Who Benefits When You're Heads Up?

"Heads up" is shorthand for situational awareness, that place of being alert to what's going on around you but without paranoia or fear.

In my book, Escaping the O-Zone, I compare it to defensive driving.  When you first slid behind the wheel in that first drivers' ed class, you started training your brain to stay alert to changing conditions on the road and to the actions of other drivers. Think of situational awareness the same way: it's defensive living.

The first person who benefits from a defensive living strategy is you. Staying aware of your surroundings lets your intuition work freely to spot trouble. And by "trouble" I don't necessarily mean  a mugger with a gun coming out of an alley. The other day for me it was something just as simple as noticing a bunched up throw-rug that nearly sent me sprawling. I tell my safety team at church all the time that physical hazards in the building, slippery floors in a rest room, broken asphalt patches in the driveway, even a light fixture that isn't working, could pose a danger to them as they pursue their duties but especially to our aging population.

So who else might you help by staying aware of your surroundings? Your family, of course. Every time you remember to lock the door between your house and garage, to install a timer that turns on your outside lights at night, or just to remind your son or daughter to keep enough gas in the car when going for a long drive, you're keeping others safe.

A friend of mine recently called the park district to report a light out, and broken glass on the ground, in a field where children play. A neighbor alerted the rest of us to the presence of a strange car parked on the street. In the news recently, I read that a husband and wife buying lunch at a burger joint noticed a teenage girl's bruised face and notified police, who subsequently discovered she had been kidnapped by a cross-country truck driver.

You may not disrupt a terrorist attack when you tell authorities about an unattended suitcase in an airport. The guy loitering near a school may just be a father waiting for his child. A senior citizen might never trip over that debris you see on the stairs.

But you never know.

Movie Review: The Judge

The Judge with Robert Downey Jr and Robert Duvall is one of those movies that you may walk out of the theatre talking about. I did, but it wasn't so much out of wonderment and appreciation as confusion because it tries to do way too much. It's a coming home film...Downey returns to Indiana from Chicago to attend his mother's funeral. He happens to be a crackerjack attorney so when his estranged father, the judge, is arrested, it falls to Downey to defend him. That plot was fine, as was one, maybe two of the subplots. But The Judge bites off far more than it can chew and a good part of the extraneous gunk gets stuck in the throat. Duvall as the judge is brilliant, maybe even Oscar worthy. Downey Jr. shows more range than I expected. All the acting is excellent but the script falters at the end...which takes about forty-five minutes too long to arrive. 3/5

My Five (Plus One!) Favorite Safety Tips

I’ve been tweeting personal safety tips for about a year now (@dougcummings3) and just followed those up with an e-book, Escaping the O-Zone: Intuition, Situational Awareness and Staying Safe which will be released Nov 1. The “O” in O-Zone stands for “oblivious” . . . that happy, unaware place in the clouds where a good portion of us put our minds while we’re not otherwise occupied. It’s nearly impossible to react to a threat from the O-Zone. By the time we hear our intuition sounding an alarm, that speeding car, angry dog, or armed predator, is already upon us.

Staying out of the O-Zone takes work. Here are five (plus one!) tactics I use to stay focused on my surroundings.

·      Approach every new environment, whether it’s a restaurant, a bar, the lobby of a building or a busy street, as though you’ve arranged to meet someone there. Keep your head up and your eyes moving. Listen for sudden sounds that break the pattern of ambient noise around you.

·      Look for a way out the moment you walk in. Mark in your mind where the exits are in every building and the fastest way to get to them. Outdoors, imagine where you could reach quickly in case of an emergency.

·      Always know your location. Whether you stop for gas, use a parking garage, duck into a coffee shop or go bar hopping, note the address. If it’s not posted, ask.

·      In your cellular phone’s address book, add ICE as a prefix to the names of relatives or friends who you would want first responders to contact In Case of Emergency. If you lock your phone, use an indelible pen to write the number of your closest contact on the case (will also help recovery if your phone is lost).

·      Avoid using headphones or texting while walking, running or biking. Eyes focused on a screen aren’t watching your surroundings. Listening to music and/or audio books places you in the O-Zone.

·      The most basic tip of all: at home, in the office, in your car, in hotel/motel rooms, lock your doors and latch your windows. That simple act may be enough to keep out an intruder.

My Advice to Aspiring Writers: WRITE. EVERY. DAY.

That most excellent site for writers and readers, Goodreads, has a section that offers the opportunity to ask questions of the writers. One question I chose to answer: What advice would I give to an aspiring author?

I said, Write. Every. Day.

It all counts, whether it’s a blog post, a long email to a friend, an imaginative shopping list, a short story, a poem, or a novel. Exercise your creative muscles for as long as you can, as often as you can. Asa Baber, the late, great Playboy columnist was the first writing teacher to tell me that creative muscles atrophy from lack of usage the same as all the others. I have found that to be true a hundred times.

Even if all you're doing is sketching out scenes in your notebook, play with ideas. Write character descriptions on bus, train or plane rides or during your break at work. Take notes on locations every time you go somewhere new. Watch for interesting things, or listen to intriguing conversations that take place in your vicinity and write them down. Don't be afraid to reconstruct the ordinary stuff that occurs every day. Have a fight with your boss? Do as my novelist friend Linda Mickey did. Kill him . . .on paper. Her furious imaginings became the plot for her first book, Greased Wheels. By the way, in every state, murder on the page is considered an acceptable alternative to punching someone's lights out. Or worse.

But let me add a caution. Writers write. They don't spin out their plot ideas at cocktail parties. In my humble opinion, talking about what you plan to write is the best way to suck all the energy from the idea and/or lose it to someone who may be suffering from writer's block. The only time to share your work is when it's reached written form and you're asking for an opinion from your significant other or a group of your fellows in a writing workshop or class.

That reminds me: by "writing," I don't mean endless polishing and re-polishing the opening page of your novel. A new writer in one of my first workshops did that and it drove the rest of us bonkers. The sad thing was...she had a wonderful, lyrical way with words. She just couldn't bring herself to move forward. I've always believed the saying, "You can't steal second if you insist on clinging to first" and it applies to writing just as it does to life. Even if you think what you've written is complete cow manure, push ahead. Finish your manuscript. THEN go back and edit the darn thing. Or throw it in a drawer to re-visit in a month. Given a little distance, you may discover it's not nearly as bad as you thought it was.

Here are two last points One comes from my Hard Earned Lessons file. Once your novel is finished, unless you've paid for a critique session, don't go to a Bigtime Writers Conference and ask your Favorite Author of All Time to read your work and provide feedback. First of all, she likely has her own manuscript to finish. Second, many publishing houses advise their authors NOT to accept reading requests from writers they don't know to avoid potential allegations of plagiarism.  My final point . . . finish your manuscript AND have it professionally edited (no, your nephew the English teacher doesn't qualify as a pro in this case...you want to be published, not graded, right?) before you start looking for an agent. The "why" comes from an agent who shall remain anonymous because she was drunker than a skunk in the bar of a New York hotel when she spoke this line, which I quote exactly: "I ‘spect to shee shit from these firsht time assh-holes and, you know what? You know what? They seldom dishappoint me."

So don't dishappoint. Write until you can write no more every chance you get.

Memorial Day 2014

At the First Division Museum http://firstdivisionmuseum.org/museum/exhibits/gallery/wwii.aspx a few years ago, a visitor stood in front of the D-Day invasion exhibit. Next to him, a man bent with age and gripping a cane addressed a boy of about eight or nine who called him, Paw-paw.

"They brought us in over here,." He used his free hand to point at Omaha Beach on a map. The finger shook slightly. It made the visitor think of Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. "Big guns were set up there and there, all over those bluffs, inside concrete bunkers. They just kept shooting at us. They never stopped."
 
The little boy listened. So did the visitor.
 
"We landed too far out. We had to swim." He paused. "Some of my buddies never made it . . . to the beach."
 
"Did they drown in the ocean?" the little boy asked. The other visitor held his breath. The older fellow shook his head but seemed lost in thought.
 
"Some of them did, yes." His voice faded, perhaps as he remembered what he had seen and tried to think of a way to describe the vision that would be appropriate for a young boy. He leaned a little more on his cane.
 
"Bullets were flying. Closer to the bluffs were mines. The mines were terrible things."
 
"I know about them," the boy said but not with the excitement the visitor would have expected from someone his age. His eyes turned as solemn as the moment.
 
"Yes," the older fellow said. Added, "It was an awful, awful day."
 
He pressed the free hand to his forehead. The boy waited for several moments in respectful silence. Then he took his Paw-Paw's hand and started leading him toward the door.
 
The visitor moved to catch up with them, wanting to say something meaningful, to thank the older man for his service. The man and the little boy passed into the hall holding hands. The visitor realized he had phlegm caught in his throat. He stopped short, coughed a couple of times. Rubbed his eyes. Realized he couldn't think of a remark that wouldn't sound banal or hollow.
 
So, for once, he kept his mouth shut.

Deft Pacing and Well Drawn Characters Carry Complex Puzzle of a Plot

It's tough to build a really good thriller. If you concentrate too much on the technical stuff (thanks, Tom Clancy) you risk losing the folks who could care less whether the villain was armed with an FN 5.7 pistol carried in a Blackhawk Serpa holster or took out Air Force One with a shoulder mounted FIM 92 Stinger manufactured by Raytheon in 1981. But if you lean toward the gooey-kissy hop-into-bed-with-every-babe stuff, you'll find many of your readers deserting in droves. What works for me is when an author creates a good basic story by putting characters we've come to care about into extreme jeopardy...keeps it suspenseful as hell...and teaches us something along the way.

Paul McEuen mixes all of the ingredients of a good story effortlessly into Spiral, his first novel.

The plot is complex but boils down to: killer fungus that can wipe out humanity sought by bad people who want to blackmail the U.S. and get back at a really nasty Japanese businessman whose past includes World War II atrocities. The author is a scientist and professor (and CIA consultant)and it shows, but the cool thing is that he feeds us the technical/scientific stuff in such a way that even the adamantly non-geeks among us can understand and follow the intricacies. And he manages the action sequences as smoothly as a SEAL taking out a cadre of terrorists...putting the likeable good guys into peril that ramps up with every chapter. Inject geo-political drama and bam! a book that keeps its pacing on multiple levels.

One warning and it's sort of a spoiler. There are a couple of torture scenes that are absolutely terrifying, so much so that even I had to skip ahead (note to the author: I think they went on a tad too long) before I got queasy. Think Hannibal Lecter in a lab with some nano-gadgets small enough to put...well, you get the point. But speaking of the villain, she's really, really awful. Not one of those who have a little niceness to balance them out. Evil.

If you love audio books, I recommend that format for your read. I found Spiral because I've enjoyed narrator Rob Shapiro's other performances. He knows how to remain in the background and allow the writer to be the star.

A Brief Return to WGN Radio

Doug talks EASY EVIL on WGN Radio