I wasn’t meaning to read this story. I drifted over from Codex (an online writers group I belong to) and thought I’d check the opening, nothing more. But the voice and the story were so compelling that the next thing I knew I was halfway through and had to finish.
There are a few things in this story I don’t know if I like. But I’m not going to mention them here and prejudice you because the narration was fabulous. The story situations compelling. The dry understatement, the mixture of the mundane and fantastic, the oddness of the tale—all lovely and delicious. But that’s not all. There was something else with the cadence of the writing that drew me. And the solution the golem finds in the end, oh my gosh, it was wonderful.
It’s 1990. You’re a housewife, homeschooling your children, and renting a room upstairs to a young man to make ends meet. There are a few odd things about the young man, but you overlook them. Then one day a woman is strangled on a jogging path near your home, and your first thought is that the young man living in your house has something to do with it.
What do you do?
Pat Brown found herself in this exact situation. She voiced her suspicions to her husband, but it was all too farfetched. However, the nagging thought wouldn’t let her go, and she soon uncovered evidence that made the young man a strong suspect.
She took the evidence to the police, but they dismissed her as a bored housewife with an overactive imagination. She evicted the young man, but it would be six years before the authorities would finally bring him in for questioning.
Dismayed and frustrated, Brown started down a path that would lead to her become a professional criminal profiler, assisting police departments and victims’ families by analyzing both physical and behavioral evidence to make the most scientific determination possible about who committed a crime.
In The Profiler: My Life Hunting Serial Killers and Psychopaths Brown tells about what happened with that young man and her journey to becoming a profiler, then she opens a number of other cases she’s worked on, giving the reader a behind-the-scenes look at how profilers work, and how their methods bring new investigative avenues to light. She also brings home very clearly just how many murders go unsolved. It’s an absolutely fascinating read.
Milk that doesn’t moo
I used to think soy milk was either for the lactose intolerant or hippies. And so I always avoided that milk section of the grocery store. But, having embarked on a new way of eating that I’ll explain in another column, I was induced to approach the alternative milk shelves. I purchased a carton of soy milk, but then I saw cartons of something even more strange: almond milk.
Puzzling. I knew, of course, that almonds did not have udders. So nobody was out there hooking them up to tiny milking machines. And they were nuts, so it’s not like you can squeeze them to make them release their tasty juices. Instead, I learned that almond milk is made by finely grinding almonds together with water. I thought this was something new, invented perhaps by a Californian who’d had too much weed, but it appears many Medieval European recipes called for almond milk, and it has always been a popular beverage in the Middle East. So almond milk has been around for some time.
But I didn’t know any of this. I just knew I loved almonds and that they provide all sorts of goodies for the human body. Besides, I have a hard time resisting adventures. So along with the soy, I picked up a carton of Silk’s PureAlmond regular, vanilla, and chocolate milk.
The soy was okay, but it left a weird zingy taste in my mouth. Furthermore, soy contains estrogen. I’m sure it’s a fine product, but I live with four daughters and don’t need any more estrogen. And I certainly don’t need it mutating me in any, um, feminine ways. So I put the soy aside and gave the almond milk a go.
It was delicious. I love the vanilla and regular flavors the best. In fact, I like it so much I only drink cow’s milk when the last drop of almond milk is gone, and I try to make sure that never happens. Some might worry that I’ll deplete my calcium stores, but not so. Almond milk actually has MORE calcium than cow’s milk along with vitamin D that allows the body to absorb the mineral. It also has 50% of the RDA of vitamin E, of which cow’s milk has none. But that’s all technical vitaminy stuff. It wouldn’t matter if the milk itself didn’t taste so dang good.
The American breakfast
I love cereal. We have our standard favorites as a family, but I also like to get a box of something new when we shop. I recently saw, perched up on the top shelf at Wal-Mart, boxes of Uncle Sam.
What the heck? Was this a Tea Party product? I know Utah is conservative, but come on. And what kind of nut sings “The Stars and Stripes” for breakfast?
Well, I might.
So I promptly snagged a box and read that it’s been around since 1908, thus making it politically neutral. Then I read the ingredients. It’s a simple cereal made of wheat berries that are steamed, rolled, and toasted to provide killer whole grain nutrition. Those wheat flakes are then mixed with flax seeds (omega 3’s anyone?). That’s it.
I purchased a box, felt patriotic, and then gave it a try when we got home. I’ve been buying it regularly ever since. It’s slammed with 10 grams of fiber and 7 grams of protein, and goes great with Silk’s vanilla almond milk and a piece of fruit.
The first time I attended a high school prom in Rich County, I thought the Rich County people were from another planet.
I was married. My wife Nellie had grown up in Rich County, and said that we had to go to her little brother’s prom.
“Your brother’s prom?” I asked. Like, what?
“Yes, my brother’s prom.”
Weird, I thought. Because in the big city, older brothers and sisters who have graduated simply do not go to high school proms.
But I’m always up for strange new experiences, and so we went.
And I can report that it was indeed strange. In the big city, grandma and grandpa do not attend the prom, nor do mom and dad or little brothers and sisters. And they most assuredly do not sit in the stands and watch the junior class perform a dance.
But that’s what they did in Rich County. And so I sat next to grandma and grandpa who were nigh unto eighty years old and watched an announcer present the junior class. There was a makeshift stage. And the announcer would announce the names of a young woman and a young man. On the stage, the young woman would take the arm of a young man, and then he would escort her out to the center of the floor to the applause of everyone in the gym. The couple would then perform a little action—he might twirl her, or she him, or she might jump in his arms, or he in hers, or she might lift her dress enough to show she was wearing cowboy boots that matched his, or dozens of other little creative things, and then they’d walk to the side to make room for the next couple.
In Rich County, there are only forty or so kids in a class, so it didn’t take long. When the juniors were all announced, the whole junior class, in their tuxes and dresses, spread out and took their places on the floor. A song began to play, and then they performed a dance that had been choreographed specifically for the occasion.
When it finished, the mother or father of each junior went out onto the floor and danced a slow dance with their son or daughter.
They then presented the seniors in the same way, after which the parents of the seniors went out and danced with their sons and daughters.
Only when that dance ended did the lights dim and the “normal” dancing begin. Nellie and I danced a few songs, and then she said it was time for us to get some refreshments and go.
And that’s what we did, leaving the teens to their evening.
I had never before seen anything like it. I laughed and wondered. Those funny hicks, I thought.
I took a job in San Francisco for a few years, then another in Columbus, Ohio. And then, years after that hick prom, Nellie and I moved from the big city to Rich County. That was almost thirteen years ago.
This last Friday I watched as my third daughter was announced and walked down from the makeshift stage. She was escorted by a young man, looking handsome in his tux. I watched him twirl her and another girl (he got to escort two). And when all the seniors had been presented, I got to dance with my girl at the prom.
I cannot tell you how sweet that was to look in her eyes, to see my little girl grown up into this beautiful, strong woman. I thought about how she was soon going to leave us, and tears threatened to spring into this papa’s eyes, but she smiled and said, “Don’t you dare.”
What’s a man to do? I obeyed. And instead of blubbering, we danced.
When we finished, I gave her a hug and a kiss on the forehead and returned to the stands.
I’ve danced six times with my girls at these Rich County proms—once when each was a junior and once when they were seniors. And I love this tradition.
I love that a huge part of the community comes out to the dance. I love that we honor and applaud these great kids. I love watching the juniors in their gorgeous dresses and handsome tuxes perform these beautiful, formal dances that remind me of something you might find in Victorian England, something that seems to have stepped right out of Pride and Prejudice.
Juniors performing danceParents dancing with kids
What an excellent evening.
How lucky I am that places like Rich County exist, and that I get to live in one of them.
Orson Card has just announced the dates and location for this year’s literary boot camp. This one is in North Carolina. Card usually usually holds a session in the west every other year. But here’s the deal: east or west, if you are a new writer, this is THE workshop to attend. It is hands-down THE best workshop I have ever attended.
If you want to learn how to write fiction from one of the masters, you will apply (the boot camp is limited to 12 people) and then do whatever it takes to attend if you’re selected. The two day writing class is also great. I don’t know that I would spend hundreds of dollars to fly in for that, but I would and did spend hundreds to attend the boot camp (way back in ye year 2002).
There’s a joke that all horror movies would be over in two minutes if you just made the hero smart and gave him a gun.
Well, Correia gives his likeable hero a gun, but not just any old thing. If you’re going to kill a vampire, why not use a rocket propelled grenade or a flame thrower? In fact, if there were enough monster outbreaks, you might have a government agency. You might also find that agency was willing to outsource some of the monster hunting to private contractors (ala Blackwater). And you can bet they won’t be hunting with pea shooters. They’ll be doing it right, with brains and firepower. Correia, someone who loves guns (used to own a gun shop and shoot competitively in rifle, shotgun, and pistol) and monsters, wrote a story that does just that.
The idea of Larry Correia’sMonster Hunter International might remind you a bit of X-Files or Men in Black, but it’s neither. However, it is as good as or better than both. Correia tells the story of Owen Pitt, a big lug of an accountant, who, as he was working late one evening, gets called into the office of his boss. No big deal, right? Except the fat man is naked, transforming into a werewolf, and vows to eat Pitt’s heart. It’s not quite how you want to end your day tallying debits and credits. Pitt almost dies in the encounter, but manages to “live the American dream” and throw his incompetent jerk of a boss from the fourteenth-story window and splatter him on a double-parked Lincoln Navigator below.
Good work for a bean counter. When Pitt finally recovers, he gets an offer he can’t refuse (mostly because of the alluring agent that comes to recruit him), and he joins Monster Hunter International (MHI), the private contractor who sends out special force teams to use any means at their disposal to kill monsters. Unlucikly for Pitt, one of the baddest monsters around is just about to ruin the world forever, and Pitt finds himself in the middle of the fight.
Correia fills the book with enough action for any red-blooded male, a variety of bad mamba jamba monsters, and wonderful characters. There’s romance and heroism (I got a lump in my throat at one part toward the end), but his signature is his humor. I laughed again and again.
Part of that humor stems from the fact that Correia has an ear for good lines. Part stems from his delight in taking common tropes and stereotypes and twisting them. And this is another one of the things that I enjoyed immensely about the book. For example, the team of newbie hunters that Pitt joins is not made up of square-jawed males and females with Navy SEAL backgrounds, although some in the company do have that. Nope, Correia puts together an accountant, librarian, school teacher, and stripper (all people who faced some kind of monster and are ready for payback), and he makes them believable hunters.
This tongue-in-cheek tweaking is everywhere. There are elves in this book unlike any you have ever seen. But he also makes it personal. Owen is not your typical accountant. Even a number of the minor characters get this treatment. For example, one of the people on the team is a Black guy with Rasta hair. But Correia doesn’t choose from what Correia calls one of the four Hollywood stereotypes. Nope, this guy plays against those types. He isn’t the comic relief, the gangsta, the sports dude, or scary male. He’s his own man, a shy virgin with a good heart. Correia also gives his characters interesting backstories. And one of the delights is discovering them.
I encountered a few minor flaws in the presentation, but these are easily overlooked. Easily. There’s also quite a bit of profanity (and so those who wish to avoid it are forewarned). However, when I turned the last page Friday night, I looked up at Larry who was lying on his bed in our La Quinta hotel room in Denver, his concealed .45 and 9mm guns on the floor beside him, and said, “Wow. WOW.” And then I think I said, “Dude, what a marvelous read” or maybe it was “Oh, great lord of zombie destruction tales do not smite me,” but I’m not sure because I was still thinking about the perfect last line of the perfect last scene of the last chapter.
Now, those exclamations of satisfaction and delight had nothing to do with the guns on the floor, that Larry’s a deadly shot, or that he’s a big 6’3″ Portugese. It has nothing to do with the fact that he and I were on a book tour together. I don’t read books that don’t grab me. End of story. I stopped doing that long ago. I don’t care who wrote them. And I don’t give false praise. False praise irks me to no end and does nobody any good, especially not the receiver. The truth is that Larry’s book was simply too good to put down. It pulled me in with the opening quote and kept delivering the goods until the end. And if you don’t believe me, you read the quote that both inspiried and opens the book and tell me you don’t want to turn the next page.
“You know what the difference between me and you really is? You look out there and see a horde of evil, brain-eating zombines. I look out there and see a target-rich environment.” ~Dillis D. Freeman Jr.
Yeah, it got ya, didn’t it. The ride is waiting folks. Just go on over to Amazon. Correia is going to be a writer to watch.
I got my masters degree in accounting and information systems. While going to school I started an investment club and learned about a man named Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett is humble, full of folksy humor, and trades places with Bill Gates as the richest man in the world, depending on the year you’re counting. His annual letters to his shareholders are a delight to read. This year’s is full of wisdom about the current financial crisis. Moreover, within a few minutes of reading you will be able to get some key insights that can help as you evaluate the plans being hatched in Washington and how to prevent this particular type of crisis from happening again.
If you’re not that into finance, I recommend reading:
The introduction starting on page 2 and ending on page 3
The “Finance and Financial Products” section starting on page 10 and running through page 12
Once you’ve read those, if you want to laugh and see Buffet’s humor, skip to page 21 where Buffett talks about the annual meeting of shareholders. Tell me you wouldn’t want to attend.
A few weeks ago, I had to travel to Denver for business. I elected to drive instead of fly. The weather was glorious, and I had a book on tape—what could be better? Driving also allowed me to stop into Rock Springs and Laramie and few other spots to do some research for the novel I’m writing. And while I was tooling around, I found two excellent places to eat.
The first was in Rock Springs. It’s about five minutes off the freeway, tucked in the downtown area, which means it’s a place locals visit. It’s called Broadway Burger Station. I walked in, past the tables, and took a swivel seat at the counter. The menu listed sandwiches and soup, but I suspect it’s the burgers most people go for. These are BIG burgers—1/3 to ½ pound of ground beef. I almost asked for a kid’s meal. Not only because the portion was smaller but because they serve the kids meals in a cardboard hot rod car! How cool is that?
But I went with the basic burger instead. All their burgers come with lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion, and their special sauce. You can also add other things including mushrooms, avocado sauce, bacon, cheese, chili, egg, ham, jalapenos, and pastrami. I went with the sautéed mushrooms. Then the very nice server tempted me with a hand-dipped malt, and I said yes because I was only thinking of all of you at the time, wanting to provide a complete and honest review.
The place was hopping the whole time I was there, and rightly so. The server brought out my burger, fries, and malt, and, man oh man–the burger with tomato and mushrooms was succulent! The fries were hot and delicious. And the malt was made with hard ice cream right before my very eyes. What’s more, I could have easily shared my meal with Nellie, which means we could have both eaten for a total of ten bucks. Great food, super-friendly service, and reasonable prices. If you’re ever passing through Rock Springs and need a place to chow, go to the Broadway Burger Station on 628 Broadway Street, (307) 362-5858.
On my way back I stopped in Laramie and found a McAlister’s Deli in the shopping strip at 2317 Grand Avenue, (307) 745-3760. This is not the type of deli that you walk into and gag because of the weird meat smells. It’s a soup and sandwich shop. And it’s apparently been doing well. I’d never seen a McAlister’s before, but found out it’s a chain that’s in twenty-two states in the Midwest and South. And Wyoming is currently as far west as you can find one.
They serve hot sandwiches, including one called The New Yorker (corned beef, pastrami, and swiss) and another called The Big Nasty (1/3 pound beef on a baguette). They have classic sandwiches, grilled sandwiches, and clubs. I ordered the Cobb Club with turkey, applewood smoked bacon, gorgonzola cheese, avocado, lettuce, tomato, and a light Parmesan Peppercorn sauce served on ciabatta bread. I also ordered a cup of their vegetable soup and a piece of Colossal Carrot Cake.
Dude, it was all delicious. Lovely. And in Laramie of all places. Laramie! All these years I never thought to stop because the town looked so unassuming. Laramie was just that place where Cowboy fans enjoyed hollering and throwing beer bottles at my favorite football team from the neighboring state. Of course, I did cut them some slack—I mean, what else can you do when your team gets dominated year after year? Sing Kumbaya?
Right. Now I see I’ve misjudged them. Maybe their football program has been in the doldrums the last few years, but Laramie isn’t a pass-through town. Next time I’m rolling by on I-80, I’m going to stop again and see what other gems the good folks there have to offer. If you’re in the area, and you love places like Jason’s Deli and Kneaders, stop at McAlister’s Deli. Then take some time to visit the lovely St. Matthew’s cathedral on 3rd street. You can’t miss it: it’s the one with the red doors.
