Welcome to the Pluckery

a newsletter of my writing, explorations, and adventures

Welcome to What Pluckery Is This? my newsletter about my writing, explorations, and adventures. If you’re receiving this, you subscribed to my writing newsletter or my Patreon.

First, some writing news. My latest short story will appear in Low Down Dirty Vote Volume 3, edited by Mysti Berry, a collection of election-inspired crime fiction. It’s the fourth Joey Cucuzza tale, if you enjoyed my Newark mob fixer in “The Cucuzza Curse,” “The Green Manalishi,” and “S.L.U.G.,” he returns, with his punky niece Nicky, in “Joey Cucuzza Loses His Election.”

As for books in general, I’m greatly enjoying Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, an apocalyptic novel that hits very close to home, but manages to pull it off without being a total downer about the whole “everyone’s dead” thing. Sort of The Seventh Seal meets Salute to the Jugger/The Blood of Heroes, I highly recommend it.

I also really liked Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, a crime novel set in ‘60s Harlem, starring the son of an infamous local heist man who tries to “break good,” but finds that he really is his father’s son. Whitehead is a big fan of the Parker novels and it shows, but does its own thing.

As for this year’s run of movies, I haven’t liked many. I did love CODA, short for Child of Deaf Adults, about Ruby, a hearing daughter of dead parents, who has been the family’s interpreter all her life. Now she’s in high school and wants a life of her own. It’s a very sweet drama that never rings false. The family runs a fishing boat out of Gloucester, and it’s so good that I thought it was a true-life story the whole time. It’s not. The story is based on a French film, and both are completely fictional. If you want something to cut the dread, this is the one.

Adventure-wise, I’ve been exploring the Pine Barrens on the weekends. There are a lot of ghost towns in the pines. Former bog iron colonies like Batsto, and other abandoned settlements. If you’ve never been there, it’s nothing like the Sopranos episode with Paulie and Christopher and The Russian; that was filmed in upstate New York. The barrens are mostly pine trees, on top of a fine white sand the locals call “sugar sand,” made by the Atlantic beating the Appalachian mountains into powder for millions of years. Below it is limestone, which creates “blue holes,” deep and dangerous lakes with an eerie bright blue color similar to the milky teal waters made by glacial silt in the far north. Here’s one that was rumored to be the Jersey Devil’s bathing spot, stained tea brown by the iron in the soil:

In the ‘30s, ghost town hunter and journalist Henry Charlton Beck claimed that “scientists tried to measure the depths with a cable and found it bottomless.” He was good at spinning a tall tale, but I didn’t dive in to find out. Swimmers drown in blue holes every year, because they are deceptively deep and very cold.

All my time in the pines inspired a creepy short story, which you can read below:

There Are Things in the Woods

Other stories in the archive include “Truth Comes Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind,” “88 Lines About .44 Magnums,” “Pope Lick Nuisance,” and more.

Eventually there will be interviews in the Lounge Pit, and more of Tommy Salami’s one minute book reviews, and you’ll be the first to see them.

I hope you enjoyed the new format of my newsletter. You can subscribe for free, and you’ll get a 7 day free trial of the paid subscription, which includes access to my short story archive, and weekly chapters of my next serial novel.