Nostalgia City Mysteries

Mark S. Bacon

Category Archives: writer’s block

7:47 am - July 25, 2023 -

A shy dragon, disabilities and f**king vulgarity

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June 26 is National Disability Independence Day

I have written several times in this space about swearing in murder mystery novels. In fact, if you do a Google search for profanity in mystery novels my blog posts are among the first references you’ll see.

What got me started on the subject, as I explained in one of my previous posts, was curiosity about my own use of profanity. After my first Nostalgia City mystery was published I got to wondering how many four-letter words I used and how that compared to other writers’ work.

I discovered, of course, that the use of profanity varies greatly in the genre, from no cussing whatsoever in many cozies to an abundance of f***ing vulgarity in the grittier forms of murder mysteries.

Unfortunately this necessitates further explanation before I can get to the reason I want to talk about bad words in the first place. Above I used asterisks rather than spelling out the obvious word. It’s my journalistic background that cemented the AP stylebook into my vocabulary. Many news outlets today—although there seem to be fewer and fewer—do not use four letter words and substitute asterisks. The older I get the less I care about maintaining this illusion of superiority. And certainly I use crude words—sparingly—in my novels. Lots of people swear these days and I believe I need to use “those words” to be realistic.

So this brings me to a funking problem. You read that correctly. Continue Reading →

Categories: Dragon Professional, New mystery book, Nuance Dragon, obscenity in mystery novels, profanity in mystery novels, writer's block Tags: , , , ,
7:26 am - June 26, 2023 -

Can I dictate my next mystery as long as I don’t drive in the dessert?

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Writer’s block part III

Here are two short paragraphs from my second Nostalgia City mystery:

Lyle Deming braked his Mustang hard and aimed for the sandy shoulder of the desert road. Luckily, his daughter Sam had been looking down and didn’t see the body.

He passed a thicket of creosote and manzanita and pulled onto the dirt as soon as he could.

Here’s how the Windows voice speech recognition program transcribed it when I read it to my computer:

Lyell great use loss think are 10:00 AM and four are being sent the shoulder of the dessert row . Luckily his daughter center had been looking Gould shaw and didn’t see the body The house a thicket of creosote her and send you a toll on two the tour as soon as he caught.

Writer’s tool kit

And people are worried about AI taking over?

In my last post, I explained that I have a tear (seven millimeters long) in a tendon in my right arm. The pain makes it impossible for me to type, and my orthopedist says I have months to go.

Rather than complain—which is silly and pointless—let me quote from an email I got recently from my friend Larry:

It seems unnecessarily cruel that God or fate attacks an author’s fingers. Why not his toes, knees, or ears?

Thanks for the support, Larry, but I already have a bum knee, and I’d like to keep my hearing.

Help is on the way.  First, my arm and hand are only slightly and occasionally painful (I still can’t type) and I’m doing PT exercises daily. Second, I’m so excited about the next Nostalgia City novel and eager to develop its quite contemporary plot, I bought professional speech-to-text software. Continue Reading →

Categories: Noir, noir novels, Nostalgia City, writer's block Tags: , ,
7:42 am - May 18, 2023 -

From the annals of modern medicine

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Or: writers’ block is a bitch, but I can still talk and read things, like Ruth Myers’ new period PI page-turner.

My thanks to everyone who suggested I obtain a speech-to-text program as a temporary cure for my writers’ block.  I discovered that Microsoft Word has that function built in. I’m actually using it right now.

The program reproduces my words quite accurately. Moving the cursor around, inserting punctuation and deleting words however, is easier said than done. No, I mean it’s harder when said than done.  No that’s not what I mean either.  It’s quicker to make corrections with the keyboard than to speak them, but that exacerbates the as-yet-to-be-fully-diagnosed pain in my right forearm.

The chief suspect appears to be medial epicondylitis,  a form of tendinitis. Ten minutes at the keyboard and mouse makes my arm painful for hours.  Using my laptop and its palm rest, rather than my desktop PC, is marginally less unpleasant. If I stay away from the keyboard entirely the pain seems to hide for hours at a time, sometimes a day.

I can imagine my orthopedist telling me to simply stop writing and I’m good to go.  That would be like telling chronically injured Olympic star Lindsey Vonn to stop skiing.  Wait—she did stop skiing.  It would be like telling Tom Brady—okay stop with the athletic analogies.  (I’m really not saying this. The speech-to-text program must have mutated to AI. I’m switching back to two-finger typing.)

Regardless, I’m a writer. I’m not going to give it up. If I had to choose between painful writing or pain-free lollygagging—well, you know the answer. If you’re following along at home, I have an MRI scheduled soon.  Stay tuned.

Writers write. They also help other writers. Recently I read a new novel by mystery writer M. Ruth Myers. The novel was so new it hadn’t been published yet. I was what’s called a beta-reader.  When I and most writers I know write a book, we want to get feedback before a book is submitted to an editor and published.     Continue Reading →

Categories: book review, Mystery novels, New mystery book, writer's block Tags: , , , , , , , ,