My novel, The Eye of the Stallion: The Face in Amber is a fantasy/adventure I wrote for young adults (it also crosses over easily into the adult fantasy market). It is partly a horse story and, in some respects, runs along the common theme of other girl-loves-horse stories. My heroine, Sonoria, is a rebel, a tough rebel just coming into her young womanhood. She is bound by her nature to challenge authority and the status quo--as all young people should do. And she loves a stallion named Spiritus that is just like her: indomitable, willful, and independent.

But enthusiasm for horses is not limited to girls. Here's a photo of me when I was about eleven years old. I was part of a horse 4-H club in my home town in Massachusetts and eventually became a pretty good horseback rider. As I recall, I was pretty sick when this picture was taken. I had the flu and a fever, but didn't want to miss riding in the local horse show. The horse's name was Pete and, to be honest, he was a sad, spiritless creature. We got along fairly well, though, except he was afraid of snow drifts and would occasionally throw me when we went on winter trail rides. I don't think I ever won any ribbons with him. I was a pretty timid rider and Pete would rather have been back in the barn. But, never mind; by riding Pete and later lots of other horses, I learned a skill that I've been enjoying all my life and acquired a love of horses--their smells, their sounds, the way they look, and the way they move. I've been able to incorporate that love into my writing.

A Mighty Strange Few Weeks

It has indeed been a mighty strange few weeks. Started out with what anyone has to go through as we muddle through modern life: the brakes on my truck failed and the part had to be ordered from "off island." Read: three-week wait. Then the air conditioning in Terry's car disappeared and it's 87 degrees here every day (Yeah, sure, that's tough, Doug). So we're down to one hot vehicle.

Then, there is a big storm way up in Japan. It's maybe fifteen hundred miles away, but, this means that after a while, a few days, the ocean swells from that system reach Guam. This sets up a large surge in the harbor where we live aboard our sailboat. This in turn translates to a boat that is being heaved and rocked and thrown about and resulted in a crushed self-steering vane when the stern of the boat was smashed against our boarding plateform.

Then, the wind changes and starts coming in from the North. A few days later, the air is filled with smog--smog! On an tiny island in the middle of the ocean? Turns out it's from China. The Chinese industrial economy is booming, there is little control of pollution, and when conditions are right, the stuff comes our way and fills the sky so that we can't see the mountains a few miles away. The air is nearly unbreathable.

Then: Irony sets in and the Chinese economy burps. I think they are now calling it that--a burp. So stock markets crash all around the world because now China is pretty important, economically, to the world.

So, what do we care? Here is a picture of Terry and I, in clear weather, up on the neighboring island of Rota in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas. It's a great island. Just wonderful. Isolated, empty beaches, gin-clear water, one dusty little town, and very friendly people. We had sailed up there--this was last spring--and were enjoying the seascapes.

The writing is going well. I'm 206 pages into the 3rd novel in this possible trilogy (Terry thinks I ought to just call it a series and let it go on and on--we'll see). I've got the plot and characters (Scraps, Sonoria, Dag-gar, the donkey called Admiral Penance, Astral the Ancient Boy) so twisted up with Time travel and magic that I've had to slow down and really think things through before moving on. I think I have a handle on it now, though. Hope to have this book done by June. As to the publication of the second book, The Mirrors of Castaway Time--who knows. I've heard nothing.

Traditional Sailing in the Western Pacific

One of my great interests here on Guam is the traditional ways of sailing and navigating used by the ancient sailors and a handful of modern islanders to find their way among the far-flung islands. This is a photograph of me at the tiller of a traditional island canoe. As a sailor of fiberglass and aluminum sailboats, it's almost beyond my ability to imagine going to sea for days at a time in a vessel like this one. The Quest was built on the island of Puluwat in the Caroline Islands by a master canoe builder, and sailed the nearly 500 miles of open ocean to Guam.

And, as if the sailing of such a canoe in the open sea were not challenging enough, the way they navigate is utterly beyond belief for a western sailor who uses GPS. They carry no GPS, no sextant--not even a compass. They rely soley on the stars, the ocean swells, and sea life to steer across the vast expanses of sea. For food and drink, it is a mash of taro root, fishing, coconut milk, and rain water.

I'll never be a true traditional navigator. I'm too old to master that mystical art, but I do want to understand it as well as I can. I'm working on a book, an adventure novel, that will deal with this and the conflicting demands of maintaining traditional cultures while acknowledging those aspects of the modern world that cannot be avoided.

Terry and Ms. Puss at Home

Here's a great shot of Terry and the fat, spoiled tiger cat, Ms. Puss. Ms. Puss is truly a boat cat, having lived aboard for the past 8 years. We found her at a restaurant here on Guam. She was about six weeks old, was pot bellied and nearly hairless and obviously starving to death. But she was a howler. She looked up at us sitting there eating and cried pitifully for food. When a morsel was dropped to her, another, bigger cat, would get it first. So, we took her home to the boat. Now she's pretty much in charge of day-to-day operations during the 5% of the day she's not napping.

Terry is a cat-crazy sailor, for sure. Can't imagine her being cat-less. She brought two cats from Germany, at great expense and hassel, nine years ago when we move from there to Guam. But, she's a fine and brave yachtie, and here she is on the foredeck of VATNA relaxing in the evening just before sunset. I was about to leave for a month to come back to Massachusetts to help take care of my mother and were sneaking in as much together time as we could. The foredeck of the boat, with a cat for company, is a great way to do that.

From the Tropics to the Cold: Another New Year's Eve in New England

We're celebrating tonight, celebrating my older sister's birthday, celebrating the New Year, celebrating being together as a family one more time even though the circumstances are not something normally celebrated. Mom is getting weaker physically, her mind less clear. We are gathered here in rural western Massachusetts, the Bershires, our family's home for so many years, to care for her.

The transition from the jungle to the winter Bershires was pleasant enough, considering the twenty-three hours of traveling and the vast difference in temperature. I'm staying at my younger sister's house, back up a dirt road in the forest, on the edge of a clear, cold, ice-covered pond. No neighbors in sight. I was sung to sleep by the music of a passing freight train which reminded me of the words of a Paul Simon song, "Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance, everyone believes it's true." This morning, I was up alone at 6:00, put on coffee, and built a fire in the fireplace, made a quick trip out to the woodpile for more firewood, and had my breakfast. Then, off to Greenfield to be with our parents for the day. Was a nice irony, scraping the frost/ice off the truck's windshield with my Guam driver's liscence.

All told, the cold feels good, being with family feels great, I miss Terry, who is back in Guam on the boat, and I've got three weeks left before I fly back to her. The woodsmoke, the ice, the dim winter sky, and driving an old truck filled with tools and sawdust makes me feel at home, makes me feel like a New Englander again.

Flying Home at Christmas

My wife, Terry, and I have been overseas teaching and traveling since 1983--twenty three years. And in that time there were the inevitable changes: family members grow up and grow old. Just got word that my mother is ill and so I'll be traveling half-way around the world to help care for her. Here's a great old photo of her with my sister, Patty, and I. It's my first birthday, so she would have been twenty-four. She has been the classic family matriarch--a powerful, determined personality and a quick mind. A registered nurse since 1941, she once ran two wards in a mental hospital and then, in her 50's, convinced my father to go in the Peace Corps. They spent nearly two years in Nicaragua doing good things. And always, family came first. Above all else, it was family and now we are happy to give back.

So, I'll leave Christmas Day and set off on the twenty-three hour journey from Guam to Massachusetts. It will be nice, of course, to be home during the Christmas season and to help out, and to be in the New England cold where I grew up.

Yesterday we went sailing for the first time since the Spring school vacation last April. Took us all day Saturday to get the boat ready and I had to go up the mast with Terry's help (we use a boatsun's chair), and finish the work on the lights. Lots of fun dangling over the deck 45 feet up, the wind whistling around you, the boat rocking.

Had things ready by Sunday morning, loaded up food and drink and four friends and set off. The wind was 15 knots from the ESE--strangely enough for this time of year--and this allowed for a great heading of NE under a full genoa and main. I experimented with the self-steering vane and found the boat was unbalanced with the sails set the way they were. Finally, we furled up two thirds of the jib and put up the staysail. This balanced things nicely and the Cape Horn vane work great with just a little Tiller Pilot to keep us pointed in desired direction. Afterwards we had Terry's great lasagna and red wine on the seawall and celebrated a great day on the water.

Interesting, though, how paranoid we writers get about saving our stuff. I'm halfway through writing the last book in the Eye of the Stallion trilolgy (working title: The Time Drifters), and everything was on board the boat--the computer and the pen drives I save the back up copies of the book to. So, before we left the dock, I was careful to put one of the pen drives in my truck for safe keeping. Can't be too safe, you know. The worst horror of horrors for a writer is to lose anything he's written to some foolish oversight or accident.