Contemplating the Next Project: Getting a Grip on the Creative Process

This is a traditional sailing canoe used by Carolinian islanders for the past few thousand years. In them, they can sail over hundreds of miles of open ocean navigating using only the stars, waves, and sea life to navigate.

In an earlier post, I wrote briefly about this and published the photo below of me at the helm of one, but now its time to get serious as regards writing about it. My next book, this year's project, is an adventure story concerning traditional sailing and navigating in the western Pacific.

So the process starts like this: I've learned a lot about traditional navigation and sailing in the past seven or so years as a member of the Traditional Seafarers Society here on Guam, but I've got a long way to go as regards a more profound understanding of island society and culture. I'm lucky to have all this at my finger tips; I can immerse myself in it. Today is Saturday (it's still raining--pouring--has been all week), but I'm planning on driving up to the utt (thatched hut) that is the meeting place for the Society and get reacquainted with my old friends. I'll pick up some more books about island history, life, culture, and start making notes. On my long daily walks (I'm up to six miles nearly every day), I can start to visualize plot ideas, let scenes blossom in my mind's eye (that's what it feels like--a flower blossoming), and get excited about all the possibilities that the imagination offers.

Right now, though, I'm procrastinating getting out my SCUBA gear and diving the boat. The bottom needs cleaning, but I don't like diving in the rain because on cloudy days the water is dim and it's hard to see what I'm doing. But, get a move on, Dougie, and get it done.

The Writer's Thinking Summer: Re-seeding the Cognitive Playground

Here is the view from the galley. I'm back on Guam and sitting in the belly of our boat. It's early on a Saturday morning and Terry and the cats are sleeping. It's rainy season and there is the nice sound of a torrential downpour on the deck so it's a fine time to be reading and thinking about stuff.

I'm between writing projects, the books of The Eye of the Stallion fantasy trilogy being finished, except for a final tweak of the last book, A Drop of Wizard's Blood. Book II, The Mirrors of Castaway Time is due to be published soon--next month, maybe. So I've been looking around for some brain candy in the form a a few good reads.

I like to think of a book as a cognitive playground (for both the reader and the writer). For me to spend precious hours between the covers of a book or a magazine, it has to offer me something to chew on, something to get cognitively involved with and excited about the way a kid might get excited about a new toy.

Sometimes, if I'm real lucky, I find it in a novel. There are few things as fine as a novel that delivers the goods on cognitive, emotional, and artistic levels. That would mean great writing style, profound wisdom dispensed subtly and maybe with equally subtle humor, and page turning excitement. A book like that is a rare fine, indeed.

It is easier to find a work of non-fiction that satisfies because you know if you are interested in the topic by just reading the title. So, the little time I have had to read this summer, I spent working my way through two of Richard Dawkins' books simultaneously: The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion. Dawkins is a biology professor at Oxford and is famous for beating the religious right over the head with its own ignorance and knee-jerk denial of the gifts of reason and science. By the way, rather than claiming to be a strict, radical atheist, Dawkins says he is a "Level 6" agnostic--almost absolutely certain there is no God--and that is as far as a scientist will go toward an absolute belief. Science, is, after all, all about probability.

I studied a lot of science in college and have a pretty good idea of the basics of Darwin's evolution but these two Dawkins books were, as he would put, consciousness raisers. For me, a consciousness raising experience is an epiphany of sorts, a realization that feels like a fresh breeze blowing across my mind, a feeling of profound excitement that I have just learned something new and something critically important. It makes me take a short, quick breath and makes me feel, as I mentioned above, like a child again.

So, Dawkins is brain candy as is the book I'm reading now: A View from the Center of the Universe. Lovely stuff in here, folks. The latest speculations from astrophysicists and quantum physics on what the universe is all about--its existence, size, age, contents, future, and most importantly, our place in it as human beings. No religion here, just science for the layman, and for this layman, its heady stuff. Here's an example: The universe is probably about 14 billion years old. Our planet is about 4.5 billion years old with about 6 billion years to go before it is destroyed by the death of our own sun. Human "civilization" has been around in some form for maybe 5 or 10 thousand years. This means we have just begun. We have another 6 billion years to go. When you think of the technological progress we have made in just the past 100 years, it boggles the mind to consider what might lie ahead--if we can survive. And one of the biggest threats to our survival is fundamentalist religion.

That's why it is so very critical that we get a grip on this problem with fundamentalist religiosity. Since the middle ages, religion has fought scientific progress tooth and nail. The religious authorities locked Galileo up because he supported Copernicus's findings that the earth was not the center of the universe. The Bible implies the Earth is flat and fundamentalists insist it is only 6 thousand years old. The result is, while technology moves forward, the social/cultural status of the vast majority of humanity remains in the dark ages. We continue to believe in incredibly far-fetched superstitions and mythologies that cause us to hate and murder each other relentlessly and without guilt.

Well, never mind. I'll think more about this later. The rain has let up and I need to take a long walk. And I've got boat projects this weekend. The faucets in the galley are dripping and I need to get my dive gear on and clean the bottom and the prop and check the zincs. We hope to go sailing if the weather improves.

Summer in New England: A Photo Gallery

This is the green New England summer of my youthful memories. It has become a habit to take long daily walks through the farm country in Montague, Massachusetts, a village just a few miles north of Amherst in the Connecticutt River valley. Here is a sampler of some pix I took with my Pentax Optio digital of farms and wild flowers (Wild Carrot and Joe Pye Weed).

Writer as Sailor as Eternal "Come-Here": The Price of the Wandering Life

Here I am last week at the tiller of a skiff exploring the marshlands inside the barrier islands off the coast of the Eastern Shore of Virgina. I've been exploring, that is, wandering from place to place, most of my life. When I was ten, we moved from northern New Jersey to a small farming village in Massachusetts and since then, in addition to traveling around the world, I've lived in Arizona, Virginia, Key West, Iceland, Germany, Guam, North Myrtle Beach, and now we've bought a home in Onancock, Virginia.

And everywhere I've lived, I have experienced the plight of every new guy on the block. Although I lived next to a farm in a rual area of New Jersey and was raising chickens by the time I was nine years old, when we moved to Massachusetts, I was considered, with some disparagement, to be a "city slicker" and a "foreigner." In Key West, where I was a radio news reporter and anchor, I noticed that whenever anyone stood up in city council meetings to give an opinion, they first let everyone know how long they had lived there, the length of residency directly affecting the influence of the opinion expressed. The same was true, in different ways, everywhere else, and now, here were are, planning on retiring to the Eastern Shore of Virginia where they call folks like us, "come-heres."

"Come-heres?" That was a new one for me. The expression itself lacks any aliterative music, and sounds like a command rather than the derogatory label it is meant to be. The reasons for this "come-here" phenomena are as universal as they are obvious. The locals are both proud of their heritage and instinctively threatened by the intruder. On the other side, some new residents see the locals as rubes and maintain a distance. Of course, there are those on both sides who are eager to accept and be accepted and thus far that is how its been on the Eastern Shore. The people are smiling, friendly, and helpful. The owner of the hardware store that was once a showroom for Model A Fords and where you can find melons, fresh corn, tools, straw hats, and bib overalls, couldn't be more welcoming.

Mary Pricilla Howes, the late sage of Ashfield, Massachusetts, the closest thing to a hometown I've ever had, wrote that for her, happiness and profound living resulted from "staying put." But for me, much of the richness of life has come from being a "come-here." When you arrive at somewhere new, you have what the Zen Buddists would call a child's mind. Things are different, strange even, and so there is much to learn and all those new people to meet. It is this engagement with, this embracing of the new and different cultures that broadens us and teaches us that there is a wider world out there and that humanity's variations are what make the world such a fine place.

Here's what I'm reading this summer: The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion, both by Richard Dawkins the Oxford biologist and famous athiest (actually, he says he is a "Level 6 Agnostic, Level 7 being an absolute athiest and in science nothing is absolute). The Blindwatchmaker is good overview of evolution but takes some reader effort and The God Delusion is a very readable and scathing indictment of mindless, pervasive, and destructive religiosity.

Still Life: Finished Manuscript on Antique Bar

In school, I was never accused of making good use of my time. If only the teachers had understood that if they had just let me do what I wanted to do, this dreamy boy would have been fine.

In any event, I made good use of the past year and here is the evidence: the 346-page manuscript of A Drop of Wizard's Blood, Book III in The Eye of the Stallion trilogy. Yesterday I finished the big, first re-write of the original manuscript, a process that took a month of 6:00 to 11:00 mornings reading the book aloud to myself. Yesterday I also sent it to my fine editor, Linda Morehouse (www.webuildbooks.com) out in California. She's a pro and I pay her to be honest with me and she is, I think, sometimes painfully so.

But, I'm pleased with the way it turned out. Writing it was a complex process, because not only did I have to make sure all the plot lines in this book worked out, but I also had to make sure they complemented and did not conflict with the plot lines in the other two books in the trilogy, as all the books are bound together by characters and the idea that Time is a warp-able, twisting, bread-dough phenomena.

Now, I'm going to rest awhile and do some serious reading, something I've missed. The next writing project will be an adventure story set in the most remote islands of the western Pacific, where we live on our sailboat when we're not in Virginia or off traveling. It will concern traditional navigation, the sailing of outrigger canoes, lost boys, and World War II.

The immediate future contains my daughter's wedding, which happens this coming Saturday right here in Onancock, Virginia. A few more things to do on the house to get ready, so I'd better get going and make good use of my Time.

Water, There Must Be Water

How can anyone live away from the water? I ask myself this. When I fly across America, when I rode the Trans-Siberian Railroad across Mother Russia, when I lived in the middle of Germany for twelve years--all these people living without the sea--or most without even a pond--where does the sustenance for their souls come from if not water?

So, here is the Eastern Shore of Virginia, that great undiscovered peninsula that is a essentially a huge farm--Iowa, say--surrounded by water. On one side, the western side, there is the great Chesapeake Bay, on the eastern side there is the inevitable Atlantic. In the middle is an utterly flat, rich land where thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of crops are tilled by Mexican workers (legal? who knows). They plant, grow, and harvest, by my observations so far, corn, tomatoes, soy beans, wheat, and cucumbers. There are smaller operations that produce green beans, melons, squash, and zucchini. And then you see the huge chicken corporations, Tyson and Purdue, their chicken farms eerily resembling small concentration camps, their processing plants attracting immense flocks of seagulls and reeking of raw meat and blood when the wind blows right.

But, again, there is the water. It saves it all from being just another prairie. In my other blogs on this site you've seen photos of the Bay side of the Eastern Shore. Here are some of the sea side. Here, just six miles from the Chesapeake, is a great ocean and the barrier islands that protect the farmlands. Hundred of miles of empty, windswept beach await the beachcomber and within those barrier islands are millions of acres of marshlands, flat, shallow water filled with crabs and oysters, and hundreds of species of fish.

Yesterday I took a break from writing and accepted an invitation to go out on the water. Here are a few pics.

A Sailor's Fourth of July: Our All American Little Town on the Chesapeake

This is it, the America I've been missing. I've been out of the country pretty much steadily for the past twenty-five years and now I'm home for this: the perfect all-American experience on the perfect, all-American holiday.

The spirit of Onancock and the physical reality of Onancock are one and the same. They linger in a mythic and pleasant past when there was an ice cream party on the town common and a band played patriotic music on the gazebo after the mayor--who is also the town barber--gave a speech. Citizens gathered around on the grass, old people in chairs or on benches, young people holding hands, kids running about. And not only the town common, but all the main roads are lined with small American flags.

So, this morning I'm up at first light and was working on the re-write of the Book III, A Drop of Wizard's Blood, while Terry slept in. This is our routine--I love the early morning air and light. But the witchy mornings never last long enough. Too soon the dayspring, with its magical cool air, deep shadows, and waking birds, gives way to the bleaching reality of full daylight. As the sun rises, the elves and faeries, sylphs and zephyrs who are my muses, take their leave and I'm faced with chores that can no longer be denied. But, today is a rest day, a day of celebration, and I'm looking forward to what this town will offer.