Assassins

     We have used many monikers of late to describe the current Administration and the collaborators enabling them. The term Nazi is invoked but it has no real sting. There are vanishingly few remaining of the Greatest Generation who lived through and saw the first-hand effects of that particular version of horror. For most people living today WWII is nothing more than a history lesson. A chapter in a textbook, a few jerky old black-and-white newsreels a, distant horizon of eight plus decades ago, old news (or fake news depending on who you believe), noted in passing while moving on to the more important minutiae of the day. It may as well be ancient Rome.

    We've tested out a few others terms; autocrats, authoritarians, oligarchs, plutocrats, kleptocrats,  bulldozers, hatchet men, wrecking balls, even theocrats; it's a pretty comprehensive list deployed in opposition, but none of these really hit the mark in the visceral way we need. They are distant in effect, esoteric even, and while accurate not particularly useful. They're the sort of words that put intellectual distance between the speaker and the listener. It's part of the elitism for which we on the left are so often chastised. 

    A better term is needed that explains what is happening. Let's not beat around the cliché' any longer and look at reality. First, we need to take Trump out of the equation; aside from being a punching bag for the left, he is a rallying point for the right. The more vigorously we demonize a clearly incoherent, doddering old man the less on point we are and the more useful he becomes to his handlers. Deep down we know that the current occupant of the Office of the President of the United States has neither the intellectual capacity nor desire to comprehend what is being done in his name. The authors of Project 2025 are running the show. They know they have two years of mostly unfettered control of the levers of power and they intend to strain them beyond the breaking point.

    This has been a systematic and damn well coordinated effort with seeds planted with the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt. Generations have been carefully trained, grievances nurtured in the fertile humus of racism and tribalism patiently awaiting the precise moment to strike a blow for white nationalism. They have rightly judged that their time is now, a compliant--indeed, cognitively compromised--cypher is at hand, the concentration of money, media and mockery, a cowering Congress afraid of its own shadow and a Supreme Court hand-picked to tip the scales of justice their way even if the Constitution must be tortured to do so.

    Without reiterating all that P-2025 has in mind for reshaping America into the pre-Civil War model, suffice it to say that to achieve their goal nothing less than the systematic disassembly of diversified federal authority must occur, to be replaced with Executive fiat. The shock and awe of the first hundred days is the bureaucratic equivalent of the blitzkrieg. Arrive with overwhelming force, crush anything that gets in the way, decimate the structures that citizens have taken for granted and instill fear everywhere. While citizens scramble to protect their own interests any coordinated response is blunted and the chaos that ensues buys time, compliance and ultimately the keys to the city. With an eviscerated and enfeebled government the halcyon days of the Gilded Age can be resurrected and all those aforementioned 'crats' can effectively do whatever they please without fear of repercussion. We'll call it the Age of Extractive Indulgence.

    So, what to do? What new nomenclature should we apply that carries within a single word not only the intention but the manner in which their ends are to be achieved. What describes the systematic disassembly of our small L liberal democracy; the flaying of civil rights, the flaunting of abhorrent illegal authority under the color of law, the dissolution of the arts and sciences and the scrubbing of the history of accomplishments and challenges by historically mistreated citizens? Is there a sole descriptor that embodies the plunder of our nation's resources to the benefit of the few, the militarization of the cop on the beat in small town America and the revocation of a Constitutional right of basic citizenship?

    Yes, there is a word that embodies the cruelty, intent, and result of the times at hand. Assassins. Assassins have breached the wall of Fortress Democracy. Assassins are about to murder America. We must call them what they are; Assassins.

Fifty two words

 One sentence. It took the Founders a single sentence of fifty two words to define what this new country they were building should be, and by inference, what it should not be.

These new United States will be just, peaceful, well defended, kind in looking out for our neighbors and will seek to offer the future these same ideals and circumstances. Fifty two words, the foundation for all that followed for nearly two hundred fifty years, until January 20th, 2025.

In these intervening years we have, as a nation, grown corpulent with success, complacent about citizenship both at home and abroad, truculent in new tribalism and tolerant-even supportive-of behavior that is antithetical to everything those fifty two words represent. We have lost our way, again, as we did one hundred sixty five years ago during our last existential crisis; the Civil War. In many ways the issues haven't changed. It is still about money, power, racism, sexism and other-ism. All those pent-up grievances carefully stoked and handed down generation to generation waiting for a tinder spark to light the wildfire consuming us now.

America has never really come to terms with it's original sin. Most assign it to slavery-which was horrific-but miss the real culprit; unfettered mercantilism. With no practical restraints on commerce slavery was just doing business. The least effort for the best return. Familiar even today. It was only when the human rights abuse became so egregious and half the country was set against the other half that a war was fought. Not for states rights, the scant cover the Confederate States used as justification, but for sake of the Union. Even the Great Emancipator declared that if he could win the war without freeing the slaves he would do so. In the end the conflict was as much about the culture of profit as anything else.

The straits in which we now find ourselves are every bit as harrowing as the lead up to the Civil War, with significantly more dangerous circumstances; an Executive branch unbound from the restraints of the Constitution is exploiting a callow Supreme Court bent on its own methodical deconstruction of the wise, time honored principal of stare decisis. A President, freed from the constraints of a fearful Congress, not just willing-but anxious-to seek revenge on enemies he conjures in his fevered dreams. The strategy is simple, set the least among us against one another for the benefit of those with the most. Pay to play at the most rudimentary level. We are set upon a course of destroying the very fabric of the words that welded us together so long ago. Nothing short of Imperial coronation will suffice, even if he must tread upon the bloody corpses of those who defend the normal order of the law. The Apostolic warning from Paul, imprisoned in Rome, to Timothy rings true across millennia, 'we live in perilous times'.

We live in times where the phrase written on so many police cars, to protect and serve, have become cruelly ironic for all, as they have been for people of color forever. We live in a time when the very notion of being stopped by people acting under the color of authority to demand our papers was beyond the pale. An intrusion upon our right to be left alone not to be tolerated. Now communications channels are crowded with what to do when masked men with guns hijack you on a street, in a factory or school, or invade your home. We have become that which the Founders worked so diligently to prevent. We have lost the battle. We must not lose the war. Fifty two words. The rallying cry for America.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Look who is now an award winning author!

 Rising Son wins Hemingway Wartime Fiction First Place!! I am honored to be the recipient of first place at the 2025 CIBAs announced April 6. The international event recognized writing excellence from around the world so it is humbling that my debut novel was so well regarded.

I'm not resting on my laurels, however, I am hard at work on my next novel, a detective novel set in 1963 Seattle. The working title is Regular Joe and I hope to be finished in time to compete in the 2026 Chanticleer International Book Awards event. Stay tuned for further developments.

 Rising Son is Book Of The Month at Ford's Books in Gig Harbor! https://fordsbooks.square.site/ Check out her Dec newsletter, Rising Son is on page 2 https://fordsbooks.square.site/newsletter

You can order the hardback or the paperback edition directly from the store. Rising Son is fully available in all formats Saturday, Dec 7. Preorder here, or with a retailer near you, and support local booksellers.

 It has been more than a little while since I posted on this particular tributary to my literary river, and well past time to do so, even if it is to indulge my ego.

I can finally say it is finished: My journey to bring my book to the printed page has concluded with the publication of Rising Son. The first-edition hardback launches Dec 7, 2024, paperback available as well, and e reader versions to. You can find all the ISBN information at the author's page of my publisher; https://deep7.com/rising-son/ . When ordering make sure to use these numbers as old editions still lurk in the electronic depths of the internet, because as we all know, if ever once on the web, forever on the web.

I encourage my readers to order from your local booksellers, they need the sale, and writers need the places to be discovered.

Here are some opinions about Rising Son:

“Wow! An incredible, sweeping epic tale of a Japanese family navigating the quickly changing world around World War II, Rising Son touches the heart and engages the mind. Robert Pace has infused his narrative with a richness and depth that place this ‘historical' novel on the shelf next to the Great Jameses: Clavell and Michener. I am truly impressed--Rising Son is a terrific read!”

Garth Stein; New York Times #1 Bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain.

"Robert Pace re-examines a whitewashed piece of American history with the detail and rich characterizations that give Rising Son the feel of an early Mitchener saga. An intriguing historical reconstruction, Rising Son repays a decades-old debt to Pace’s father, a witness to a shameful part of America’s past."

Dave Boling; Bestselling author of Guernica and The Lost History of Stars.

Channeling my Inner Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney, best remembered as the cranky commentator at the close of the CBS tele-magazine Sixty Minutes for so many years, came to mind not long ago when I was pursuing the prosaic task of folding laundry towels. His half-whine, half bluster voice echoed in my head, and what follows is an homage, of sorts, to his memory.


There are too many towels in the world. Just the other day I happened to find myself in a department store and while looking for a pair of sensible shoes wandered through the linens department. Did you know there are finger tip towels? They're little scraps of cotton that are slightly larger than a wash cloth and not as big a hand towel. Do we really need finger tip towels. After all, aren't your fingers part of your hand? Mine are. Then there were bath towels and bath sheets. What are bath sheets? Who sleeps in the bathtub unless they are in trouble with their spouse and why do they need special sheets? They aren't even fitted.

And what about kitchen towels? They often come with chickens or ducks painted on them, or maybe oregano and turnips. These seem to be mostly for people to look at, hanging nicely from the oven handle because most of them don't do the one thing they should do, and that is dry things off well. They sort of move the water around without really absorbing anything. But they look nice hanging on the stove. If you like painted chickens. What we really use to clean up spills are paper towels, which may also have pastel chickens or turnips. The logic of this escapes me. How does it make sense to use paper made from trees that take fifty years or more to grow to a useful size to clean up a coffee spill when we could use cotton, which take one growing season on a farm to make kitchen towels that don't absorb much?

Maybe we could use the worn out towels from the bathroom in the kitchen. They still absorb moisture, and since they are around the house anyway, we could quit using paper towels. We could call them rags and wash them in hot soapy water with bleach to get them really clean and safe to use. Who knows, maybe a bleach stain will look like a chicken. Or a turnip.

1000 Words About Other Writers Words

Writers like to hang out with other writers. Rest assured, we watch people, study their mannerisms and speech patterns, the way they walk or how they hold their fork or cell phone. But that is research, mostly. When we gather to hang out, we commiserate with one another about the difficulty of the process, the frustrations of a constantly changing marketplace, and the shifting sands of creating a ‘platform’ from which we shill our work. But we also share the euphoria when someone just kills (in a good way) ten thousand words in a marathon session of writing where gold flows from the fingertips in such an intense fashion that nothing else exists except the story (Here’s a hint to aspiring writers: If you write every day, sessions like the one just described happen a lot more often.).

Besides your mom (who has to), or your spouse, if applicable, (who sacrificed a lot by leaving you alone-or kicking you in the butt-when you needed it), no one is more likely to stand on a chair and cheer for you when succeed than your friends in the writing community. It gives all of us hope. Hope for those who haven’t broken through that we can, and hope for those that have, that they can keep doing so with better results each time.

With all of the above in mind, here are three reviews of books written by writing colleagues ranging from a self-described ‘almost famous’ author to two who are getting legs in what promise to be nice careers.

William Dietrich, a NY Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning author has written twelve novels and five book-length non-fiction titles in his career. The Barbed Crown is the sixth in the series starring the roguish American ex-pat Ethan Gage. A devotee of Benjamin Franklin, he is a scoundrel, a gambler, an adventurer and pseudo-savant who finds himself sometimes being the grease and sometimes the grit between England and France during the Napoleonic Wars. In this highly entertaining book Gage finds himself slipping past the English naval blockade of France in a tiny boat on storm tossed seas with bullets and cannon balls whizzing by his head. He is doing so to seek out and kill Napoleon himself, whom, in a roundabout way, he has blamed  for the death of his beloved wife, the exotic Astiza. Failing that, then surely he can abort the general's coronation!

Complications ensue, as they must, and poor Ethan, who never seems to catch a break, still manages to survive by his wits, luck, and marksmanship. This book (and all in the series) are like a scrumptious bowl of nourishing cereal, chock full of scrupulously researched and fascinating history baked into a story that snaps with humor and crisp dialogue, crackles with page turning actions and pops off the pages with unlikely but entirely plausible ways the fictional Ethan Gage might have ended up near the heart of the biggest players of the era while everyone seems to be playing one side against the other. This book is a great stand-alone read and I highly recommend it for your reading list. But for maximum fun invest in starting at the beginning (after all, with the age of the internet nothing is really ever out of print) and read them all. You can thank me later.

The Barbed Crown

By William Dietrich ©2013

HarperCollins       ISBN 978-0-06-219407-7

Now let’s leap forward a century and half a world away from Napoleon to the Age of Electricity, shall we?

Capacity for Murder is the third installment of the Professor Bradshaw Mysteries by Bernadette Pajer. An electrical engineering professor at the University of Washington in frontier Seattle, Bradshaw is introduced in The Spark of Death enmeshed in defending himself against a charge of murder in the electrocution death of a flamboyant colleague. In an era of titanic egos and society-changing advances in technology, his effort to prove his innocence eventually lead to a consulting detective role in Fatal Induction. This hobby of a sort expands in Capacity for Murder, and the sometimes absent-minded, occasionally OCD and always proper professor is summoned to the distant ocean beaches of western Washington. Beyond the reach of railroads or even much in the way of roads, his task is to unravel the cause of the accidental frying of a patient at a health spa sanatorium. Or is it an accident?

Trying to balance a romance not acted upon, his engineering students along for the journey and a cast of characters as rich as they are quirky, Bradshaw goes from being the central investigator to a dismissed "we'll call if we need you" persona non grata. But when big city law enforcement arrives he perseveres when he sees the investigation headed in the wrong direction and nearly gets himself killed in the process.

This is an homage to the ‘closed room’ style mystery-as much a how dunnit as a who dunnit-in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie. Having been reviewed and receiving the Washington Academy of Sciences seal for scientific accuracy, this book and the series are just plain great fun to read, without a single static moment. Chock full of early Seattle, science and sparks in the age of Tesla. Read the series if you can, or Capacity for Murder if you can’t. You’ll get a charge out of them! (Ohm dear, I have punned. Resistance is futile.)

Capacity for Murder

By Bernadette Pajer    ©2013

Poison PenPress    ISBN  9781464201288

Occasionally I have the excellent good fortune to review a writer early in what promises to be a gifted career. Such a writer is Laurie Frankel. Goodbye for Now is a wholly original and yet somehow inevitable novel that charts the intersection of life, love, death and technology. If you could talk to your DOL (departed loved one) one more time, would you? How about ten times? Perhaps you could with a genius programmer, his beloved girlfriend (found with just the right programming algorithm in a dating service), and her unexpectedly and suddenly deceased grandmother at the center of this wondrous book.

At times funny and heartwarming, at times heart wrenching and through some mystical alchemy sometimes both at the same time, Goodbye for Now is a polished gem of prose really deserving a wide audience. Sometime in the future, maybe, just maybe, a long-departed great-great-grandpa will be giving fly fishing tips to generations he never lived to see because Laurie Frankel wrote this novel. For me this was one of those standing on my chair cheering reads that instantly made my must-read list for this year.

Goodbye for Now

By LaurieFrankel  ©2012

Anchor Books   ISBN 978-0-307-95127-4

Disclaimer notice. Each of these books was purchased at full retail price before review and while the authors are known to me, if the work wasn't good, it wouldn't be on my blog.

Forget me not. Excuse me, who are you?

Every reader has a special author whose work they admire, cherish even. Someone that reaches into their soul, throwing open the doors and windows to allow the light and fresh air to fill up the dark spaces. For me, one of those authors is Jennie Shortridge. Her latest novel, Love Water Memory is about a journey. A trek of reawakening for Lucie Walker who doesn't know how she got knee deep in the cold, swirling waters of San Francisco Bay, where she is from, or who she might be. Or who anyone else might be, including a purported fiance' coming to get her from Seattle. Dissociative fugue; amnesia. Perhaps an emotional trauma. Perhaps she might get better-eventually. Perhaps she'll remember. A world suddenly full of blanks spaces and faces with whom she shares a past she can't recall. This book is a rich, haunting story examining the very essence of what it is to be when you don't know who you are. How do you find your way home when every path leads to a blank wall? This novel illuminates how we rediscover love in the heart when the mind has lost its way. Finely crafted, emotionally charged yet patient and redemptive, this is another gem. Thanks, Jennie, you are a joy to read. To read my review of her previous book When She Flew, click on the title.

Love Water Memory by Jennie Shortridge
Gallery Books
ISBN 978-1-4516-8483-4
ISBN 978-1-4516-8483-8 (ebook)

Searching for Headroom

" '...You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!'

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens 

When writing went from a pastime to a serious endeavor as a novelist, so too went the fantasies of writing the Great American Novel, becoming a NY Times #1 bestseller, earning millions and getting a seven figure deal for the movie rights. Yes, that was a letdown, to be sure, but in my heart I knew I was writing because I wanted to. I enjoyed the research, the work, the late hours letting my imagination conjure people, places and plots. I was having fun. Of late I haven't been having much fun.

The problem is writer's block, but not the kind you are led to imagine is the dark despair of a dearth of ideas. Most writers have more ideas than they will live long enough to commit to keyboard, monitor and hard drive (more modern than paper, you know).  No, the blockage is much more prosaic. It is ordinary life. The things we all have to do. Earn a living, take care of our obligations, spending time with family and friends. These all take time, energy and increasingly a piece of my soul. Which brings me to my Dickens quote.

The actual muse that drives each artist is as individual as a fingerprint, and it occurred to me last Christmas, as I watched George C. Scott deliver those famous words as Scrooge to Marley's ghost, that Dickens could have been describing the creative act. It doesn't take much to upset the applecart, so to speak. Sitting at a keyboard, of course, is the first task, and comes highly recommended from experienced writers, but in and of itself is pretty useless.

I also need a clear head. One that isn't jammed with the detritus of the day, demanding my time, disrupting my process. As they say, messin' with my head. I haven't been able to find that place recently and as a result I lose the momentum of the story. I used to dream in character dialogue and plot lines. Now I dream about elder care and medical procedures and mortgage payments and dinner menus. This is not helpful in finding the way back to the keyboard for something other than Facebook debates on politics or Tweets about where I might be having dinner, perhaps the source of that undigested bit of beef.

And that's really the thing here. Petty annoyances accumulate to create disruption and dyspepsia of my muse. It's really bothersome, too. My writing should be where I find my solace and diversion and when that element is missing it manifests as a cantankerous attitude (well, more pronounced than usual, at any rate), and a sort of irritability whose source can't quite be pinpointed and an amplitude that can't quite be quantified. 

Now this is the point where the reader would expect despair to win, and read an announcement that I was leaving my writing behind to devote more time to other things. You would be wrong. This is actually where I tell you that I draw inspiration from my friends and colleagues who know exactly what this place looks and feels like, yet manage to forge ahead in spite of the challenges. Friends like Jennie Shortridge, who just launched her latest book Love Water Memory, and Robert Dugoni who actually had to tell his law firm that he was a writer first (and a damn fine one), and a lawyer part-time. William Dietrich whose work ethic and finely honed skills as a writer set a standard to which I aspire, Kevin O'Brien who has carved a niche in the thriller genre to be envied and Garth Stein who actually got that brass ring. All these writers and many more whom I know and respect show me that the trick is not in being beset by daily life, but inspired by it.

Now comes the transition. The moment when I actually sit at the keyboard and create new worlds and characters. Now is when the beef, the mustard, the potato, cheese and the gravy come together to make a meal. And sometimes just musing on a blog will kick start the process. So to all my patient and long suffering readers, thanks for lending me a moment as my collective of silent shrinks. I'll try not to waste your time. 

Pardon me for the interruption, I need to get back to work. 

When I was God

 Writing fiction is black magic. As an author it’s an intoxicating power to live entirely in a realm of your own creation, populated by people, places, times and situations that exist or vanish at your whim from a position of omnipotence. Being a fiction writer is being God—at least in your own mind—until you aren’t.

When the real world intrudes, suddenly your God-like status becomes servant to the mundane. Taking out the garbage, doing the dishes, paying the bills, laundry, pets, kids, significant others, bosses, car repairs. A magnum share of mediocrity hammering down on our Demi-godness. Is it any wonder so many of us practicing this dark art are viewed as eccentric, vainglorious, irrational or just plain odd?

When writers hit a ‘zone’ where the words flow effortlessly like water over a falls, dialogue filling our heads faster than our fingers can fly across the keyboard, plot lines converging and resolving in a glorious headlong rush of excitement, it is exhilarating, exhausting and completely absorbing. It is euphoric, like perfect chocolate, or sex so good you forget where you are.

When it goes away; when the voices are thrummed silent by the real world and the plots become a shoebox of notes stuffed under a bed or in the bottom of a desk drawer it is dispiriting, depressing even. Our absence from creation weighs heavily. We drift in a purgatory that seems never ending, carrying us further from the wellspring of inspiration and depositing us where we least wish to be, desperately searching for a magical reset button so that we can begin anew. Writers tell tales of gladness or sadness, of demons and deities, of extraordinary circumstances populated by ordinary people or super beings vanquishing implacable foes. It is our therapy, our muse, our obsession and our most unrelenting taskmaster. In a word, for us it is life: Life as real to us as it is unreal to those around us not tormented by our curious obsession.

A vanishingly small number of fiction writers actually make a living at the craft. Fewer still ever reach that brass ring of riches. Billions, maybe trillions, maybe more, words flow out, some of them very good that never finds an audience. Yet in the end that isn’t what really matters for most of us scribbling away in obscurity. What matters is that for a while we live among the gods, and if we somehow manage to get published we achieve a tiny sliver of immortality wherein someone, an eon after we are dust, might stumble across a timeworn volume of our work in an obscure old curiosity shop and begin to read our words. If we were good, they will find themselves inhabiting a world of our creation, a world where we were gods.