” Bingo, kid. Other than about a dozen aunts, uncles, and cousins, she hit the nail on the head.

I have one cousin who “don’t take to people.” The last family reunion we had, he climbed up a tree and “throwed up.”

When I was a kid, the reunions were fun because we had this older relative who had Tourette’s syndrome. In the middle of a sentence, he’d throw his head back and let out a sound like a whooping crane. Everybody called him “Whoop.” These were simple affairs—Big K Cola, large bags of generic grocery store cookies, potato salad, and ham and cheese roll-ups. “Hon, the hardest part is takin’ the plastic off the cheese!”

Even Whoop probably wouldn’t come to a reunion with people throwing up from the trees. And he damn sure wouldn’t come to one with 50 gazillion people trying to be at the same place at the same time. Just an observation.

“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.”—Erma Bombeck.

As the comedians say, “You can’t make this stuff up.” And it makes great material to write about…if I only had the time.

So, not to sound insulting or anything since I’m asking everyone, but how do you balance family time and writing time?

Leslie Budewitz Interview By E. B. Davis

Humans. When they baffle you, reach for chocolate.

Leslie Budewitz, As The Christmas Cookie Crumbles, Kindle Loc. 943

The Agatha-Award winning Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries continue.

 
In Jewel Bay, Montana’s Christmas Village, all is merry and bright. At Murphy’s Mercantile, AKA the Merc, manager Erin Murphy is ringing in the holiday season with food, drink, and a new friend: Merrily Thornton. A local girl gone wrong, Merrily’s turned her life around. But her parents have publicly shunned her, and they nurse a bitterness that chills Erin.

When Merrily goes missing and her boss discovers he’s been robbed, fingers point to Merrily—until she’s found dead, a string of lights around her neck. The clues and danger snowball from there. Can Erin nab the killer—and keep herself in one piece—in time for a special Christmas Eve?

Includes delicious recipes!

www.lesliebudewitz.com/as-the-christmas-cookie-crumbles/

I find it hard to believe that it’s been four years since I caught up with Leslie Budewitz’s Food Lovers’ Village Mystery series. Perhaps because of that hiatus, I noticed something different. Leslie’s writing is cozier—more sink in the cushions and disappear from reality—reading than it ever was before. For those of us who like our cozy reads to be like biting into the center of a warm, soft chocolate cookie still gooey and melty, the reading was awesome.    

Not to say that it avoids some harsh realities about people and how they treat each other, but Leslie makes the effort to provide the soft contrast to the black and white thinkers who judge without compassion, and isn’t compassion the essence of cozies?

Set during the weeks before Christmas and the wedding of main character Erin Murphy, As The Christmas Cookie Crumbles portrays the best, worst, and sometimes goofiest of human behavior during this season. This book will be released on June 8^th.  

Please welcome multiple Agatha winner Leslie Budewitz to WWK.                                    E. B. Davis

Erin witnesses a fight among members of the Thornton family. Who are the Thorntons, and why is Erin shocked?

Walt and Taya Thornton run an antiques and Christmas shop in the village of Jewel Bay, up the block from the Merc, the local foods grocery Erin runs in her family’s hundred-year-old building. Once Erin’s kindergarten teacher, Taya has always embodied the Christmas spirit to Erin – she even looks like an elf. So when she yells at her daughter to go away, saying “You’ve shamed us enough” on the sidewalk on Decorating Day, in front of dozens of people, Erin is stunned. She knows Merrily Thornton’s past – everyone in town does -- but hurts for the woman, humiliated by her own mother in public. 

Is fear of judgment the reason why people keep up appearances without regard to the truth?

That is an astute observation. Taya had reason to question what she thought she knew, but chose not to, because she feared what else she might learn. 

Merrily Thornton pleaded guilty to embezzlement twenty years ago and served time. Why does Erin trust her?

It’s not a blind trust. Erin likes her, knows she did her time, and sees signs of rehabilitation. That’s enough, she thinks, to start a friendship.

What’s an earworm, and what plagues Erin during the season?

An earworm is a song that gets stuck in the brain – like the very worst Christmas songs that wrap their way around Erin’s brain stem!

Like so often happens to me, Erin can’t remember someone’s name. Does Erin focus on other aspects of humans other than their labels?

Erin prides herself, as I do, on having a great memory and easily coming up with other people’s names. But there is one woman in town whose name she can never remember, also like me. (After 15 years, I’ve finally begun to recognize her when I see her out without her husband, whom I easily recall, or without having to ask mine “Who was that?”) I thought it would be fun to give the usually-sharp Erin that same frustration.

Erin’s mom Fresca thinks trust is more important than risk. But Erin starts writing procedures for the store to reduce that risk. Does Erin think naiveté equals stupidity?

No. But she’s worked in big business as well as small, and knows how easy it is for small businesses to overlook the importance of simple things like policies on cash-handling or computer use. And she knows that employees generally want to have regular reviews and manuals they can refer to. Plus she’s going on vacation – her honeymoon – and her staff will need to take care of things without calling her!

How do we empower people in our lives who don’t deserve that power?

Oh, great question! As you’ve suggested, fear is one way, and not questioning them is another. Probably the biggest way, I suspect, is not trusting our own instincts about people. We want to like and be liked, and easily dismiss our own misgivings instead of digging into them a little deeper.

What is a “Splash” artist?

Luci is a soapmaker and recurring character who sells her products at the Merc. She calls her business “The Splash Artist.” Soap, baths, bubbles….

“Back inside, the scent of lavender mingled with cocoa and coffee.” (Loc 230)

Are scents important to the Christmas season? Are they important to the retail season?

Oh, yes! Turns out that memory and scent are closely tied; both are located in the limbic system of the brain and evolved early in human development. That’s why we can catch a whiff of cologne and find ourselves thinking of a boyfriend who wore it 30 years ago before even noticing the scent. And because holidays, especially Christmas, also build on memory and tradition, I think scents play a big role in our enjoyment of them. And occasionally, of less positive memories as well. As for scent and retail, there’s a thing called “scent marketing,” where retailers deliberately evoke a scent to trigger that limbic response and, they hope, a purchase. Erin won’t stoop to something that deliberate, but if the aroma of chocolate or strawberry jam seeps out of the Merc’s commercial kitchen into the shop itself, how could that be a bad thing? < smile >

Why hasn’t Erin met any of her husband-to-be’s family, the Zimmermans?

Adam left Minnesota for college and has never gone back. His and Erin’s work schedules made a visit impossible. He’s never felt close to his family, and envies the bonds the Murphys share.  At times, though, maybe they are a little too close!

Would you describe Almond Bianchi? Fudge Ecstasies?

Almond Bianchi are meringues made with ground nuts, sweet, melt-in-your-mouth clouds. And Fudge Ecstasies? The name says it all, don’t you think?

Like Ms. Marple, are people who assume the worst of people realistic, or are they insecure, judgmental, negative and/or guilty?

Ah, the eternal debate: Is the pessimist realistic, or choosing to dwell on the negative? Is the optimist naïve, or choosing to focus on the best in people? Depending on your own point of view, you could make either case. I think our point of view is a choice, and it affects all our interactions and experiences. Put simply, we see what we want to see – which the pessimist would call blindness and the optimist might call generosity. We do have to recalibrate our perceptions at times, which can keep one up at night.

What is it about a Subaru that Erin likes? Do you drive a Subaru?

I love my Subaru! It and the Chevy pickup seem to be the semi-official vehicles of Northwest Montana – and no doubt of other regions with lots of mountains, weather, and people who love getting out of doors like Erin and I do. Their biggest advantages are solid construction and all-wheel drive – plus a hatchback that even a small dog can jump into!

Why does Erin decide to put some Jewish holiday décor in the Merc beside the Christmas decorations?

As she strolls past the shop windows, she realizes that the village has overlooked Hannukah, and thinks maybe a reminder would be a good idea.

You change to present tense occasionally during your story. What were the instances, and why did you decide to do that?

I use present tense to describe places and traits that are ongoing or continuous, much as we do in regular conversation. “Oliver ran down the street,” but “Oliver is short.” A first-person narrative should feel like Erin telling the reader the story, and I wanted to play up that narrator-reader connection. 

Erin doesn’t trust outsider Detective Bello (love the name), who displays “short-man” syndrome issues. How does she deal with him?

At first, she’s irritated. He comes into this town, not knowing a thing about it, or her, and dismisses her observations. Tells her he’s not going to let her interfere with his investigation. “His investigation? Since when? This is her town, too.” But she comes to realize he does know how to run a murder investigation, and he comes to understand that her knowledge of of the community is invaluable. As the danger heats up, she appreciates his protectiveness of his new patch. And as the investigation drags on, he appreciates her doggedness. They’ll never be completely comfortable with each other, I suspect, but they do develop a mutual respect. 

Why do people use “the exception proves the rule” in arguments?

Turns out the phrase comes from science, and uses “prove” not in the sense of “confirm” but in the sense of “test.” Like when we did proofs in high school math.

There’s an “embezzlement pattern,” which Bello refers to, but the pattern doesn’t seem to apply to Merrily. What is the “embezzlement pattern?” Why does Bello apply it to Merrily when it doesn’t fit?

This is something I encountered years ago in my law practice. Not to get too detailed, but many embezzlers are your next door neighbor, women with positions of trust in small businesses where they had easy access to money and the means to cover up their deception. A lot of research has focused on this pattern and the reasons for embezzlement, which do tend to differ between men and women. And it does fit Merrily now, but not in the past, which leads Erin to probe the past.

There’s nothing better in a cozy than cookies proving the time of death. How do cookies prove the time of Merrily’s death?

Ooh. How to answer without a spoiler? Erin sees what Merrily had been making for a cookie exchange, realizes what steps remained, and worked backwards to figure out the time of death. Naturally, Detective Bello is skeptical. But he’s newly arrived in Montana from Florida, and a cookie sometimes called a snowball is new to him! (Well, maybe it isn’t, but he is a skeptical kind of guy!)

What is Chocolate Cabernet sauce, and what does it best top?

Eight ounces semi-sweet or a combination of semi-sweet and bitter chocolate, melted, with a cup of heavy cream, a tablespoon of butter, a teaspoon of vanilla, and two tablespoons of Cabernet or another red wine. Mmmm. Erin first tastes this treat at the Summer Art & Food Festival in Crime Rib and recreates it for the reader in Butter Off Dead. It’s best served on ice cream. We were given a bottle of a pourable version a few years ago, went to buy more, and discovered it was no longer available, so I searched out a few recipes and created our own, which is thicker, almost fudge-like. I think I hear a jar calling me right now…

What kind of wedding cake did Adam and Erin choose?

You know, I never asked them! Readers, suggestions?

What’s next for Erin?

A nice long vacation in the sun. Seriously, she doesn’t know what Adam has planned their honeymoon, though he has told her to make sure her passport is current and promised to tell her what to pack at least three days before they leave. (I know where they’re going, but I’m not telling, either!)