Artist Christon Anderson, a native of the Florida Panhandle, took this photo of his daughter walking in The Cove neighborhood of Panama City after Hurricane Michael stormed through. I think Anderson’s photo will become iconic, similar to the little girl running away from her napalmed village during the Vietnam War. Sometimes it takes an artist to find an image that says it all.
 
Michael was a Category 4 at 155 mph. A Cat 5 is 157 so Michael was at the upper range of Cat 4. So far 29 bodies have been found in the storm-ravaged region of Florida and Georgia. A K-9 sniffer dog named Tucker found one body under the wreckage of a house. A drone unit found another. As waters recede, searchers expect to find more.
 
As of Wednesday, October 17, 1,135 people are listed as still missing. Many on the list are disabled or elderly residents. There’s still hope that many of these missing persons simply haven’t been able to make contact with relatives or they may have evacuated and have not yet reported in. Or maybe they are waiting under the rubble for Tucker to find them.

What does climate change/global warming have to do with these massive storms? Read more here:  Hurricanes and Climate Change
​See more of Christon Anderson's photography on Instagram and Facebook.

With Richard Powers’ meaningful quote in mind, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story,” meet writer and storyteller Larry Darter.
 
Darter is the author of two successful mystery-suspense-thriller series. First is the Los Angeles private investigator Ben Malone series with five books so far, and second, the T.J. O’Sullivan series in which T.J., a New Zealand expat, works as a private investigator in Hawaii. Darter is a retired police officer and veteran of U.S. Navy and Army Reserves. His background gives deep credibility to his fictional works.
 
Let’s take a look at his upcoming Live Long Day in the Ben Malone series which is an exploration of child sex trafficking. Larry says in his blog post about Live the Long Day, “During my career as a street cop, child prostitution was something I rarely encountered. While I did encounter prostitutes regularly, they were typically adult women, most of whom it seemed had turned to prostitution to support a drug habit.”
 
Sadly in recent years, child prostitution problem has grown dramatically. Darter says in his blog, “I learned that the child prostitution in cities like Los Angeles, the setting of the Malone Novels, is a real and growing problem. Los Angeles County law enforcement officials and the social services agencies who deal with the problem on a daily basis describe the child prostitution problem in Los Angeles as part of a growing nationwide epidemic. Young girls, some as young as 11-years-old are coerced into a life that will forever leave them emotionally scarred.” Read more at Darter’s blog about Live Long Day. 

Although Darter is writing about Los Angeles, child prostitution and sex trafficking is a problem in southern Arizona as well.  Here are two sources from Tucson.com and KGUN 9 TV to inform you of our local problem.  Tucson.com    KGUN9 TV

​In his blog, Darter introduces us to the work of Dr. Lois Lee, a leading expert in rescuing child sex trafficking victims. She is founder and president of Children of the Night, a nonprofit dedicated to “rescuing children and young people from prostitution worldwide.”

Darter wrote Live Long Day with the express intention of raising awareness of this serious criminal problem affecting our children. He is dedicating a portion of royalties earned on Live Long Day as a donation to Children of the Night.  Darter says, “My intent is not to foster a sense of hopelessness–I want us to get angry about a problem that strips hope from our most vulnerable citizens. Children are the future of our nation.”
 
That’s a sentiment we can all support. And we get to read a terrific mystery book in the process! 

Larry Darter's blog: http://www.larrydarter.com/child-prostitution-and-the-live-long-day-novel/

To pre-order Live Long Day, go to: 
LiveLongDay@Amazon

originally posted 2018-07-22

​I'm working on my second Letty Valdez mystery.  ​The title of the new book is Dragon's Revenge. It will be published November 20, 2018.

I've been thinking about language and how fraught it is with controversy these days.

Some people seem to think that telling a falsehood is perfectly okay. If called on the lie, they double down and tell a bigger lie. As a former news reporter, I am convinced that facts matter and that telling lies can undermine everything, from personal relationships to a democracy. 

On the other hand, there are those who think one should never use certain terms because those terms are not socially accepted anymore or they are not politically correct or maybe they just plain rude. These folks are willing to censor others to see their view of correct language prevail.

So what about writers who want to express a thought or words said by a character that doesn't speak in a politically-correct way. 

Here's an example. In the 1960s, women were often called "girls" or if you were a hipster, you called them "chicks."  So if I write a book about women in the 60s and 70s, it seems right to me to use the language of those times - girls and chicks - even though if someone called me a chick, they'd get an earful from me (I'm a Second Wave feminist!). 

Back to Dragon's Revenge: A substantial portion of this book is a memoir written in the 1970s by an old man who was a boy in the 1890s in Tucson. His stepfather was a Chinese immigrant. At that time, they called this man a "Chinaman" although that term is no longer used and is considered derogatory and offensive. In my book, he will be called a Chinaman in the memoir because that's what he was called in 1890. 

Accuracy and facts are more important to me than changing definitions of what is currently "correct" or "polite."

Originally posted 2018-02-15
Recently one of America’s greatest writers died, Ursula K. Le Guin. Note that I said “greatest writers,” not “greatest science fiction writers” or “greatest fantasy writers.”  Le Guin won numerous awards during her career, and sold millions of copies. Many of us believe that her books have become part of the canon of American literature. She was both wildly inventive and deeply thoughtful in how she approached her work. You leave her books both entertained and provoked to do some serious thinking of your own.
 
I’ve always thought the fact Le Guin’s parents were both cultural anthropologists was a significant factor in the imaginative worlds she created in her books. Rather than the showy heroic stories of conflict and triumph we so often see, Le Guin created characters and societies with complexity and ambiguity. (photo left: NerdPatrol, Flickr)
 
Take for example, her classic The Left Hand of Darkness. This compelling story follows a Terran (earthling) to the planet of Gethen where all the inhabitants are ambisexual most of the time. But once a month they come into “kemming” for a few days and become either male or female for purposes of reproduction. Which sex the Gethenians transform into depends on conditions they find when the state of kemmering begins. Although Le Guin refers to them as “he,” sometimes they are “she.”  The Terran, Genly Ai, finds this more than disconcerting because he comes from a place where everyone is either a he or a she, and he treats them according to this permanent state. Ai is himself always a male. Needless to say, this book, first published in 1969, had a deep influence on the Second Wave feminists of the day, and that includes me.
 
Another highly influential book was The Dispossessed. Here she creates two twin worlds. One world is rather like ours is these days. Cut throat capitalism rules, and anyone unlucky enough to not be part of the elite are doomed to suffer – homelessness and hunger abound in the shadow of extreme wealth. The other world is socialistic and authoritarian, but no one goes hungry. Le Guin called this world “an ambiguous utopia.”
 
Le Guin considered herself a feminist. She was also an advocate of non-violence and expressed a deep interest in ecology and a concern for our environment. She was influenced by Daoist philosophy, and that shows up in her writing, too.
 
Not only was she a terrific writer, Le Guin also had a wicked sense of humor. Regarding her advice for women writers, she said:  If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.” For the record, Le Guin married, had three children, and did not commit suicide.
 
Perhaps her most famous quote is from The Left Hand of Darkness, a quote that is unfortunately often attributed to Hemingway, “It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
 
In December 2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published her book, No Time to Spare:  Thinking About What Matters in which she ruminates on old age.  Le Guin died in January, 2018.