Black rhino mother and calf

Here's two more reasons to contribute to Bowling for Rhinos. Contact your local zoo or go HERE.

If you can't go bowling, send a check to American Association of Zoo Keepers, Oregon Zoo, 4001 SW Canyon Road, Portland, OR 97221-9704 Tell 'em I sent you!

Black rhinocerous

Black rhino. One of my favorite pictures from our recent trip to Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya.

What it takes to keep rhinos alive in today's world: an army of armed guards to keep poachers away.

You can help out by supporting an annual zoo keeper event: Bowling for Rhinos. If you live in Oregon, click HERE. If you live elsewhere, contact your local zoo. I've seen the results--this is a cause to support.

Mystery dinner game: Hyenas, Tuskers, Chaos

Shortly before we left on our huge-deal safari to Kenya, one of the trip organizers suggested I dash off one of those role-playing mystery dinner games for a group activity. "You write mysteries, right?" Yes, but I'd never seen, much less played, such a game, and I was trying to draft the first 100 pages of the next zoo mystery so it could steep while we were gone, and meanwhile pack, finish a bathroom remodel, get typhoid shots, and arrange dog and house care and ... So I said, "Sure!"

I resuscitated my corporate communications chops and welded them to mystery conventions and worked my aging ass off. I stole freely from a game I bought and customized it for a zoo keeper group in Kenya. The final package had invitations with a rhino logo, instructions, name tags, clues in envelopes, and player booklets. The setting was, of course, a safari camp. The game had a cunning murder, wacky characters, a false confession, gunshots, and plenty more. Naturally there was no time for a rehearsal before we left.

One night it was raining too hard for a red-light game drive, so instead of lurching around in an open van looking for leopards and hippos, we gave the game a try. I was a little trepidatious. Not nearly enough, it turned out.

On the plus side, we were all pretty well lubricated--Tusker beer for many, wine for some. The women were keen to do it and argued over who got which of the four female parts. On the other hand, the men were not so enthusiastic. My husband and two other men agreed to give it a try after some arm-twisting, but we were a guy short.

We were staging this at the dining area of the camp and several of the Kenyan staff were on duty to open beers and so on. They thought this game sounded great.

One of them was John (not his real name), a tall young Maasai warrior (apparently all Maasai men are warriors), draped in his red robe and beaded head covering. He's learning the safari business from the ground up, waiting tables on his way to become a driver/guide, for which he will also need three years at the university in Nairobi. (The drivers had extensive training and knew everything.)

Aside from being a sweet, wide-eyed heart-throb (I say that in a motherly way), John was fearless, and he stepped in to take the last role.

I whipped up name tags for people who wanted a role and didn't have one--the murdered woman's ghost (a brilliant idea, if I say so myself), hyena, leopard, lion, bushbaby, giraffe (a non-speaking part), tortoise (also non-speaking), and so on. Everyone who wanted to get in on it had a part, even if it was mostly to growl at random intervals.

And so we commenced. But, honestly, I had no way to know that the illumination at this eco-resort would be dimmer than candle light. Reading 12 point type meant standing right next to one of the scarce little light bulbs. So we had a few issues with the script.

John had a key role, a big part. He speaks at least three languages (his tribe's, Kiswahili, and English), but reading English was a tiny bit challenging. He got the words, but some of the flavor fell overboard. We applauded and kept the momentum. People loved hamming up their character. They vamped and whined and boasted and sneered and mostly forgot the player booklets.

And every time really crucial clues were about to be revealed, the two bartenders, hunched under a blanket together, ran through the middle of the group whooping like hyenas (exactly like hyenas). This aroused the leopard (in her spotted pajamas) to snarl and claw at them which set off the rest of the animals. I think the giraffe stampeded and the tortoise may have been trampled. It was hard to tell in the dark.

After extended chaos and considerable hysteria, the murderer threw her hands in the air and shouted a confession. We cheered.

So all you mystery writers, learn from my tail. Tale.

* Need I say "Tuskers"?
* Set up characters to be either gender.
* Be ready for audience participation.
* Don't expect anything complicated to work at all the way you intended.

And bring a flashlight.

John

Those crazy hyenas

Taking our bows

Pictures thanks to Liz Quinlan

Plot Brain: Part 2

Arrrgh! The plot's all laid out in a summary, but those first chapters don't quite work in the first draft. Or do they? Is it too slow and dull? Is the build-up to the real action essential and interesting or merely labored? Will my editor like it? Will anybody?

Perhaps if the description were trimmed, the dialog crisped up, the verbs more vivid, then it would be fine. But a cliche is solidifying, the one about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Structure, not style, is the issue. Probably.

Clearly the root problem is lack of talent. The great reviews on the first two books were flukes of an irrational industry, of minds infantilized by television and bad movies, or of kind-hearted strangers who couldn't bear to speak their real opinions. There is no hope, none at all, of lightening striking three times. I should learn to knit. The world would be better for it, rather than throwing ink and pixels at what is sure to remain a hopeless mess.

Is the wallowing over yet? It better be. This is taking up valuable time. Shoulder to the wheel: what am I trying to accomplish here, the core passion for this tale? Get away from the keyboard and pace in circles until that comes into focus once again. That summary is a jigsaw puzzle where each piece can fit in several places, but some may be missing. Mess with the major scenes. Challenge each one--whether it's needed, where it belongs. Harder: what else could happen? Rearrange, reinvent.

Brain: do your thing. Think, dammit, think!


Is there something wrong with wallowing?

Plot brain

I am back from a wonderful trip to Kenya and Amsterdam, still getting caught up. More later on Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (pictures!) and Amsterdam's city zoo, Artis.

I am settling in to the first draft of zoo mystery #3 and thinking about "the creative process."

A friend informs me that working on a PhD dissertation makes you stupid. That's what she's doing, and she's missing exits on the freeway, forgetting to buy milk, and tripping over her own furniture.

I understand completely. It's exactly the same for me. When my head is filled with a complex and challenging project (e.g., zoo mystery #3), it gets full. The cortex doesn't seem able to muscle the door on that topic closed and open the door to regular life. The dog reminds me that it's almost noon and I haven't fed him yet. The husband wonders why dinner is at 8:00 PM instead of the normal 6:30 PM. I send out a lot of "belated" birthday cards.

It sounds like chemo brain, but trust me, it's not. The cortex LIKES to be exercised. It feels good to be smacked by inspiration, to prune a sentence until it is shapely and tight, to grasp what that character will do next. Even as I forget the shopping list and park in front of the wrong grocery store, I feel smarter.

Go figure. It'll be good for you.


We're fuzzy, but our horns are sharp.
Japanese serow at Woodland Park Zoo

MS Word for Authors: Hepl with Speling

MS Word is anxious about your spelling, and for good reason. Many of us are rotten spellers as well as fumble-fingered. Word can help us if we approach this in a spirit of cooperation.

MS Word also worries about your grammar, but has less to contribute there since Word spent the time in Miss Pluperfect's English class flirting with PowerPoint and making fun of Excel. Excel refused to talk to anyone about decent English ever after and this explains why its help system is so incomprehensible (although better now than it used to be). But I digress.

Word is going to check your spelling unless you order it not to. Words that trouble it will show up underlined in red. Right-click and Word will offer alternative spellings in a range of relevance. (Control and click for Macs.)

If you hate the red underlines in general or because Word is flagging words that are spelled just fine, you have choices. 1) Learn to spell; 2) Turn spell check off; 3) Teach Word to spell. We will skip Choice 1 as hopeless and address the others.

The Options menu in MS Word allows you to turn off spell check (and grammar check) or to tailor them to your preferences. Take a look, but read about Choice 3 before you yield to irritation and go turning everything off. (Use the help system to find Options if its not obvious from the menus.)

Choice 3 is to tell Word that whatever it has underlined in red as deeply flawed is in fact just peachy the way it is. Right-click (Macs: Control-click) in the character's name or Polish town or dialect that you want Word to accept as fine. Select Ignore if you want a pass on only this instance, Ignore All for the whole document, and Add to Dictionary for every document you will ever create with this copy of MS Word.

Needless to say, you should be cautious with the Add to Dictionary option. "Mamah" or "likker" may not work in all your oeuvre, so perhaps better to stick with "Ignore All" rather than accepting it for everything forever. On the other hand, if you are writing a series and protagonist "Ivana" is flagged every time, go for it.

You can also go to Spelling & Grammar and use the dialog box to click through all the flagged words one after another instead of catching them on the fly.

Teach MS Word your idiosyncratic words, then take those red underlines seriously. Spelling matters if you want to come across as professional and competent. Find those words underlined in red and review the suggestions. You could be wrong, and Word could be right. This can save you embarrassment and possibly humiliation. Use all the tools you available to do the job right.


Picky, picky, picky.

Book review: Stolen World

What is it with obsessive collectors? Most of us collect something or other--salt and pepper shakers, British stamps, Hawaiian coins, cheese cake recipes--but we don't risk our freedom, our marriages, or our financial security to possess one more. Some people do and Stolen World, by Jennie Erin Smith (Crown Publishers, 2011)is about people who obsess about reptiles. More specifically, it's about men who smuggle them into the US to sell them to other collectors and who hope to achieve fame and fortune doing so. The "fame" is status in the world of reptile collectors and seems to be almost as strong a motive as the money.

Smith's background is in journalism, but the book reads like a novel. The personalities, adventures, successes, and failures of smugglers Hank Molt, Tom Crutchfield, Edmund Celebucki, and the infamous Anson Wong are recounted in a crisp, calm style. Smith doesn't judge or lecture or make free with exclamation marks because she doesn't need to. She lets these peoples' words, actions, and court records speak for themselves and they surely do. Persistent law-breaking motivated by a yen for adventure, by a compulsion to collect the rarest species, and, of course, by money make for a page-turner, a very good read.

Stolen World is surprisingly short on documentation considering the chronicles of illegal activities undertaken by real people, some of them still living. But what she vividly and engagingly describes is consistent with other books on the same subject--The Lizard King and The Last Tortoise, for two, the latter previously reviewed in this blog.

Smith describes how lax zoos were in their animal acquisitions in the 60s and 70s. Until the feds and their own industry cracked down, reptile curators in zoos were a major market for the animal importers, regardless of local laws or the mortality rate. (I saw a bit of ethically dubious animal acquisition myself when I was a new zoo keeper in the '70s.) When zoos began to clean up their act as a result of stronger US and international law--and public embarrassment--private collectors became the customer base of the reptile market. Smith also chronicles the rise of captive breeding of reptiles, which accounts for the bulk of the US market today. Go to the TRAFFIC website, however, and you will find that smuggling wild-caught reptiles is hardly a thing of the past.

A personal note: What I found truly dismaying is that many of these men claim to "love" reptiles. What kind of love pays locals to pull wild animals out of their habitat, jams them into false-bottomed crates to ship them thousands of miles, and sells the survivors to people who very likely cannot keep them alive for more than a few months? What kind of "love" scorns conservation efforts for the species they desire? Perhaps in their older years, some of these hard-drinking, thoroughly treacherous guys stopped to consider the body count they were personally responsible for, but one is permitted to doubt.

Read another review from a knowledgeable person here. The "herpers" seem to have reacted strongly to Stolen World. Read some of their comments (the word "venomous" does come to mind) here. You will find them in keeping with the people described in this book.

Then read the book yourself. It's a fascinating journey through the intersection of psychology, commerce, and biology.

Here's how you can buy Stolen World and benefit Herpdigest, a free reptile news digest, at the same time:
1) Send a check to Herpdigest/Allen Salzberg/67-87 Booth Street -5B/Forest Hills, NY 11375. Make the check out to Herpdigest.
2) By Paypal - the account is asalzberg@herpdigest.org
3) By credit card, Master or Visa, Discover and Amex, only, send credit card number, expiration date, billing and shipping address to asalzberg@herpdigest.org. Include those 3 numbers from the back of the credit card.
4) By phone at 1-718-275-2190 11 A.M.- 6 P.M Eastern Standard Time (NYC.) If not in, leave message.




Captive bred reptiles at an Oregon reptile event.