BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Anyone who has read any of the books in the Rowan Gant Investigations series knows who Detective Benjamin Storm and Special Agent Constance Mandalay are. Furthermore, anyone who has talked to me, or attended one of my writing or Q&A seminars knows that everything is book material in my way of thinking. That includes using various quirks or physical descriptions from the everyday reality to enhance the fictional reality, which is still fiction even if I call it a fictional reality. Make sense? Yeah, it doesn’t to me either…

But, here’s where I’m going with this – I use what I know to write stuff that I make up, but what I make up is exactly that – stuff I make up. It’s not real, and it doesn’t actually reflect a real reality.

Case in point, Ben Storm and Constance Mandalay. I should also say here – SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t read my books, or are only just starting to do so…

Ben is loosely – and when I say loosely I mean LOOSELY based on one of my very best friends of all time, a Metropolitan Saint Louis police officer. Their similarities being that they are both 6 foot 6 and the last person on Earth you would want to see coming through a door at you if you are doing something wrong. Other than that, I get “cop slang” from my friend, and of course, procedure and the like. However, that is where it ends. Ben is NOT my buddy, and my buddy is NOT Ben.

In the first few novels of the series, Ben was married to Allisson. She, in turn was LOOSELY based on my cop buddy’s wife – also a very dear friend. Hell, she took me shopping and acted as my fashion consultant when I was desperately trying to woo E K. She’s like a sister to me. However, once again, the LOOSELY based is just that. My friend worked in the medical field, so I made Allisson a nurse.

Constance Mandalay is a Bride of Frankenstein sort of character. By that I mean she is literally a hodge-podge of personality and physical traits from countless individuals, some of whom I know, some of whom I don’t know, and some of whom are also fictional characters from TV shows and movies. That isn’t to say that the pieces didn’t fit well together, because they did. She’s a great character… After all, she even has her own spin-off series now…

But moving right along…

Somewhere around the fourth novel, Ben and Allisson started having some relationship issues. My cop buddy and his wife were NOT mirroring this. Said issues were between the two fictional characters and only on the page. By the fifth novel, things had ended for them and Ben was moving on with his life. Since the young, pretty, intelligent, Sig Sauer packing FBI agent, Constance Mandalay, had been at odds with Ben on more than one occasion a natural progression took place – Tension turned into sexual tension, and they ended up dating.

Back here in the real world, my cop buddy’s wife was none too pleased about this, and she has been sure to let me know.

Every. Single. Time. I. Talk. To. Her.

And so, just the other night we were all together at Double D’s Pizzeria, which is owned by their son. We were having a bit of a planning meeting about the release party for In The Bleak Midwinter which will be taking place there at Double D’s. I brought them one of the ARCs of ITBM as a gift, and as she started flipping through it I made the preemptive comment, “Yeah, Ben and Constance are still dating.”

She looked across the table at her husband and said, “So you’re still having an affair with Constipated, huh…”

It’s a good thing Mandalay is fictional, because gun or no, I’m thinking she wouldn’t stand a chance against my buddy’s wife, and the nickname would be the least of her worries…

More to come…

Murv

Or: How Michele Bachmann Got Me Into Trouble With My Wife

I’m not a Michele Bachmann fan. Personally, I think the woman is off her rocker, but I am stating that as my opinion based upon her rhetoric. I’ve never met her – nor do I want to meet her – and moreover, I am not a clinical head-shrinker, so I’m not academically qualified to diagnose her as a nutjob. That said, (being a disclaimer and all, you understand) I’m relatively certain her elevator stops somewhere in between the first and second floor.

All good. I’m not about to begrudge her the right to run off at the mouth. However, as I’ve always stated, other people’s rights end where mine begin, and now Michele has directly affected said rights. How? She got me in trouble with The Evil Redhead.

For this to make sense, I need to give you a bit of info. You see, there is a routine here at E K Central. Each morning I wake up at oh-dark-thirty, start the coffee, visit the “Little Merp’s Room,” then install a 45 minute back massage on The Redhead. Trust me, if she doesn’t get her back massage in the morning, there’s hell to pay. After that, I proceed to get breakfast ready, answer email, prep EKay’s lunch, clean litter boxes, and on, and on. Somewhere in there, I take the o-spring to school, get my daily walk in, then return home in time to refill my coffee, bow and scrape to The Redhead, and then walk her out to her vehicle. It’s not that she needs an escort; it’s that she needs a pack mule. Yes, I “carry her books” for her (that’s a metaphor. I carry her lunch, extra shoes, and other stuff. Although, sometimes there are books, too.)

It’s at this juncture where her supreme evilness imparts upon me the instructions for the day. You know, stuff like, “Pick up my dry cleaning, polish all of my shoes, paint the house, build me a gazebo, make sure you prepare Beef Wellington for dinner tonight, and my vodka & tonic was too weak yesterday so if you don’t do better this evening there will be hell to pay. “

See what I mean? Normal stuff.

What does this have to do with Michele Bachmann, you ask? I’m getting to that.

On Friday morning, following standard procedure, I walked E K to her vehicle, loaded her lunch, stood still while she slapped me around, replied with, “Thank you, Mistress, may I have another?!” just as I am supposed to do, and all was good. Among her daily instructions to me was the following: Water the Basil and Oregano on the porch.

Easy enough, even for me, right? Well, not so much…

After seeing off Her Worship, I went back into the house on a mission to fill the watering can and tend to her herb garden. As I entered the door, The Early Show was blaring from the idiot box. On the screen was one of the co-hosts, and Michele Bachmann. From the speakers I heard, “Inducements inducing people to break the law to be induced to get the inducements that they were induced to be induced by, for the purpose of inducing…”

Okay… Yeah… So that is definitely NOT a direct quote. Here’s the real one:

“We’re inducing more people to break the law by giving them inducements and if someone comes into this state, they can subsequently also obtain other benefits on occasion as well,” she continued. “So we don’t want to have any inducements that will be a magnet to induce more people to come into the united states illegally.”

Even so, my overarching point here is that Michele Bachmann was flinging a ten-dollar word out there, in its various forms, multiple times in the same sentence.

I make my living with words. I notice shit like this. Especially when someone overuses the living crap out of a word. I mean, grammatically it’s never a stellar idea to use a word multiple times in a single sentence unless it’s an article or a preposition or a conjunction or something of that ilk. Know what I mean? It’s sort of like the old rule about not using a word in its own definition.

So… How did this get me in trouble?

Again, that’s easy – Inducement-gate was like a big train wreck to my ears. I stood there staring at the screen, drooling (because I was being mind-numbed), and I just couldn’t look away or tune it out. I’m sure plenty of folks are thinking, “Doooood. You’re making too big a deal out of it.”

Well no, not really. I’m not saying she should take a long walk off a short pier because of Inducement-gate (there are plenty of other reasons why I think she should do that.) However, as I said above, words are how I make my living, so a verbal train wreck like that was bound to make me go all googly-eyed.

And so, with my eyes goggled up, and my brain severely numbed, I completely forgot to water The Supreme Redhead’s herb garden – a fact that dawned on me Friday evening as I was paying daily homage to Her Worship by removing the lint from her sweater with a single three-inch strip of 15 year old generic cellophane tape, just like she’d told me to do. I guess I was still a little brain-numbed too, because instead of just going and watering the damn plants, I said with my out loud voice, “Oh crap, I forgot to water your herb garden!”

The doctor says I’ll be good as new in a few weeks if I just take it easy. He also suggested that I avoid exposure to Michele Bachmann.

I wonder if I should send HER the medical bill, or just forward it on to the GOP?

More to come…

Murv