Notebook dump!

Hey, haven't done one of these for awhile. Here are the names, phrases, ideas (such as they are) and ephemera that have been piling up in my Blackberry:

• Name: Professor Graymeat (Dickensian!)
• Holed-up heist gang sends 1 guy to supermarket. He comes back with 48 chicken pot pies 'cause they were 3 for a buck. They eat nothing but chicken pot pies for 3 days. Everybody's pissed.
  
• Dust Bowl - rabbit drives - Black Sunday, April 1935 [This is from PBS's "Surviving the Dust Bowl," which leans heavily on The Worst Hard Time, a fantastic book by Timothy Egan.]
• qfisllc.com, forensics website
• CODIS - FBI lab DNA database
• University of Leyden - Dutch, John Quincy Adams studied there
• Whip City Chargers
• Dexter Arthur Wheeler, known as Dart?
• Character from Black Cat, AR
• Actual name: George Forsyth
• Plot: a son or daughter makes self up to look older, can pass for parent - uses this trick for gain
• Whip City Sinners
• Actual surname: Pitkat
• Prissy FBI supervisor makes his office a foot bigger than regs allow
• Mood Ring Eyes
• MS13, brutal Salvadoran gang
• Mannix Whitlock
• Dindo Ramos: actual Filipino name
• Fulfilled as a strip-mall mattress salesman
• Title: SUICIDE RUN
• Odd feeling: seeing something you once owned (a chair, etc.) used as a period movie prop
• Sunset hero: a big talker who seems not to be around when shit hits fan
• Shards of silence (from Dwight Yoakam song)
• Character with huge beaky nose, reminds narrator of canoe-carrying Indian from old cartoon
• Name for minor character: Sherm Howe (tip of cap to Travis McGee)
• Title: INDIA INK
• "You're uncouth." "Me? I got couth drippin' out my asshole, lady."
• Song: Flora's Waltz
• Character: singer/songwriter who scrapes by in bars. He's afraid nobody'll clap when a song ends, so he segues each song into the last, plays 45 minutes straight.
• You might as well tell a skunk he stinks.
• Character who takes delight in being unmemorable, invisible
• Title: FELONY STOP
• Title: CEMETERY RIDGE (from Gettysburg?)
• Abe Lincoln: "Argue long enough and you can convince yourself there's no difference between a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse."

Out with the old

Just sold the Mazda RX-7 I raced for six seasons, and I did so with no regrets whatsoever. Indeed, when the guys at the Flatout Motorsports shop told me they were set to trailer the car to its new owner and asked if I wanted to drop by, snap a few pics, and maybe pat its haunch tearfully, I said hell no - haul that sucker away and bring me a check.

Let me add hastily that this was and is a damn good race car: fast and reliable, with all the important bits put together correctly and tuned to suit my driving style. I have no doubt its new owner will enjoy it as much as I did.

But that's all the affection I can muster for the 05. Yup, the 05 - my number. If your interest in racing stops at Days of Thunder, you may think drivers give their cars feminine nicknames and mutter to them affectionately. Not so. Race cars exist to be used up, thrashed within an inch of their life, and then disposed of. In one of my books, protagonist Conway Sax (a former NASCAR driver and mechanic) says, "A street car's a tool. A race car's a weapon. Not much more to it than that."

So I sold my old weapon, and you know what that means: time to build a new one. Which entails, of course, a future blog post.

Worth a thousand words

Somebody asked recently how I named Conway Sax, the protagonist in my mystery series. By way of response, I simply emailed this photo.

One! Two! Got the swine flu

I'll never know for sure whether I had a bona fide case of H1N1, as I didn't go to the doc for confirmation, but this much is certain: Been sick as a damn dog since Saturday.

So's half the country, of course; schools are ghost towns, the Cleveland Browns are so decimated they're seeking a roster-rules exemption just to field a team, and vaccine shots are running way behind demand.

I'm just about healthy again. The details I'll spare you, but trust me - you wouldn't wish this sickness, whatever it is, on your worst enemy.

And yet! As an optimist, I insist on silver linings, and the scores of hours I spent staring vacantly at the TV produced a few. For starters, the final scene of my Conway Sax work-in-progress came to me while I watched, of all things, "The Biggest Loser." Hey, you takes your inspiration where you finds it. The epiphany is a true comfort to me. In the past, I've always known my novels' final scenes before I started writing (which, by the way, is extremely common among writers I know). Such was not the case this time around. I waded into the book anyway, because that's what you do, but I admit I felt somewhat adrift without a final scene in my head.

The other tidbit I picked up comes from a multi-part documentary IFC is running on Monty Python. There's a gag in Monty Python and the Holy Grail that I'd forgotten. King Arthur canters past a couple of serfs. Serf One prostrates himself and says (quoting from memory), "Bless you, good King!" Serf Two says, "How do you know he's a king?" Serf One says, "He doesn't have shit all over him."

I love that bit - it reminds me of the "A young bull and an old bull" joke from Colors. In Conway Sax' world, anybody not covered with shit is indeed a king. I guarantee you I'll work it into a story sometime.

It looks like the Daytona 500 in the record books

In Victory Lane I, my daughter, my son, and my fabulous wife Martha do our best to dent my expensive aluminum hood. Photo: Amy Mills.

A killjoy could peer at the results of yesterday's Sports Car Club of America race and conclude that I won almost by default, as most of the top drivers in my class chose to skip the event at Watkins Glen International (the best race track in North America, by the way, and absolutely stunning in mid-October).

But you're not a killjoy and you don't have access to the results (not if I can help it), so take my word: I was Jackie Stewart out there. I was Emerson Fittipaldi and Juan Manuel Fangio and Ayrton Senna all rolled into one, with just a soupcon of Dale Earnhardt Sr. for grit's sake.

At least that's what I told my family, who finally got to see me do something other than hit the wall.

In which I stock up on nonfiction

I don't like to read fiction while I'm writing it - I find myself unconsciously aping my favorite writers. (I can flip through my first book and say That's a James Ellroy sentence, or That's a Travis McGee-style minor character.) I need to be reading at all times, so the solution is to load up on nonfiction for the six or eight months it takes to write a Conway Sax first draft.

Mission accomplished!

I bulled through the local Borders* yesterday and came out with the following trade paper:

• A Terrible Glory, James Donovan. This one, which like most nonfiction has an overlong subtitle, is a bio of George Custer and a history of Little Bighorn.
• What Hath God Wrought, Daniel Walker Howe. This U.S. history covers 1815-1848. Having read plenty of Revolutionary and Civil War histories and biographies, I now find myself filling in gaps with books on the Industrial Revolution and Reconstruction.
• Memoirs of the Second World War, Winston Churchill. I'm a big Churchill fan - William Manchester's (sadly unfinished) bio of the titan is one of my favorite books - but I'll admit to being put off by his imperious prose. Time to get past that!

This lot, combined with the John Quincy Adams bio that gathered dust on the TBR stack all summer while I gorged on McGees, ought to carry me through. And then some.

* 'Twas a pleasure to buy physical books for a change. I love my Kindle, but I've decided it works best for novels. Hefty nonfiction, with its maps and footnotes, is best read in hardcopy.

You got how many MPG in that 20-year-old Honda?

Chang Ho Kim is an old friend of mine, a top-notch mechanic specializing in Hondas, and a championship-level autocrosser, so I need to link to this post at a green-car blog.

When Chang heard about a fuel economy competition, he dusted off a 1989 Honda CRX HF that was sitting behind his shop, tuned it up, lowered it (to reduce wind resistance), installed snow tires (to reduce rolling resistance), put on the funny-looking cow-catcher you see here, and had a go.

And won, achieving a 118-mile-per-gallon average and beating some fancy hybrid machines in the process. So surprising was Chang's low-tech approach that contest organizers hyper-scrutinized his fuel consumption, but in the end he won fair and square.

Follow the link above to read how he did it, and keep in mind that there's more than one way to skin a cat: light weight and skilled driving are your best friends whether you're racing or saving fuel.

The first paragraph of Conway Sax 4

Yeah, I'm going to need a better working title than that. One candidate is Mood Ring Eyes, but while I like the feel of the phrase - three four-letter words with distinctly different vowel sounds - it's better suited to a romance (or for that matter a cheesy pop song) than a noir mystery. Anyway, here's the opener as it now stands:

I was running and I was naked and my hands were cuffed behind my back. Ziptied, actually, the plastic strips cinched tight as hell, circulation long since gone. I pictured my hands oversized and puffy, like the Hamburger Helper mascot.

Forty words down, 76,960 to go! (Actually, I'm more than 5,000 words in, and I like where the story's heading.) Stay tuned.

They don't make 'em like they used to

I'm not an unqualified fan of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, but the group does know how to throw a party. To celebrate its fiftieth birthday, the IIHS crashed a brand new 2009 Chevrolet Malibu into a '59 Chevy Bel Air.

If you think of cars from the 1950s as rolling fortresses, iron-framed behemoths that could run right over today's tin cans, watch this. (Stick around until the end to see how the drivers would have fared.)

Even a Blind Pig Dept.

Well what do you know! I won a race for the first time in more than a year.

My company, Flatout Motorsports, made a pilgrimmage to New Hampshire Motor Speedway for a double race - one Saturday, one Sunday. I invited family Saturday, whereupon Murphy's Law kicked in: clammy drizzle prevailed. My family patiently waited for my race. I got a great start, passed the guy in front of me, got carried away entering the first turn (a high-speed NASCAR oval), and spun out in front of the entire field. They missed me, but I didn't miss the wall; I slapped it hard with the right front corner of my car. The photo you see here is small, but a careful look shows that the entire front end, which I'd bunged up in a previous race, is pretty ugly looking. It's held together, for now, with duct tape and Dzus fasteners.

By the time we came past the grandstands in which my family sat expectantly, I was DFL (dead bleeping last), and there I would stay.

Sorry, family.

The next day was a different matter entirely. I've never golfed, but those who do say it's that one sweet shot per eighteen holes that keeps you coming back to play the frustrating, expensive, time-consuming game.

Sunday was the racing equivalent of that one sweet shot. From the drop of the green flag, I battled hard with two friends who drive cars much like mine. One friend would pass me, I would pass him back, and so on. We were each focused on the few hundred yards ahead, but were thinking strategically at the same time. How good are his tires? Should I press him or wait for a mistake? Will we come up on any lapped traffic soon?

In the end, I beat my pal by a whopping three-tenths of a second - half a car length. It was by far my best race of the year, and maybe my best ever. It made up for the season's mechanical glitches, bad breaks, and driver incompetence.

Now if only my family had been there to see it.