The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective - The Case of the Vanishing Mare

I wrote a story for kids about a 12 year old pet detective who lives on the seashore and finds vacationers’ lost and missing animals. In part because I wanted to write something fun and light, about a character who relied on listening and empathy. A story about growing up and the joys of summer. No sex. No violence. A book about long summer days, bike rides and the beach, spending time with your friends, being forced to spend time with your family. The beauty of nature.

This is the final story. Maybe I’ll write more one day.

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective - The Case of the Vanishing Mare. [epub]

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective - The Case of the Vanishing Mare. [pdf]

Chapters ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective - The Case of the Misdirected Beagle

I wrote a story for kids about a 12 year old pet detective who lives on the seashore and finds vacationers’ lost and missing animals. In part because I wanted to write something fun and light, about a character who relied on listening and empathy. A story about growing up and the joys of summer. No sex. No violence. A book about long summer days, bike rides and the beach, spending time with your friends, being forced to spend time with your family. The beauty of nature.

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective - The Case of the Misdirected Beagle [epub]

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective - The Case of the Misdirected Beagle [pdf]

Previous Chapters: One. Two. Three.

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective - The Misplaced Hobbes Investigation

I wrote a story for kids about a 12 year old pet detective who lives on the seashore and finds vacationers’ lost and missing animals. In part because I wanted to write something fun and light, about a character who relied on listening and empathy. A story about growing up and the joys of summer. No sex. No violence. A book about long summer days, bike rides and the beach, spending time with your friends, being forced to spend time with your family. The beauty of nature.

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective - The Misplaced Hobbes Investigation. [epub]

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective - The Misplaced Hobbes Investigation. [pdf]

The first chapter can be found HERE

The second chapter can be found HERE

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective: The Case of the Runaway Saint Bernard

I wrote a story for kids about a 12 year old pet detective who lives on the seashore and finds vacationers’ lost and missing animals. In part because I wanted to write something fun and light, about a character who relied on listening and empathy. A story about growing up and the joys of summer. No sex. No violence. A book about long summer days, bike rides and the beach, spending time with your friends, being forced to spend time with your family. The beauty of nature.

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective: The Case of the Runaway Saint Bernard. [epub]

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective: The Case of the Runaway Saint Bernard. [pdf]

For those interested in more, the first Miranda Bennett story is HERE.

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective: The Eloise Blenheim Thompson Case

I wrote a story for kids about a 12 year old pet detective who lives on the seashore and finds vacationers’ lost and missing animals. In part because I wanted to write something fun and light, about a character who relied on listening and empathy. A story about growing up and the joys of summer. No sex. No violence. A book about long summer days, bike rides and the beach, spending time with your friends, being forced to spend time with your family. The beauty of nature

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective: The Eloise Blenheim Thompson Case [epub]

The Case Files of Miranda Bennett, Pet Detective: The Eloise Blenheim Thompson Case [pdf]

I do feel bad for Sarah Desssen (Though I probably shouldn’t…)

I won’t repeat what Sarah Dessen did or the controversy that went on for days afterwards. Or the fact that many of the writers who jumped to Dessen’s defense later were forced to issue apologies (even if most of the apologies were insincere and half-assed).

The truth is that Dessen’s comments were not the worst of the lot. Some of her friends were despicable. The fact that the comments came from people who make their living examining the world in an empathetic manner to help them understand people makes it more offensive.

The sad truth is that I saw myself in Dessen’s comments. (That’s NOT a compliment by the way. It should shake Dessen to the core). Because I read her tweet and some of her other posts around that time as a sign that she was depressed and anxious. I’m depressed a lot. And depressed people – like alcoholics or others – fairly or not, often see ourselves reflected in the actions and thinking of people around us. So there is some projection in this, and I apologize if anyone finds it offensive.

I was depressed at the time. The beginning of winter is always hard. Places starting to play Christmas music before Thanksgiving always grind me down. The cold weather means I spend less time outdoors and become sedentary, which means fewer endorphins. I had a birthday last week, which was depressing. In the past year we’ve buried my uncle and my grandfather, not to mention some friends. I spent time with my father cleaning out my uncle’s house in Kentucky. I now have two books that no agent (or anyone else) wants to read. I’m not sure I have the energy to try and write another one, or pitch more articles or look for a job. I could go on, but the point is that it’s a lot. It’s enough to make me forget that anything good has happened to me this past year – or even in my life.

I understand the performative nature of posting on social media. I don’t do it often. And when I do, I try to be subtle. (I am a New England wasp) But sometimes I post things on social media to get people to respond. To get a reaction. To get a sign from the universe that people care. It’s needy. It’s pathetic. I tend to think a little less of myself when I do.

We do it because it often helps a little.

I have an active google search for my name delivered to my inbox, and so I understand the temptation to come across one’s name and after reading the article to complain on social media, can you believe this? I’m having a hard time and then I come across this nastiness! Because one’s friends and readers will reply.

I mean, I wouldn’t do that. Not because I’m a better person. It’s because – and this is similar to why I never throw myself a birthday party – I don’t believe that people would reply with positive responses that would buoy my mood. But I understand the thought behind posting it.

There are many problems with this particular instance, of course. To single out one obvious point, the student who made this remark may have been an obnoxious, know-it-all college student (which is to say, a college student), but the committee she was on picked Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy over your book. If you don’t understand why some people feel that this is important, then I don’t know what to say.

And here’s where people will say in her defense that she’s not writing shallow pablum, but if you honestly would prefer that college students read your young adults novels to reading about race and the criminal justice system and having lectures and discussions about this, then I don’t know what to say.

I’ve written thousands of articles. I’ve gotten dozens upon dozens of rejections for my novels. Part of me has given up ever thinking I’ll get published. So that’s where I’m coming from. That’s part of where my depression is rooted, in the fact that I have accomplished nothing of any value. I’m not going to claim that having a novel published will solve all of my problems, but I will solve the problem of being an unpublished novelist. That’s one less problem. Then I’ll have the problem of critics and being ignored and all that, but you know what, it sounds preferable to spending my free time sitting at the kitchen table, alone and childless, wondering if I’m wasting my life because no one has ever cared, and there’s no reason to ever believe that someone might.

What I read in your statement was exhaustion and depression. You have a life that a lot of writers would envy. You have a written a shelf of published books (where most of us have an unpublished and rejected chunk of hard drive space), money (you’re not Bill Gates but you’re doing very well by writers standards), a partner, a child. Hell, your books may not chosen as required college reading, but you write award winning YA novels that get considered. Most people are lucky to get one of those things in life.

Despite all this, it does not bring you joy.

Maybe that’s temporary. I hope it’s temporary.

Because when you pull yourself out of this state, I hope that you will be able to see just how cruel and nasty and vicious you were. How much pain you caused. I think one of the great lessons of adulthood is how little other people think about us. As human beings, we tend to center ourselves in the world, but it’s rarely about us. Much of the pain we cause in the world is because we are careless, and much of the pain we receive is because other people were careless.

Depression is a state where we think that we are worthless, that devalues ourselves and our lives, but it also makes us the center of the universe. It cuts us off from so much because the universe becomes a closed system in which everything becomes an attack on us. I can say that with clarity and certainty because I’m not depressed right now. But I know that one of these days, I will go back to thinking otherwise.

The comment that you saw as so painfully wounding to you was about a college student who wanted her classmates and her school to face important serious urgent issues in our society and to use this opportunity for required reading to not spend the time on something easy, but to tackle something difficult.

To write for younger readers is to hope that they will remember the stories, that they will take something away from them as they move on to other books, other authors. That they will seek out ever more complex work. That the books will help them to grow as readers, but also as people. This young woman read your work, knew your work, and she wanted to challenge her classmates, she wanted something more. Unlike what some of your friends think, that doesn’t mean that she hates teenage girls and is a misogynist, but that she read you at a certain age and then when she got older, she wants to build a fairer, more just society.

That sounds admirable.

And even if she didn’t like your books, no one should be attacked for that. People are allowed to not like your books. Not liking your books doesn’t make someone a misogynist. Not reading YA books as an adult doesn’t make someone a misogynist. Not wanting YA books to be in a college curriculum doesn’t make someone a misogynist.

I hope that you get better, Sarah. It sounds like you’re going through a hard time, and I hope that you get help and find some peace. I mean that sincerely. I’m not just concluding this way because I worry you’ll read this and sic your friends on me to drive me to depression and suicide. (Which honestly struck me as a possibility when I started writing this, so I guess we’ll find out if you’re doing better).

Thoughts About Star Trek: Discovery, Season One

Sonequa Martin-Green is so good.

Doug Jones. I don’t think that it’s appreciated just how incredibly talented he is because almost every role he plays involves being under a layer of makeup, playing an alien or a monster. He is a master mime and when I think about some of the actors I have known and their studies of motion and breathing – and how I occasionally mocked such things on some level – Jones shows what an actor who studies behavior and motion is capable of. In Saru he’s doing an incredible job with a new creature and it’s remarkable to watch.

Michelle Yeoh! Michelle freaking Yeoh!

Anthony Rapp is so good and it’s great to see him get to play a role that lets him be dark and intense, to be dramatic and romantic, to be the hero and be an annoyance. To be the genius who isn’t so much humbled, but comes to understand how the rest of this team can help fulfill what he sees as his mission, his project.

It’s always good to see Jayne Brook working. Honestly, it’s been far too long since she had a major role and it’s nice to see her playing an Admiral and getting to sink her teeth into a role that shows what she can do. (Also, as an utterly shallow thought – she looks amazing).

I’m honestly still unsure about the inclusion of Sarek, but James Frain is good.

I had no idea who Mary Wiseman was before watching the show, but she is the heart of the show. She represents what Star Trek is and exemplifies these principles and ideals that the show celebrates. She is incredibly adept at both comedy and drama, and I’m not going to lie, I have a little crush. The only comparison I can think of is Allison Tolman, who came out of nowhere to star in the first season of Fargo

Centering the story on someone who is not the Captain is such a good idea that it’s surprising no one did it before.

The idea of telling the story of the Federation-Klingon war and the creation of the Neutral Zone is an interesting idea. It’s not really the story that the series is interested in telling, though.

Setting the series in the “past” of the Star Trek universe is an interesting idea but it brings up a lot of problems. It’s hard to go where no one has gone before without being anachronistic or changing the timeline or throwing continuity out the window (or at least, throwing it out the window now and then). Using characters that we’ve seen before but in contexts telling all new stories that don’t seem to fit is strange. It feels like fan fiction, and I don’t mean that to be derogatory, but there is a way in which fan service can hinder storytelling.

Discovery seems unsure of what it wants to be. It’s not all new. It’s not fan service. I think the show might actually make more sense to someone who doesn’t have years and decades of knowledge.

The series includes two things I honestly loathe and which constantly annoy me in science fiction – parallel universes and time travel.

I’ve never been a fan of the Mirror Universe. I mean Spock with a goatee is funny and a good meme (back before we used the word) but the universe doesn’t make much sense. It was featured in one episode of the original series. One. Hell, Harry Mudd played a bigger role in the original series. The fact that DS9 had multiple Mirror episodes is probably my least favorite thing about the series. The fact that Voyager didn’t have a Mirror episode is one of the better things I can say about the series. The way that Discovery used the Mirror universe was an interesting idea, maybe a great idea, but it feels odd. More clever than anything.

I miss the serialized nature of Star Trek shows. It would be nice to have an episode or two – or a few, even? – that are just adventures and investigations without each episode being a part of a massive uber plot.

The Terrans in the mirror universe are on the verge of destroying all life in the universe because of their energy source and how they are using it. If one believes in reality, it’s hard not to laugh a little, because of course, they’re talking about us.

Having said that, it’s one sentence in the entire season.

“We do not have the luxury of principle–” “That is ALL we have, Admiral.”

The last episode was meh.

Maybe the fact that the USS Enterprise shows up in the final minutes of the last episode will mean something in season 2. But as it’s presented, it’s not a cliffhanger, there’s nothing dramatic happening. It feels like they run out story and had to put some filler to pad out the last episode.

The theme underlying the first season is fundamentalism. In every episode, in every plot and subplot, it is about fundamentalists seeking to impose this idea of fascistic purity on their society, on the larger universe. It is not unique to any one species. In this universe it is the Klingons who go to war because others are an abomination, in the Mirror universe it is the Terrans. There are Vulcan fundamentalists. There are people who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. This doesn’t end when war begins, and it can infect people at war.

There’s a way in which the show was well made. In every way. And I also say this knowing that the first season of Star Trek shows are often mixed. (Hell, the first season of Next Generation was just bad). But there’s also a way that the show didn’t quite feel like Star Trek. The moral conundrums are too easily settled, the commentary is mostly nonexistent. But more to the point, the very fact that an organization and a group of people who signed up for exploration and science were turned into soldiers, their work being turned to make weapons of war, was far too easily glossed over.

This has always been one of the elements of Star Trek that people struggle with - the degree to which this is a military organization and the degree to which it is not. I can’t help but think about what it mean for an organization that for the most part has been about peaceful exploration for decades, generations – since the Romulan war – and suddenly forced to become a very different organization. For the people to lead very different lives. A war so bad that cadets are called up and sent to ships fighting on the front lines.

This is a war on a scale that most of the people alive today are unused to, but we never get that feeling watching the show. It’s one thing to complain that the show never conveys the scale of the war, but it is so isolated and insulated that the result is that it never quite captures just what’s happening. It’s one thing for a ship to be out in space, often days away from other Federation ships, as with other shows, and have this sense of isolation. I haven’t watched DS9 since it aired, but those last few seasons leading up to the finale were intense in a way that Discovery wasn’t – because they captured the brutality and costs of war. Discovery ends far too neatly, far too comfortably.

Just as I mentioned earlier that the people behind Discovery wanted the show to be straddling fan service and having known characters but not be shackled to continuity, I can’t help but think they struggled as far as other aspects of the show. Discovery wants to be a war story (or possible war stories?) but it doesn’t want to be a brutal, intense, gritty realistic kind of war story where people die and even if we win, we sacrifice a lot.

I am reminded of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, which Star Trek veteran Ronald D. Moore developed and how it tried to be brutal and real and topical. I think about The Orville, which is a show that so clearly loves Star Trek and what it means and is made by people who love Star Trek. I keep thinking about how Discovery had many options about what to do and how to approach it, and I don’t think it completely succeeded on its own terms.

What does it mean that so much of our contemporary pop culture is simply retreading familiar ground?

Star Trek Discovery has a lot of good ideas. It has a lot to like. But it is also impossible to love. It’s not bad at all. But I’m not sure that it’s Star Trek.

Which leads back to my concern about continuity. Because I do dislike it when it becomes more of a straight jacket. So I do understand and sympathize with the many producers who worry about what to do and how shows should connect and to what degree they should reference each other. Because there is part of me that feels that a good writer can craft something working within continuity. Every show and every episode has some limits on how to work, what characters can do, financial and technical limits. To a degree, continuity is something that we’ve invented in our own minds and turned into an almost boogeyman-like scale creature. Part of me think sthat making a show set in the past of a show means you’re agreeing to abide by certain rules just because that’s the decision that was made.

I do think back on what first attracted me to Star Trek, and it was the fact that it was meditative and commented on society, and that for all its flaws, it was able to have action and adventure, but those weren’t the moments that ultimately stayed with people. Those models were stunning. They still are. The effects, while not up to today’s standards, could be breathtaking. The creature designs were very good for TV. But what stayed with me were the characters and the stories. It was Kirk feeling old and finally confronting loss and failure in Wrath of Khan, Picard experiencing a whole other life and culture in Inner Light, the unsettlingly alien yet relatable Vulcans and Klingons and Ferengi (oh my). It was Data trying to understand what it means to be human. It was how after two of the best episodes of the series (The Best of Both Wolds), Next generations spent an episode (Family) where there was no action, no science fiction, just characters wrestling with family and their own emotions and the fallout of big events.

Of course if one asks any Star Trek fan, they’ll have a different answer for what “their” Star Trek is and what it means to them, but I fear that the show – like the recent films – has spent a lot less time considering what has always been at the heart of the show. Instead they replace it with something else, and it’s something that feels, well, much more generic. Discovery is a good show, but it’s soul, well, I’m uncertain it’s Star Trek.

My Problem with Election Day

Today is Election Day and I hope everyone voted. I vote, I’ve volunteered to canvass and phone bank for candidates over the years. One thing I loathe about Election Day is poll standing. For those who don’t know the term, it refers to the people who stand outside polling places waving signs and saying, Vote for Whoever! I loathe this for a few reasons. One, simply because I am an emotionally reserved, quiet New Englander who doesn’t see the need for such over the top behavior. Another reason – and I say this as one who has been it in the past – is that it feels like an attack on all the work we’ve done to reach out and educate the public over the previous weeks and months. All that time spent knocking on doors and making phones and talking about candidates and issues with people is something that I enjoy. But then here I stand yelling and waving and being the human equivalent of an internet pop up ad – and it actually makes a difference. All that time and effort spent talking with people and appealing to them on multiple levels and being an annoying billboard will actually change minds and votes and there’s something about that which hurts. My default is not optimism, but talking with people is something I enjoy, something I do think makes an impact. Election Day just brings me back to my cynical self. Really the only part I like is chatting with other poll standers. But at least it didn’t rain today.