StanleyWheeler

A scene from one of my favorite movies, and in my opinion, Ridley Scott's best work. The Napoleonic wars provide the setting for this enigmatic story of a series of encounters between two officers of the hussars. It is based on Joseph Conrad's book The Duel, A Military Tale . My copy of the book was published in 1927; the copyright date is 1908. It is also my favorite of Conrad's works..but I've only read three or four of his books.  I wrote a short story or two set in the Napoleonic era (after reading Arthur Conan Doyle's The Glorious Hussar ), but they have all been lost...and weren't very good. The novel I had started years ago, set in the 1796 Italian Campaign, may be forever imprisoned on a defunct computer; I'm probably the only one who would have been interested in reading it. 

At least two of the women in my noir novel, and one of the women in Justice in Season suffer from chronic pulchritude. The terrible disease brings a great deal of unwanted attention to the afflicted. However, the malady confers distinct advantages upon the sufferer. The three characters capitalize on those advantages. They just need to remember that chronic conditions can become terminal. Although "pulchritude" sounds like a reference to some swollen, pus-filled wound, its meaning is quite the opposite--by which I do not mean a puckered, but healed hurt. Pulchritude refers to physical comeliness. The word comes from the Latin pulchr , - pulcher meaning, or referring to beauty. The protagonist in the noir novel, Noah Vale, also known as Duncan Kane, ponders the aforementioned affliction when he reads a passage from Charles Dickens'  Great Expectations ; it says,  “Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures, hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?”...

Wednesday night, Sleep capriciously refused to abscond with my conscious thought to the land of peaceful dreams. I rose from that bed of unrelenting wakefulness, and reserved tickets for a special event; I also added some hotel reservations. Sleep still maintained her discrete distance. What choice did I have? I turned to film noir. Detour - Edward G. Ulmer 1945 - staring Tom Neal and Ann Savage. Neal plays a man who is hitchhiking across the country to see his sweetheart; he finds misery packaged in a pale sweater and a dark skirt. (That's misery in the skirt, not Neal's character). Tom Neal makes a sympathetic character, but it's Ann Savage's performance as Vera that holds this otherwise forgettable film above of the waters of obscurity. As Vera, Ann is at her most savage. Nearly every time she opens her mouth, it's like having the jagged end of a broken bottle shoved into your guts; every phrase gives the bottle another painful twist. Vera is not just abr...

A friend who is reading The Orb told me that she is only three pages into the book and is already hooked; she can't wait to read more. I can't say what kept her from reading beyond the first three pages. Here is a 360 degree view of a location that figures prominently in the book.  Click on the street to see the 360 degree view.

Saturday I was able to devote some time to the noir novel. I think I've just about finished writing the cemetery scene. (I've never noticed until just now how similar the words "cemetery" and "symmetry" sound...obviously different...yet an eerie resemblance rests just beneath the surface...just like things rest beneath the surface of the cemetery. On second thought, they're not that much alike, aside from the consonant pattern. One has more syllables. Never mind.) Before I got distracted, I was about to write that in keeping with the noir theme, I viewed Fritz Lang's 1945 noir thriller, Scarlet Street . It starred Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea. Robinson and Duryea are among my favorites of the era. At one point in the film, Joan Bennett, pretending to be a painter, says, "The way I look at it, every painting, if it's any good, is a love affair." I thought that was the most interesting line spoken in this dark film. Th...

But fortunately, it doesn't usually leave a mark. Now that The Orb has been posted to Amazon, I'm free to resume the book that had possessed my thoughts even before I had even started writing it. I was about half way through Justice Resurgent , the sequel to Justice in Season , when I brushed up against an idea for a noir novel that stuck to me like a tar-baby. I wrote religiously (I think that means with consistent regularity...but it always makes me think of saying prayers and Gregorian chants--by use of the word, I mean the former, rather than the latter), and got about halfway through it. But I had to leave the noir novel temporarily to finish The Orb by the arbitrary deadline that I had given myself. The Orb was a work that I did by request. I felt obligated to complete it before the end of 2016. Anyone can write half a book. I can write the first half of multiple books at the same time. For me, the finishing of the book requires some devotion, some dedication, some c...

Here is the cover of my most recent publication. It is available on Amazon. Here is the link:  Finding-Jack-Book-One-The-Orb-ebook . I wrote it in short, episodic chapters. Most chapters are only about 1,000 words, although the latter chapters run significantly longer. The story takes place in a fictionalized version of a real town: Weiser, Idaho, and its alternate dimensional sister location of Shington.