All of that is true.  Jim, I have to note, has been good to me all the way back to the first novel I wrote, LINE OF VISION, back in 2000.  We didn’t know each other, but he was gracious enough to give me one of those coveted “blurbs” for the cover.  I wrote him a little note of thanks and hoped that Jim really did like the book as much as he had claimed in the blurb.  (Now that I know him better, I know that he never would have said it if he didn’t mean it.)

Anyway, when I was doing my tour of the New York bookstores that year, at least two of them said, “You’ll never guess who was just in here, talking about how great your book is.”  Jim was already a big name back then, and I was floored that he would spend the time to spread the word about an unknown author like me.  It told me two things about Jim:  One, as savvy a businessman as he is, he is also a true enthusiast of books; and two, he’s a really nice guy.

Obviously, I was very excited to have the chance to write a book with Jim.  I admit I was nervous, too.  We have different styles.  We both write thrillers but they’re different.  And we talked about that up front.  I recognized that, first and foremost, this was the James Patterson brand, and he was running the show.  I said to him, “It might take me some time to figure out how to co-write a James Patterson novel.”

And I’ll never forget what he said to me.  “We’re not writing a James Patterson novel.  We’re writing a James Patterson and David Ellis novel.”  That was about the nicest thing he could have said to me.

But make no mistake, GUILTY WIVES is right in line with the Patterson signature.  It is fast.  It is full of surprises and twists.  It is scary and graphic and disturbing and gut-wrenching.  At the right moments, it’s funny and sexy, too.  I can honestly say I’ve never had more fun as a writer.

So what did I learn from co-writing with the king of bestsellers?  I could go on for a long time, but all of the things I’ve learned could probably be distilled into a single sentence.

It’s all about the drama for the reader.

Readers want to go on a ride, so take them on one.  They want to be entertained, so entertain them.  They get boring and hum-drum all day long.  When they open your book, they want sparks flying.

Does that sound like an obvious statement?  Maybe so, but a lot of authors forget that simple charge.  Jim Patterson doesn’t.

I always felt like Jim was doing more than collaborating with me on a novel.  He was trying to teach me, too.  And it was always about the reader.  It’s not about winning writing awards (though he has won plenty).  It’s not about how impressively you display all the research you’ve amassed.  It’s not about the number of syllables in your flowery description.  The only question is, how will the reader respond?  If it heightens the drama for the reader—because it makes you love the protagonist or hate the villain; because it scares the shit out of you; because it tears at your heart; because it turns your expectations upside down—then it belongs in the book.

Jim always preaches, never miss an every opportunity to maximize the drama.  Why speak quietly when you can shout?  Why quietly acquiesce to misfortune when you can lash out?  Why jab a finger when you can throw a punch?  Why throw a punch when you can engage in a high-speed shootout?  Why a soft kiss and not a sizzling romp in bed?  Turn. Up. The. Heat.  And then, when you’ve turned up the heat as high as you can—turn it up higher.

Beautiful prose is great, descriptive passages are wonderful—as long as the reader’s heartbeat doesn’t slow down.  It can be done, but it’s not as easy as it may sound.

Every single one of his famously short chapters has an exclamation point to it.  It’s wickedly funny.  It’s scary as hell.  It’s thrilling.  It’s heartbreaking.  Whatever—it’s something with a punch.  Always an exclamation point.  No chapter is ever boring.  The chapters are not short for the mere sake of being short.  They’re short because it forces the writer to pack that punch.  And then, before the reader has a chance to recover, there’s another punch when they turn the page.  It’s a means to the end of keeping the reader invested in the story.

I am completing another thriller with Jim, but I’m continuing to write my own novels, too.  And a funny thing happened along the way as I wrote THE WRONG MAN, the third novel in my Jason Kolarich series, which is out June 28.  I’ve started asking myself, What would Jim say?  How would he handle this?

It doesn’t mean I’m copying Jim’s style.  But he’s in my head.  And there are a lot worse things to have floating around your noggin than the influence of the top-selling author in the world.

We can debate whether election laws should impose residency requirements on candidates, like the one-year requirement that applies to the Chicago mayoral race and Rahm Emanuel.  Some would say, who cares if a candidate just recently moved to the jurisdiction—let the voters factor that in when they cast their ballots.  Others claim that a tangible connection to the locale should be a critical prerequisite to the right to run for elected office in that jurisdiction.

But public policy is for law schools.  When you run for office in Chicago, you put on your flak jacket.

Illinois law requires that a Chicago mayoral candidate must “reside in” Chicago for one year preceding the mayoral election.  The moment that Mr. Emanuel filed his candidacy papers, a stampede of challengers lined up to test his eligibility under this law.

Nobody really doubts that Mr. Emanuel is, in his heart, a Chicagoan.  He lived in Chicago and served in Congress from Chicago until January, 2009, when he resigned to become President Obama’s Chief of Staff.  And few people seriously contest that Mr. Emanuel intended to return to Chicago one day—after all, he’d said as much to friends, and he had leased, not sold, his Chicago home, where he continued to store many prized personal and family possessions.

To Mr. Emanuel’s legal team, those two facts essentially ended the debate.   Having a permanent residence plus an intent to return to that residence one day, they argued, was all that was necessary to satisfy the legal requirement that Mr. Emanuel “resided” in Chicago for one year prior to the mayoral election.  After a lengthy and rather chaotic evidentiary hearing involving many challengers to Mr. Emanuel’s candidacy, Chicago’s election board determined that Mr. Emanuel did, in fact, intend to return to his Chicago home and had not abandoned that residence.  Based on several court decisions dating back to the 1800s, held the election board, these facts were sufficient to allow Mr. Emanuel to run for mayor.

But a bitterly divided appellate court in Chicago saw the issue differently.  Mr. Emanuel’s intent to return to Chicago, held the 2-judge majority, was irrelevant.  The requirement to “reside in” Chicago for the year preceding the election meant to actually live in Chicago, which Mr. Emanuel obviously did not do.  Even more interestingly, the majority opinion compared statutes concerning residency requirements for voters against those for candidates—both of which statutes use a variation of the word “reside”—and found that Mr. Emanuel did have a “residence” in Chicago for the purpose of being qualified to vote in Chicago but did not “reside in” Chicago for the purpose of being a candidate.  In other words, the majority concluded that Mr. Emanuel is a qualified resident of Chicago to vote in the upcoming mayoral election but is not a qualified resident to run in that election.

Was the majority opinion correct?  It depends on whom you ask.  The majority opinion dove into great detail to support its position, while the stinging opinion of the dissenting judge complained that the majority was asking the wrong questions altogether.  Right or wrong, it is fair to say that the majority’s opinion was a novel interpretation of Illinois election law on the issue of candidate residency requirements.

Next up?  Emanuel’s lawyers are appealing to the Illinois Supreme Court and asking that court to stop the printing of the Chicago mayoral ballots—which at the moment would not include Mr. Emanuel’s name—until the high court resolves the issue.  The smart money says that the high court will take the case.  Given that this is the first “real” mayoral election in the state’s largest city in a generation, and with the eligibility of the prohibitive front-runner hanging in the balance, this case is probably too big for the high court to ignore.

But predicting the outcome of that appeal?  You might as well predict the weather in Chicago this April.

David Ellis, an award-winning novelist and former election lawyer, was the Impeachment Prosecutor who convicted Governor Rod Blagojevich before the Illinois Senate in 2009.  His new novel of political corruption, BREACH OF TRUST, is available for pre-order today.

But I want to hear from you, too.  So please give me your comments and together, we’ll conquer the world.   Or at least have some fun.

Beyond my opening post today, I’m including some posts I did with my friends at The Outfit, where I still contribute.  I highly recommend that blog, featuring a group of Chicago’s best mystery and thriller writers.  Many of those posts were focused more on the process of writing, but hopefully they will be interesting to one and all.

The truth is that I was writing this novel well before Blagojevich was arrested on December 9, 2008.  Here’s what happened.

I’ve been in my current position, as Chief Counsel to the Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, since the end of 2006.   For those two calendar years before the governor’s arrest, we were engaged in what was essentially a holy war with Blagojevich, whom we did not trust.  The battle took many forms over many fronts, but the long and short of it was that I had absolutely no time to work on my novels.  I’d fallen behind on my book-a-year schedule.  My publisher and literary agent wanted to know why.  I told them there was this crazy person running our state government with a name that was unknown and hard to pronounce—but that one day soon, the whole country would know.

Then write about him, my agent advised me.

So I started to write a novel about a governor who turns corrupt, and how it happens.  It was something of a character study.  It talked about what I considered to be pretty standard stuff in terms of political corruption—bribes and extortion and influence-peddling.  It wasn’t about Blago per se.  Frankly, while I believed him to be dishonest, I had little idea what he was actually up to.  We hardly ever met with him, given our lack of trust and our poisonous relationship, so I didn’t even really know the man on a personal level much at all.

Still, I thought the novel would be captivating and eye-opening.

That is, until December 9, 2008.

I was about 100 pages from completion of my novel and within earshot of my December 31 deadline.  The morning of December 9, I was getting ready for work when my sister-in-law from Dubuque, Iowa called our house.

Turn on the television, she said.  Your governor is in handcuffs.

The allegations gushed forth over the next hours.  Selling a U.S. Senate seat.  Extorting the Chicago Tribune.  Selling official actions for campaign contributions.

Even for those of us who had viewed Governor Blagojevich with a suspicious eye, this was jaw-dropping stuff.  More to the point, it completely dwarfed everything in my novel.

Truth had become stranger than my fiction.

Once the impeachment trial was over, I revisited the manuscript.  I knew that this novel would now be viewed as something written by the Impeachment Prosecutor.  There would be certain expectations.  I didn’t want to re-write the Blago story, of course—to me, fiction is no fun if you’re not making it up—but I couldn’t leave the book the way it was.

The result?  Well, it’s not the story of Blago, but you’ll see similarities.  If you read carefully (or even not so carefully), you’ll see plenty of differences, too.  And I can promise you that the ending will surprise you.

But I never thought it would be so hard for my fiction to compete with reality ….

I remember in my first novel, LINE OF VISION, I had a scene where my protagonist broke through the back door of someone’s house.  Except I didn’t know how to break through the back door of someone’s house.  So I wrote a placeholder, something like this:  “The lock came loose surprisingly easy.”  And I figured I’d go back and fill in some detail later.  But we didn’t have the internet back then and I didn’t know any burglars or cops, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to practice on somebody’s house, so I showed my first draft with that placeholder language, and every person reading that draft said that they didn’t notice, or care.  And I’d have to go back and check, but I’m pretty sure I left that placeholder in there.

I’m a lawyer and I write about the legal system, in one way or another, in every book.  So as a matter of professional pride, I want to get those details right.  But sometimes those details are inconvenient to my story.  So what did I do?  I created my own city, which of course most people recognize as Chicago, but still—it’s my own nameless city, in my own nameless state, so I can create whatever laws and whatever procedural rules I want, and nobody can say I got anything wrong.

Going too far?  Probably.  I could probably set the whole thing in Chicago, get a few of those details wrong, and nobody would care.  Certainly lawyers and cops have seen reality butchered enough on television that most of them wouldn’t bat an eye if one of my books played fast and loose with some criminal procedure.  In fact, I can only think of one television or movie set in a courtroom that came even remotely close to reality, and that was an excellent movie called The Music Box, about a Nazi war crime prosecution in Chicago.  (Trivia: the judge in the movie was played by a real federal judge from Chicago, and the same one who presided over the Blagojevich trial, Judge James Zagel.)

Right now, I’m co-authoring a novel and it’s set in France, and I just finished writing a prison escape.  I had one minor problem.  I’d never been to a French prison, much less escaped from one.  It paralyzed me for a while.  After I painstakingly detailed to my wife the various problems of writing this scene, she hit me with this—and this is not the first time she’s said this to me:  “Is anyone going to care other than you?”

I hate it when she says that.  But she was right.  And maybe that’s a good place to draw the line—to worry about reality when the reader is going to worry.  Will the reader care about the fact that I didn’t toll the Speedy Trial Act in my novel when the defendant pleaded insanity, when everybody knows that the Act is automatically tolled in such a case?  No.  Most normal, well-adjusted people probably don’t even know what the hell I just said.

Somebody was talking about John Grisham the other day, and I remembered something that bothered me about his novel The Pelican Brief.  You have this law student who has provided a theory on why two Supreme Court justices were just murdered; she submits her thesis in written form to the FBI; and what is the response by the evil villain, when he learns of it?  He blows up her car, obviously intending that she be inside it at the time.  Anyone have a problem with that?  My guess is no.  I did.  Maybe if you killed her before she submitted the document to the FBI, sure.  But once she had put that document into the hands of the federal government, what was the point of killing her?  Wouldn’t her death from an obviously organized hit—a car bomb—not automatically give credibility to her theory and point suspicion directly on the very person who was trying to cover up his role in murdering the judges?  I mean, really, is there anything more colossally stupid than assassinating the law student at that point?

If you think it through, I imagine most of you would agree with my logic.  But my wife’s voice returns to ask me that question:  “Did anyone care other than you?”  I’m pretty sure the answer is no.

I think you can categorize this stuff.  There’s real reality.  Like, a revolver doesn’t have a silencer, so if you write about a silencer on a revolver, you have objectively, completely misrepresented reality.  Then there’s reality like the Grisham example above, where there’s no objective truth, it’s just a subjective take on what is “realistic” and what isn’t.  Then we can break those things another way into my wife’s category of the-reader-won’t-care and the-reader-will.

So, getting out my slide rule and inputting this algorithm into my computer, I have come up with this simple formula for all you writers out there:

1.       If it’s absolutely, clearly wrong and more than a few people will catch the mistake—get it right.

2.       If it’s absolutely, clearly wrong and nobody but you will care, then pick whichever way makes the story better, unless you’re anal retentive and can’t stand the thought of a mistake (whoops, there’s another category).

If it’s not absolutely, clearly wrong but just a subjective take on what seems realistic, let your spouse decide.

I don’t think of someone creating an Excel spreadsheet.

But the longer I write books, the more I realize the importance of having my act together beforehand and as I go along.

One way is advance outlining. I don’t always do it and I know our community is all over the place on this. I hear that Lee Child and Lisa Scottoline don’t do it at all. James Patterson outlines every chapter and preaches it as gospel. Me, I never used to do it at all.

But as time has become tighter for me since I took this job with the government (that’s right, folks, I work longer hours for the government than I did in my private law practice, stereotypes notwithstanding) and my kids were born, I have realized that I don’t have the time to head down one path, only to realize later that I need to turn around and change direction. I don’t have that week to waste. I don’t outline every single thing, in part because I lack the discipline and in part because I know that I’ll call audibles as I go along, anyway, but generally plotting something out in advance has become more a part of my writing than I ever thought it would be. It’s also more fun than I thought it would be. The best parts of my novels are the parts that I didn’t write but dreamed up in my head as I outlined, only to be spoiled when I actually had to translate that brilliant idea to paper.

Another organizational tool is keeping track of what you’re doing as you go along. I’m talking about keeping a chart of some sort that chronicles what you’ve done in each chapter. I never used to dream of doing that. But now I like it. It helps you keep control over your book. You get 300 pages in and the thing gets unwieldy, yes? You wonder how many times you left this clue, or that red herring, or that information about character. You want to know how long you’ve gone without major action, or how long ago you reminded the reader of something that is so important that you want to emphasize it, but not too often.

It also helps with revisions. Your editor makes one of those maddening general comments about how there’s not enough of this or too much of that in the book. It’s easier to digest that comment if you can see your novel from the big picture. With one of my books, I only did this after the editor came back with her comments. At that point, I thought it was necessary to see the big picture to understand what she meant. The result? I couldn’t believe how much I learned about my book from this chapter-by-chapter chronology. To any of you out there who haven’t tried this, I highly recommend it.

I want to add a couple of additional things at the end here, unrelated:

1. Scott Turow’s new novel, Innocent, is brilliant. He’s always been my favorite but he continues to amaze me. When it comes to drama and the law, this guy is playing chess, the rest of us checkers.

2. I haven’t said a word about Blago and his trial. I did predict in an earlier piece that he would go with the “clown defense” and that’s partly what he seems to be doing; that and the I-was-duped-by-greedy-friends defense. I’ve been waiting for him go with advice-of-counsel, as some have predicted. But that would require his lawyer to go along with it, and who knows if that will happen? In any event, riveting theater. Who can predict what a jury will do?

My answer: Keep watching that dumb show.

I have to admit that I’ve watched Celebrity Apprentice this season. I’m not sure why. The guy’s a complete buffoon, but unfortunately he wasn’t a harmless buffoon. He was remarkably destructive. The system of government effectively braked to a standstill while he was governor. Nobody could trust him, and when the man with so much power can’t be trusted, how can you do anything?

He also made my life, personally, rather hellish with the retributive, childish games he played, including forcing the legislature to remain in session, pointlessly, for almost two years straight.
I had enough Blago to last me a lifetime. And yet I watch that show.

A lot of people think he’s making matters worse by running around like a moron, blabbing to every talking head and now appearing on this reality show. (By the way, how is that show in any way reflective of “reality?”)

But I disagree. I think that Rod is selling his defense on that show.

Have you seen it? It’s guys against gals, and the first week the challenge was to run a diner for a day and see how much money you could raise. Rod, not surprisingly, completely blew his assigned task and was openly mocked on the show for doing it. The only reason he wasn’t the first celebrity eliminated was because his side—the men—won the competition.

Last week, he once again proved absolutely worthless. He couldn’t even turn on a computer, much less type or do any kind of research. Again, he looked completely stupid, and he quite possibly would have been eliminated had it not been for the fact that another celebrity volunteered to be eliminated.

Plus, even in his interactions with others, he looks like the polar opposite of a leader. He’s a wall flower, a blowhard at best with no substance. That’s the Rod I remember; the guy couldn’t run a meeting to save his life. He could hardly organize a thought.

And that, in broad terms, will be Rod’s defense at trial. He’s a clown. A blowhard. He smiled for the cameras and issued press releases, but his aides did everything else. Those things he said on tape? That was just blabber. Nobody took him seriously. The people around him said, “Yes, Governor, right away, Governor,” but then they blew him off when he left the room. Nobody actually followed through on the things he said, and he knew they wouldn’t.

The harmless goof. He plays it naturally on TV. Let’s see how he plays it at trial.

(Note: Wearing Joker makeup 24/7 only counts as immersion acting if, in fact, you are playing the Joker in a movie; otherwise it’s considered creepy.)

Then someone asked me if I immerse myself in my characters. In the traditional sense, the answer is no. I don’t become my protagonist all the time. I don’t see how any writer could do that. It’s the difference, I suppose, between an actor playing a character and a writer scribbling out that character plus everything else around that character. The writer is covering more ground than just that one person. (See witty banter between Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. at the Oscars.)

But it raises an interesting and related question. Obviously, we all try to get inside the heads of our characters every time we plot an action they would take, a thought they would have, dialogue they would speak. But do we practice a mini-version of immersion?

I do so but only sparingly. I once wrote about a serial killer and found that I was writing more powerful prose if I was listening to violent rap music. Sometimes when I have to write a “mood” scene I think about what I want the mood to be and then put on music that gets me in that frame of mind. And sometimes it works the other way—I happen to have on some music that ends up altering my mood and the prose seems to adjust accordingly.

It’s not only music; at times I have used television or movies, but less as a deliberative choice. I don’t necessarily decide to watch something on a particular topic to get me in the mood to write a certain scene or point of view, but if something I watch gets me in that mood, I will try to take advantage of it. Especially because these days, when I’m writing, it’s sometime past midnight and my general mood is tired and cranky.

I would be interested in what others do. Time to write being at a minimum for me, I’ll take any crutch or inspiration I can get. And I am continually surprised at how much I learn from other writers and readers on this blog. Do any of you try to get (and stay) in role, playing your protagonist in real life, even for a short time?

That’s it for me, for now. It’s time to get some sleep and this damn clown make-up takes a long time to scrub off.

1. Dick Adler was always a great reviewer of thrillers for the Chicago Tribune and I just recently found him in the blogosphere. I highly recommend his blog. And it has nothing to do with the fact that he just said my novel, THE HIDDEN MAN, was the best thriller of 2009.

2. I was rocking my baby daughter to sleep this evening and watching a Seinfeld rerun. Although there are many, many memorable cameos in that series, I am now convinced that there is none better than Bookman, the Library Cop. For the life of me, I don’t know how he went through that entire rant with Jerry without bursting into laughter.

3. Congratulations to our newcomer Bryan Gruley on the Edgar nomination for Best First. I’m looking forward to reading STARVATION LAKE and some of the others on the list. But I noticed something missing from that list—BAD THINGS HAPPEN by Harry Dolan. Am I missing something? Was this not released in 2009? Is he not American? Because it’s one of the best books I have read in a very long time. Great fun.

4. The “scandal” surrounding Governor Quinn’s early release program has been—surprise—completely blown out of proportion. From a political and public relations perspective it was a blunder of monumental proportion. But substantively, what they did hardly made a difference compared to the previous policy. Instead of making inmates wait 60 days in prison before being granted “meritorious good time” (MGT), they granted it right off the bat. Sounds bad until you consider that they pretty much always give out MGT in full, anyway, so these inmates getting released from prison after 7 days or 22 days or whatever—all that Quinn’s policy did was shave a month or two, at most, off their sentences. You want to argue that they shouldn’t give out MGT so freely? Fine, go ahead, I might agree, but that’s nothing new. That wasn’t the story. The part that Quinn played just shaved a matter of days off someone’s sentence. That person who got out after 18 days in prison and committed another crime—well, if the old policy had been in place, he’d have been out after 60 days and probably would have committed the same crime. 60 days versus 18. That is basically the whole story.

5. And when the media reports that someone was sentenced to 3 years for battery and only served 35 days in prison, we need to keep in mind that this only could have happened if that person had spent a great deal of time in county jail, awaiting trial (i.e. the person couldn’t make bond and stayed locked up pending trial). You get credited for time served in county lock-up pending trial. Sometimes cases take so long to go to trial, the amount of time you serve in county, awaiting trial, ends up being half or more of the sentence you ultimately receive. So if you are getting a day for a day, and you walk into prison already having served half your sentence—well, yes, you aren’t going to spend much time in prison. But you did serve time—just not in prison. And anyone who thinks county jail is better than state prison is dreaming.

6. I’m just going to say one more thing on this topic. A lot of people think that the 60-day-minimum rule is discriminatory against the poor. It is a fact that in many cases, the people who couldn’t afford bail and awaited trial locked up in jail will ultimately spend more time in prison than those who could afford bond and were living in their comfy homes prior to trial. Same crime, same sentence, the poor person serves more time because of the 60-day-minimum policy. In fact, the current Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, whom I consider to be one of the finest jurists I have ever known, back when he ran the criminal courts in Cook County, held that the 60-day policy was unconstitutional for this very reason. His decision was reversed by a sharply divided appellate court, but even the judges finding it constitutional didn’t think the policy was so grand.

Let’s see … I covered Chicago, writing, and crime. I guess that means I’m done.

I’m not sure “accident” is the right word. I mean, what’s an “accident?” An event that wasn’t planned or intended or expected? Well, actually, that might qualify. I surely didn’t expect him at my door, though I suppose I should have. The rest of it, well, I’m not sure how to view it. Admittedly, things get a little foggy in the middle there. The ice, for example. Throw ice into a scene and the possibility of calling something an “accident” goes up exponentially. And that was part of it. My feet did slip, I do recall that. And so did his, or maybe it was just my weight pulling him down. I guess I’m not really sure. I should probably be careful here, because if I start admitting to a lack of recall, it’s going to be hard to be sure I did or did not intend to do something.

This much I can say with certainty: He’d been to my doorstep several times that I could confirm, on days when I normally wouldn’t be home mid-day. Who knows how many times he was there when I was actually gone? And always with that bag, that mysterious bag. I couldn’t very well be expected to know what was inside it, now could I? I mean, for all I knew, it could be holding a shotgun or something.

I know what everyone’s going to say. I’m not stupid. They’ll all take the easy route. But put yourself in my shoes. How could I be sure he was the person he purported to be? I don’t mean reasonably certain but sure? When the risk of error was so high? I really had only a handful of seconds to make a decision, and if I was wrong, then an assailant would be only steps away from entering my home.

And I’ll just add this one thing, and then I’ll shut up like my lawyer wants me to. He had every chance to identify himself. I asked him, twice, who he was as he approached my house and he looked at me like I was crazy. A government agent? A spy for my enemies? He could have put me at ease but he didn’t. So this guy is approaching my house and I’m asking him to reassure me and instead he mocks me and that smile, well, I guess it could be viewed in hindsight as a confused grin but I thought he was taunting me.

Anyway. I’m not supposed to say I’m sorry because it could be interpreted as an admission of guilt, but the truth is I do feel kind of bad about the whole thing. I guess the guy was just doing his job. I’m just saying, he could have identified himself. Or just plain stopped in his tracks and turned around. He could have just dropped the letters and magazines on the sidewalk and moved on to the next house.

It looks like the guy will live, by the way. He was dressed pretty warmly so the knife barely even reached his skin. I hope everyone has a happy holiday.