Year 5 of an Indie Writer: Week 12 AKA Control the Controllables

by
Scott D. Parker

I’ll admit something: I often write these posts with little reference to real world. I’ve always thought folks who read the posts here at DoSomeDamage get enough of the real world, so why inject it here?

Not today. I do have writing comments, but I’ll get to them later. Let’s talk about what’s happening.

Coronavirus Is Changing the World

I’m a historian and I always look at things in the long span of history. It’s why many things that irritate me don’t surprise me because we’ve likely seen it before. Back when this virus started, my wife asked if it would get over here. I said of course it would. If the 1918 Spanish Flu could reach American shores with only boats and trains, the 2020 Coronavirus would have a much easier time with planes thrown in the mix.

Now, we’re all hunkered down in our homes and apartments. Many of us are losing our jobs. When this whole thing started for us Americans, I likened the Wuhan portion to the start of a war, the invasion of Poland, for example that initiated World War II. This week, however, I’ve taken on a more nuanced viewpoint: this is like the Battle of Britain in 1940.

For months, England was bombed by the Nazis. Nightly, the population spent time in bomb shelters, praying the bombs wouldn’t fall right where they were. They carried on their lives, but it was different, challenging, and seemingly forever. What ironic timing I started listening to Erik Larson’s new book, The Splendid and the Vile, about that very event.

Eventually, however, the bombs stopped falling. There was an end. The Allies persevered, but things had changed.

Things will change in 2020 as well. As much as we want this hunkering down to end, what we really want is to know what happens next in the story of human history. Ain’t that the truth. I opined to the family that the ‘words of the year’ might be ‘flatten the curve.’

But that got me to thinking about New Year’s Eve 2020. Nine months away. What’s it going to be like then? Will this be over, or will Phase 2 be in full swing? Boy, do we want the answers to that, huh?

Controlling the Controllables

On the writing front, I’ve posted here about controlling the controllables. That is, we can write, edit, format, and design a book all we want right up until it’s published. After that, a book belongs to the world, and readers will make up their own minds about the book.

The same thing applies here with our current crisis. The sheer enormity of the situation can almost paralyze us into non-action or, worse, destructive action. I can’t fathom what doctors have to do on a daily basis in Italy. I can’t imagine needing medical supplies but having none. I can’t comprehend some of the numbers and data I see on the news.

If I were to let it get to me, I’d probably cry every day. I did, once, mainly because my son is a high school senior and his memories will be of staying home and away from his friends, likely no prom. Graduation is iffy. It freaking sucks.

But I had a moment of clarity one morning as I said my daily prayers. I think it was Tuesday, the first full day I worked from home. I am not a doctor or a medical professional. I’m not a decision maker, a restauranteur, or a guy stocking shelves in the grocery store. I’m just one guy—a son, a husband, a father, a friend, a co-worker—who is in the same boat as everyone else. The best thing, the absolute best thing I can do for me, my family, and my community is to do my part.

To control what I can control, and that means staying put.

I listen to the mayor and the police chief as they talk about local directives. I listen to the state and national leaders. I monitor the news, but do not obsess over it. Nor do I check it frequently. One reason is that it can be so depressing. Another is I have a day job at an oil and gas company. Talk about double anxiety.

That moment of clarity I was talking about? Well, here it is: my whole life has prepared me for what’s to come. I am who I am today as a result of every single decision I made from the time I could make them until today. Did I ever think I could work from home? Not really, until I discovered I could in 2011 and learned how to be even more productive. Did I ever think I could stay optimistic in times like these? Yes, because I had family members who showed me how. Did I ever think I could write a book? No, until I did, and I did it word by word, chapter by chapter, day by day, until the words ended up as a book.

Day by day is the only way we have to deal with our situation. You are stronger than you can possibly imagine. If you can simply get through a new day, count your blessings and do it all again the next day. It ain’t easy. In fact, it can be damn hard. But it’s not impossible. A thing is only impossible when you haven’t done it yet. After that, it gets so much easier. Well, how about more straightforward. Life isn’t exactly easy nowadays.

Control the controllables. Works for writing books. It’ll work for the year 2020.

The Secret Weapon for Creatives: Keep Creating

I promised something writing related, so here it is.

I’m writing a story for an upcoming project. It’s one of my Calvin Carter, Railroad Detective, stories set in the 1880s. I’ll admit all this real-world news killed the imagination for the first part of the month.

But this week, something changed. Maybe it was the work-from-home environment where I don’t have to commute and, thus, have more time prior to work time, but I found myself getting through this story in chunks.

And man oh man, did it feel good to write those words! For a little bit each day, I got to escape to the 1880s and stand next to my characters as they figure out how to stop a hijacked train.

So, you writers or creatives out there: keep creating. Keep writing. If nothing else, you’ll escape.

Stay safe. Stay calm. Stay focused on what you can do to help.

That’s my message to you this week.

Beau and the Blues (Dead Clown Style)

Today, Beau Johnson takes a look at DEAD CLOWN BLUES from R. Daniel Lester.

Carnegie Fitch, once-upon-a-time drifter and now half-assed private eye, has a sharp tongue, a cheap suit and dog-bite marks on his fedora. Yes, that’s just how he rolls through the downtown streets of Vancouver, BC, Canada, aka Terminal City, circa 1957, a land of neon signs, 24-hour diners and slumming socialites.
Fitch gets the case of a lifetime when he gets caught up in the death of a janitor with a checkered past as a circus performer and a stash of ill-gotten gains. And since nothing attracts the moths quite like the glow of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, he will cross paths with a series of lowlifes and nut jobs, including a gang of criminal clowns, a femme fatale with beaucoup daddy issues and an off-kilter circus elephant named Mary with a taste for human fear.
See, Fitch has always dreamed of the big score, the buried treasure, the duffel bag full of cash. Because that’s fat city, the place to be. Easy money. The good life, where the whisky flows like water and you never get a bill. But what if nothing is as it seems and chasing the dream means getting knocked silly not once but twice and ending up in a hospital bed, pissing blood after being repeatedly kidney punched by a psycho clown with no moral compass?
And what if that’s not the worst that will happen?
What if Fitch is forced to dig through his past to sort out who he is and why he is and just what the hell he wants out of this loopy thing called “life” anyway.
Well, then Fitch’d have a serious case of the Dead Clown Blues.

Two Plague Films

I have to admit it is rather difficult to resist the temptation, during the time of this pandemic, not to revisit favorite plague-related films: The Andromeda Strain, Twelve Monkeys, Contagion.  One not to be overlooked is Elia Kazan's tense Panic in the Streets (1950), which combines a plague story with film noir.  Set and shot in New Orleans, it stars Richard Widmark as an officer with the U.S. Public Health Service.  Along with a police captain, played by the always good Paul Douglas, the two discover that a homicide victim found on the city's waterfront is an index case, or patient zero (Gwyneth Paltrow's role in Contagion), a carrier of pneumonic plague. This leads to an investigation in which Widmark becomes convinced that everyone who came in contact with the body has to be inoculated. If this is not done within 48 hours and the pathogen that killed the man spreads widely, the city will have a disaster on its hands. Widmark's character has to talk to the petty criminals in the shadowy world the victim belonged to while dealing with city officials who don't believe his dire claims.  And, of course, there is a reporter who gets wind of the situation and who might print a story that could cause mass panic in the city.  It's fast-moving and suspenseful, and besides the people I mentioned, it also has Zero Mostel and Jack Palance.  Barbara Bel Geddes plays Widmark's wife.  It's not an obscure film by any means, but it's not a film that pops up among the most mentioned of plague-themed films. I saw it years ago and it took me by surprise. Quite good.

Less well known is a Mexican plague film scripted by Gabriel Garcia Marquez no less.  It's called El ano de la peste, from 1979, and it's an adaptation of Daniel Defoe's book, A Journal of the Plague Year.  Defoe's novel, written in 1722, is about the Great Plague of 1665 that struck London. Marquez takes the story and transposes it to a contemporary Mexican village.  As Marquez said, "I've always been interested in plagues, beginning with Oedipus Rex.  A Journal of the Plague Year is one of my favorite books.  Plagues are like imponderable dangers that surprise people.  They seem to have a quality of destiny.  It's the phenomenon of death on a mass scale.  What I find curious is that the great plagues have always produced great excesses.  They make people want to live more. It's that almost metaphysical dimension that interests me."

El ano de la peste concerns a doctor who becomes aware of a terrible germ killing people in a Mexican town, but by the time the authorities he has warned take him seriously, the germ has spread and all of Mexico becomes threatened.  The government (never efficient or very helpful in these movies) tries to contain the situation and is less than truthful to the public in how they deal with it.  This film is a sci-fi-horror film-thriller hybrid and is directed by Felipe Cazals.  It's an intelligent film that gets into the political and economic fallout of an ecological and medical disaster - all things that, needless to say, remain relevant.  How the film winds up I won't give away, but it does conclude with a note of pungent irony that doesn't cast an admirable light on the government authorities.

You can watch this film on You Tube.  It's worth checking out.

Happy plague film viewing!