Little Gems

Any art student can tell you San Francisco is and has been a haven for visual and performing artists. The city has museums for everything from cartoon art to statue gardens. There are LED light displays on the Bay Bridge, and on the windows of the top 6 floors of the City’s tallest building. The music scene is as lively as it ever was, from string quartets playing in the subway stations to local groups who become major headliners, like Train. The local secret is the art you find in passing. Maybe it’s not so much a secret as something people take for granted. Doesn’t everyone walk past a bronze statue of a man with multiple heads, arms and legs on their walk to the office? Or come up from a Muni station to a stage hosting a hip hop dance group for one random night on Market street? I really like these little gems tucked in not-so-obvious places. I like them so much, I put at least one in each of my books. 

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Details, Details

Welcome to Day 2 of our local’s peek at San Francisco. Did you know the City has not one, but two subway systems? The Municipal Railway, known more commonly as Muni, runs beneath and around city limits. The other, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, aka BART, connects surrounding suburbs to a main artery through downtown San Francisco and beyond. Anyone using contemporary San Francisco as a setting has to acknowledge the fact that it’s not an easy place to drive. We’re not quite Manhattan, in terms of congestion, but we’re pretty darned close. Muni is a way of life for locals thus it’s referenced in my novel on submission and plays a role in my current work-in-progress. No one would claim Muni rivals the subway systems of Europe or New York but it’s continuously improving. New lines are added all the time. New cars, too. And some special older cars. There are two 100% above-ground metro lines that celebrated their opening by interspersing historic street cars brought over from Italy. The cars were built in 1928 and they shudder and rumble in a way the modern cars don’t. They have quieter engines than the modern metro, though. Whether you’re a passenger or a passer-by, the dominant sound is metal-against-metal of wheels on the tracks, similar to a cable car. By the way, no local uses the word “trolley” in reference to city transportation. We have our iconic cable cars, we have street cars (the metro on above-ground routes), we have trains (the metro), and we have buses. “Trolley” is a verbal miscue that can either denote a tourist, or disrupt the authenticity of San Francisco as a setting. On the subject of words, another phrase to avoid, unless your character is a tourist, is “San Fran.” And if you say or write “Frisco,” well, you can show yourself out. I don’t often hear the word “subway” when folks talk about the San Francisco metro system. The word “Muni” is all you need to sound like a local. 

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Scene of the Crime

Setting is a conscious choice each author makes. I’m a “write what you know” type so I set my stories in and around San Francisco. It’s risky. I imagine New York-based authors and my Bostonian writer friends face the same risk. That risk is preconceived notions about the location. When I say “San Francisco,” what comes to mind? The Golden Gate Bridge? Fog? Fisherman’s Wharf? As someone who’s lived in or within spitting distance of the City By The Bay for most of my life, those images are rarely what I see. Okay, I do see the GGB, as we call it (because, really, who has time for all those syllables). My day job office has some pretty spectacular views and that’s one of them. But fog isn’t nearly as prevalent as it once was, thanks to climate change. And I, like most locals, need a reason to go anywhere near the Wharf. My San Francisco is different. The neighborhoods I frequent. The types of people I’m around. The City (yes, with a capital “C”) is almost like a character itself. Like other iconic cities, there are landmarks that never change. There are still pockets of the City of Dashiell Hammett. But it’s also constantly evolving. That’s one of the reasons it makes such a great location, that co-mingling of old and new, sometimes literally side by side. For the next couple of days I’ll show you real locations that inspire my settings. Along with my heart, San Francisco is a great place to leave a trail of clues. 

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#My5WordLifePhilosophy

Earlier this week, I was reading through Twitter and came across a hashtag that intrigued me:  #My5WordLifePhilosophy.  The answers ranged from “Animals are better than people” to “Judge me when you’re perfect.” And so on. Naturally I wondered what my fellow Miss Demeanors would have to say on the topic and here it is:   Paula: Never give up, never surrender.   Alison: Think outside of your box. Tracee: No regrets. Robin: We each have our paths. Cate: Empathy is your greatest superpower. Michele: Your life is your story. Me (Susan): Surround yourself with good people. Incidentally, today the hashtag #ifIwereamixeddrink is trending. Ponder that one! (I’m a Manhattan.)

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Stories

If you are a person who loves stories, which I am, going to an orphanage is like going to the mother-lode.  Every child there has a story. They are sharing those stories all the time, whether you are wandering around a mustard field, or going shopping (where there was a cow in a store) or looking at mango trees and gravestones, or sitting around a fire. One of my favorite things to do was to sit at a bench and watch the kids play badminton, and invariably some cherub would wander over, sit next to me, and begin to tell me a story.  One afternoon I went into the dormitory where Rosey and her friends live and they showed me their books of pictures. These kids don’t have many possessions in their lives, but they have pictures of people who mean something to them and every single child there has one of those albums. (When I went home, I sent them a box full of pictures, which said Fedex box is still stuck somewhere outside Delhi. That is another story.) Most of the stories are somewhat harrowing, as you might imagine, and sometimes the children are sad, but for the most part they are happy and energetic and vibrant and all good things. Partly, I suspect, this is because they are young and resilient. But I have to give a lot of credit to the people who run this orphanage. I’d been communicating with the people at the Good Shepherd Agricultural Mission for more than 3 years, and reading their newsletters, and I felt I had a good sense of who they were. But I’m old enough (and have read enough Charles Dickens) to know that good people are not always good, and religious people do not always act the way they should. However, from the moment I arrived on the mission, I was struck by the love and kindness with which each child there was treated. There were more than 100 children, which makes for a large family, and yet it felt like a family. You could just see the trust in the children’s eyes. When I left the orphanage, to head back to Delhi and then to home, I had the true sense of having left a part of my heart there. But the stories will stay with me forever.  

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Fires

You’ll notice that in every picture of me from India, I’m wearing a puffy pink coat. That’s because I was freezing the entire time. It wasn’t actually that cold. Probably in the 40s. But there was no central heating. So whatever it was, it was, unless you could get a seat at the fire. How I came to appreciate fires! The central fire, and the hub of all conversation at the orphanage, was in an old mango tree that had toppled over in a storm.  We would all huddle together on a log and watch the flame. (I was huddling. Most of the kids were trying to jump over the fire.) My hair, my clothes, my skin all smelled of smoke. Periodically someone would go off with an ax and come back with wood, which they would throw onto the fire. Time passed in a different way than I’m used to. You could spend hours just chatting with the people who came and went. The coziest fire was in the library, in a fireplace. Here many of the kids congregated in the afternoon. (I should say that I was at the orphanage at an unusual time. For most of the year, the kids would be at school.) Here I played an intense game of Monopoly with Rampal (and we came in second). I was also introduced to a lot of good books, such as the Percy Jackson series. The most exciting fire was in the jungle. One night, we all crammed into a jeep and drove into the jungle, which was only about ten minutes away, but felt like an entirely different world. There was a huge vat filled with curry, that the cooks had been working on all day. Music was blaring. A lot of Justin Beiber. (It struck me funny that the kids used the flashlights from their iphones to navigate their way around the jungle, but ate food cooked over a wood fire.)  Then there was the fire I went to first thing in the morning. At 7:00, music would come over the loud speaker–uplifting hymns. Soon thereafter a girl would knock on my door. “Your tea, aunty.” Then I would make my way over to the kitchen fire, where Maya and some others were cooking the toast. I’d sit there and chat until it was time for breakfast.  When I got back to Delhi, the first thing I did was take a long, hot shower. It felt great, but I missed the warmth, communal and otherwise, from those fires.

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Names

When I arrived at the Good Shepherd Agricultural Mission, I was warmly greeted by a great cluster of children, each of whom hugged me and told me their name. A minute went by. Then came the first question,  “Do you remember my name, auntie?”  As a teacher, I have long known the value of remembering students’ names.  In fact, I make a practice of calling my students by name over and over again during the first few classes, because I believe that if you keep calling people by their names, other people will call them by their names too. They will remember the names, will become friends and the class will be a success. All of which is to say, I desperately wanted to remember each child’s name. But it was so hard. There were so many names to remember, and the names were so unfamiliar and even if I remembered them I didn’t say them right. Rosey and Shane and Gladys were easy to memorize. But then there was Roshni and Khushboo and Jyotika. I spent the first day fumbling around and everywhere I turned was a beautiful child looking at me and saying, “Do you remember my name, auntie?” That first night I thought a long time about the issue, and in the morning I had a plan. I went to breakfast (oatmeal over toast) with my notebook and I asked each child to write down his or her name with some distinguishing characteristic. Immediately they leapt in. Rampal wore a gray hat. Indro had a colorful hat. Ayushi had a puffy watch and Jyotika a scar on her chin. I filled up pages (one of which is in the photo). An orphanage is a communal place, and no one makes a decision on her own. There was much discussion over each person’s distinguishing characteristic. Was her nose unusual? Were eyes a particular color? Did she look like she came from Nepal? After that, every time someone came up to me and asked if I knew her name, I could at least pause and point to the notebook. It bought me some time and good will. By the time I left, I could pick out everyone pretty well, and since I’ve been back I’ve gone over all my pictures and written names on them to be sure not to forget. Just last Sunday, Rosey called me and her first question was, “Do you remember me, Aunty?” Yes Rosey, I remember you and Anthea and April and Raymond and Rampal and…”  

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India

How I happened to go to India this past January is a long and convoluted story involving tragedy, triumph, stubbornness  and one very sweet young woman at an orphanage who I’ve been sponsoring for the last 3 years. Since I first began communicating with her, Rosey has been gently suggesting that I come for a visit, but getting to India is not an easy proposition. She lives in an orphanage 300 kilometers to the east of New Delhi, near the border with Nepal. To say that it is remote is putting it very mildly.   At first I planned to fly from Delhi to Pantnagar, which would have taken me somewhere close. But that plane only leaves 4 times a week. And it’s often canceled, which, in fact, it was. So then I decided to take the train. When you are going to India, many people have advice for you, most of it harrowing, so when I got to the train I didn’t know what to expect. (I should say that I had hired a guide to drive me to the station. He deposited me in my seat and said, “Don’t move.”) Fortunately, almost all the signs in India are in English. I knew that Haldwani, the stop I was getting off at, was second to last and that it was 5 hours away and that one of the men who runs the orphanage would be picking me up. With Rosey! Still, it is a little daunting to be a middle-class woman from Westchester, NY, with all that means, on a train going into the heart of India. The fabulous thing was that they kept serving food, and I kept eating it. There was cereal with warm milk. There was a very tasty vegetarian thing. Also very tasty desert, and tea. The Indian tea is the best tea I have ever had. Finally we got to Haldwani. It is not a metropolis. I stepped out and looked around and saw no one who looked like Clifton, from the orphanage, who I knew to be very tall, white and Australian. There was no one who looked like Rosey either, who I knew to be very small, beautiful and Indian. I felt a little like Cary Grant in that scene in North by Northwest when the cropduster is coming after him. I felt the teeniest surge of panic, except there was no way out. The next train back to Delhi would not leave for hours. So I followed the direction in which other people were walking and then I said a prayer and then lo and behold I heard a very tall Australian man saying, “Susan?” I had been found. And what an adventure I had. which I will relate tomorrow.

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Must A Main Character Be Like Me?

I am in the midst of rewriting large portions of my fourth book this week. There are three POV characters in this story. One is an African American female police officer, aged 27, single sans kids. She’s been a cop for three years and is very smart with a high EQ, but a troubled history. Another is a hugely successful 37-year-old Black female orthopedist of West Indian descent that armchair quarterbacks injuries on a sports network as a medical commentator. She’s in a heap of trouble. The third is a 35-year-old former Caucasian attorney turned stay-at-home mom to twin boys, one of whom is autistic and homeschooled. She’s a walking anxiety disorder with a sharp wit. All the characters are American. None of them are particularly like me, though I am sure my personality and observations bleed into all my characters. Specifically, their back stories and cultural heritages don’t match my own (though the orthopedist is of West Indian descent and so is the Jamaican half of my family).  I have things in common with all of my POV characters, though. And, most importantly, I’ve done my research.  All this writing has me thinking this week about character creation. How like me should my characters be? How much latitude do I have, as a fiction writer, to create characters that have different cultural heritages and American experiences than my own?   In practice, I tend to err on the side of a lot of latitude, providing I’ve done the research and have a connection to the character so that they come across as a real person and not caricature. For The Widower’s Wife, one of my characters was a white male insurance agent math whiz. I am not white. Not male. Not an insurance agent. And definitely not a math whiz. But, I interviewed a female friend insurance agent and am married to a former math major. I’d felt like I’d done my homework. Still, I’ve been known to take too much latitude in my life. So, I asked the MissDemeanors for their take.  Q. When you write main POV characters, do you create people that share your gender and ethnicity or do they come from other cultures? Why? Alexia: I write main characters who share my race, gender, and socioeconomic background because I spent the first 47-ish years of my life not finding many/any middle class, African American, female main characters and I got tired of not reading about anyone who looked like me. #representationmatters. Susan: I tend to write main characters who share my race, gender, etc. because I feel I have something authentic to say from that point of view. However, I did write a novel with a protagonist who was an Indian young woman, and that was a challenge, but I tried to get around it by making sure she and I had points of intersection. So I made her a Christian. I definitely populate my fictional world with a wide variety of people.  Michele: I’m going to sound apologetic here, but the truth is I don’t feel qualified to write from the point of view of someone ethnically or racially different from me. I do feel I can write from a male point of view and I’ve written gay characters with some authenticity, probably because I have gay family members and friends. What I try to do is appeal to the universal themes and desires that all human beings struggle with. I applaud those who can write with more diversity than I and enjoy reading those stories. Alison: I have an extremely detailed knowledge of my ancestry because I grew up Mormon. I can go onto a Family Search website and see my ancestry (including when everyone was baptized and received various temple ordinances), which is mostly English and Swedish, with a little Scottish, Irish and Welsh thrown in. If you go back several centuries, there is some French. Needless to say, my experience is that of a fish-belly white woman. My protagonist, Abish Taylor, is also white (but, wait for it, she has auburn hair). Before my editor convinced me to write Blessed be the Wicked entirely from Abbie’s PoV, my favorite voice was that of the male police officer and returned LDS missionary. He’s also descended from Mormon pioneer stock, which means some variation of the British/Scandinavian mix. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if I could convincingly write another ethnicity for three main reasons: ignorance (I don’t know what I don’t know), fear (I’d be afraid to get something really wrong), and anxiety (I wouldn’t want to offend someone if I did get some thing wrong). Tracee: Susan and Cate may remember we (or I) were asked a version of this at our book even last year in Manhattan. The specific question was how did I feel about writing from a man’s point of view. For me the intersection or commonalities of culture and sociology economic situation are more restrictive than gender. On the other hand, if I really felt a story needed a character outside my comfort zone I think I would try. On the other hand…. would I get it right? I would never write a character simple to check a diversity box. I don’t think that’s fair to who ever really lives in that box. We all deserve authenticity. Paula: It’s a tricky question. I believe literature should reflect the multicultural world we live in and as an agent I try to do my part to champion writers who contribute to that multiculturalism. As a writer I believe that writers should in theory be able write about anything or anybody, but in practice in my own writing I am more cautious. My mystery A Borrowing of Bones features characters of different genders and ethnicities, but so far I only feel comfortable writing from the point of view of characters ethnically similar to myself. I do write his and her points of view, but both my hero and my heroine are former military and having been raised in a military family I hope that helps me pull it off. Robin: Authenticity is important to me – if a character is unrelatable they’re not fun to write and less fun to read. I have no problem writing in the voice of different genders. My best friends have always been men and they’re used to me asking lots of (sometimes inappropriate) questions. Socioeconomic diversity isn’t a problem, either. I’ve personally experienced the gamut on that so I have my own life to draw on. I’m also comfortable with writing gay or straight characters, being gay myself and having grown up, lived, and worked around straight people. Ethnicities are trickier because I worry about getting it wrong or the character feeling 2-dimensional. That’s where I proceed with caution and get guidance from friends. Looking back at the stories I’ve written, all have been set in and around San Francisco so multiculturalism is part of the world-building. Not to mention one of the reasons I love the SF (and NYC). When it comes down to it, though, it’s service to the story. I agree with Tracee, I won’t go out of my way just to tick a particular diversity box.  

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Creating Multi-Ethnic Characters and Landscapes in American Crime Fiction… (Alt. Title: Can Crime Fiction in America Be Post-Racial?)… A True Story

 “What are you?” Growing up in small town New Jersey in the 1990s, I stared down that question on a near-weekly basis. Parents, teachers, strangers at the mall—all would ask shortly after requesting my first name. “Catherine” didn’t reveal enough about me. It was too generically biblical. Every land to ever encounter a missionary doled out the moniker like a Christmas fruitcake. The name defied easy categorization. And, back then–as like now–seemingly everyone needed racial classification. I’d often answer, “American. Born in Queens.” My stock response invariably frustrated my interrogator. Here I was, a plain-old Catherine, with olive-skin and dark curls that, incongruously, could not speak Spanish. My straight nose, which hooks when I smile, had been keeping plastic surgeons employed across cultures since the invention of rhinoplasty.  And, now, I was telling someone—attempting in as PC-a-way as possible to figure out my race—that I’d been born in one of the most diverse cities in America.  “No, but what are you? Are you Black or White?” My usual follow-up sounded even more insolent. “Both.” The answer had the virtue of being true. Nearly all my paternal relatives trace their history back to Europe, specifically Ireland. My maternal ethnicity is more complex. A Jamaican-born US immigrant, my mom is primarily the descendant of West Africans brought to work sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean. Her ancestors mixed with Carib Indians, originally hailing from South America, Desi diaspora, and European indentured servants. There are members of my mom’s family with skin the deep brown of a carob pod and others as fair as ground nutmeg. Everyone is American, either U.S. born or naturalized. And everyone is considered Black.  I was and am proud of my racial heritage and all the people that had to exist to, eventually, make me. And I was (and am) always happy to share my family history. What I didn’t want to do in answering the what are you question was to adopt someone else’s idea of me based on their concept of what it meant to be Black or White American.  Back in the 90s, I was particularly sensitive to the stereotypes associated with being Black or White. Many of them had come from popular movies and music videos, which often reduced ethnic characters to caricatures. Jamaicans were all pot smoking Rastas. Black people were, by and large, good at sports and poor at academics. White people were the inverse. Blah blah blah… bull crap.  To me, my family members weren’t statistics or representatives of a particular racial group. They were individuals. And, individually, they’d always bucked the flawed assumptions most often made about their respective races. To this day, the family member best at math is a Black cousin on my mom’s side that went on to get an advanced engineering degree at Columbia University. The family members best at sports are my half-Irish, half-Jewish cousins on my dad’s side that started on a Division I baseball team and collegiate basketball team, respectively. My mother—the Jamaican-born Black woman—never smoked pot until my father—the 1970s White hippie—gave her a joint. Saying “both” was my way of asserting the truth and simultaneously refusing to be defined by another’s idea of Blackness or Whiteness.  Few wanted to hear my answer, though. Once a teacher told me in front of my entire class that saying “everything” was unacceptable. “This is America,” she said. “In America, you have to choose. Are you White or are you Black? Pick one.” “I’m both. I’m— “Well, what will you write on the SAT? There’s no checking all that apply.” After hearing this line of thought so often I acquiesced for a long time and began self-identifying as only Black. I thought the category was most likely to include me. America’s history of discriminating and enslaving people with any African ancestry meant that folks with less Sub-Saharan blood than myself were classified as Black. Therefore, to my thinking, I clearly belonged in the Black category.  As a Black woman, I wrote Black characters. When I penned my first book, Dark Turns (Crooked Lane Books, Sept. 2015), I made my protagonist a Black American ballerina. One of the antagonists was a White American student. There was a Hispanic American ballerina in the book. Just as I had been told that I had to identify with Black or White, I felt that my main character had to share my racial background in order to be believable. Everyone else had to be in a neat box.  As I matured, both in my writing and personally, I began to reject the idea that I couldn’t check all the racial boxes that applied to me. I moved to a diverse, suburb of Manhattan where many of the families near me were also mixed race, either because the couples married outside of their racial group or because the adults themselves were multi-racial. Living among so many multicultural families, I realized that I, too, could claim my varied heritage. And, if I could, why not my characters? Why couldn’t I create multi-racial characters? Moreover, why not create ethnic characters that, like myself, would be influenced by their cultural heritage but not defined by a racial identity?  In my second thriller, The Widower’s Wife (Crooked Lane Books, Aug. 2016), my main character is a bi-racial Brazilian American whose undocumented parents are deported. Her culture, gender, and race influence her–and impact how some secondary characters relate to her–but the most salient part of her backstory is that her parents were taken away. That is what creates her primary motivation to keep her family together at all costs.  In my latest suspense novel, Lies She Told (Crooked Lane Books, Sept. 2017), my primary character makes clear her amorphous ethnic identity and my supporting cast hails from a variety of multi-ethnic backgrounds as well. There’s a British transplant to America of African descent, a freckled Ginger-haired woman based on a high school acquaintance of Jewish and African American descent, and a Trinidadian American. The cast is diverse because they live in a diverse city and my fiction reflects the world that I know. In some sense, they are all post-racial because their racial identity is less relevant to their story than their jobs, their personal histories, the state of their marriages and their mental health… There are some that would argue no minority character can be post-racial, particularly in crime fiction given the unequal application of law based on wealth and perceptions of race. Moreover, critics might say, race is still a defining characteristic in American society today. To have multi-ethnic characters that don’t “choose one” or don’t relate to their world constantly aware of their racial identity is somehow disingenuous.  To these critics, I’d say that I write from my experience, not ignorance. I agree there need to be stories that address racism (past and present) and the legacy of racism. Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing is a beautiful and current example of literature that does this.  But, I would also say that there needs to be American stories where the cast is ethnically diverse and multi-ethnic without the story being about their ethnicity–especially today. And I think that American writers of all ethnicities and races should endeavor to include some diversity in their stories to accurately reflect what America looks like. It’s not as segregated as our art often indicates.  And it’s definitely not as segregated as some segments of the population would like. In the past couple years, I’ve become painfully aware of the ongoing backlash against multiculturalism in America and concerned about the renewed racial tribalism that I see in 2018. After years of feeling comfortable identifying as multiracial,  I hear the echo of calls to “choose one” in political rhetoric that refers to individual Americans by their perceived races before identifying them by first name. And I see a demand to check one box when watching video of White nationalists waving flags from a time when miscegenation was illegal. Recently, I read that White nationalists were using DNA tests from 23andMe to prove the “purity” of their Caucasian ancestry. Some posters on message boards envisioned a world where nationality would be determined by such tests. As my own little protest against this idea, I recently sent off a vial of my saliva to 23andMe. According to the company, my DNA is from five continents. There’s Irish, Caribbean, British, Sub-Saharan African, and South East Asian, with likely some East Asian and American Indian thrown in a long time ago. I shared the results wherever I could on social media along with three hash tags: #multiracial #American #me.  I have a diverse family. I live in a multicultural, multiethnic area. And I ardently believe that I can reflect that experience in my work. Moreover, I believe that I can create ethnic and multi-ethnic characters that know their backgrounds without it being the most important thing about them or how they relate to the world.  Sometimes, I will write a scene in which a character’s ethnic and racial heritage becomes relevant to the way they are being treated by another character. Just as, sometimes, in my own life, my ethnicity (or the question of what I am) becomes particularly relevant.  More often, though, my characters’ races simply influence what they look like as the move through their story, more concerned with, say, the possibility that their neighbor is a murderer.  I hope that, by writing American characters from diverse heritages and having them all interact, I can encourage a broader idea of what it means to be American. There are so many hyphenated-Americans now that, perhaps, we should all stop hyphenating. Moreover, some of us have too many hyphens to possibly do it.   I don’t need to check one box. And I believe that, as a writer, I can develop relatable American characters that defy easy racial classification and any corresponding stereotypes. The people in my books are individuals. They have cultural backgrounds and they are influenced by them. But they are also just themselves. And I think that, in 2018, I can leave them be.                    

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