T is for Tomlinson

I think a lot about my last name. Not so much because I'm egotistical, or just because my name is basically "my brand." But I was aware from an early age that the Tomlinson branch of our family tree was goning to die out if my brother Rob did not have, as they used to say, "issue."

My father was one of three brothers. My uncle Hubert died when I was three years old, not long after he earned his medical degree. He was my father's baby brother, and my father would have been only 33 at the time. His and Hubert's mother had died when they were children and his father died the year before Hubert did, leaving my father an orphan in his early 30s. My father's half-brother, Jim, worked the family farm and died a bachelor. His middle name was Lee, which is also my brother's middle name, a name they both inherited from our grandfather.  My father's younger half-sister is only eight years older than I am and she has a son, but of course, his name isn't Tomlinson.

Tomlinson isn't that uncommon a name. There's an English actor named David Tomlinson who was in Mary Poppins.  There's football player LaDanian Tomlinson who used to play for the San Diego Chargers, whch enlivened the football season for me. (Basketball is my game.)  there's the writer H.M. Tomlinson and when I was a kid, I bought a couple of his novels just because it tickled me to see the name "Tomlinson" on my bookshelves.  I'm not related to any of them. Nor am I related to Ray Tomlinson, who created teh @ separator that makes email possible.

There are 43 different Tomlinsons with a Wikipedia entry, and that doesn't count Tomlinson Holman, an American film theorist and audio engineer who developed the world's first 10.2 sound system. I don't actually know what that is, but I'm always impressed by people who invent the "first" of something and I can only hope Tomlinson did not get beat up because of his unusual first name.  (My father's friends called him "Tommy" which would probably have been a good nickname for Holman.)

S is for Shakespeare, who was born in April

They aren't really sure when William Shakespeare was born. He was baptized on April 26th in 1564, which makes next Saturday his birthday. It is known that he also died in April (April 23, 1616, which made him a man whose life spanned two centuries). That death date, 1616, sounds like a long time ago, but it was actually the 17th century, which somehow does not seem so distant. In his last play, The Tempest, there are references to the place that will become North America ("O Brave New World") and and the preiod known as the Renaissance was already coming to an end. (I was always taught that it ended around 1637.)

Here are some things they already knew in Shakespeare's time:

The earth revolves around the sun (1543)

the earth has a magnetic field (1600)

Galileo was already making detailed astronomical observations although he had not yet formuulated the law of falling bodies.  Johannes Kepler had discovered the first two laws of planetary motion. Shakespeare would have been aware of these studies in the same way that an educated person today is aware of important scientific discoveries. His plays are full of poetic references to stars and one speech from Romeo & Juliet is considered a test of how well an actor can handle the playwright's language.

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”

So Happy Birthday Will!

The illustration is from the Wiki quotes site. Don't know who created it, but it tickles me. Shakespeare would have fit right into the 21st century.

R is for Ellen Raskin

One of my favorite books is Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game. It's a kid's book. Middle-grade, I supposed, but I read it as an adult and was totally charmed. It's a mystery of sorts. An eccentric rich man (Westing) invites a group of people to play a game. The winner will become Westing's heir, but what unfolds is a lovely, character-driven story about love and family and expectations and choices and chances.  Raskin died too young and I take that personally. she wrote several other books, many of them revolving around wordplay like The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel).

Between the Letters--The new sub-genres of romance

Used to be, there were just a couple of kinds of romance novels. There were contemporary romances, like the ones I devoured from Harlequin. And there were the historical romances that always seemed to star pirates, Vikings, or Scottish highland rogues which I didn't like as much. (Still, the best-looking man I ever saw in my life--and bear in mind I live in Los Angeles--was a kilt-wearing Scot in Glasgow.)  Paranormal romance wasn't yet a "thing" and what was then termed "spicy" was not yet what I call "clinical." (I'm not a prude, I'm really not. I've written things I would NEVER have wanted  my mother to read. (Although bless her heart, my retired Methodist minister aunt reads everything I write and is VERY supportive.) But I'm not a huge fan of what's called "New Adult,.  I really don't find all the intense description of the parts all that romantic. For me, romance novels were always more like fairy tals than anything else. You got your prince and you lived happily ever after (HEA).  But now you don't necessarily even get HEA, there's HFN (happily for now).  This is not news to longtime romance novel fans, but I was out of the loop for quite awhile and now that I'm back--I hardly recognize the genre. There are three trends that baffle me--
Alien Tentacle Sex.
Sasquatch Sex.
Forced Birthing Sex.

I'm curious enough about all three sub-genres that I'm going to have to check out at least one book in each category (because unlike some trolls who post on Amazon without actually, you know, reading the books they're reviewing, I like to know what I'm talking about.

I've also discovered that werewolf/shape-shifters and BBW books are a big thing in the paranormal
romance world too. Who knew? I celebrate that trend because it has always annoyed me that so many romance heroines were gorgeous girls (who mostly don't think they're pretty because their shiny brown hair isn't a dramatic raven color).  Real women aren't perfect and real women need the fairy tale too.

I'll keep you posted on the Sasquatch love.

Q is for Question

On August 7, 2011, I posted a story called "Stoway" on the blog. It was a story I'd written to submit to an anthology of stories inspired by Edgar Allan Poe tales. It was my sci fi version of "Masque of the Red Death." So here it is, more than three years later and yesterday andtoday, people have suddenly been visiting that page and reading that story. It's way, way too many people to have just stumbled across the story by accident. Is there a link somewhere I don't know about? If you've found the story, I'd love to know how you got here. 

Thanks and Happy Easter!

Q is for Quick, Amanda

Amanda Quick is one of several pseudonyms used by best-selling author Jayne Ann Krentz, who writes several kinds of fiction under her various names.  I like the idea of using different names to distinguish different genres of books and am always interested in why people choose certain names. Every once in awhile, I'll stumble across a name that really seems made for a pseudonym. Like actor Paul Blackthorne's last name. Blackthorne is a cool last name. "Katherine Blackthorne" sounds like someone who writes Gothic novels, doesn't it? Much more memorable a last name than "Tomlinson."

Before she turned to writing full-time, Krentz was a librarian and it's possible our paths crossed when I was in college because she worked in the Duke University library system. I hope I did. I was in and out of practically every library on campus at one time or another. (the Med School library was a great place to study because it was quiet and also you could meet a lot of cute med students. Not that I was that shallow.)

I love that Krentz genre-hops and also writes mashups. (Some of her books are described as "paranormal futuristic novels of romantic suspense." Sign me up!  I've read a lot of Krentz' stand-alone novels and really enjoyed them. A bunch more are on the TBR bookcase.

Q is for Ellery Queen

My mother subscribed to both Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (EQMM) and Alfred Hitchock's Mystery Magazine and EQMM was the first market I started pitching when I began writing mystery fiction. I badly wanted to be selected for their "first mystery" story but I never made the cut.

Of the two magazines, I preferred EQMM and I eventually went on to read the Ellery Queen mystery series. Ellery Queen started appearing in movies, and eventually in a television series starring Jim Hutton, which I remember enjoying. Full episodes of the series are posted at imdb. In a way, the Ellery Queen series was a precursor of Castle. Queen was a mystery writer. His father (played by David Wayne) was a police inspector and he helped him solve mysteries. I'm surprised no one has rebooted the series yet. Ellery Queen has been around for a long time since being created by two writers who were cousins. It's one of the most successful mystery franchises/brands ever, spannign 42 years.