Notes from a New England Writer

  What Lies Ahead

The key to success is consistency and the key to consistency is determination and the key to that is enjoyment--have fun or it won't last (like love, like marriage and, yes, like writing.) So, I shall spend the winter writing doing that as well as reading, walking, and working out at the local Y. 

Have written the rough drafts of four new novels and they are hanging out here on this laptop. I'll be happily tweaking them during the cold months ahead and plans are to hammer them into some kind of publishable shape.

 Having a personal "brand" is important for a writer. I have a friend who brands herself as a Southern writer and, as I grew  up as a farm boy in the remote Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, I am a New England writer. That is, a writer who is a child of the long New England winters, deep, steep forests, and flinty farmers. 

As I am now an old man, my next book will be about my personal experience of aging and the great adventure of dealing with death. Yes, an adventure. 

More later.

 

A Farewell to Youth and a Hello to Adventure

I've been advised not to "broadcast" my current age, so here I am an undisclosed number of years ago. My wife and I had just moved to the Florida Keys where I got a job as a broadcast journalist, she a job waiting on table and tending bar in Key West. 

Looking back on it, though, the most important thing we did as soon as we arrived was buy our first boat--a 12 foot skiff with an 18 hp outboard. It was ideal for the shallow back country of the Keys, where we snorkeled, spearfished, and explored the maze of small mangrove islands. 

We had no idea that our two years in the Keys would be just the first step in the huge adventure of living, teaching, and travelling literally around the world for twenty-five years. This adventure would include living aboard a sailboat on Guam for ten years while studying the secrets of the ancient Pacific island navigators. I eventually wrote a book called Brothers of the Fire Star, an national-award-winning adventure novel about two boys struggle to survive World War II while learning to navigate a traditional canoe among the Marianas Islands. And yes, the book is available on Amazon.com.

This is the S/V Carpe Diem, a fine boat indeed, that belonged to a friend and  aboard which we spent eleven days at sea taking her from Guam to the Philippines. 

Remembering Guam One Year Later

I lived on a sailboat on the island of Guam for eleven years and sailed the islands of Micronesia  while studying the secrets of the ancient Pacific navigators. I eventually returned to the mainland U.S. to be closer to my grandchildren, but returned to the Pacific every year for the past nine years.

It's been a year since I was a "Visiting Author" for the public schools on the island of Guam, courtesy of the Guam Chapter of the International Reading Association. It's gratifying to think that my novel, Brothers of the Fire Star, is a success on the island and is being used in the schools in their reading programs.

It's a long flight to Guam--literally to the other side of the planet--and the schedule was tough. I visited sixteen schools in six days and often presented to five hundred students in each school. At the end of the week, I was exhausted but happy as I boarded the plane for the thirty-hour trip back home.

Brothers of the Fire Star has won literary awards in Adventure fiction, Young Adult fiction, and Historical fiction and is set on Guam and in the islands of Micronesia during World War II.

1st Place Winner in Sci-Fi/Fantasy in the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards

This multiple-award-winning novel is the third book in my Eye of the Stallion fantasy series but it is a stand-alone adventure with a time-twisted, fast-moving plot. Appropriate for young adults and adults, it includes great characters from the other books including Astral the Ancient Boy, Admiral Penance, his long suffering donkey, and the great Scraps, a powerful wizard with a miserable camel. The central conflict of the series continues with the survival of Space-Time depending on the eternal love of two Time Drifters, Sonoria and Dag-gar. But can that love survive Sonoria's determination to be free of Dag-gar's control? Or will Captain Sorrow, the avatar of dark and vagrant energies destroy the Universe?

  

The Summer I Ran the Bulls

Running the Bulls in Pamplona: Blood, Torture, and Sangria

Every July, for a week, the world news media ends their regular news programs by showing short video clips of throngs of people running along the narrow, cobbled streets of Pamplona, that small, ancient city in north-western Spain made famous by the writer, Ernest Hemingway. 

These people are being chased by bulls and, often enough to make it interesting for the media, a few of those people, mostly too-bold young men, are gored or stomped to death. What isn’t considered newsworthy enough to be shown, however, is what happens in Pamplona during the other twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes of each of those eight days. This is a pity because, as Hemingway knew, it is when the real human drama happens. In fact, Hemingway never actually ran the bulls.

When I was young enough to still be stupid about such things, I decided it was necessary go to Pamplona and participate in this famous ritual. My son, then just-graduated from high school and feeling the need for some sort of rite of passage into adulthood, came along. We made the nineteen-hour drive from our home in the middle of Germany, across France, and over the Pyrenees into Spain at a hundred miles an hour in a small, shrieking Peugeot that should have had a five-speed transmission.

We arrived in the early evening and found a campground about two miles outside of town. In our innocence, we set up our tent figuring that, after running the bulls and then spending the days leisurely hanging out in town, we’d drive back to the campground and relax around a fire and share stories before going to sleep. It would be a nice father-son experience.

 We were soon to learn that during the Festival of Saint Fermin during which the bulls are run, sleeping is not possible or even desirable. This should have been obvious when we set up the tent. The campground was over crowded with young people from around the world having also come to run the bulls. They were mostly young men from Australia and New Zealand on walkabout and they were, all of them, very drunk.

The only spot left for setting up a tent was right in front of the door to the men’s toilet and shower facility. There was a bright light just above the door and this meant that we would not only have no darkness to sleep by, but we would also be in the immediate path of raucous, all-night boozing, vomiting, pissing, laughing, and/or fighting. In the end, it didn’t matter. We spent just one night trying to sleep there. Once we got into Pamplona itself, we didn’t leave town for three days. We only went back to the campground at the end of the week to reclaim what was left of the tent.

I had been to Pamplona a few years before, arriving by train the day after the feria ended. It was a peaceful place and perfectly picturesque with narrow, cobbled streets, and a wonderful, large central square, the Plaza del Castillo. Around the Plaza were cafes and restaurants where locals sat enjoying coffee or glasses of wine and maybe some tapas. There was something, though, that put us off a bit—something in the air. In fact, the whole town reeked and I was to become well acquainted with the source of that reek: The streets were filled with the stink of old urine. And more interesting than that, it was the stink of old urine mixed with sangria, a drink made from red wine, fruit juice, and brandy. The term sangria comes from the Spanish word sangre which means bloodletting and gore. I was to learn sangria is exactly the same color as bulls blood.

The Festival of Saint Fermin honors one of the many Catholic saints of the region and the running and later the fighting of the bulls in the city’s bullring is an integral part of the celebration. It all starts at exactly noon on July 6. Until that moment, the scene in the square is one of thousands of people milling happily about dressed in white and holding up red scarves.

 At the precise moment, a large fire cracker is set off and everything changes. The scarves get tied around necks and the dancing starts. Music comes from live bands and celebrants form conga lines and start moving. The lines are long or short, all men or all women, or a blend of men and women. It doesn’t matter. Everyone is happy—very happy. These lines move like great joyous serpents around the square and up streets and down them again, growing longer or diminishing as people join in or drop out. And everyone is swilling bottles of that sangria.

And the thing is, this never stops, not the dancing or the swilling. Not for more than seven days, not late at night, not in the early morning, not for breakfast or dinner or lunch. The party goes on and on and I figured they must work in relay teams. Dance for an hour or two, rest for a while, eat, get something to drink other than sangria—like water, I would think. I would also think that locals could, when they were exhausted, simply go home, take a shower, sleep in a real bed, and recover for the next round. In Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, the book that made all this running, swilling, and dancing immortal, Jake Barnes and his pals somehow manage to score hotel rooms and sit down in actual chairs at nice cafes to eat good meals.

 This, of course, was not possible for us. We had no home, no bed, no showers. All the hotels in Pamplona are booked a year in advance, all the restaurants are flooded over with happy drunks, served by exhausted waiters who inevitably become surly.  They are especially surly to those of us who tried to use the toilets in the restaurants without having first found an open table at their cafe to sit at and order a meal. No table, no meal, no toilet. This explains that all-pervasive urine-sangria reek; revelers simply did their thing anywhere and everywhere and smashed their empty sangria bottles on the pavement.

But did we have fun? Were all cares entrusted to loving hands of blessed Saint Fermin for three days? Were bottles of sangria bought and consumed and the bottles smashed? Did we dance, and piss, and laugh with drunken abandon? Did we, at three o’clock in the morning, sleep next to—or with—total strangers on the grass of the Plaza? Were breakfasts ignored and raging hangovers treated with liberal doses of the hair of the sangria dog? Did we cheer on the almost-naked young women who, in the middle of a screaming crowd, and soaked with sangria, allowed themselves to be lifted high on a man’s shoulders while they stripped off their tops and raised their arms in pure hedonistic glory? Did we admire the guy who, also almost naked, could shotgun a quart of beer through a rubber hose and then, lifted onto the shoulders of a compatriot and spun in circles, spew that beer onto our upturned faces? And, finally, did we run the bulls?

Yes. And here is the truth about that: It takes a great deal of courage, courage of the foolish, sangria-fueled kind, to run with the bulls in Pamplona. I know this is true, because if it hadn’t been for sangria and my son shaming me into it, I might have chickened out.

To run the bulls in Pamplona, the runner needs to work his way through a nearly impenetrable, roaring mob that has gathered along a narrow, cobbled street made narrower by a sturdy double wooden fence that has been set up to guide the runners and the bulls from the starting point to the bull ring. To do this, it was necessary for me to get down on my hands and knees and crawl and shove and slink my way through a forest of human legs and shuffling feet. But when I stood up, there I was, in the street where six bulls, guided by a number of oxen, and all desperate with confusion and terror, would soon come charging along at a four-minute/mile pace.

The bulls are released from their pen at the bottom of the street at exactly 8:00 a.m. A large firecracker goes off when the first bull emerges from the pen and again when the last bull is out. The bulls are less dangerous if they are running in a group. A lone bull on a crowded, narrow street is a deadly bull and so you listen for the firecrackers to determine if they are running close together or if they are strung out.

Runners carry a rolled up newspaper, the idea being to show your courage by touching a running bull with the paper. So while you wait for the first firecracker to go off, you are standing in the street shoulder-to-shoulder with many hundreds of other people holding your rolled up newspaper in the air and chanting “Ole! Ole! Ole!” The sound of this chanting, as the morning sun shadows the cobbled streets, and as your fear rises through your hangover and tightens around your heart, is a powerful experience and I was surprised by my reaction to it. It was the power of the mob, I realized later, that left me suddenly, utterly fearless, uncaring whether I lived or died. I was, very briefly, willing to give my life for—what?

Then the first gun went off and we started moving, slowly at first, just walking, everyone looking over their shoulders, back down the street from where the bulls would come. When we saw the people behind us start to run, we started jogging, slowly at first and then faster and faster until we were running hard, dodging and leaping and shooting glances over our shoulders to see the bulls coming. And here’s the other thing about running the bulls: Most people who are injured are injured not by bulls, but by other runners, by getting knocked down, by tripping and falling and getting stepped on.

So, then I was running with the bulls. The bulls are fast, much faster than the runners, and, as it turned out, on this day, strung out in two groups. As the first group passed me, I stepped aside into a doorway and watched. Then I was out in the street again, running, until the next group came past. This time I held my ground and stayed in the street. All around me were men who were younger or faster or braver (more foolish) than I. They jumped in at the bulls, touched them with their rolled up papers, and leaped away again.

And then it was over, the bulls all gone by. But still the mob ran and I ran with them, not understanding why. After a minute or so, we arrived at the entrance to the bull ring. The great double doors were being swung shut but the mob ran toward them, squeezing and fighting to get past them. I found myself jumping up on the backs of those in front of me, climbing over them as the doors shut behind me. And then I was actually in the bull ring, in the middle of it. The crowd in the stands was cheering and there were bulls running around and the mob was spread out inside the ring chasing them, still trying to touch them with their rolled-up papers.

This then was the final phase of the running of the bulls. After the mature, fighting bulls have been run into the arena, they are herded into a separate paddock and young steers with leather caps on the tips of their horns, steers that are simply terrified and not particularly dangerous, are released into the bull ring. A certain number of the runners are allowed into the ring and the doors closed. These runners then chase the steers about for a while trying to touch them with their rolled up papers and occasionally getting tossed into the air for the approval and entertainment of the crowd.

That afternoon I went back to the arena, bought a ticket, and sat among a crowd of handsome young Spanish men and women and witnessed the actual bullfights. It was during these fights that they would kill the bulls I had run that morning. They say there is a long list of Americans who have seen a bull fight and a very short list of Americans who have seen two bull fights. I will remain on that first, longer list. This is because, Hemingway be damned, the inconvenient truth is the glorious tradition of bull fighting with its powerful metaphors for courage and the eternal struggle between life and death, involves torturing animals until they die.

During the highly ritualized bullfight, a bull is released into the arena. Powerful, aggressive, and frightened, they are first stabbed in their neck muscles by picadors, men on horseback wielding lances. (In Hemingway’s time, the picador’s horses were unprotected and were often gored by the bulls, racing around the ring with their intestines dragging behind them.) 

Then banderilleros stick barbed flags into the bull’s neck.  All this serves to cut the animal’s neck muscles and encourage bleeding. Then, exhausted and in a weakened state, the bulls are confronted by the matador. The matador, after a flashy—and, yes, brave and skilled—display of taunting the bull with his cape, delivers the tercio de muerte, the “part of death,” by driving a sword down between its shoulder blades and into its heart. There is a great deal of blood and during the first fight, I began to feel weak, light headed and nauseous and I thought I must be getting sick. By the third fight, I realized the spectacle I was witnessing had put me in a state of shock.  

The night after I ran the bulls and witnessed the bullfights, having not slept in three days, I felt emotionally depleted and physically exhausted. My son, who I had hardly seen during the feria, had cut the side of his hand open on a shard of glass from a sangria bottle and I helped him find a medical tent where such emergencies are handled. Then he disappeared again and I was once more alone. 

I hung around the Plaza in a daze, drinking water and chewing on a loaf of bread. There was a small group of musicians from Peru playing music in one corner of the Plaza and I lay down in the grass near them and fell asleep to the sweet sound of their flutes and guitars.

Outside the bull ring in Pamplona is a granite bust of Hemingway. It’s a herculean image of the writer, coarse and powerful and enigmatic. It was here my son and I had arranged to meet the next morning. We made our way back to the campground, which was by now a scene of unspeakable filth and disorder. We didn’t sleep. We pulled the down the tent, packed it in the Peugeot, and headed back across the Pyrenees.

About to Leave for Guam and FestPac 2016: Jet Lag and Joy

              Sitting with dancers from Papau New Guinea at FestPac 12 years ago in Palau.

On Sunday, I begin the journey to Guam. It will take a couple of days with a layover in Honolulu to rest and hang out for a few hours at Waikiki. Once on Guam I will have two weeks to recover from jet lag do have some book signings. Then, on the 21st of May, the 2016 Pacific Festival of the Arts begins.

I have been selected as a literary delegate representing Guam and will be attending writing workshops with other delegates. Then, on the 25th, I'll be doing an hour presentation on the writing of my novel, Brothers of the Fire Star. I will also be a bus driver. I may get a tattoo. I'll be sleeping on a futon on the floor of a classroom in a high school. There are no laundry facilities. I will be wearing an island-style "tapis" which is really a kind of skirt. So I'll be driving a bus whilst wearing a skirt. And talking about what I love and what I do.

The Writer Celebrates His 70th Year with a Bit of Traveling, a Bit of Writing

If you live to be 70, consider yourself a lucky bastard. I'm almost a lucky bastard; I've finished 69 years. But almost is not good enough, so here we go.

My 70th years happens to coincide with my wife's 60th and our 35th wedding anniversary. And more traveling around the world, and the completion of another novel and the realization that the next one is burning in my head and coming out my fingers, through the keyboard and into my laptops infinite memory. I'm off and running.

Since I entered my 70th year, we have driven down the East Coast, seen family in Atlanta, come down with shingles two days after Christmas, and then, heavily medicated thanks to a doc-in-a-box, drifted on down to the Florida Keys to once again babysit the dolphins at the Dolphin Research Center.

Then we were off to the Philippines to sail, stopping off first in San Francisco--to rest, we told ourselves, before the long flight to Manila. We enjoy San Francisco: City Lights Book Store, that serious place of worship before the alter of free thought, with all the serious, non-smiling, heavily-burdened-with-existence customers perusing the shelves while, yes indeed, the light from the city filters in through the windows that look out on Columbus Avenue. And I'm one of them, I suppose, or I wouldn't crave hanging out there. And right there, within a couple of stone throws, we found two funky little Italian restaurants and a hole-in-the-wall cafe that served coffee or wine or beer and simple food and in the afternoons, thrown-together jazz musicians of uneven but magical quality play together into the evening. 

Then the miserable thirteen-hour flight to Manila eased somewhat by some small friends of mine called Atavan. Calms the nerves, eases the hours. Then Manila itself, through the wretched city in a cab that cleverly over charged us and still the cost was a sad joke. Two days of jet lag recovery and then we're back at the airport and flying south to Cebu City. The airport here is on Mactan Island, the very place where Magellan, that savage, meddling, control freak, was killed by the local folks after he stuck his nose in their business. Mactan is now one big industrial zone--a place of poverty and pollution by my standards, but a decent-enough home for thousands of Filipinos. 

Sailing, then, for eleven days, from Mactan down around Bohol Island, up to Leyte, across the to Comotes, and back to Port Carmen. Adventures by the dozen. Mostly no wind or wind on the nose so we motor sailed into it, from place to place. Anchoring was the challenge, water that went from 1000 ft. deep to 3 feet in fifty yards and we were figuring out tides before dropping the hook on a lee shore and trying to avoid anchoring in coral. And the main fuel filter would plug up with shit stirred up from the fuel tank and the engine would die on the lee shore and then we would sail on a close reach and get off the shore and change the filter and get the engine going and try anchoring again. And you really can't swim in the lovely water when anchored in a bay off a town because the raw sewage from the town drains freely and copiously into the bay. But exploring unknown places is very fine and we did it with very fine friends.

Back home, then, exhausted, with another, longer stop in San Francisco and back to the hole-in-the-wall jazz cafe and eating off our jet lag in the the Italian restaurants. Jet lag eventually does yield to red wine. We have found this to be true.

Home to Virginia and a fast-approaching spring. So we have managed to avoid the worst of the winter once again. Now it's April and a cool, damp season is here and is wonderful with bird songs, blooming flowering trees and bushes and greening grass. And a new kitchen being constructed, which is Terry's dream coming true.

My traveling is not finished, though. It's back to Guam on May 8th to be a literary delegate representing Guam in a Pacific-wide festival of the arts and culture of the islands. My novel, Brothers of the Fire Star will be featured and I will do the featuring. More on that later.

Writing, Rewriting, and Rewriting Again....and Again...and Again....

 Me, the author of an essay on the manly--and, in certain famous cases, womanly--glories of cigar smoking standing at a cigar shop in Key West.

"There is no such thing as writing--just rewriting." This is a famous quote that thousands of writers and writing teachers would like to take credit for, from Somerset Maugham to Doris Lessing to the adjunct community college evening-course writing instructor. 

Who knows who was the very first to realize this bitter truth, but it must go back to the authors of the cuneiform etchings of ancient Persia. Any writer worth his laptop quickly learns this or turns his laptop in and takes up something less demanding--like rocket science or teaching preschoolers.

I love the Philip Roth novel in which the young writer protagonist makes a pilgimage up to the snowy Berkshire hills in Massachusetts to pay homage his god, an older, famous writer. He spends the day with this guy and watches and wonders. The old genius's writing day? He spent three hours putting a comma in and the next three hours taking it out.

And the fact is, after the first five drafts of the novel are finished and the editor has had her expensive ways with the manuscript, then the rewriting begins. Oh, the glories of the rewrite! Why did I use that word? What was I thinking? This word is absolutely perfect. And this entire scene that I thought was so powerful, so in keeping with the protagonist's motivations? No, no, no. I would be so much better this way.....

And it goes on and on until finally you know you have to just give it up and submit the piece/novel/poem and be done with it or you'll be sitting there growing moss and cobwebs, your great-grand children will be going off to college, and your wife/partner will be using you for a coat rack.

It is, of course, all part of the joy of writing, of creativity, of self-actualizing. Here's a link to an essay of mine that was published in The Prague Revue. I must have rewritten it a hundred time over the course the month I give myself to write essays. Let me know if  you find any typos, clumsy sentences, daft reasoning, or misplaced commas. I know they are lurking in there, waiting to leap out and cause great consternation and blushing.

http://praguerevue.com/ViewArticle?articleId=3488



 

 

This Writing Life: Tis a pity the writer's a whore.

This is reputed to be Shakespeare's death mask. It may be or it may not be the Bard, but at least in one respect, it gets the message across: This man is dead, drained of life, and so drained of his creativity. Shakespeare didn't have to deal with the roaring cacophony that is our outrageous world of the Internet and social media. He wrote with a quill pen on coarse paper and sent letters by horse carriage. There were not millions of voices out there warning him that if he didn't join this group or that one there, he'd never make it as a writer.

So my message to myself today is that if I am going to create, I need to guard my creative energies and there is precious little of that energy left after I've spent hours every day sitting at a computer hooked up to the Internet thinking up clever ways to get noticed--whoring for attention, as it were. It all makes my head ache, my stomach knot up, and my spirit long for the quiet and solitude necessary to daydream. And I must always remember that daydreaming, simple daydreaming, is the genesis of creativity.

So, as a writer, my first obligation is to my creative self, to my daydreaming. That requires time, long, uninterrupted expanses of time that is quiet, reflective and free of the bloodthirsty killers called distractions. Close the windows, lock the doors, read something wonderful to prime the mind, and have the courage to daydream. Then, for at least four or five hours a day, have to courage to not whore yourself out.

What I Learned About Fiction Writing by Writing Essays for the Prague Revue

Salvador Dali kisses Rachel's hand after painting her portrait.

Writing is like painting is like life is like love: it takes time to get it right. 

For more than two years now I have been contributing an essay every month to The Prague Revue, a lovely, new-born, online literary zine. I was asked to be a regular contributor based on my short stories which TPR had published over the years, first in their original paper journal format and then in the new, digital Internet format. But now they didn't want short fiction, they wanted essays. 

I hadn't written an essay since college or at least since my broadcast journalist days in Key West (if banging out a ten minute news cast, including an occasional human interest story, in twenty minutes can be considered writing essays). But essay writing was writing, after all, and writing is my passion, so I agreed to do it. At least give it a try. You have to admire the courage of the editors at TPR.

I should probably report here that I struggled with this new genre which is usually referred to as creative non-fiction. Creative non-fiction, despite the creative part, has to be fact, not fiction. It has to be colorful//brisk/well researched/poignant/amusing and above all interesting and well written.

The first month's essay struggled to emerge after a full day of slogging away at this laptop, a day filled with an agony of increasing self-doubt. I thought I had a great idea but the essence of it refused to flood out of my fingers onto the blank screen. My writer's brain choked, my writer's self confidence was soon in full retreat. 

What to do? I stopped my struggle, closed the computer, and went for a long walk. Walking, as many writers find, is a fine thing to do in moments of creative trial and tribulation. Sure enough, after a few miles of hoofing it around town, I had the longed-for epiphany. To wit: It was the first day of the month. The completed, finely burnished essay was not due until the last day of the month. What the hell was I sweating for?

So, I set up a method of approaching essay writing. I would always be casting about for ideas, 24/7, day in and day out, daytime/nightime. When I was struck by one that seemed to have promise, I would note it down in my iphone. This way I built up a backlog of ideas for future essays.

Next, I would not spend time sitting at the computer just staring at the screen. I would write say, three sentences if that's all that seemed to be forthcoming, and move on to another writing project (this blog, my next novel). The only rule was that I would spend at least an hour a day on that month's essay. Just an hour, minimum. Of course, if it was going well, if the ideas were battering at the door of my imagination eager to get out, I would keep going and sometimes I would finish the first draft of a 2,000-word piece in a couple of hours.

Here's what I noticed happened: Every day when I sat down to write with the understanding that I only had to work at it for an hour, it took the panic and sweat out of essay writing. It allowed me plenty of time for my imagination to work and for me to do any research that was needed. It gave me time to re-write and fine tune and find any of those pesky typos and grammatical gremlins that lurk, smirking, within the syntax. For example, if I finished an essay by the middle of the month, I would still spend an hour every day re-writing it. It is wonderful, frightening, and enlightening when you realize how you can improve an essay you thought was finished if you re-write it every day for a couple of weeks.

And now I'm applying this idea to my fiction writing. As I re-write the draft of my just-finished novel, I treat each chapter as I would an essay. I spend at least an hour a day on each one, but if frustration and anguish creep in, I move on to something else. I'm adding a chapter to the middle of the book and having a great time writing it because I'm taking my time and allowing my character to take her time to develop fully.

In short, I'm no longer rushing the creative process. Our creative juices need time to gather, drip by drip, into a puddle of imagination. If I rush things, I'm missing all the possibilities for epiphanies--those lightning strikes of "ah ha!" moments that come if we give them enough time.

Winning the End Game: Having the Courage to Live Well Until the Last Breath

HL Tauri--The Birth of a New Solar System: I think of all the potential lives swirling about in that primordial, cosmic soup.

This photograph has got the cosmologists all excited. It was taken by a state-of-the-art telescope high in the mountains of Chili and it shows something that has never been seen before-- the actual initial stages of the formation of a new solar system. In the middle is where the new sun will be and the dark bands are where the planets are forming. And its all congealing from a vast cloud of interstellar dust.

Where am I going with this? Well, it may be a bit of a stretch, but it all makes me think of birth and life and death and the endless cycles of things in our Universe and that while death is as natural as birth, it's ever so much more terrifying; dying is no cause for joy and balloons and handing out cigars.

And now that I'm just a couple of weeks away from turning 68, it seems that death is happening all around me. It always has been, of course, but now that I'm retired and hanging out at home with not much to think about except writing, it is what I'm thinking about.

Most of my friends are about my age, of course, and seem to be dying at an alarming rate. And those that are still alive all have plenty of death-and-dying stories to share and I'm no exception: My 64-year-old cousin just passed unexpectedly, my mother has been dead for three years and my father-in-law, too, and one of my brothers-in-law was killed in a motorcycle accident, and my mother-in-law is terminally ill and my 95-year-old father has lost his mind to dementia and seems to be existing in a perpetual nightmare. The two guys across the street, who were my age, died last year and so did two high school friends. Oh, I could go on and on. And now that all this is happening, I realize that I have reached the phase in life where I'm supposed to begin deal with the End Game. Until recently death had been kept at a distance by relative youth and a busy schedule. Now when I look over my shoulder, I see all those pesky shadows.

The purpose of this blog is to keep a log of my life to hand down to you, my descendants who may have an interest in my share of where they came from and may be reading this. And if we are to be completely authentic about it all, it now means I should keep a log of the last years of my life. Thus far I'm healthy enough and have the genetics to go on living for another 25 years or more. All I need is luck. Still, we need to be prepared.

 So I shall begin herein to cite snippets of wisdom regarding our universal struggle to come to terms with the universal fate. I'll start with Mark Twain who is supposed to have said, "I'm not afraid of dying. I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it did not inconvenience me one bit."

It's like all the lives that may be formed from that nascent solar system pictured above: they are not the least bit perturbed at still being dead.

So I suppose there is humor in death. In fact, I'm counting on it. Watch this space.

The 100th Anniversary of the Beginning of World War I and a Memorable Bicycle Journey through the Killing Fields.

 The Bones of War: Skeletons of soldiers killed in the Battle of Verdun lie visible an impressive ossuary that sits atop the battlefield.

 Some thirty years ago, or so, I had a summer on my hands. My wife and I were living in Europe--had recently moved there from Iceland, in fact--and I was thirsty for some sort of small adventure. A bicycle trip across Europe from Germany to Paris seemed just the thing and so I bought a nice new Peugeot machine and set off by myself to experience the Continent first hand. What I hadn't counted on were my encounters with the ghosts of war. You can read more about this in my essay about my trip in The Prague Revue: http://praguerevue.com/ViewArticle?articleId=6169

When it comes to war, one can take the high road of cynicism (humanity deserves the horrors brought on by its animal instincts) or the lower, more realistic road (in this case the road I traveled on my bicycle that summer) which lead me though the settings of bloody old battles that are now green pastures, farms and forests and peaceful farming villages. This lower road suggests that we humans are infinitely complex animals that seem to be making very, very slow progress towards some sort of improved version of ourselves.

Death in the trenches: The Battlefield at Verdun

Summer 2014: Grandsons, Travel, Boats, Book Signings, and Beaches

 A successful book signing at the Sundial Bookstore in Chincoteague. We sold books, met good people, and had fun.

 

Time for grandsons to visit: Beaches, boating on the Bay, and just time together.

It's a bit tough getting used to having a 2-year-old and an almost-6-year-old around the house, but the joy of being a grandfather trumps it all. Now they've moved on to other adventures (in New Hampshire) and the house is a little too quiet.

It's June: Summer, Life is Good, and There's Deep Space to Think About, Too

Merely Infinity: Deep Space From Hubble

In summer, my eyes turn toward the heavens because the Earth has tilted and now I can see my favorite star constellations like Scorpio and Arcturus. Lovely stuff, really. And NASA just released this photo of deep space objects, namely lots of swirling, twirling galaxies. Thousands of them, and each of them no doubt full of sun-like stars with Earth-like planets filled with life of some sort or another. It's ever so instructive to look outward, towards the unknown and unknowable, towards an infinity that our finite awareness can never hope to grasp.

Close to home, summer brings around the celebration of things like war and remembrance, one time battlefields where thousands died and now thousands play. For example, see here below. The first is a photo taken on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Terrified soldiers, many, many of them soon to be dead, are disgorged from a landing craft on a beach in France. The picture below that is what that beach looks like today. If I had to choose, I'd choose the second one.

We hope that, as we gaze out into an infinite Universe that if there is life out there, and there most certainly is, that it does better than life here on this finite, fat little ball. That just maybe life evolved without having to kill to survive, to love without hate, and live without dying. And why not? Come on now, really. Why not?

Back to the Far Pacific: Book Signings and the Real Reason for Writing

 

Terry and I visited the new version of our old school on Guam and posed with the Seahawks mascot.

 

 

The writer's life can be fraught with frustration, disappointment, and a special bitterness reserved for those of us who try to create something worthwhile from a blank page. Still, there are rewards for persistence. This week Terry and I are visiting the far distant tropical island of Guam where we lived/taught/sailed/wrote for eleven years.

 

Terry needed to return for professional reasons and I, too had a good purpose: to do a book signing and to talk to kids about the adventure of being a writer. I am always intrigued and amazed by the sophistication of some young children. Yesterday I had a wonderful conversation with a room full of were there 50 of them?--third graders.

Third graders? I don't write for third graders. My books are aimed at young adult/adult readers. They are adventure stories, they run to more then 200 pages, they have some challenging vocabulary, they have sophisticated plots and characters, they even have chapters.

Still, for thirty-two years I worked with children of all ages as a school-based speech-language pathologist and now, after all that, there are expectations. When a former colleague here on Guam, a wonderful person and a spectacular educator, asked me to talk to her class, I would have been hard pressed to deny her. Then she asked if it would be alright to include all the other 3rd graders in the school. So, then, there they are, 50 of them--at least 50.

But, truth be told, I know third graders and appreciate them. They are at that level of development where the thrill of life has not begun to leak out to be replaced by an insipient, knowing cynicism (that starts in middle school), where small things can be indescribably wonderful, where a visiting author, a large, gray-bearded, deep-voiced stranger is a wonder to behold--a veritable hero, star, someone famous.

And so it was--a wonder to behold. For forty minutes, they sat on the floor staring up at me and listening with an attention that was nothing less than rapt. But not just listening--participating in a conversation about this wonderful thing that they are struggling to master (as are all of us who presume to be authors): writing.

When working with kids, I take a practical, realistic approach. They need to be entertained, need to be challenged, and love to be given the opportunity to perform. I asked them to tell me what imagination was. One girl got it right: It's seeing pictures in you mind. Oh, yes.

So, they then closed their eyes and watched the scenes play out in their mind's eye while I read a brief passage from my novel Brothers of the Fire Star, a sailing-adventure-historical story set, in part, right there where they were sitting, right here where they lived among the islands and atolls of the western tropical Pacific.

I then help up a photograph of a man sitting in an island-style outrigger canoe and asked them to write down the answers to questions: What is he thinking? What is his name? What is he afraid of? What is he going to do today? Who does he love? How many children does he have?

I then stressed the importance of first sentences. I believe you can hang a entire story on it's first sentence and I re-read the first sentence of the book. I asked them to write a first sentence of their own book using the information they had written about the man in the canoe. I gave them time to think.

Then, the best part, I asked volunteers to come up and sit in "the author's chair" and read the answers to the questions and the first sentence--in front of everyone.

 

 





Write, Write, Write, Write, Write: How Being Obsessed with Writing Can Pave the Road to Greatness--or at Least Improve Our Prose

My Obsession: Here I am, the kitchen table scribbler, writing, writing, writing, writing.

I write. I write that I am writing. Mentally is see myself writing that am writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing. I remember writing and also seeing myself writing. And I see myself remembering that I see myself writing and I remember seeing myself remembering that I was writing and I write seeing myself write that I remember having seen myself write that I saw myself writing that I was writing. I can also imagine myself writing that I had already written that I would  imagine myself writing that I had written that I was imagining myself writing that I had written that I was imagining myself writing that I see myself writing that I am writing.                                                                       
                                                                                                  Salvadro Elizondo/ The Graphographer


Nobel laureate Mario Varcas LLosa opened his novel Aunt Julia and the Script Writer with this quote. It's a fun house mirror kind of thing that gets the point across: an obsession with writing that is the genesis of all great literature and that can also drive the writer a bit mad, destroy relationships, and maybe destroy the writer, too.

To accomplish great things in a difficult profession, both extraordinary talent and extraordinary obsession are necessary things. Whether it is writing or ballet dancing, playing the piano or brain surgery or theoretical physics, doing great things takes a single-minded, long-term focus.

As I continue my struggle to improve my prose fiction, I realize now that my other writing--blogging, working as a broadcast journalist, and, for the past two years, as an essayist--has also played a powerful role in that learning process. Example: as a news reporter/anchor for several radio stations, I was required to not only go out and gather the news, but to get back to the station in time to write those stories up into a coherent news cast--and then read my own reporting on the air. This was a deadline dictated by the seconds of a clock and the format of the station. I had to be in front of that microphone with five minute of well-written news at exactly the right time.

This resulted in not only dramatically improved typing skills but in a dramatically improved ability to come up with the right words quickly, to foresee the elements in the story that needed to unfold, to organize those elements into a beginning, middle, and end. It taught me to get the point across in a colorful, interesting style while being a minimalist with words. Typically, I would have, say, 30 or 40 seconds to tell a complete news item.

As for blogging, I started this blog back in 2005 when I was living on a sailboat on the island of Guam. I never thought  of it as a way to promote myself and my writing. It was, really, just a personal journal. This non-deadline prose is the sort of writing that can be fun as well as instructive. Blogs do go out there into the world--around the world, in fact, with a potential readership in the billions--and you want it to be interesting, thought provoking, entertaining--all the things good writing should be--while being relaxed and easy going. I have, in fact, via an online publishing service, put the first six years of this blog into book form (glossy hard-back--looks great) just for my own and my family's interest.

When I was invited to write a monthly piece for The Prague Revue, an online literary journal, I found myself up against a different sort of deadline. While it no longer came down to those final desperate seconds, the writing had to be much different. I have a month to produce a thoughtful, entertaining, 2,000-word piece that will draw in and hold onto the modern, Internet reader, a reader with a notoriously short attention span. To do this, I usually spend an hour a day for three weeks or so, thinking, researching, writing, and then re-writing (and re-writing, and re-writing, and re-writing....) until I think I have it about right.

Again, the goal of this discipline and effort is an improved ability to find just the right word, to weave those words into compelling, alive-on-the-page prose. The more we write, the more our writing improves. The better our writing, the better we feel about our writing and the better our writing becomes, and on and on in the lovely rising spiral of competence.

Of course, to learn to write prose fiction well, there is no substitute for actually writing prose fiction. And writing and writing and writing and writing and writing.......

The First Draft is Finished: Now What?

 Rough Draft: Red-Winged Black Bird on a Joe Pye Weed

It was a long, cold winter and so a perfect one for a writer with a snug room, a good laptop, and no day job. Here is the first draft of my new novel, working title, Red-Winged Black Bird on a Joe Pye Weed. It is 294 pages, 74,500 words long in its present incarnation.

 Short plot summary: Set in rural New England in the 1950's and 60's, an abandoned boy and the nurse-midwife who raises him struggle to cope with the devastating legacy of war.

I finished it on April 2 and sent the file to my local printer. For $34 they printed in, punched holes in it, and put it in a loose leaf binder. I do this for a couple of reasons. First, I need to have some sort of hard-copy closure. I need to see it, feel it, heft it, flutter the pages, stare at it in wonderment because, when I finish a book, it always seems impossible that I could have done such a thing. The other reason to have it printed out is because I need to have it in a manageable form for my own use. I'll need to leaf through it during the re-write process, make notes on it, bludgeon it, maybe even throw it across the room once in a while. The other reason is to prove to my suspicious wife that I really have been doing something creative and constructive locked away in my dark room for so many months.

As for re-writing, I guess I'm lucky in that I enjoy it. So many writers don't. I'm going to give the book time to "cook" as Hemingway said; that is, let it sit for a while so I get some distance from it. After going over each page, each paragraph, each sentence so many times for so long, you get so you can't see what's really happening anymore. Time will allow the over-familiarity to fade so I can read it with "new" eyes. A couple of months ought to be sufficient, but waiting for the cooking process to finish is difficult. The urge to leap into in, to get going on it, is nearly overwhelming.

But, it's all perfect timing. Winter is over, spring is here, and I need to get out of this writer's cave and do other, spring-like things like take my boat out on the Chesapeake, or soak up the sun, or listen the tweeting birds who I've been supporting since last October with bag after bag of bird food. They owe me that much.

First Day of Spring, a New Novel, and a Birthday Celebration

 The Bard's Death Mask--or Maybe Not

I had no idea there was, extant, a death mask of Shakespeare. As a collector of masks, I want one of these for my wall. But never mind. it might not be him at all, apparently.  But now segue, please, to:

The first day of spring, 2014. And a singular day it is, too: Terry's birthday and the day I finished--or nearly so--my next novel. And today is appropriately spring like after the nasty winter. It's sunny and cool, flowers abound and trees are budding out with a fine enthusiasm.

I've been, as the editor-in-chief of the Prague Revue (for whom I write a monthly piece) says, "You, sir, are a machine!" I assume he means a writing machine and I assume it was a complement. And it may seem like I'm running on a full tank of gas because I've had my nose to the grindstone of this computer steadily now, daily, with little respite, for the last seven months,through a long, dark, bitter, record-setting winter. 

But it was good, very good. The new novel, whose working title is Red-Winged Black Bird on a Joe Pye Weed, is longer than usual for me, coming in at nearly 300 pages. There is an ongoing contest on Facebook to come up with a short-as-possible pitch for your novel. Something you can use to pique the interest of a busy agent while riding with him/her in an elevator. I've been working on one for this book: The devastating affects of war, a boy, a midwife, a baby. I like it.

Here's Terry. Obviously it would be improper to reveal her current age, but she doing fine indeed and today, particularly, is up and ready for anything. My birthday gift for her was, I must admit, a stroke of genius: her first flying lesson. That will happen tomorrow. Tonight it will be champagne, flowers, and dinner out. Ah, love!

Lost in the Jungle of Symbolism: Let the Beholder Find His Own Meaning

The Writer in the Jungle of Symbolism: Watch out, you're surrounded!

This picture of me taken by my son while were were on a hike in the wilds of the Florida Keys a few years ago can be milked so nicely for symbolism, I thought I'd use it again. Look at me, smiling in the jungle, but what is the meaning of that smile? And the white shirt? The relaxed pose? All this while the dead palm frond just behind me looks like a threatening hand? And why the jungle? Lots and lots of symbols can be conjured out of a jungle. But the truth is, I just stopped and turned around and he took the picture. No planning, no intended symbolism.

I think there is a truism here: Writer's don't think about symbolism as much as critics and professors of literature do. Hemingway said that a writer should never knowingly put symbols into his/her work but when the work is finished, it should be full of them. For example, in this picture you might think that I'm actually trying to look like Hemingway. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, I have the graying beard, and yes the adventurer's white shirt, and yes, I'm in the jungle and I may even have had drink or two. But no, Hemingway was the last guy on my mind. It just happens to be the way I look and the way I live.

And so it goes with writing. For example, Hemingway's justly famous story, "Hills Like White Elephants" seems to be about an unwanted pregnancy and a possible upcoming abortion, though Hemingway never mentions these things. Literary prospectors, mining the story for symbolic gold, have blasted out all sorts of fools gold ideas. Like the white hills resemble the shape of a pregnant woman's belly or, and here's a good one, the white elephant is, according to the dictionary, a property not worth the effort of owning and so would be the unwanted baby. I've been to white elephant parties and ended up with junk I saved for the next white elephant party, but I never ended up with a baby. 

To my knowledge, Hemingway was never asked about the symbolism in this story and I doubt he would have answered anyway. My take on it is that Hemingway liked elephants, had recently been hunting them in Africa, liked the way the distant hills resembled them, and figured they gave the story the background mood he wanted; so he used them.

Here's what Hemingway actually said about the purported symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea: 

 

"No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better. I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."

So we need, I think, to be careful with the symbols, to go easy, not try too hard. If, as Hemingway said,  we make our characters and places real enough and true enough, they can mean different things to different people. That is, the reader will find the symbols that meet his/her needs in the work of the artist. And that, after all, is the real purpose and joy of art.

Writing Down the Winter

Welcoming February 2014 with a glass of wine.

It was a long, cold January, one for the record books and one to be treasured, in that strange way writers cherish the excuse to stay in doors, curled up, tucked away, warm and writing.

The working title of my next novel is Red-winged Black Bird on a Joe Pye Weed. It's set in 1950's-60's rural New England with an important scene on Guam during WWII. It concerns a boy whose father and mother had abandoned him to the care of a nurse-midwife. As of Friday, I was 171 pages into it, or about 47,000 words. If you're lucky when you write a book, the plot, the characters, the setting all fall in together in a glorious and wonderful stew and this has happened now. I, for the first time, I am totally absorbed in and obsessed with writing: I want to do nothing else. I have to pull myself away for a weekend break. I tease myself; it's like foreplay.

Speaking of writing, I was about to send in my February piece to The Prague Revue (an essay on Kurt Vonnegut and the effect that his being in Dresden as a POW during the firebombing in WWII had on his writing). Just before finishing the piece, I happened to visit TPR's website, as I do several times each week. And so, of course, I find that the Universe has conspired against me with a cosmic coincidence. There was a very nice piece, written by the editors, about Kurt Vonnegut and his experiences in surviving the fire bombing of Dresden. Pure bad luck for me. So, I regrouped, dropped back and punted them another piece, this one on the mythologist Joseph Campbell and his impact on 20th century writers, film makers, and thinkers.

Today is Super Bowl Sunday and we are going to a neighbors for the game (Denver-Seattle). Terry flies to Atlanta early tomorrow, so we'll have to be careful tonight. She has six more months in this job.