Susannah Charleson Online

News

June '06-November '07

November '07--

So yesterday I leave Texas sweating beneath my jacket because it's humid and 82, only to arrive in Chicago where the wind's blowing and the temps are dropping, and I'm hauling luggage through the airport when I get buzzed by a message from my agent, who needs something turned around like ...now ... or a least in 24 hours, and I think -- 'k no sweat, I'll do it at the bed-and-breakfast, which has a data port.

Only my cabbie doesn't know the location I'm headed. I'm staying at a bed-and-breakfast in a monastery on a road the cabbie's never heard of, and these monks are a contemplative order, so though they have a very pretty website, they're not out there making a lot of public noise. They call their monastery a bastion of "Silence in the City", and perhaps that translates to invisibility too, because my cabbie Does Not Believe This Place Exists.

So I get on the phone and have a friend get directions off the pretty website on the Internet, directions I translate as frantic Here, Here, Here's and much pointing, one hand for direction and the other to italicize. And after a wild ride where we get honked 18 times and shot the finger a few times less, I arrive at the monastery. $42.00 plus tip poorer. The cabbie roars off to known places, shaking the dust of me off his accelerator, leaving me at the door of the church. Where I knock.

And knock.

And then I see the bell.

So I ring it.

I see a sign that suggests monks have been welcoming travelers for centuries and indicates that the Brother attending the door may have a long way to walk and to be patient. And so I am, standing there contemplating deeply spiritual things. Like the fact that I really need to go to the bathroom. I'm twitchy and clammy as I gaze at the bell. Cold plus full bladder creates a particular and poignant urgency to one's prayers. Try this and see!

About the time I'm about to start dancing, Brother A opens the door. He is without a doubt the Handsomest Man I Have Ever Seen. He shows me graciously into a front parlor and bids me wait for Brother [B], a sort of Assistant Guestmaster.

I wait. And look up at the lovely 19th-century crown molding. And wait. And wait. In the distance I think I hear a toilet flush, which seems cruel.

After a long while Brother [B] arrives. It turns out that the room I thought I was getting, a loft next to the chapel, was already booked, and I am to go in the little companion guesthouse next to the monastery. It's a large space -- a whole apartment really -- with a kitchen the size of mine at home. Brother [B] shows me through every corner of it, gives me a decorative history of the rooms, and mentions that the stove has an electric pilot light, so I won't need to use a match. We have passed the bathroom, elevated like a throne room relevant to the importance of its position (quite right!), but I am not quite able to excuse myself from Brother [B] to use it. He points out the coffeemaker and the tea kettle, and when I mention I love tea, he reaches for the kettle and I think:

Do NOT Run Water.

And perhaps I'm telepathic--or he is psychic--because to my relief he smiles and says perhaps I'd like to settle in before I have a cup, and I say yes and nod somewhat desperately.

As he's about to leave, I ask the location of the Data Port, and Brother [B] looks a little blank. The what?

The data port , I say, the Internet connection.

Oh, he says. I don't think this apartment has one.

I'm thinking of my agent and the deadline and begin sweating semi-colons, and so I start looking around the apartment until I find a phone. Brother [B] assures me that local calls are free.

And I think -- did I bring a phone cord? I did.

And I think -- do I still have AOL on my laptop? I do.

So okay -- I can jury-rig a connection with an old phone cord and dial-up AOL and fervently hope that it'll transfer 48 pages of text without timing out.

Now Brother [B] is curious about this data port, explaining that he's not very computer knowledgeable. So I try to explain data transfer and the virtues of high-speed over modem, and I make a Very Passable Imitation of a modem's nasal plainchant (ee-ohn-EE-ohn-EE-ohhhhnnnnn--aaaaaaaaack). With a smile and a bow, he says he understands a little, but he looks at me as though I said pull my finger.

He shows me there's food in the fridge, including some very nice cinnamon rolls, and he hands me the key and slips out the back door. I watch him pull up the hood of his robe and stride back to the monastery in time for afternoon prayers.

And I run to the bathroom.

And a little while later, I manage to connect to the Internet. And then I wrangle another cab and head to my conference in the city, where everyone smiles and pats my shoulder and says that I'm the smart one at conferences. I always avoid the conference hotels and manage to stay somewhere wonderful and quaint.

And I think you know, it is that. So I mention Brother [B] and the cinnamon rolls. And discreetly leave out the part about the bathroom.

And that's the truth.

Bless you.

September '07--

Lest I begin to believe search dogs are the only ones who use their noses to define a situation--past or present--the house Pomeranians remind me that they are fully capable of recognizing when Someone Who Is Not Their Own has been in the house. The cable guy was here today, and he spent a lot of time waving his hands in front of the television and twizzling with cords and mumbling under his breath, and though all the dogs were outside at the time, when he left (at 4:48, on the very back side of the sometime between noon and five timeframe), all the dogs rushed in to angrily inspect the places he had been in the house. It's always fascinating to watch the Golden and her little Pomeranian consorts literally scramble through the rooms, tracing the steps and transcribing the spaces where a stranger in the house has passed. It's a Keystone Cops sort of effect, their hurry, and when they make it to the front door and jump up to sniff at the doorknob, they all swear a little in Doggish, as though they'd chased him out, slammed the door, and shouted And STAY out! for good measure.

July '07 --
In the Encouraging Word category: Scent of the Missing won the 2007 Mayborn-UNT Press 2nd Place Nonfiction Prize for Literary Excellence in the manuscript category. The competition was part of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference of the Southwest, hosted by the University of North Texas and its Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism. A rigorous, worthy conference it is, too, with an excellent roster of panelists, presenters, and keynote speakers, as noted here.

June '07 --
Rain, rain, rain and more rain. After two years of drought, I can't begrudge Texas its wet transition from spring to summer, but we are all amazed here, a few of us staring upward like those urban legend turkeys who gawp at the rain until they drown.

Storms here, too. Weather reporting in real time has contributed a great deal to urban safety in the approach of storm. Have you seen weather.com's interactive maps? They allow users to track weather literally street-by-street as it moves across a given area. The lag-time between storm movement and satellite image is slight enough that the service is genuinely helpful.

Rural areas aren't so well-served. I think about those Texas families last year who lost everything in the middle of the night, living in areas so small or so remote that they had no Civil Defense sirens, no Internet, and with a loss of a transformer or two, no electricity for TV or radio, either. I regret our trend toward phones that need electrical support and wonder how many of these people also didn't have a usable phone or any other way to learn what was coming until it was gone, and their homes and lives with it.

***

Puzzle worked a series of scent discrimination searches one evening this month in the pouring rain. I was curious to see how the weather affected scent patterns -- thinking not only of the downward press but also the resulting rain drag and air moving upward (in addition to the lifting action already present during storm). Apparently there's not much effect! Both Puzzle and her colleague, a Belgian Malinois, seemed to have no trouble finding and identifying the correct scents in a heavy downpour. Being a Golden Retriever, Puzzle seemed to especially like searching while soaking wet. She shook herself liberally in the back of the Jeep and grinned at me, ready to do it again. And again. And again.

April '07 --
We've been trying to find a healthy snack that Puzzle and I can share while out in the search field. Search sectors often feature difficult terrain, and when we stop for a water break, sometimes both dog and handler need an energy boost. Since weight in the pack is at issue -- especially in summer when I carry double the amount of water for both of us, a friend recommended Endless Pawsibilities' Bow Wow Power Bars, and we have been trail testing them this summer. Good stuff! They pack well; Puzzle and I love them, and they feel like a healthy choice while on the job. Good energy without the sugar crash thirty minutes later. A SAR colleague in another state asked where to find them. Just click the woof!

February '07 --
Feb. 10: A friend gave me a big bag of fortune cookies. Every so often I take one and look at the dog closest to me and say,"This one's for you." Tonight, the cookie in question was for Puzzle. While she sat at my feet, I opened it up, and the fortune read: The day will come when you have to search no longer. Puz wasn't impressed. She ate the cookie. Quite fond of shredding paper, she tried to eat the fortune, too. She's not much on prescience, is the Golden.

Feb. 05: Thank you to Rochelle Lesser for promoting Scent of the Missing on the Land of PureGold Foundation website. For those who love and admire the Golden Retriever, this decade-old site provides the ultimate resource on all things Golden. The largest Golden Retriever website in the world, and at its heart -- a not-for-profit foundation supporting advances in cancer research and cure for this lovely breed.

Visit the Foundation here or the interactive forum site by clicking the banner below!

January '07 -- a write-up on Team Puzzle's appearance at Crimebake 2006, sponsored by the New England Chapter of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America, is now available online here. Scroll down to page 3.

November '06 -- Puzzle and I will be making a presentation at Crimebake 2006, hosted by the New England Chapter of Sisters in Crime and the New England Chapter of Mystery Writers of America in Lowell, MA. This lovely annual conference offers some of the best information on mystery and thriller writing (and reading) out there. See Crimebake website for more information (note: this link will update to the next year's conference every January).

October '06 -- author Michael Perry's new book is out: Truck: A Love Story. I love this author's work. Within just a short timeframe in 2005, while I was deep in a structural revision for Scent of the Missing, Perry's Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time was recommended to me by a fellow writer and, a week later, by a firefighter colleague of mine on a disaster response team. I need to take both friends to dinner as a thank you for the recommendation.
Speaking of dinner: a foster Great Dane, Hamlet, ate my first copy of Population 485. He thought it was a fine book, too. Here's what I wrote when I ordered another copy. See 08/06/2006 entry.

June '06 -- a love of Goldens, great products and some catchy copy. You can't go wrong with a Trust the Dog ballcap: fashionable and deeply relevant in any context! Sound like a plug? It is. Golden Gear does some good work in behalf of Golden Retriever rescue.


News June '06-November '07 November '07-- So yesterday I leave Texas sweating beneath my jacket because it's humid and 82, only to arrive in Chicago where the wind's blowing and the temps are dropping, and I'm hauling luggage through the airport when I get buzzed by a message from my agent, who needs something turned around like ...now ... or a least in 24 hours, and I think -- 'k no sweat, I'll do it at the bed-and-breakfast, which has a data port. Only my cabbie doesn't know the location I'm headed. I'm staying at a bed-and-breakfast in a monastery on a road the cabbie's never heard of, and these monks are a contemplative order, so though they have a very pretty website, they're not out there making a lot of public noise. They call their monastery a bastion of "Silence in the City", and perhaps that translates to invisibility too, because my cabbie Does Not Believe This Place Exists. So I get on the phone and have a friend get directions off the pretty website on the Internet, directions I translate as frantic Here, Here, Here's and much pointing, one hand for direction and the other to italicize. And after a wild ride where we get honked 18 times and shot the finger a few times less, I arrive at the monastery. $42.00 plus tip poorer. The cabbie roars off to known places, shaking the dust of me off his accelerator, leaving me at the door of the church. Where I knock. And knock. And knock. And then I see the bell. So I ring it. I see a sign that suggests monks have been welcoming travelers for centuries and indicates that the Brother attending the door may have a long way to walk and to be patient. And so I am, standing there contemplating deeply spiritual things. Like the fact that I really need to go to the bathroom. I'm twitchy and clammy as I gaze at the bell. Cold plus full bladder creates a particular and poignant urgency to one's prayers. Try this and see! About the time I'm about to start dancing, Brother A opens the door. He is without a doubt the Handsomest Man I Have Ever Seen. He shows me graciously into a front parlor and bids me wait for Brother [B], a sort of Assistant Guestmaster. I wait. And look up at the lovely 19th-century crown molding. And wait. And wait. In the distance I think I hear a toilet flush, which seems cruel. After a long while Brother [B] arrives. It turns out that the room I thought I was getting, a loft next to the chapel, was already booked, and I am to go in the little companion guesthouse next to the monastery. It's a large space -- a whole apartment really -- with a kitchen the size of mine at home. Brother [B] shows me through every corner of it, gives me a decorative history of the rooms, and mentions that the stove has an electric pilot light, so I won't need to use a match. We have passed the bathroom, elevated like a throne room relevant to the importance of its position (quite right!), but I am not quite able to excuse myself from Brother [B] to use it. He points out the coffeemaker and the tea kettle, and when I mention I love tea, he reaches for the kettle and I think: Do NOT Run Water. And perhaps I'm telepathic--or he is psychic--because to my relief he smiles and says perhaps I'd like to settle in before I have a cup, and I say yes and nod somewhat desperately. As he's about to leave, I ask the location of the Data Port, and Brother [B] looks a little blank. The what? The data port , I say, the Internet connection. Oh, he says. I don't think this apartment has one. I'm thinking of my agent and the deadline and begin sweating semi-colons, and so I start looking around the apartment until I find a phone. Brother [B] assures me that local calls are free. And I think -- did I bring a phone cord? I did. And I think -- do I still have AOL on my laptop? I do. So okay -- I can jury-rig a connection with an old phone cord and dial-up AOL and fervently hope that it'll transfer 48 pages of text without timing out. Now Brother [B] is curious about this data port, explaining that he's not very computer knowledgeable. So I try to explain data transfer and the virtues of high-speed over modem, and I make a Very Passable Imitation of a modem's nasal plainchant (ee-ohn-EE-ohn-EE-ohhhhnnnnn--aaaaaaaaack). With a smile and a bow, he says he understands a little, but he looks at me as though I said pull my finger. He shows me there's food in the fridge, including some very nice cinnamon rolls, and he hands me the key and slips out the back door. I watch him pull up the hood of his robe and stride back to the monastery in time for afternoon prayers. And I run to the bathroom. And a little while later, I manage to connect to the Internet. And then I wrangle another cab and head to my conference in the city, where everyone smiles and pats my shoulder and says that I'm the smart one at conferences. I always avoid the conference hotels and manage to stay somewhere wonderful and quaint. And I think you know, it is that. So I mention Brother [B] and the cinnamon rolls. And discreetly leave out the part about the bathroom. And that's the truth. Bless you. September '07-- Lest I begin to believe search dogs are the only ones who use their noses to define a situation--past or present--the house Pomeranians remind me that they are fully capable of recognizing when Someone Who Is Not Their Own has been in the house. The cable guy was here today, and he spent a lot of time waving his hands in front of the television and twizzling with cords and mumbling under his breath, and though all the dogs were outside at the time, when he left (at 4:48, on the very back side of the sometime between noon and five timeframe), all the dogs rushed in to angrily inspect the places he had been in the house. It's always fascinating to watch the Golden and her little Pomeranian consorts literally scramble through the rooms, tracing the steps and transcribing the spaces where a stranger in the house has passed. It's a Keystone Cops sort of effect, their hurry, and when they make it to the front door and jump up to sniff at the doorknob, they all swear a little in Doggish, as though they'd chased him out, slammed the door, and shouted And STAY out! for good measure. July '07 -- In the Encouraging Word category: Scent of the Missing won the 2007 Mayborn-UNT Press 2nd Place Nonfiction Prize for Literary Excellence in the manuscript category. The competition was part of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference of the Southwest, hosted by the University of North Texas and its Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism. A rigorous, worthy conference it is, too, with an excellent roster of panelists, presenters, and keynote speakers, as noted here. June '07 -- Rain, rain, rain and more rain. After two years of drought, I can't begrudge Texas its wet transition from spring to summer, but we are all amazed here, a few of us staring upward like those urban legend turkeys who gawp at the rain until they drown. Storms here, too. Weather reporting in real time has contributed a great deal to urban safety in the approach of storm. Have you seen weather.com's interactive maps? They allow users to track weather literally street-by-street as it moves across a given area. The lag-time between storm movement and satellite image is slight enough that the service is genuinely helpful. Rural areas aren't so well-served. I think about those Texas families last year who lost everything in the middle of the night, living in areas so small or so remote that they had no Civil Defense sirens, no Internet, and with a loss of a transformer or two, no electricity for TV or radio, either. I regret our trend toward phones that need electrical support and wonder how many of these people also didn't have a usable phone or any other way to learn what was coming until it was gone, and their homes and lives with it. * Puzzle worked a series of scent discrimination searches one evening this month in the pouring rain. I was curious to see how the weather affected scent patterns -- thinking not only of the downward press but also the resulting rain drag and air moving upward (in addition to the lifting action already present during storm). Apparently there's not much effect! Both Puzzle and her colleague, a Belgian Malinois, seemed to have no trouble finding and identifying the correct scents in a heavy downpour. Being a Golden Retriever, Puzzle seemed to especially like searching while soaking wet. She shook herself liberally in the back of the Jeep and grinned at me, ready to do it again. And again. And again. April '07 -- We've been trying to find a healthy snack that Puzzle and I can share while out in the search field. Search sectors often feature difficult terrain, and when we stop for a water break, sometimes both dog and handler need an energy boost. Since weight in the pack is at issue -- especially in summer when I carry double the amount of water for both of us, a friend recommended Endless Pawsibilities' Bow Wow Power Bars, and we have been trail testing them this summer. Good stuff! They pack well; Puzzle and I love them, and they feel like a healthy choice while on the job. Good energy without the sugar crash thirty minutes later. A SAR colleague in another state asked where to find them. Just click the woof! February '07** -- Feb. 10: A friend gave me a big bag of fortune cookies. Every so often I take one and look at the dog closest to me and say,"This one's for you." Tonight, the cookie in question was for Puzzle. While she sat at my feet, I opened it up, and the fortune read: The day will come when you have to search no longer. Puz wasn't impressed. She ate the cookie. Quite fond of shredding paper, she tried to eat the fortune, too. She's not much on prescience, is the Golden. Feb. 05: Thank you to Rochelle Lesser for promoting Scent of the Missing on the Land of PureGold Foundation website. For those who love and admire the Golden Retriever, this decade-old site provides the ultimate resource on all things Golden. The largest Golden Retriever website in the world, and at its heart -- a not-for-profit foundation supporting advances in cancer research and cure for this lovely breed. Visit the Foundation here or the interactive forum site by clicking the banner below! January '07 -- a write-up on Team Puzzle's appearance at Crimebake 2006, sponsored by the New England Chapter of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America, is now available online here. Scroll down to page 3. November '06 -- Puzzle and I will be making a presentation at Crimebake 2006, hosted by the New England Chapter of Sisters in Crime and the New England Chapter of Mystery Writers of America in Lowell, MA. This lovely annual conference offers some of the best information on mystery and thriller writing (and reading) out there. See Crimebake website for more information (note: this link will update to the next year's conference every January). October '06 -- author Michael Perry's new book is out: Truck: A Love Story. I love this author's work. Within just a short timeframe in 2005, while I was deep in a structural revision for Scent of the Missing, Perry's Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time was recommended to me by a fellow writer and, a week later, by a firefighter colleague of mine on a disaster response team. I need to take both friends to dinner as a thank you for the recommendation. Speaking of dinner: a foster Great Dane, Hamlet, ate my first copy of Population 485. He thought it was a fine book, too. Here's what I wrote when I ordered another copy. See 08/06/2006 entry. June '06 -- a love of Goldens, great products and some catchy copy. You can't go wrong with a Trust the Dog ballcap: fashionable and deeply relevant in any context! Sound like a plug? It is. Golden Gear does some good work in behalf of Golden Retriever rescue.