A Question From The Author About The Future of Andrea Cort

Posted on July 15th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

An interesting creative question, regarding my character Andrea Cort:

The character lives on in short fiction. There was one published this year, “Tasha’s Fail-Safe,” and another coming out next year, “The Coward’s Option.” (Don’t expect more novels unless I become a big deal via another franchise.) But I am, pretty much, telling stories from the beginning of Andrea’s career, by necessity, and that necessity is defined by the place where she is le…ft, by the novel and novella that take place last, chronologically.

Tags: Andrea Cort, Fiction, Tasha's Fail-Safe, War of The Marionettes | Category Blog Business, Books, Science Fiction, Writing

Letter to the Relics Soon to Gather Dust In A Drawer

Posted on July 9th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

In the early days of my marriage to Judi, we experienced a windfall.

When she was small, her grandfather bequeathed her and two other relatives a plot of land, in an undeveloped part of Florida. Her section was never worth more than about $500.00, for about half an acre (I think). Then, for a few months, during a real estate speculation boom, the eyes of developers turned to anything that could possibly be valuable, and we started getting letters offering us greater and greater amounts for this really pointless piece of property. It passed $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, with dizzying alacrity. We knew that at a certain point it would drop just as precipitously, and in the end, showing not-quite-perfect timing, we accepted one of the offers a few weeks before receiving what would turn out to be the highest one. And then the powers that be realized that the land really wasn’t good for anything and the next few offers we received, before the ownership database updated, showed the value declining at a speed approximately twice as fast as the appreciation before it.

As I say, the timing was not QUITE perfect. But the money came in handy.

But before the sale, Judi showed me the now-yellowing deed.

It included a provision, for which her grandfather could not be blamed — it was then the requirement of the location — that at no point in the future would the land ever be sold to any black people.

It was peering through a window at a more savage time. And one incomprehensible to me, on a logical level, even if you put the idiotic premises of racism aside. Okay, so you’re such a rampaging bigot that you don’t want to sell your land to a black person – as if their money is no good; let us buy that. In what way does it hurt you that the person you’ve sold it to will someday sell it to a black person? I suppose that if you’re “protecting the neighborhood” it makes a sick kind of logic if you fear the re-sale imminent…but if, as in this case, the deed yellows in a drawer for forty years?

Whatever. By the time we sold the land, that provision would have been unenforceable anyway. We don’t know the race of the buyer or of the current owner, if different, nor do we care.

But if we could go back in time and talk to whoever was responsible for ensuring that deeds for real estate in that area contained that noxious provision, what would they tell us?

That they were just protecting their deeply-held personal beliefs.

That they were within their rights to do so.

That we would be oppressing them by objecting.

Fifty years later, now, we can tell them that they’re irrelevant, that their deeply-held personal beliefs did not trump the rights of others, and that we owe them nothing but scorn and pity.

This has been a message to the bureaucrats and tradesmen now seeking to preserve their right to discriminate.

Faster than your worst fears, you too will wind up a relic in some drawer, object of nothing but scorn and pity from the generations that come after you.

Tags: Bigotry, Florida, Gay Marriage, Race | Category Commentary, Life Wisdom, Politics

Why Watson is Loyal to Holmes

Posted on July 7th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

I’m currently reading THE GREAT DETECTIVE by Zach Dundas, a splendid history of Sherlock Holmes from Edgar Allan Poe (whose Dupin was a Holmes predecessor), through Basil Rathbone all the way to Downey and Cumberbatch.

I haven’t even passed Conan Doyle’s era yet, and I can already see that Dundas picks up meanings that most readers and dramatizers have missed, starting with the precise reason why Watson is always so loyal to Holmes, which until relatively recently I thought I was the only reader to understand.

Many readers miss it in Doyle’s vivid but Victorian prose, but at the time the two then-young men meet, Watson is a broken man: a recent military veteran, suffering from a disability, living in indolence on a miserly pension. They become roommates out of financial necessity and for weeks, weeks, Watson watches his odd companion come and go at odd hours, following strange errands, and has nothing at all but do but watch him in resentment, wondering what he’s up to, while he sits at home and does nothing, which is at that point the sum of his ambition. When Holmes invites him along on the case that we know as A STUDY IN SCARLET, he specifically tells Watson that he’ll be useful and should come “if he has nothing better to do.”

That savant of perception saw that his roommate had given up on life, and with that one gesture, pulled him out of despair.

By the end of their second case, Watson has made a new best friend, discovered that he can make a contribution to the world, and met the woman who will become his wife. (One of four wives he would have, by some counts; none of whom would live long. It’s a storytelling problem. For Holmes and Watson to make sense, Mrs. Watson needs to be either absent, or very very understanding.)

Watson is loyal to the man who helped him with his Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

And in return, Holmes gets, not a slow-witted fool, not somebody to whom he can show off his brilliance, but a man in whom he can place his utmost reliance: a man who will march with him into hell, if need be. (As all the best Holnes/Watson dramatizations get; see how brave Watson is in THE SEVEN PERCENT SOLUTION, for instance. They may not get “why,* but they do understand that Holmes would not saddle himself with an idiot.)

The only dramatization I have ever seen that understood exactly what was going on with them is Stephen Moffat’s SHERLOCK, in which Sherlock, who “cannot read people”, figures out *precisely* what’s going on in Watson’s head and acts on it. “Want to come along?” “God, yes.” It’s nothing less than an intervention. (And the reason why I argue with people who think Moffat and company don’t get Sherlock. They get it better than almost anybody working on TV or film has ever gotten Sherlock.)

I have always seen the intervention angle, since my first reading of A STUDY IN SCARLET.

This is one reason why, as good as it was, I rebel at the middle-aged Basil Rathbone Holmes and the portly, doddering Nigel Bruce Watson; it is *critical*, genuinely critical, that the pair meet and partner up as young men, one of whom is about to idle his life away in self-pity. It’s what the story is about.

Tags: Sherlock Holmes, The Great Detective, The Seven Percent Solution, Zach Dundas | Category Books, Commentary, Writing