Just muttering Archives - Laurie R. King

Um, like, you know?

June 22, 2016 by Laurie King 13 Comments

I love NPR. But sometimes, it puts my teeth on edge.
I don’t listen to a lot of radio, mostly when I’m driving somewhere, but my local station (KAZU, 90.3 FM, at CSUMB) keeps me company whenever I’m on the road in Santa Cruz county.

However, I have a complaint–not aimed at KAZU, mind you, but at the guest speakers on the national programs. People, please. When you have so many verbal tics you can’t get through a single sentence without a “you know” or a “like”, I change stations, no matter how interested I might be in what you’re saying.

Because I can’t hear you. All I hear is your uncertainty (…just…) and your need to affirm my agreement (right?) and understanding (you know?) before you can continue. You’re showing inexactitude (like) and hesitation (um) on a matter that you, theoretically at least, are an expert on and have carefully considered opinions about.

It’s not just radio, either, but public speaking of any kind. So please be aware, Dear Speaker, that I need more than your bio to be convinced that you’re someone whose opinion matters. Authority lies between the lines, and I need you to claim your expertise, to own your material, unencumbered by extraneous noises that chip away at my confidence in you. How do you expect me to believe you, if you’ve only let me see your own doubts?

It has to do with intimidation, I know. Whenever I find my speech taking on a ridiculous number of ums and likes, I realize I’m uncomfortable, and I need to pull myself together—because if I’m uncomfortable, my audience is, too.

To be clear: none of those questions, hesitations, or hedge-words are bad in and of themselves. Too many uses of “just” dilutes the message—but a precisely placed use can underscore it. “Sorry” may be a cringing attempt to disarm—or it can be the opposite, a verbal poke in the eye. The key is in the control. If those words are slipping in all over, then they’re burying the message.

This may be less true for a young audience. There’s an interesting piece—on NPR—about how young women have the right to talk this way, since deliberately changing their speech patterns to sound more, well, masculine can emotionally blunt their speech.

Which is fair enough—so long as you’re not trying to catch the ear of someone, you know, like (um) me?

Drought’s toll

October 24, 2015 by Laurie King 6 Comments

Here in California, we watch the skies as if the collective pressure of our gazes could press moisture from the thin clouds. Four years of drought are taking their toll:

This live oak came down a few days ago, just crashed to the ground without a breath of wind. Five trees have come down on our hilltop in the past couple of months, and more to come. Here’s a California Bay just off the deck, its leaves normally green and perky:

And if I stand and look off the deck into the valley, the trees are clearly stressed, and even if the rains come soon, may not survive.

And the way they’re talking about El Niño, the trees that are still standing in January are going to wash down the valley in the storms.

(But of course, climate change is just a theory.)

LuRKing on the Web

October 11, 2014 by Laurie King Leave a Comment

Like podcasts? Like a bunch of LRK podcasts? Conversations with Marcia Muller or Ruth Dudley Edwards, a panel on Higher Mysteries, a chat with a Baker Street Babe, and a whole lot more.

Podcasts on the LRK site, here.

LuRKing on the Web

September 27, 2014 by Laurie King 3 Comments

The Laurie R. King web site has dozens of corners and byways that, if you haven’t gone exploring there in a while, you may not have seen.

For example: If Watson were a Woman—not by Laurie King, but by guest author Fred Erisman, who explores an assertion made in 1941 by Rex Stout, that Watson was in fact a woman. Yes, before Lucy Liu was even born.

As Professor Erisman says:

The Watsonian voice, with all its assumptions and elisions, is so much a part of the Holmes stories that it raises a compelling question: what if Watson were someone else, and, more particularly, what if Watson were a woman?

“If Watson Were a Woman,” nestled in the LRK site, here.

Throwback Thursday Twofer

August 21, 2014 by Laurie King 6 Comments

Today’s Throwback Thursday post serves as proof that some authors do their research long in advance. Long, long in advance, like this picture, taken in 1982, a good twenty years before this particular writer set pen to paper to write The Game.

And here, said author contemplating the possibilities of alternate universes, wherein she and her young family take over the responsibilities of a hotel in Agra, India…

How about a Throwback Thursday?

August 14, 2014 by Laurie King 7 Comments

Going through some files the other day, I came across a few unexpected voices from the past—so I thought, hey kids, let’s have a couple of Throwback Thursdays here on Mutterings! So, how about some old covers that didn’t quite make it into the real world?

I’ve talked before about the original proposed cover of Beekeeper–

and you may remember the first hardback cover of A Grave Talent–but before Bantam did their first paperback–

they tried this:

How would that cover work for you?

The author’s bedside reading

July 26, 2014 by Laurie King 4 Comments

No, really, it’s the author’s…bedside reading. These two books were tucked at the bottom of the bedside table of the motel in Corte Madera where I’m staying during the Book Passage crime writing conference: I have stayed in upscale hotels where the management appears at your door with flowers and a copy of your book to sign for the hotel library, however, this place, while clean and tidy and blessed with remarkably efficient air conditioning, has never struck me as upscale.

All authors dream of spotting some stranger reading their book on a plane or bus, and although I have gone 21 years without that fantasy fulfillment, surely this counts?

Flowering welcome

June 18, 2014 by Laurie King 7 Comments

It’s no secret that I have a weakness for odd plants. And a while ago I posted images of my front entrance, the thing that sold me on the house from my first step in the front door. But the house still manages to surprise me. When I got back from a trip to England last month, one of the plants—an asparagus fern that’s also known as a Ming Fern—was in full bloom.

Welcome home, Laurie.

Letting in the day

November 21, 2013 by Laurie King 5 Comments

In the Dick Francis novel Decider, the protagonist is an architect with many sons and a difficult marriage. At one point he reflects on the unlikely things that make people buy one house over another—in his case, a large tree that he can envision his boys climbing.

I bought a house last year. My decider was what lay just inside the front door: a jungle. At the time it had not received any care except watering for over a year, and the tiles beneath were sticky with the droppings of aphids and mealybugs. It took aggressive pruning and a lot of insecticide soap to get both the bugs and the plants themselves under control.

My family and I have had many discussions about this jungle: whether to furnish it with a resident parrot or a cage of finches; whether there is enough light for orchids or if I should stick to foliage plants; whether it should have rain forest sound effects every time someone walks through.

And then there’s the door. The inside door to this idiosyncratic airlock is glass, making for a nice terrarium effect from inside. However, the outer door is very solid oak, and the lights (those long windows next to the door) are not transparent. And the view outside is stunning, especially when the trumpet vine is in flower, about eight months of the year.

I would stand in the entranceway and study the view with the door open, and then I would turn around and look into the house, and see the living room—as anyone standing outside would see it, especially at night. Yes, we have few passers-by, and the trumpet vine hedge is so thick a person has to work hard to see through it, nonetheless, having both doors transparent would make for a an openness verging on vulnerability. Of course, I could always put up shades, but…

This went on for months. In the morning, I would open the outside door and let the sun pour in, admiring the view. Then at night I would close up the house and admire the oak’s solidity. As the weather got warmer, the issue of cross-ventilation entered into the conundrum: leaving both doors open cooled the house in the evening, but it also invited in a lot of flying creatures.

As I said, it was months (slow learner?) before the answer came to me: the conundrum was the decision. I realized that I liked opening the house in the morning—literally opening it up to the day and to the world. Equally, I appreciated the day’s closure, with the visual barricade more important than the actual turn of the outer lock. So why not leave it that way? The discussion had become an important part of my day’s ritual. And by replacing the inner lights with openable (screened) windows, I could even have my cross-draft.

All of which, come to think of it, is pretty much how I write as well, muttering and grumbling at what look like problems but turn out to be the very element the book was missing.

The only puzzle is knowing when it’s time to open the door and let the day in.

The English conundrum

August 1, 2013 by Laurie King 11 Comments

When I travel, I prefer actually settling down in a place for a week or six rather than camping out in hotels. Yes, hotels are nice for providing services like hot and cold running meal delivery, after which one heaves the tray into the hallway rather than dealing with dirty dishes, but one misses so much.
Such as the eternal questions of life. Questions such as, Why do British supermarkets use trolleys with wheels that turn 360 degrees instead of those that go in a straight line? One would think full-turn wheels are better–until one launches into the car park and has to wrestle a hundredweight of freewheeling groceries that want nothing but to follow the slope into the nearest bit of polished metal door or wooden post. Every shopper in the country must have back problems.
My theory is, the carts were designed for tight navigation of the shops themselves, and overlooked the growing number of individuals who might a) want to transfer groceries to a motorcar and b) lacked servants to do the task.

Okay, that’s a hypothesis for the shopping trolleys. But what about the English brooms? Why do British brooms all resemble those that Americans only employ when faced with a broad expanse of driveway? Why do Brits put up with clunky objects impossible to navigate into the corners of kitchens or under the edges of refrigerators? A tool guaranteed to endanger anyone trying to use it on a set of stairs? An implement that would be just as useful if it lacked a handle entirely?
It’s certainly not because the standard British kitchen and stairs resemble a broad expanse of driveway.
So, my British compatriots: any elightenment here?