Frightening off the aliens

A READER who signs himself “Still Waiting” wants to know if my friend ever finished the science fiction novel he was writing. I’m afraid not. That was about six years ago, and he hasn’t added a word to it since. He says it’s writer’s block, but I think it’s woman trouble. You can’t write science fiction if you’re having woman trouble.

But never mind that. He says you can claim the beginning and finish it yourself if you want. Anyone is welcome to give it a go. So here it is once again:

In the opening chapter, aliens in a low-flying spacecraft spot a yacht at sea.

“What is it?” asks 1!@#.

“I don’t know,” says 2$%^. “But it has life. It flies. It swims.”

“It is a bird – it has wings in the air.”

“But it does not fly. It must be a fish — it has fins in the water.”

“But it does not dive,” 1!@# points out.

“Look, it has two large parasites. They have four limbs each. One is in its stomach, devouring something,” says 2$%^. “Another is outside and torturing it by pulling hard on its wings with strong winches. Now he twists its back fin with a large wheel.”

“Don’t get too close,” warns 1!@#. “Those parasites look dangerous to me.”

“Me, too,” says 2$%^. “We’re outta here.”

Well, it’s quite a promising start, I think, though I find those alien names a little difficult to pronounce. I would be interested to see how somebody develops the theme. I think maybe my friend was going to blame yachtsmen for Earthlings’ lack of contact with aliens, but I’m not sure. Like most writers, he didn’t care to talk about where he was going with this book, mostly because he didn’t know.

He was actually going to write a factual book called In the Wake of Ulysses but he was a little slow. He woke up too late, and that great sailor Hal Roth beat him to it with We Followed Odysseus. So he decided to write fiction instead, reckoning that nobody could beat him to that.

Anyway, what with woman trouble and all, he got stuck. Permanently, it seems. He did what writers always do: he stared at the computer screen and waited for inspiration.

Been there, done that. Do that regularly, in fact. It’s hell, but somebody has to do it.

Today’s Thought

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, between it and true art.

— Truman Capote

Tailpiece

“I hear your new car was recalled by the dealer.”

“Yeah, there was a defect in my bank account.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for another  Mainly about Boats column.)

Writing for sailing magazines

NOW AND THEN someone asks me how to write for sailing magazines. And I reply: “Frequently, and without hope.”

Frequently, because they often ignore or lose unsolicited articles. And without hope because most beginners fail to understand what a particular magazine is looking for.

If I may say so without boasting, I have written for many of the biggest sailing magazines, and I’ve worked as managing editor of a nationally circulated  powerboat magazine, so I have labored on both sides of the aisle.

As a professional writer, trying to earn an honest penny, I have been ignored by the best of them. Even if they’ve published you before, even if you’re well known, it makes no difference. Both Sail magazine and Cruising World have taken more than a year to reply to proposals or articles I submitted. One day, I guess, in an emergency, they shuffled through the slush pile to find something usable, and accidentally came across my stuff. There was rarely an apology or an explanation. Just some mumbling in the background about my submission “falling through the cracks.” Again.

When I became a managing editor myself, I made it my business never to keep a writer waiting longer than one week for a decision. I may not have been a good editor, but I was very popular with my writers.

One day I’ll tell you the best way to go about writing for sailing magazines, but meanwhile, if you are serious about earning money by writing articles, I’d suggest you find a more lucrative field than sailing. Almost any subject from gardening to gangrene will find you a wider audience and better compensation. You’d be better off writing about herbaceous borders. Or babies. Or knitting. Anything but sailing.

Today’s Thought

With pen and pencil we’re learning to say

Nothing, more cleverly, every day.

--William Allingham, Blackberries

Tailpiece

“What caused the fire on Fred’s yacht?”

“The investigator said it was spontaneous combustion — a $20,000 policy on a $10,000 boat.”

Hunting and pecking for a living

ONCE IN A WHILE somebody will ask me how many words I have written during my career as a professional writer. I can honestly say I don’t know. Millions, certainly. Maybe even millions of millions. But I don’t know. Only amateurs count the words.

For 20 years I wrote a 1,000-word newspaper column six days a week. I seem to remember that came to about 5,000 columns. At the same time I wrote editorials for seven years. That’s somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 editorials. Then I wrote editorials full-time for another paper for two years, six a week. That’s an extra 600 or so.  

Then I wrote books about boats. Twelve or so were accepted by publishers. Three or four never did find a home. In between, I wrote articles for magazines. I never kept count of them, but there were certainly scores, possibly hundreds. And these days I write columns for my blog. I’ve done more than 900 so far. So what I say to the people who ask is “Go ahead, you do the math.”

The second thing they ask is why I never learned to touch-type. They see me hunting and pecking at the keyboard and jump to the conclusion that I was never taught properly. Well I was, as a matter of fact.

One of the subjects we studied at journalists’ college was touch-typing. We were all young men, then, of course. Women newspaper reporters were very rare at that time. I don’t think our editors trusted them to know what news was. We certainly didn’t have any women cub reporters at our college.

We took lessons in typing from a rather nice middle-aged lady who wore a resigned look on her face. She knew what would happen. She knew the young male reporters bursting with testosterone and awash with hormones would never want to be seen touch-typing in the newsroom like a bunch of fairies. Real reporters pounded their typewriters with two fingers and swore at the keys when they got stuck.

We didn’t actually wear fedoras and trench coats, and we all did pass our typing exams because we had to, to keep our jobs, but as soon as we got back to our respective newspaper offices we all abandoned touch-typing and regressed to manly hunting and pecking.

For one thing, it made our stories more concise, which endeared us to the copy editors. They had great power over us. They could change our spelling and our grammar and cuss us out in front of everybody. We were very scared of the copy editors.

The other thing about two-finger typing was that it slowed down the communication between the brain and the fingertips. That was a good thing because it gave you a chance to criticize your writing. When we did eventually get a woman in the reporters’ room she was hated by the copy editors because her stories were always three times as long as they needed to be, and filled with useless twiddly-bits, as if she were chatting idly to her next-door neighbor.

The problem, as we figured it out, was that she was a star touch-typist. She typed at the speed of a blazing comet. She didn’t have to think about where to find the m or the n or remember when to hit the caps lock or anything. Her fingers flew to each hidden key surely and automatically, and there was nothing to stop the steady stream of words from her brain flowing straight out of her fingertips, no time to assess the true sense of the words that flowed like Niagara out of her typewriter, no chance to do a modicum of self-editing as she wrote.

In the press club bar in the evening, the poor copy editors who had the dreaded task of cutting her copy down to size would order large whiskies with shaking hands and we young-blood male reporters would shake our heads solemnly and commiserate with them. We actually bought them drinks when we could afford it. It was always a good thing to keep in with the copy editors.

I still hunt and peck. I am still an atrocious typist. But what the heck. Who cares? I don’t have to worry about copy editors any more. And, glory be, the keys don’t get stuck together now, either.

Today’s Thought

He wrote for certain papers which, as everybody knows,

Is worse than serving in a shop or scaring off the crows.

— Rudyard Kipling

Tailpiece

There was an old lady of Worcester

Who was often annoyed by a rorcester.

She cut off his head

Until he was dead,

And now he don’t crow like he yorcester.

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

How I wrote a kids' book

A FRIEND WHO ASPIRES to become a writer, bless her misguided soul, asked me the other day how it was that I came to write a children’s novel called Danger, Dolphins & Ginger Beer. It was all about sailing.

“How did you get the idea?” she wanted to know.

Well, I told her, I had been a writer almost all my working life, but I’d never written a children’s book. I had been a newspaper journalist, a common hack writing the usual news stories and, later, writing a daily humor column.  But it occurred to me one day that a good journalist ought to be able to write just about anything, so I decided to write an adventure novel for kids.  I had one big advantage to start with — I knew where the action would take place. My family and I had sailed our own boat in the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea.

There we saw a beautiful little island in Virgin Gorda Sound. On the chart it was called Mosquito Island. It had white sandy beaches and dark green palm trees rustling gently in the sweet-smelling trade winds. And, very importantly, it was just the right size for kids to have an adventure on.

Now this is a very romantic part of the world. It’s just a few miles from the island that Robert Louis Stevenson called Treasure Island in his famous book, and even closer to an island called Dead Man’s Chest, where 15 mutineers were stranded with no food and one bottle of rum, yo-ho-ho!

It didn’t take me long to write the book, and I thought I was very smart.  But when I sent it off to the publisher, my editor there wasn’t happy. She made me rewrite the whole book and add new characters — a pair of twins — to complicate the plot.

I’d started the book with the youngest character, Andy, sitting on a hill, acting as a lookout and guarding the camp on Crab Island. “Wrong,” said my editor, “in a children’s novel you must introduce the main character immediately, and the main character is Sally.” So I changed the beginning to Sally sailing back to the island in a small dinghy. I still don’t like my editor’s finished version as much as my original, but if you want to get a book printed you have to do what the editor says, whether the editor is right or wrong.  

I discovered, rather belatedly, that children’s novels are subject to all sorts of strict rules. They’re not at all easier to write than adult novels. Kids are very clever and they know the difference between a good book and a bad one.

My biggest challenge was to prevent little Andy from taking over the book — he’s such a bouncy, appealing character and he wants to be everywhere, doing everything, all the time.

Percy the pelican, and the little bird who sits on his head when he’s fishing, are real characters, though. We saw scores of them on Crab Island and laughed every time a pelican dived at full speed into the shallow surf with a big whoosh of rumpled feathers and that huge beak wide open to scoop up little fish. I could never understand why they didn’t break their necks.

Scorpion Island is real too, but its name on the nautical charts is Anegada. The book’s main character, Sally, is no-one in real life that I know of.  She’s a different sort of main character from most. She’s not flashy, not a show-off. She doesn’t draw attention to herself or demand praise. She’s quiet and thoughtful and loving and brave and resourceful. I think if I were a girl, I’d like to be Sally.

Danger, Dolphins & Ginger Beer was first published by Simon & Schuster in New York and for about 10 years it was used as a school textbook in various parts of America. It was also in libraries all over the country, of course, and it was translated into German and published in Hamburg. It’s now out of print, but you can find used copies on the Internet. 

I have a large file filled with letters and pictures from schoolkids saying how much they enjoyed the book. But I’ve learned not to get too swollen-headed about that. I soon figured out that their teachers mostly made them write those letters to me as class exercises.

And then, flushed with success at having sold my first children’s novel (and having proved my theory that a good journalist could write anything), I promptly wrote two more. Alas, nobody in the publishing world wanted to publish them. Some people might surmise from this that some journalists are not quite as smart as they think themselves to be. But my theory is that some people just don’t recognize a good thing when they see it. Stupid publishers.

Today’s Thought

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, “To hell with you.”
— Saul Bellow, NY Times, 21 Jul 85

Tailpiece

One from the Walnut Street Gazeout (should be Gazette):
“How’s your husband doing with his drinking these days?”
“Much better. One bottle of beer puts him flat on his back now — if I aim it properly.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Writing about cruising

MANY WORLD CRUISERS, especially the younger ones, start sailing before they have enough money in the cruising kitty. So they’re always looking for ways to earn a dollar or two in a foreign port. Now and then somebody will ask me if it’s possible to write articles and books about cruising, to pay for a round-the-world trip. 

Well, it’s possible. A handful seem to manage it at any one time, but I’d say it’s next to impossible. Lin Pardey, one of the best known modern cruising authors, once told me she reckoned you’d need six or seven books in print before you could live off the proceeds.

If you write a book that sells for, say, $15 you’ll likely receive publisher’s royalties of about 10 percent. A boating best seller in the USA is generally taken to be one that sells 10,000 copies or more. So the most a new author is likely to make, over a number of years, is $15,000 a year. And remember, the field is very crowded with would-be authors willing to accept less than you, just to get their names in print.

Magazine articles are a total crapshoot. I have sent articles to two of the largest sailing magazines in the United States and waited more than a year for a reply. Even though I’m an established professional writer, and even though they’ve used my stuff before, my submissions went into the slush pile.

The payment magazines offer for an article of 2,000 words with pictures varies from $100 to $1,000, depending on the publication’s prestige, circulation, and bankroll.

If I were to set off cruising the world, I’d try to master in advance a marketable skill more likely to produce a cruising income.

Among these skills are the ability to repair diesel engines, fridges, watermakers, SSB and satellite radios, computers, and electronic instruments, together with general yacht repairs, deliveries, sailmaking and canvas work, and even varnishing. Fiberglass repair and rigging skills are always in demand. And here’s a skill not to overlook, says cruiser and author Don Casey — cutting hair for fellow  cruisers.

Today’s Thought

A month of days, a year of months, 20 years of months in the treadmill, is the life that slays everything worthy of the name of life.

— Roy Bedicheck, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist

Tailpiece

“My girlfriend thinks I'm a stalker."
"Say what? Your girlfriend thinks you’re a stalker?"
"Yeah, well, she's not actually my girlfriend yet."

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

 

 

 

The writing business

The 15-foot Albacore

I WAS THINKING the other day about mankind's most desperate desire. I was reminded that mankind's most compelling urge is not to make money, make war, or make your neighbor sick with jealousy over your new sit-on lawn mower. It's not to romance your boss's wife or make a million on eBay. Mankind's most urgent desire is to change what other people have written.

I know this because all my working life I have written words for money; and all my life a certain species of human called a copy editor has pounced upon those words with glee and changed them, willy-nilly, without justification, and for no good reason whatsoever.

It doesn't matter what you write, or whether you're an amateur or a professional, somebody always wants to change it. Somebody always knows better. Somebody is always ready to believe you're an idiot who never learned no grammer and can't spell no how.

It was with more than the usual trepidation, therefore, that I e-mailed my latest offering to Joshua Colvin, editor of a nice little magazine called Small Craft Advisor. I have to admit that Josh has always been kind to me. Unlike most other editors, he seems to be equipped with a heart. But this time I may have gone too far. I may have provoked him.

You see, one of the things an editor likes most is to be told how many words a forthcoming article will contain. This is so that he can estimate the space needed, and so plan a place for the article in his magazine. They're always planning, these people, and always having to re-plan at the last moment when their first plans don't work out.

My offering was a nice little story about a newly married couple here in Bellingham, Wash., who spent their honeymoon sailing and rowing to Alaska in an open, 15-foot Albacore racing dinghy. It took Michael Kleps, a practicing attorney, and his wife, Elizabeth MacDonald, a qualified commercial electrician, seven weeks to cruise the 900 miles to Juneau, sleeping almost every night among the bears and other wildlife in a small tent pitched on whatever wilderness spots of beach or rock they could manage to land on.

The trouble is that I told Josh rather brashly that I could squeeze the story into 1,000 words. We professionals are good at stuff like that. That's why we are professionals.

So I was at first astonished, then disbelieving, and then chagrined, when the little word-counter on my computer told me that the story had come out at 2,000 words, not 1,000. Of course, you can't rely on word-counters too much. They lie. I have often found that. So I counted the words myself. Er, yes. Two thousand. And no way could I shorten that article. Every word was golden, every phrase a gem. Nothing was wasted or repeated.

So now I know Josh will have to change it and squeeze 2,000 into the space he left for 1,000. The only thing that consoles me is the fact that this is a symbiotic relationship. It is the job of a writer to pour out everything he has learned. It is the job of the editor — nay, his primal urge, his greatest delight — to change everything, to slash and cut and purge like Attila the Hun, leaving bleeding nouns and wounded adjectives littered all over the countryside to die painful deaths.

This is how we live. This is how it has always been. Writers create. Editors slaughter. It's too terrible for words.

PS: The sweet little Albacore is for sale in Juneau, Alaska, for $500. She's ready for the return trip next summer. If you're interested, click on Comments below, leave a phone number or e-mail address, and I'll put you in touch. Your details won't be published.

Today's Thought

The reason why so few good books are written, is that so few who can write know anything.

— Bagehot, Literary Studies: Shakespeare

Tailpiece

Here’s a hint for beginning gardeners on how to distinguish weeds from proper plants:

Pull everything out. Those that come up again are weeds.

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

 

How to write a best-seller

I’M SURE YOU MUST HAVE WONDERED, as I often have, how to write a book good enough to win a Pulitzer prize. Well, wonder no more. I have the answer.

I have just read E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, published in 1993. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1994. I’m sorry it took me so long to get around the reading it, particularly as it deals with the two subjects I know best, boats and newspapers, but I have no reasonable excuse to offer. Anyway, here’s what I learned from E. Annie:

First you have to look up a lot of obscure little words that will impress the Pulitzer Prize committee with your knowledge of obscure little words. Here are some examples that E. Annie scattered around in her book: Ruvid, plangent, nacre, vetrid, thunge, drenty, sadiron, pelm, caliginous, strigil, and ichor. That’s just for starters. You need lots more than that.

Next you have to persuade your readers to suspend disbelief. There are those of us cynics who simply can’t believe that the main character, a non-swimmer, learned to swim in 15 seconds after his dinghy capsized in the remote freezing waters of Newfoundland and was rescued six hours later by his boss who just happened to be out fishing in his own skiff.

Equally, it would be hard to persuade us that another man, who was drowned, found, declared dead, and later placed in his coffin for the wake, woke up when his wife accidently stuck him with a pin, started coughing up water, and came back to life.

And then there was the man who had a farewell party that got so out of hand that a mob of his drunken friends took axes to his uninsured seagoing yacht in the harbor and actually sank it — and he didn’t mind. Didn’t mind. I ask you.

Furthermore, there’s this thing about knots that goes through the whole book. I have to admit that I believe Turk’s Heads bring good luck, but I simply can’t swallow the notion that knotted strings can cast witching spells, influence events, and foment bad occurrences.

So how you make your readers believe these things — or, at least not mind being told such big fibs? Well, it seems that you have to bombard them with facts.

E. Annie obviously did extensive research into Newfoundland fisheries, boatbuilding, weather, weak jokes, and the staggering incidence of incest and sexual assault in the region. And she never leaves out a fact she researched. Line after line of facts, real facts, whether they have anything to do with the plot or not. Well researched facts are plainly the things that earn Brownie points for pusillanimous Pulitzer wannabees. They cover up the pusillanimity, if you see what I mean. As far as the author is concerned, such lists of boring facts may well be no more than corroborative detail, intended to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative (as Mr. Gilbert put it) but they do serve very well the task of pulling the wool over the eyes of the Pulitzer prize committee, and I commend this strategy to you.

But wait. There is more. If you are writing a love story, as this is, you must be careful not to make your main characters too lovable. I presume the Pulitzer people must have become too jaded after reading so many love stories about curvaceous blonde bombshells and handsome, dashing, muscle men. (Oh, yeccchh!) E. Annie must have known this because she was careful to describe her hero (um, well, main character, anyway) as fat and dishevelled, with a hideous prognathous jaw — a man, moreover, of “cringing hesitancy.” And who was attracted to this timid tub of lard? A middle-aged woman with calloused hands, gray, mended dresses, and “taut thighs like Chinese bridges.” Holy cow. Chinese bridges?

Finally, here’s a hot tip from E. Annie: learn to write shorthand, diary style, in between the long lists of facts and lengthy paragraphs of dialogue. Leave out verbs and other important words, and let your readers make up their own sentences. Here’s what I mean:

“Saw her. The tall woman in the green slicker. Marching along ... A calm almost handsome face, ruddy hair ... Looked right at him.”

Well, that’s the most of it. That’s how you write a Pulitzer winner. There’s only one more thing. You also need to be a genius like Ms. Proulx. You have to understand human nature and the subtle relationships between people; and you need the skill to convey their emotions to your readers, especially the PP committee members who are struggling to see through the wool.

I’ll never win a Pulitzer prize, that’s quite certain, but there may be some of you out there who will benefit from my advice here, and that is sufficient reward for me. I wish you the best of luck.

Today’s Thought
Excellence is the perfect excuse. Do it well, and it little matters what.
— R. W. Emerson

Boaters’ Rules of Thumb, #141
Diesel engine oil. The rule of thumb is that used oil from a diesel engine should be jet black, and no other color. If, after a few hours, it is brown, milky, or some other color, seek expert advice as soon as possible.

Tailpiece
“What’s that mark on your nose.”
“I get it from glasses.”
“Why don’t you try contacts?”
“They don’t hold enough beer.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Neither fowl nor fish

A FRIEND OF MINE is writing a science fiction novel. In the opening chapter, aliens in a low-flying spacecraft spot a yacht at sea.

“What is it?” asks 1!@#.
“I don’t know,” says 2$%^. “But it has life. It flies. It swims.”
“It is a bird – it has wings in the air.”
“But it does not fly. It must be a fish — it has fins in the water.”
“But it does not dive,” 1!@# points out.
“Look, it has two large parasites. They have four limbs each. One is in its stomach, devouring something,” says 2$%^. “Another is outside and torturing it by pulling hard on its wings with strong winches. Now he twists its back fin with a large wheel.”
“Don’t get too close,” warns 1!@#. “Those parasites look dangerous to me.”
“Me, too,” says 2$%^. “We’re outta here.”

This is as far as my friend has got with his novel. It’s quite a promising start, I think, though I find those alien names a little difficult to pronounce. I shall be interested to see how he develops his theme. I think he’s going to blame yachtsmen for Earthlings’ lack of contact with aliens, but I’m not sure. Like most writers, he doesn’t care to talk about where he’s going with this book, mostly because he doesn’t know yet.

He was actually going to write a factual book called In the Wake of Ulysses but he was a little slow. He woke up too late, and that great sailor Hal Roth beat him to it with We Followed Odysseus. So he decided to write fiction instead, reckoning that nobody could beat him to that.

And that’s where things stand at the moment. He’s stuck. He’s doing what writers always do, staring at the computer screen and waiting for inspiration. I wish him lots of luck. Been there, done that. Do that regularly, in fact. It’s hell, but somebody has to do it..

Today’s Thought
Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, between it and true art.
— Truman Capote

Boaters’ Rules of Thumb #61
Echo pilotage. Next time you’re feeling your way into port in dense fog, trying making a sharp, loud noise. A blank pistol shot is good, but a bell or a horn will also work. Note the time in seconds from the original signal to the return echo from a cliff, wharf, or moored freighter. Every second’s delay indicates a distance off of 1 cable or 200 yards. Every 10 seconds' delay means you’re a mile away. The rule of thumb at work here is that sound travels about one mile in 5 seconds.

Tailpiece
“I hear your new car was recalled by the dealer.”
“Yeah, there was a defect in my bank account.”

How to write for magazines

NOW AND THEN someone asks me how to write for sailing magazines. And I reply: “Frequently, and without hope.”

Frequently, because they often ignore or lose unsolicited articles. And without hope because most beginners fail to understand what a particular magazine is looking for.

I have written for many of the biggest sailing magazines, and I’ve worked as managing editor of a powerboat magazine, so I have labored on both sides of the aisle.

As a professional writer, trying to sell my wares, I have been ignored by the best of them. Even if they’ve published you before, even if you’re well known, it makes no difference. Both Sail magazine and Cruising World have taken more than a year to reply to proposals or articles I submitted. One day, I guess, in an emergency, they shuffled through the slush pile to find something usable, and accidentally came across my stuff. There was rarely an apology or an explanation. Just some mumbling in the background about my submission “falling through the cracks.” Again.

When I became a managing editor myself, I made it my business never to keep a writer waiting longer than one week for a decision. I may not have been a good editor, but I was very popular with my writers.

One day I’ll tell you the best way to go about writing for sailing magazines, but meanwhile, if you are serious about earning money, I’d suggest you find another more lucrative field than sailing. Almost anything from gardening to gangrene will find you a wider audience and better compensation.

I must, of course, reveal that I am the copy-editor for Good Old Boat magazine, and I happen to know that the Editor, Karen Larson, will give you answers in considerably less than a year. Furthermore the magazine’s editorial requirements are listed on the website <www.goodoldboat.com>.

(But I still think you’d be better off writing about gardens. Or babies. Or knitting. Anything but sailing.)

Today’s Thought
With pen and pencil we’re learning to say
Nothing, more cleverly, every day.
--William Allingham, Blackberries

Tailpiece
“What caused the fire on Fred’s yacht?”
“The investigator said it was spontaneous combustion — a $20,000 policy on a $10,000 boat.”