This is about knowing your emotional limits, expressed as a history nerd metaphor. I wrote it as a paramedic, with EMS in mind, but it certainly can apply elsewhere.

I’ve been working on the ambulance for a quarter of a century. I’ve had Bad Days. Far more good days, but enough Bad Days to recognize my reaction.

I’m not going to delve into Bad Day stories, not really. I usually answer the question about “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?” with a deflection like “My paycheck.”

People ask that, but they don’t want to hear the real answers.

But the thing about the bad calls, is you push through and you do what you have to do, because you have to in the moment. And then , you feel numb. You function. People don’t even realize that you are off your game, but you are. And then some tiny, stupid annoyance happens and you lose your shit. What isn’t apparent, is that the bad calls use up your reserves. They leave you with no patience for the stupid little annoyance.

So, lets say –hypothetically, of course– you have to do CPR on a child in front of her mother on Christmas day. You don’t break down, because that’s simply not an option. You do what you have to do, and then you restock the truck and get ready to do it again. And you might seem fine.

But then–again, purely hypothetically– somebody might threaten to write you up for not sweeping up the backings from the EKG electrodes from the floor of the ambulance, and you – purely hypothetically, since you are a professional – grab them by the shirt and threaten to stab them.

This is considered poor workplace etiquette. It’s also why I spent my first decade in EMS getting fired every few years.

Because I didn’t hear the ping.

So, for the non WWII history buffs out there, the standard US service rifle, the M 1 Garand, was a semi automatic rifle with an eight round capacity, which gave an advantage over both the Germans and Japanese who had five rounds in a bolt action rifle. A distinctive feature of the Garand was that after you fired the last shot, it would eject the clip with an audible ping. So, when you heard that ping, your weapon was empty.

Once that happened, your primary way of dealing with threats was gone, and until you took a moment to reload, all you had were worse options.

For a long time, I just wasn’t attuned to that ping. I would miss it or ignore it and then when the next issue came up, it was Hand Grenade Time, or Bayonet O’Clock.

Which works as a metaphor, because my reactions tended to be explosive, indiscriminate, destructive, and dangerous to everybody in the vicinity, including myself.

I may be a slow learner, but over the past twenty five years, I have gotten better at knowing when I need to take a moment to reload before dealing with the next problem.

So do yourself and everyone around you a favor, and learn to listen for the ping.

 

I recently read “The Crystal Void” by John Houlihan.

This was a joy to read. If George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman series had an illegitimate child with HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu series, this would be it.

The main character, Captain d’Bois, relates his adventures in first person in an outrageous French accent and a sense of bombast and humor that is part Commander McBragg and part Pepe LePew.

There is action, horror and humor throughout.

Sit back and enjoy this Napoleonic Mythos mashup.

Recently I got a mediocre review of my pulp sword and sorcery book Broken Crossroads. In and of itself, that’s fine. I’ve survived worse, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and mediocre is better than scathing, so I’m not all that broken up.

But what did concern me was the problems the reader seemed to have. I always read the reviews, good and bad, and try to see what they had to say, and if that issue is something I want to work on. In this case, the things the reader didn’t like were staples of the old pulp sword and sorcery genre as it existed in the days of Leiber and Moorcock. The stories were episodic, the characters’ backgrounds didn’t invite big revelatory resolutions and complications later, opportunities for dramatic callbacks were missed.

I grew up reading the short, episodic tales of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric, Kane and Conan, and the formula was simple. Characters who can have an adventure, then another, without the need for callbacks or dramatic earth shattering changes to either the hero of the world. Adventures that can be read individually, out of order, with no single unifying thread, where the hero tends to reset between adventures, where jewels and riches won “slip through their fingers,” leaving them hungry and destitute for the next adventure, rather than buying a castle and retiring to the country. This is almost certainly the result of the fact that they began life in the old short fiction magazines, such as Weird Tales or Amazing Stories and not as full novels or even collected short stories, like they can be found today. Given the space restrictions and nature of the publication, it was necessary that a reader be able to jump into another adventure with their favorite swordsman or rogue or exiled sorcerer emperor outside an overarching narrative structure.

The closest modern analogy would be weekly detective procedurals, where our hero solves a new mystery every week, without the viewer needing to have seen last week’s episode. Sure there is generally a pilot that sets up the character, and occasional cliffhangers that will be resolved next season, but in general, you can catch and episode of Law & Order or Psych or Supernatural without really knowing or caring which season it’s from or what happened previously.

In fantasy literature today, that’s no longer the case. Even books and heroes which would seem to fit neatly into the old pulp genre, like Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series, or Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, both of which clearly show the influence of and affection for Raymond Chandler and Robert B Parker, have a clear story arc which transcends the individual novels, and the characters and world change with each installment. There is no reset to baseline in the old episodic tradition. Likewise Michael McClung’s Amra Thetys books, whose protagonist would be a clear descendant of the rogues of the pulps, quick of wit and of blade, ready to take on a corrupt city or a supernatural terror, follow a story arc.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t read these books. You should. You just shouldn’t read them out of order. The concept of a continuing story, one where characters and setting change and grow by their experiences is valid, and probably makes more sense and may well be arguably better from a pure literary standpoint. But I still miss the old pulps. I have a soft spot in my heart for the lighthearted adventure, swashbuckling derring do, and the comfort that whatever happened, those heroes would be back again,

When I wrote Broken Crossroads or rather, the first story with the characters who would come to inhabit that world, I wanted to write a short story. I wanted to write a love letter to Fritz Leiber’s heroes of Lankhmar. I wanted to create my own team of buddy rogues, who would loot temples, steal treasures, fight supernatural foes and cause headaches to the city watch, then squander their riches off the page between adventures and be ready for the next escapade.

Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s a reaction to the rise of Grimdark, sweeping multi volume epic fantasy, maybe I’ve just had enough realism over the past few years and want to write something light and entertaining. I do know it was a conscious choice to work in that style. And I plan to continue that particular series as the episodic adventures of two platonic buddy rogues who will fail to wisely invest their loot and need to take a new contract whenever I feel the urge to write another adventure for them.

The old pulps might be literary comfort food, but there are times when you’re not in the mood for a seven course tasting menu, but a bowl of mom’s mac and cheese would really hit the spot.

I’m ok with that.

If you are too, please feel free to check out Broken Crossroads, which is cheap on Kindle or free on Kindle Unlimited. If you want something meatier, read Brust or McClung. I won’t complain about that. I’ll just be over here with my mac and cheese.

I’m going to take a moment to talk about the recent murder of George Floyd, and how it’s part of a continued trend, and try to take a swipe at one of the pillars of the problem.

Pretty much everyone can agree that Floyd’s murder was beyond the pale. That it was deliberate and totally unjustified and the officer responsible should be punished. That’s not a radical opinion. Officer Chauvin has been fired and charged with murder, and those who stood by and did nothing while George Floyd died begging for his life on the sidewalk have also been fired, and will probably be charged. So that’s something.

But I doubt that would have happened without the video. The same with Ahmed Aubrey, where his murderers weren’t even charged until video surfaced. It seems that only when the public sees the murder first hand is there any chance that there will be consequences, and even then maybe not, as Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and Walter Scott’s cases demonstrate.

I could go on.

Sadly, I could go on.

But while nobody is denying there’s a problem, the excuse that I hear is that this is “not all police” and the work of “a few bad apples.”

I’m a paramedic. I’ve been in public safety for over two decades. I’ve worked in some rough cities, and worked closely with the police. I’ve definitely been protected by the police, and felt safer for their presence in certain circumstances. So I’m not anti-police. I just want accountability for the police

I know it’s not all cops. Anybody who is engaged in reasonable discourse knows it’s not all cops. It may very well be a minority of cops. A few bad apples.

But the rest of the saying about bad apples is that a few can spoil the bunch.

The problem won’t go away while the police shield the bad apples, make excuses for the bad apples, defend and cheer when bad apples are acquitted or fail to be indicted. As long as the establishment closes ranks and circles the wagons around the shitbags, they will continue to give the whole institution a bad name.

This is a tendency of organizations, to cover for their mistakes. But it makes them complicit. Just like the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts should have to answer for covering up the crimes of their people, so must the police.

If you truly want to claim that these “bad apples” don’t represent all cops, the whole organization needs to demonstrate that. We give tremendous power and authority to the police. We arm them and give them broad powers to detain and arrest people. But that power should come with responsibility. And part of that responsibility has to be the removal of those who would abuse that power.

If the police want to claim any integrity, they need to cut the cancer from their ranks.

Or those few bad apples will spoil the bunch.