Brother skunk (II)

...in which we continue our tale of the downstairs neighbors.

After having skunks spray in the house last January, I am, as you might expect, highly sensitized to their presence: one whiff, and all my panic alarms clang and hammer. So a few weeks ago when my ears and nose told me the black-and-white charmers were back underneath the house, my first impulse was to burst into tears of utter frustration.

My second impulse was to move into a hotel so my throat wouldn't close up again, then put the house on the market. but instead, I phoned my faithful building contractor (to whom the book Folly is dedicated) and said that I wanted him to start tearing out the deck at one side of the house and not stop until he’d found how the creature was getting in. The access hole for a skunk doesn’t have to be large—they can squeeze through a surprisingly tiny space—but it had to be there. I didn't care if the entire deck was gone, I wanted it found.

By great good fortune, his men uncovered the place ten feet into the demolition job.

The idiot, the criminally incompetent, the madman who built the house thirty years ago had forgotten to put in one of the foundation blocks, the pieces of two-by-eight that fill the space between the joists where they rest on top of the sill plate. The missing block is under a cantilevered fireplace section, so probably whoever was framing that section just got carried away with the upper portion and simply overlooked it. But there it was, a space eight inches high and fifteen wide, large enough for an entire platoon of skunks to march, shoulder-to-shoulder.

With glee, we blocked it up, called the trapper to take away the skunks that had to be under there, and waited.

Except that we had a piece of blessed luck: for some unfathomable reason, the skunks hadn’t actually moved in yet, but had merely been coming by to cavort in my ducts in the evening. Three lovely, winsome, clever little juvenile skunks appeared on my deck, mystified and peeved that their nice warm evening playground had been lost to them. Around and around they went, ducking under the deck and popping out with puzzled looks on their cute little faces when they came out on top again instead of the big, warm, dark recesses of the crawl space.

Seldom has a construction job had a more satisfying result. When they propped their adorable little feet on the back door to peer in, I thumbed my nose at them gleefully, safe behind a thick pane of glass.

***
In the interests of public service, I will suggest the following. Mothballs don't work for me, they just give me headaches. And turning cats loose on wildlife may have unfortunate repercussions, particularly considering the tendency of skunks to spray--and washing a cat with tomato juice is even more thrilling than washing a dog. Most sensible cats will do what mine do, settle in at a safe distance and watch with interest (although a friend told me about a family pet, purported to be half bobcat, that fell into a kennel of hounds and walked away in considerably better shape than the canines, but that's another story). Noise does help, if you can run a loud radio and some lights in the area they're moving into, rather like the convenience stores that play elevator music into teenager hangouts. Dribbles of fox urine (from the garden center, lest you have a vivid image of Laurie King following a fox around with a small jar) didn't do much.

Two things that did help for me were a powder called "Shake Away Small Critter Repellent Granules", which have some kind of urine as their active ingredient and, although they won't drive off an animal that really wants to be there (and I'm sorry, but leaving cat food outside should be against the law) they do discourage those critters that are just hanging around, waiting for their magic opening to reappear.

But basically, what works is to find how they're getting in, and block it off. And here's how you do it.

If you're not sure but sort of suspect an area, go out and buy a sack of cheap flour (organic stone-ground not necessary) and sift it evenly over the ground near the foundation. When you find the foot-prints, you've found the place.

However, just blocking off the hole is not a great idea because, as one of the comments says, you really, really don't want a dead skunk in your walls. Or indeed any other creature. So you rig up your Laurie R. King skunk excluder (patent non-pending) and sit down with a copy of her latest book while the device does its work.

You need to buy the sort of humane trap that's made of heavy wire--Haveahart is the common brand. Look at it to see if you can get the fixed end off--usually it's held on with wire clips, easily bent and removed. What you want is a wire tunnel that, when the creature passing through steps on the trigger plate, snaps its door shut on the household side, leaving the animal staring puzzled at this metal patch over its hole.

So when you get it home, remove the trap's solid end and put the entrance end against the place the creatures have been getting in and out. You'll need to fix the trap firmly so it can't be shoved aside, and you'll need to fill in any parts of the hole larger than the trap, so the animal can't get past it. Set the trigger, and leave it.

If you're sure there's only one creature under the house, then one passage through the trap should be sufficient, and you can fill in the hole as soon as you're sure it's made its way through the excluder. More than one creature (and there usually are several) means you should go out and check the device every few hours, re-setting the trigger as needed--those outside can't get in, unless they figure out how to jump over the trigger plate without touching it.

One firm caveat: do not do this at the time of year the creatures are having their young. The babies won't be able to follow their mother outside, and since she won't be able to get back in, they'll die. Better to put up with your neighbors until the young are mobile.

And there you have it.

Now, how many crime writers out there can give you instructions for a skunk excluder?

Next week, the crumpet?

Brother skunk (I)

Mephitis mephitis is God’s creature, too:
a story in two parts

For the third time in four years, this winter the King residence has been host to skunks. You know the skunk, don't you? Mostly from the small dark heap by the side of the road that makes your eyes water for a mile or so. They’re adorable creatures, elegantly black-and-white with astonishingly enormous plumes of tails, paws as clever as hands, and a delicate face with shiny black eyes that melt the hardest heart.

Unfortunately, they stink. No, stink is not sufficient. In fact, no word in the thesaurus is adequate to describe the active defense mechanism of mephitis mephitis. And you’re nodding your head knowingly, thinking that you’ve smelled the creature.

But you haven’t. Not unless you’ve been in the immediate vicinity of a truly angry skunk have you had the full treatment.

You see, the skunk has two, as it were, gears. The one is the sharp reek you get along the road or when a neighbor’s dog has made the mistake of its life: a warning shot. But the other, the souped-up, overdrive, extra-added-value version, takes that sharp reek and piles it on top of a harsh, throat-clenching miasma very like that of burning tires. It seizes your every pore, it fills your lungs, throat, head, it coats your hair and makes your clothing an offense.

And twice last January--a year ago--I had it permeate my house, when the gigantic male that had taken up residence in the heating ducts under my house let fly.

I am told that skunk spray is chemically similar to the mustard gas of the Great War; going by its effects on my system, I can believe it. For the next six months, my throat suffered a variety of weird symptoms, culminating in a charming habit of just closing down every so often. They call them laryngeal spasms, the same thing that sent the pope to the hospital recently, and as a form of entertainment, I really can't recommend them. The throat closes, you count slowly to ten, or fifteen, and just before you pass out a harsh wheeze comes trickling down your tubes and the lungs cry out with joy. This makes life interesting enough when you're standing alone in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to come to a boil, but rather disconcerting to anyone who happens to be in the vicinity, since frankly it looks like you're dying, and of course you can't very well reassure them, "It'll be all right in a moment," because speaking requires the passage of breath. As this was also the period when I was at Left Coast Crime and then on tour for The Game, it made life awkward, to say the least. I got in the habit of telling my escorts and the bookstore staff that if I went red in the face and began to make alarming noises, not to call an ambulance, because it passed, and I wasn't going to die. Probably.

I live in the countryside by choice. I am not one of those who grows irate upon discovering that the landscape outside the windows is not as sanitized as a shopping mall. I bring in our cats at night so they don’t become snacks for our local coyotes and bobcats, I arrange my planting around the paths and preferences of the deer, and I bang around with the shovel before moving into an area of the hillside where the rattlesnakes like to bask. They were here first, I figure, so I’m happy to share.

I don’t even mind skunks—outside. They’re welcome to live in the fallen oaks and under the sheds, welcome to dot the landscape with reeking notifications of their presence, but as close neighbors, as the people downstairs, they are not good. They ravage the mucous membranes of my throat and rip up the ductwork under the house.

So I found a charming gentleman (looking himself rather as if he might live in a fallen oak) who cheerfully placed his humane traps in my house’s crawl space and carried their occupants away to a place where they could live out their long and fragrant lives in the wild. Three of them. We breathed a (clean) sigh of relief, filled the hole they seemed to be coming in through, and replaced the shredded heating ducts. My throat ceased to spasm; life was good.

And then last month came the ominous sounds of ripping in the ducts, the eye-tingling aroma arising from the vents.

They were back.

(to be continued...)

The joys of censorship

I was on a panel for the California Association of Teachers and Educators this week, with Gillian Roberts, Cara Black, and Nadia Gordon (plus various pseudonymous identities--seven writers for the price of four!) and one of the things that came up was censorship. Namely, a poor beleaguered teacher (not here in California) who is being taken to task by her school board for turning her students into career criminals by--yep--having them write mysteries.

This, clearly, is an oversimplification, but not as much as you might imagine. And it's one of those all-too-commonplace bizarrenesses that makes any sensible person just stand gobsmacked and wonder where to begin.

Are we, as professional crime writers, a particularly bloodthirsty lot? Actually, any gathering of crime writers I've attended has been filled with polite and helpful people, without a knife (even a verbal one) in sight. And really, when you think about it, crime fiction is probably the most moral art form there is: an examination of consequences is built into the very bones of the genre.

I understand the concern of parents, that we might not wish to have our kids researching explosives and poisons on the Internet, but a detective story encouraging murderous impulses? Have we as a country gone absolutely insane? Must we pander to the limitations of the terminally unimaginative and chronically uneducated? Political correctness (also known as Good Manners) is for the most part desirable, but really, can't we just draw a line after which we say, "Oh for Christ sake, do shut up."

Or am I being ill mannered?

***
I should mention that if you're not signed up for the web site's e-newsletter, you might want to do so. The next one will be out in a week or so, and will have not only a photo of my cat (or portions thereof) but of my husband. This is especially for all those members of the mystery community who have expressed doubt concerning his existence.

There's also a survey coming onto the site, with prizes.
***
To respond to a couple of the remarks--No, I haven't had to re-read the Russell books (although no doubt I should do so, regularly.) I did read O Jerusalem before I wrote Justice Hall, in order to get the voices of those two characters straight in my head, but not the others. Some day I may be forced to, maybe two years from now when I haven't worked with Russell for a while, but so far I've avoided it.

And as to the question of why I "released GRAVE TALENT for publication" when I wasn't happy with it--honey, if I waited until I was ecstatic about a book to let it go, there would be no Laurie King books out there. I'm never satisfied with a book, period. The best I can hope for is being satisfied that it's the best I can do with it. It's like raising kids: You cannot impress absolutely everything upon them. You work to shape them to a few essentials (such as: Not looking when you step into the street is harder on you than it is on the oncoming car; Generosity is a sign of strength, not weakness), then you pray that the things you haven't managed to plant in their minds don't prove too disastrous. And then you turn them loose.

A voice (in the wilderness?)

First off, a comment to a comment. Andi my dear, I don't believe I ever said that a book has to be either grim or heavy to be award-worthy. Indeed, if you look at the Best First list you'll see that we as a committee didn't, either. And I would not venture to say that women writers lack seriousness--indeed, some of us are a tad too serious.

What I personally look for, and what I think most judges are hoping to see in a book, is what can be called "voice", or its near synonym, confidence. A strong sense of person (which applies both to the writer and to his or her characters) just jumps off the page at you, and all the noir grit or meticulous research or humorous banter in the world aren't a substitute. The Thin Man is brilliant not because of Hammett's clever dialogue (although it is very, very clever) or because of the twists of the plot (which, though highly improbable, is nonetheless clever) but because it is perfect unto its kind: Dashiell Hammett cups his authorial hands around his book, and keeps them there, beginning to end, without spilling a drop of its essence.

Because the book I'm working on involves a set of characters I haven't thought too much about for a number of fairly busy years, I've had to go back and read its predecessors, all four Martinelli books. Some of you may know that this is a thing I dread, detest, and never ever do if I can at all avoid it: when I re-read something I've written, all I see are the clunkers, so once a book has finished with the proof pages, that book is literally out of my hands. I know that some authors take the first copy of a new book and read it lovingly, cover to cover, but nope, not me. I really don't want to know.

However, I also don't like to get letters telling me that I've given Kate Martinelli a round face in one book and a square face in another, or that Lee Cooper's eyes magically change color, or... Well, you get the idea. So I had to go through and make notes about the lives of these people. And it wasn't easy. I found I didn't much like A GRAVE TALENT, although it's the only Edgar I've won--I have to agree with Barbara Peters (she of Poisoned Pen fame), who wasn't much taken with the book when it first landed on her desk. I wasn't all that taken by it, either, this time around.

But TO PLAY THE FOOL--now that book I could see the point of. In fact, though I say so myself, it is a very tightly written and very human book--not splashy, but a small gem. And WITH CHILD was pretty good, and if NIGHT WORK had a little too much God-stuff, it was easy to skip over those parts.

So, does this mean I should go back and make a second edition re-write of A GRAVE TALENT? (Not that I'm volunteering to do this, you understand.) Authors have done so, from time to time, and not all of them had as poor a result as the other King's THE STAND Mark II. Personally, I think there are probably things in GRAVE TALENT that I'm not seeing, because my eye is critical. What I do know is that, thank God, a person does learn craft. My first drafts are still disastrous, unreadably so, but I have learned to rewrite more effectively.

Your motto for the day, then, and the first of the promised writing tips: Write for yourself, rewrite for your audience.

No extra charge.

Also, a big thanks to those who tried to lead this ignoramus through the undergrowth, and especially the Mistress of the Web, maggie Griffin. I've now conquered the web link process (I'd typed + instead of =) and so I can now tell you that you should really take a look at sarah weinman's blogand you don't have to hunt it down! A link which takes me sixteen strokes and a copy-and-paste, followed by a lot of squinting to check for typos, but for you guys, anything.

As for atom syndication feed, I've tried, maybe someone can let me know if it's working. Whatever that is.

Voodoo

So I'm lying on an hard table in the physiotherapist's office the other day, where I ended up after wondering if we couldn't do something about this arm ache that I've had for three years, and I'm thinking about voodoo. Because really, there's not a lot to do in a physiotherapist's office as you're staring up at the fluoroscent lights for fifteen minutes while the machines make one specific muscle jump and buzz for you except to think about voodoo. Ultrasound? Light therapy? Acupuncture needles? Are any of these essentially different from having a person with a painted face shake rattles over you and chant the appropriate ritual?

And because I'm a writer and my brain is basically uncontrollable, it wanders off into various by-ways that are none of your business and eventually washes up in a column it has read recently by Jon Carroll, one of the pleasures of the San Francisco Chronicle (even if he does rather go on about the cats.)

He's talking about the inability of this great country of ours to put into place any kind of central fingerprint data base, due mostly to what he terms bureaucratic infighting. And he's talking about the Innocence Project (which has a web site, although those of you who have been paying attention know I can't put the link here because I live in the Mac Ghetto) and goes on to talk about fingerprint technology, and that's the tie to voodoo, in case you were wondering where this was going.

Remember the old Paul Simon song that talked about the myth of fingerprints? A bit of modern irony, you thought, to juxtapose "myth" with something so hard-edged and undeniably Scientific. As Jon Carroll put it, "In proficiency tests, fingerprint examiners routinely score less than 60 percent in matching prints." Um, pardon me? On CSI there's this great machine that whirs and chunters to itself with the prints flashing hypnotically past, and then with a fanfare of trumpets here's your perp, all wrapped up and ready to go.

Sixty percent?

Subjective analysis, anyone?

Voodoo.

Onward!

Well, the response unfortunately was gratifying, which means I feel obligated to push on with this peculiar form of communication. I have to apologize for past and future oddities, many of which are not my fault, honestly. I work from a Mac, and the Google people who own Blogger seem determined to drive us Macniacs out of our last few working brain cells. Links either refuse to post or take idiocyncratic pathways (the title text, which on my screen gives no sign of a link whatsoever, apparently for other computers links not to the web site as I instructed but back into the blog), spell check buttons appear and then vanish, and as for Atom syndication...

Actually, I have to thank that particular Anonymous for a good laugh, when s/he wrote, "It would be very cool if you would enable the Atom syndicate feed of your blog" etc. You ever see that Gary Larson cartoon of the dog owner scolding the dog, and the dog sitting with his tongue out happily listening to "Blah blah blah blah Rover blah blah blah" ? That's me and tech speak. "It would be very cool if blah blah blah your Blog blah blah."

However, I'm good with languages, and know how to use a dictionary, if not a spell check, and if I can figure out the book of Ruth in Hebrew, I can figure out what "Atom syndication" means. So I found it and I followed the instructions and yep, you guessed it, nothing happened. I'll try again with the Safari program, but unless we've got some Mac nut out there who's been through this and can advise me, expect weirdnesses. Then again, it's Laurie King, you'll be expecting weirdness anyway.

And before you suggest tech support, it's fairly clear, considering the form letter responses I get to my cries for Help (which range from "please please please" to "If you don't help me I'll say rude things about Blogger in my posts!") that there is no support at Blogger, just a machine set to generate patronizing suggestions.

If I change to another service, I'll let you know--by a posting onto this blog. That'll show 'em.

Anyway, a couple of things that came up since I posted:
Yes, I'm going to try to post regularly, at least once a week. And when the bumps are ironed out, it'll probably be a specific day of the week, since I doubt any syndication feed will recognize me.
And no, that erased first post wasn't an obcenity, it was just me seeing if I could erase a post if I needed to. And I can, or anyway, I could.
Last, thanks for the comments about women and writing, especially Dichroic's snippet of song. Which I'd make a link to if I could. And Katherine's remarks about DLSayers, "Or that she didn't commit what in my view would have been multiple justified homicides," makes the point exactly, because Sayers gave up her only child so she could get on with her life. Very sad, that.

This particular Muttering seems to have got cumbersome, so I'm going to cut off here and start anew with a new idea. Stay tuned.

Where are the girls?

In her review of the Edgar nominations last week, the excellent Sarah Weinman bemoans the lack of women in the Best First category. Yeah, Sarah, I know: I was the chair. I also, a year ago when I was putting together the committee, took care to balance it: two men, two women (plus me); thrillers and cozies; Left Coast and Other. And when the ballot came down to it, that's what we said, too: Where are the girls?

The women Sarah mentions (and do look at her web site, whose address is http://www.sarahweinman.com although I can't get the Blogger software to create a link on my Mac, another form of discrimination that needs to be addresed) as I was saying, the women she singles out did indeed write appealing books, just not quite as appealing--TO THE FIVE OF US, let it be said--as the books that ended up on the list. And although I admit that affirmative action might work in academia, we couldn't really feel justified in giving extra points to the women just because they were women. So we gulped, and voted, and that's the list we came up with.

Now, I don't want to make a big thing out of one Edgar list--next year it might be all women. But how long has it been since that happened? Just glancing over the last ten years of Best First nominees (see the MWA website--and I agree, this lack of linkability is a pain) I see none that have more than three of the (usual) five, and it's generally one or two women among the boys.

I know that women can write as well if not better than men. And I know the mystery world is one place where women have been given free rein since the Thirties. Women write about half the mysteries out there, give or take a percentage point or five. So why don't we win half the awards?

We can't even blame the publishers for not submitting books, since our committee actively asked booksellers for their recommendations and were alert for any positive review for a purported first novel, hunting it down and ripping it from its publisher's reluctant hands. A thing that not all the committees did, I agree, hence the number of Law and Order nominations.

Women have the skill and the heart to write on a par with men. But there's also the undeniable fact that we women in general spend our energies in a lot more directions then men do. I've been a professional writer since 1993. During that time I've also done the bulk of work when it comes to raising kids, keeping a house together, organizing a family's lives, and all the rest--I'm even the household handyman. I can't help wondering if my books might have been just a bit better, more focussed, more intense, if I'd been able to concentrate on nothing but the writing stuff during that time. As, I'm afraid, a lot more boy writers do than girls.

All of which seems to come around to the topic that I worked on with my very first novel, Why are there no female Rembrandts?

Maybe we're just not big enough bastards to tell the world that our time and our needs are more important than theirs.

What do you think?

So, what?

This blog, assuming I conquer the technology, will be about pretty much whatever comes to mind. Politics, writing, life. And comments, please.

Kicking and screaming

Is it really the twenty first century already?? Well, it must be, because Laurie King is doing a blog.