New Story, A Rejection, Trump's Georgia Indictment, Muncie Cold Cases, Weirdness, Sinead O'Connor

 I had much of “Their Bright Future” written on Monday night. I wrote a bit more in the morning. Things were going good, except I needed to get to work. I chomped at the bit to get back to the story during work. We worked until 1:30. It looked like I would not get home until three, but the #12 bus was on time and I barely caught the #5 and got here around 2:30. I had to tend with email and Firefox crashing, so I did not get back to the story until around 3:30. I finished around 8. I did something I ought now with the diet, but which I did when I was in prison, I got a pint of ice cream from McClure's. I feel like I have finally written a good short story. The plot is the same as what I wrote in prison, the conclusion is different, and the narration is also different.

It is based on the death of my great-aunt Grace, and for the record the story raised some questions about the history for which I have no information, only curiosity:

1. How did the family get Grace's body back to Versailles?
2. How did they get her belongs back?
3. How could they afford to get her back to Versailles?

And I got another rejection:

Thank you for sending “Road Tripping.” After careful consideration, we've decided this submission isn't right for AGNI. Our reading periods run from September 1st through May 31st.

Kind regards, The Editors

P.S. If you'd like to subscribe to the magazine, click here and enter code SEM18 for a discounted subscription rate offered as a thank-you to our submitters: http://agnionline.bu.edu/subscribe.

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I got an email from Pete Tengardy, he is still writing. This is a good thing. In the prison writing groups, he struck me as better than me.

 Items from the news and email:

 Kansas newspaper police raid: co-owner dies after becoming ‘stressed beyond her limits’ and Who was Joan Meyer? Kansas paper co-owner who rebuked police raid as ‘Hitler tactics’ – and died a day later –  this is disgusting.

The Trump Indictment – no, I have not had time to read it – The charges against Trump and allies in Fulton county – full text of indictment.

 From CrimeReads, Muncie: Cold Cases: Grief Has No Expiration; Keith Roysdon on murder, Muncie, and what it means to work a cold case. 

That’s why we made a conscious effort to center the victims and their families for our book. We’d written about almost all the cases in the book over the years, in a series of articles for The Star Press newspaper in Muncie, Indiana. Because of a 1929 sociological study, Muncie, home of Garfield the cartoon cat and the university where David Letterman went to school, has long been considered the typical small American city.

It’s also a place with a high number of murders, including cold cases, over the decades. In the series of cold case articles, Walker and I had written about nearly three dozen unsolved murders, some dating back many years.

Almost all those cold cases had one thing in common: Surviving family members and friends who missed and mourned the person who was killed, and who still wanted justice.

Cold cases are shockingly common in the United States. The national murder clearance rate, the percentage of homicides that are solved, has over the years fallen to only about 50 percent, CBS News reported in 2022.

In writing about unsolved murders in our community, we found some that were still well-remembered – we wrote our third book, “The Westside Park Murders,” about the infamous 1985 slayings of two teenagers – and some are barely remembered. Over the years, we found, local police departments had lost or thrown away many murder case files. Others were ostensibly destroyed by flooding from broken pipes in police storage rooms. In many instances, the police investigators who originally worked the cases had long since retired or had died. Some family members had died, leaving no one to mourn or call for justice.

The Weird: World-Wide Weird: Scott McLemee looks ahead to some ‘promisingly weird’ books from university presses due out this fall. 

Today, I need to get to the sheriff's and then to Ball State to renew my Christopher Marlowe books. Of them I finished Honan's Christopher Marlowe. I found it well-written, thoughtful as it adduced and judged evidence; a bit of a different Marlowe emerges – not quite the daredevil, hellraiser. I think the Independent's review hits the nail on the head:

By heaven, this is an excellent, necessary and hugely welcome book. Though it responsibly synthesises previous scholarship, brings new perspectives and enlivens old, its greatest achievement is this: it presents a Marlowe that the sane can live with. The work is a corrective to decades of semi-fictional, fictional and downright preposterous authorial posturings over the Elizabethan marvellous boy.

To ground in what is known, and to refuse fantasy and excess, however, is not to impoverish the reader's encounter with this active man. The fact is richer than the fancy, and Honan's approach is based in his assessment of Marlowe as "not a romantic, but a questing realist". Neither is this hagiography: Honan's words, chosen with fierce and precise care, sometimes have wider applications. Marlowe's life "has something to tell us about living with endemic, provocative faults, as well as about gaiety, audacity, elated persistence".

It has been cold (well, it has been in the 60s), gloomy breezy, drizzly here. This does not feel like August. Tonight, no fiction, but I have work to do here.

‘She spoke truth to power, always’: Sinéad O’Connor’s affinity with Black music – and liberation 

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