Mike Jastrzebski's Blog, page 20

The eyes are the window to the soul

Grand baby Brynn only a few hours old

by Christine Kling

At last we have slowed our travels, and finally I’ve started the new book. I adore road trips, but there comes a time when the itch to start building that fictional world becomes almost painful. Travel is all about focusing on the outside world while writing is about turning one’s eyes within. It was time to get focused.

Every new book is a chance to “get it right” this time, to become a better writer. I’m building my characters and outlining my plot, and my new baby (this one will be number 7!) is still early in her first trimester. I have already come up with a possible name for her, but I’m keeping that quiet.

The phrase I used as a title for this blog refers to eyes being the windows to the soul, and it is often mis-attributed to Shakespeare. In fact, the phrase is an old English Proverb. Whatever the origin, the words have been echoing in my brain this past week as Wayne and I welcomed the arrival of the first grand baby (pictured above) into our newly combined family. Baby Brynn’s eyes were so bright and full of personality only hours after they first blinked in the air. They would roll around and then lock onto your eyes. I had forgotten that sense one gets that newborns are wise and know some secrets to the meaning of life that they will soon forget as the hours pass. I can look at her tiny fingers or adorable toes, but I don’t feel the same connection I feel when I look into her eyes. It is like eyes are windows into the mind at the very least, and we are always left wondering what is going on in the minds of babies.

Given that I know that when I interact with all people, eye contact is one of the most important things that determines my relationship with them, I suppose it’s not surprising that I often write about eyes when I am describing characters. But often can become too often! Many of you know that I use the software Scrivener, and one of the things it can do is report on the “word frequency” in a manuscript. In my last book, to my chagrin, I discovered that I used the word “eyes” 180 times!

When I learned that, I kind of went, Whoa! As writers, we want to write original prose, to use the language in wonderful ways and repeating words over and over isn’t exactly exciting. That doesn’t mean that I want to look for different words and suddenly start referring to visual orbs or some other ridiculous “synonym.”  I also don’t want to get so caught up in language that I throw the reader out of the story. Then again, I don’t want to write long paragraphs of meaningless details about a character’s hair color or wardrobe choices. It’s not about lots of details, but rather about significant meaningful ones.

I was always a fan of Ernest Hemingway’s minimalist style. He said more by what he didn’t put on the page than what he did. In his book Death in the Afternoon, he wrote:

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

I’m always looking to become a better writer and to learn from my own weaknesses. I think my over-reliance on describing eyes to telegraph what a character is thinking comes from my fascination with eyes, but also from not getting to know enough about my characters. Writing only about a character’s eyes, in Hemingway’s view, leaves hollow places in my writing.

I use these character templates in Scrivener to start building the details of the characters who will inhabit this new world, and I’ve noticed that in the physical description, I always include the color and often the shape of the eyes. Okay, it is important to know that, but I don’t have to write it. Maybe this time I’ll be able to be more minimalist — to omit writing out all those eye descriptions and instead write only the tip of the iceberg.

Eventually, I’ll get better at getting better.

Fair winds!

Christine

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Getting into your character’s head…

C.E. Grundler

Two weeks and counting. That’s the official toll I’ve paid for burning the candle at both ends. Two weeks being sidelined from attacking the decks when I was closing in on the finish line. Two weeks, but time has seemed to crawl, even go backwards. Yeah. I get it. I’m not a kid anymore and I don’t get over a simple summer cold in a day or two. I’ve learned my lesson.

Two weeks with no boat work, and very little writing would have made for a very cranky human if not for the fact that it let me catch up on a whole bunch of reading, research, and watching old heist movies, (technically, also research.) To create a truly menacing villain with solid (albeit perverse) reasoning behind his actions, I needed to step beyond my own emotional comfort zone and climb into the head of someone with a highly deviated moral compass and an emotional range that required books by psychologists and neuroscientists to grasp.

Much of what you’ll find on the webs when it comes to shocking acts and reasoning falls along the sensational end, but doesn’t delve into the nuts-and-bolts in a nice, straightforward way. I was hoping to take a peak under the hood, so to speak. And not just for the crazier characters. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a bit of an introvert, though ‘a bit’ is a bit of an understatement. On the spectrum of introversion, I’m way off in the deep end of the pool, and I’m cool with that. Not surprisingly, so is my main character. But not all of my characters. What I needed was a manual for the human brain. Basic operation, normal or otherwise, and the emotional motivations that drive behaviors, both normal and Abby… Normal. (Bonus points for anyone who knows that reference.)

In the end, two books rose to the surface. One, The Psychopath Inside, is the truly fascinating story told by James Fallon, a highly accomplished and well respected neuroscientist who came to discover purely by accident that his own personal brain patterns were text-book perfect examples of a psychopath. His research spans the range, from studies of Alzheimer’s to evaluations of some of the most horrific serial killers, and he’s a very entertaining fellow, both in his writings and public speaking. Check him out, he’s quite fascinating and his unique insights into the inner workings of the brain, as well as the effects of environment versus genetics are well worth a look.

The second book, Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, takes a broader view of human nature, and encompasses the full spectrum of emotional behavior. Being that emotions tend to take the front seat over logic or reasoning when it comes to conflict, a thorough read of this book is an eye-opener to understanding and convincingly conveying the human animal in all its baffling behaviors.

As writers, we want to reach our readers on the deepest, most subliminal level. We want our books grab them, pull them in, and to resonate with them long after they’ve reached ‘The End.’ We’re writing fiction, and fiction, in its essence, works best when there is conflict. Emotion plays a key part in conflict, and the better we can convey the emotion flowing just beneath the surface of these conflicts, the more our readers will be invested. To that end, I can’t recommend these two books highly enough — they compliment each other in a surprising way, and there’s the added bonus that you might just gain some insight into the actions of your fellow humans, fictional or otherwise.

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Shit happens

By Mike Jastrzebski

When we left St. Augustine our plan was to go straight to Southport, NC. This would take us substantially offshore and allow us to give our new standing rigging and our sailing skills a little workout. After all, we haven’t had the sails up since we came back from the Bahamas a year ago.

The weather reports called for three or four days of anywhere from 5-15 knots of wind and possible showers along the way. The first day out was perfect and we sailed for 5 or 6 hours on a beam reach, then the wind shifted to our nose and died down to 3-5 knots so we motored through the night.

The morning brought threatening skies and a slight breeze on the nose. We reefed the sails and kept motoring until the storm hit us. It wasn’t particularly bad. The winds were on our nose at 10-15 knots with gusts to 20, so we tacked along our route until the storm passed and the wind died again.

At about this time Mary went below and popped her head back out to tell me that water was coming in from somewhere and it was pooling around the battery boxes. She said she had checked the bilge and looked around and found no major influx of water. A conundrum, at least until she went back down to fill some of our water bottles and discovered that our fresh water wasn’t working and a 25 gallon tank that should have been full was empty. We’d found our water leak but we were left with only a couple of bottles of drinking water to last us for the rest of the trip.

So what to do? Mary took over the wheel and I went forward and started our generator (a Honda 2000) so that I could make water. I filled the two 5 gallon folding water jugs we carry on board and then we changed our course and headed to Charleston, SC to repair the water system.

That should have been the end to this leg of our journey except that as we motored across Charleston Harbor a torrential rain hit us with winds of 20 plus knots and rain so thick that we couldn’t see the water we were traveling on. As the storm hit we were turning into the channel where the anchorage we planned to use was located. It was blowing so hard that I was having a hard time keeping the boat on track and I could only catch fleeting glimpses of the shoreline and I’m sure that had I not had a chart plotter, we would have lost the boat.

A half hour later, just as we were coming up to the red bouy that marked the area where we planned to anchor, the storm eased up and we were able to pick out an area to drop the hook and settle in. An hour later, after 48 hours of traveling, the storm was over and we were both napping. We figured Monday would be soon enough to work on the water system.

A final note here for anyone who is considering adding AIS to their boat, do it. Mary and I are in agreement that it’s probably the best thing we’ve added to our boat this past year. (That’s saying something considering how much we love our water maker.) Why? Peace of mind. You know where the big boats are, where they’re going, how fast they’re going, and an alarm will even go off if you get too close and if it looks like you’re on a collision course.

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Killer Femmes

by Christine Kling

This week I’d like to share with all Write on the Water readers two tidbits from the ongoing marketing efforts of Christine Kling, author.

A few months ago I was honored to be asked to join four other authors in creating an ebook bundle. We called our bundle Killer Femmes: 5 Irresistible Crime Novels From Around the World and we are offering it at the amazing price of 99¢. Yes, that’s not one book, but FIVE complete novels for that price.  It is ONLY in e-book form, but as you know, anyone with a laptop or mobile phone can read an epub or mobi file using free downloadable apps. Although I linked to Amazon for the title above, the online bookshops carrying our book are Amazon, Barnes&Noble, iBooks and Kobo.

The other women writers in this bundle have all been traditionally published, and they are far more successful than I am, so I was really jazzed to be invited to be in such company. I mean these are award-winning authors with huge numbers of fans. Each book in the bundle is part of a series, and we hope that by marketing to our separate individual fan bases, we’ll sort of cross-pollinate and perhaps pick up some new fans each.

Now you know who the Killer Femmes are…what are the books like? Libby’s novel Easy Innocence is the first in the Georgia Davis PI series, featuring a smart young Chicago cop hunting for the murderer of a suburban high school girl.  Zoe Sharp’s hardboiled thriller Killer Instinct introduces Charlie Fox, a beautiful but lethal ex-soldier who rights wrongs in Lancaster, England using semi-legal methods. Julie Smiths’ Louisiana Hotshot sends hip young poet Talba Wallis deep into New Orleans’ rap scene to unmask a killer. Sujata Massey included The Flower Master, set in Japan. Rei Shimura is sent to flower arranging school in Tokyo and gets tangled up in the murder of a snippy teacher.

Marketing one’s own books is one of the most difficult parts of this self-publishing business. I’d much rather just write the books than have to go out there and publicize them. But back in the old days when I was going on book tours and having to sit at a card table in some Waldenbooks at a mall and direct customers to the restrooms, it was all much more difficult. There are lots of inventive ways to market on the web that don’t require so much shilling for oneself. I love the idea of authors getting together to help each others’ sales.

In this case, I can state unequivocally that this is a heck of a deal. Even if you only end up liking one of the books in the bundle, it’s a deal.

The second tidbit I want to share with you is that Libby, the great marketing mind behind our bundle, has put together a contest. From today through July 25, you can win a $100 or $50 e-Book Gift Card to the bookseller of your choice simply by entering on the Facebook Page for Killer Femmes. For those of you who love contests, the word is the odds of winning are excellent (translated that means we don’t have very many entrants yet), so why don’t you give it a shot.

And finally, for those who have been following the travels and travails of this blogger, we are finally settled in Chino, California for the next two months and I will be able to do the one thing that I think will sell more books than anything else I can do:  write the next book.

 

Fair winds!

Christine

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I did it…

C.E. Grundler

No, not finish the deck. Yet, at least.

Yeah, everything was moving along full steam.  I was writing each morning, at least double to triple my personal ‘you must write this much’ quota, squeezed into every possible moment I wasn’t either working feverishly on the boat or giving the house some much needed attention, all in the midst of blistering temperatures and obscene humidity. I was so pleased with the headway I was making. Like planning a heist, each step had to fall precisely into place for the next to follow — that ‘next’ being that final glassing. It was all about timing.  And according to the weather, the no-longer upcoming 4th of July weekend promised 3 glorious days of cool, low humidity days. Perfect.

I guess it was inevitable. My daughter had been away for a week, camping at a music festival. She returned happy, tired, with a bit of a sniffle and a sore throat. No biggie… unless, that is, you’re not in your twenties anymore and you’ve been burning the candle at both ends. Those little sniffles might as well have been the Black Plague. I spent the last week with a stuffy, foggy head, hacking cough, aching bones and muscles, and overwhelming exhaustion that’s left me sleeping, or at least trying to sleep, the majority of the day trying.  I’ve never had a summer cold level me to this extent, and I’m only starting to feel better today. Considering how I’m feeling at the moment, that’s not saying much.

I know once I post this a certain few people will be emailing or calling, asking why I didn’t go to the doctor, (I thought it was just a minor bug and would pass in 24 hours, and once that clearly wasn’t the case I was too cranky to be dragged anywhere,) and how I should know better.  I can hear the lectures already because I’ve heard them countless times over the years. I know they come from concern, mean well, and yes, I know I should take it easier. Pushing myself to get everything done resulted in a week of NOTHING getting done. No real writing to speak of, and no fiberglass work. I may or may not have caught up on some reading, if repeatedly falling asleep mid-page counts, and I’ve slept through a dozen heist movies — or the same movie, looped a dozen times.

I get it. Really. I do. The lectures won’t be required anymore. I’m not a kid anymore, and like it or not, I don’t bounce back like I used to.  No more burning at both ends. I want to see the next book finished and the boat done, but then I recall what happened to Jim Henson. And I’m bookmarking this post as a cautionary warning for the next time I catch myself in overdrive.

On that note, I’m going to sleep now. Again.

Oh, and I’m dragging my own @ss to the doctor later.

 

 

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Don’t Feed The Gulls

Back in the early 1970s, the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull found its way onto the New York Times best-seller list for the better part of a year with several million copies sold. The book was even made into a motion picture. Still, seagulls didn’t get much respect.

Then, a decade later, there was a second decided campaign to increase the standing of seagulls. This, of course, was the highly intellectual effort championed by the band Flock of Seagulls.

Unfortunately, even the very best of the early MTV generation failed in improving the lot of this coastal bird.

My personal connection to these feathered beings is mixed. On the one hand, my earliest memories on the water involved the lookout for gulls, which gave us direction to feeding bluefish and striped bass. On the other hand, there have been far too many times over the years when I’ve wandered to the water’s edge only to have one of those darn scavengers peck away at the pretzels, crackers, or sandwiches I’d left at the side of my beach chair.

This 4th of July weekend I sat at the beach watching these wonderful birds that have forever been in the backdrop of my days along the water.

I thought, too, of my dad telling me, “Don’t feed the gulls.”

Like many who hunt and fish, my father had great respect for nature and an understanding that feeding wild animals creates a dependence that alters their ability to survive in the wild.

But “Don’t feed the gulls” also involved self-interest.

As I watched the gulls along the beach yesterday, I remembered the end of a beautiful summer day some years ago. I was on the ferry running from Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard to Woods Hole on Cape Cod. The air was warm and the sun was low in the sky. Like many aboard the ferry I was on the upper deck enjoying the late sun. Nearby, a passenger began feeding a gull potato chips, drawing the bird so close to him that the gull literally took the chip from his hand.

Several passengers thought this feat was one worth emulating, so they, too, held out food. In the matter of a minute, the slow moving ferry was followed by a squadron of squawking gulls that hovered just above the crowded deck.

“Don’t feed the gulls,” had been my father’s instruction, his sensibility being that of a naturalist and conservationist, but also that of one who observed nature. “They get excited when they feed,” he told me. “And when they get excited their bellies open up.”

Fortunately, I had stood back that day on the Vineyard ferry. I can still picture those grey birds jockeying for position as they dive-bombed for potato chips. All in unison, it seemed, they got excited and strafed that deck with enough guano to fertilize a large farm. I have no doubt that everyone on that top deck learned that seaside lesson well – Don’t feed the gulls.

by John Urban

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Hanging out alone In St. Augustine.

By Mike Jastrzebski

We’re out at the end of the south mooring field here at the city marina. Except for on the 4th when a slew of boats took up mooring balls to watch the fireworks, we haven’t had many boats around us, and that’s the way we like it. In fact we were surprised when we arrived and found our assigned mooring ball at the far end of the field. There were at least 4 or 5 empty balls closer to the marina, but when they sent someone out to register us and he said we could take one of the closer moorings if we liked, we turned him down.

It’s not that we’re antisocial, we did manage to get together with our friends Kate and Allen, and another friend, Sadler. it’s just that we like our space. It’s why we prefer to anchor out or take a mooring ball rather than stay in a marina.

Our plan was to leave on Saturday the 5th and head up to the Carolina’s, but when it looked like Arthur was going to do some damage to N. Carolina we decided to stay here another week and see what happened. According to friends of ours who are in Wilmington, NC it was pretty much a non-event. No complaints on our part though. We’re in no hurry and St. Augustine is a nice place to visit.

As for the fireworks, they were spectacular. One of the reasons we decided to stay through the 4th is that for as long as we’ve owned the boat (19 years) Mary has wanted to sit back in the cockpit, have a cocktail, and watch fireworks. It was worth the wait because the fireworks were as good as any I’ve ever seen.

Friday the 11th, weather permitting, we plan to head out to the ocean and sail directly to Charleston, SC. We’ve heard that the intracoastal through Georgia gets a little shallow for our 6’4″ draft. Besides, we tested out the engine on our trip from Titusville, now it’s time to do what we love best, sail.

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By the numbers

Our little Mazda road warrior at a gas stop in beautiful British Columbia.

by Christine Kling

I want to get a blog posted today, but I am feeling overwhelmed by the numbers in my life lately. I pride myself on loving the nomadic existence, but I have been living out of luggage since I left my boat and flew to Fiji on December 17, 2013, and I am starting to feel it.

3 weeks at sea

2000 miles

1 broken rudder

4 islands visited

6 flights to get to Florida

60th birthday

 

1 week in St. Maartin

44-foot catamaran

8 people

3 islands

 

2 trips to Florida

1 car sold

1 boat sold

9 boxes mailed to Majuro

28 bags to Goodwill

 

2 months in Europe

8 countries

24-day Eurail Pass

12 museums

3,000+ digital photos

669 steps up the Eiffel Tower

3 Greek ferries

4 families visited

1 business meeting

 

But it is the past few weeks that have just about worn me out.

 

36 days

1 car/2 people/2 dogs

95% travel with dogs on lap

3,591 miles driven

1 day 800 miles

3 car ferries

8 books brought in research box

0 books read

1 round-trip flight to Denver

15 friend and family visits

10 pounds gained

12 nights in hotels

1 night sleeping in car

 

Now

1 book to write

and

1 exhausted author.

 

Fair winds!

Christine

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Power Hogs

By Mike Jastrzebski

When it comes to cruising I guess you could say that Mary and I are power hogs. Since we prefer to be on the hook or when necessary a mooring ball, this can be a problem. On the hook in the summer we have four fans running 24/7. We also have refrigeration, but what makes us power hogs are the extras. We have an inverter on board with three computers plus an iPad, an iPod, two Kindles, a 32 inch TV, a radio, a phone, a chart plotter, radar, a VHF radio with AIS, a Ham radio, and finally our watermaker. All of these electronics, both the toys and the necessities, require a lot of power, usually 150 plus amps a day.

So how do we handle it? One of the first things we bought when we were just beginning to cruise was a Honda 2000 generator. We didn’t have anywhere near the toys or boat electronics that we have now, but we found that when we were at anchor we needed to run the generator 3-4 hours a day to keep our four golf cart batteries topped off.

Last year we added three 140 Watt solar panels and two additional golf cart batteries. If we had sunny skies and ran the engine occasionally as we moved the boat this allowed us to go many days, even weeks without starting the generator.

Now that we’ve added the watermaker we have once again become more dependent on the generator. We have a CruiseRO 110 volt watermaker. It puts out 20 gallons per hour and runs on the generator. We only have two water tanks on Rough Draft. One is 20 gallons and the other is 25 gallons. We go through a tank of water every 2-3 days which means we have to run the generator and watermaker every 2-3 days to keep the tanks full. This is not a bad thing since the watermaker has to be run every 3-5 days to keep the membrane clean and healthy. This also means that we get a couple of hours a week of battery charging from the generator.

I’d love to hear from any cruisers out there who would like to share how many amp hours you use a day while at anchor.

For anyone interested my historical thriller, The Storm Killer, is on sale for only .99 this week.

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Klinging to the coattails of a futurist

 

View from the hotel in Denver

by Christine Kling

For many years when I was a teacher and then a college professor, I loved to go to technology conferences. I admit that I am more than a little geeky, and I used to love to go to the presentations by the “futurists” most of all. I remember how astonished I was when I first learned about Moore’s Law back in about 1999.  This law was postulated by Gordon E. Moore, the founder of Intel and it states that the number of microprocessor transmitters in computers doubles about every two years. It was nearly impossible to believe that we would have computers with one terabyte of memory or that operated at the sort of speeds we see today. And the idea that we would all be carrying powerful computers around in our pockets (smart phones that could also do global positioning) just sounded crazy – but exciting crazy. It made my head hurt in a wonderful way to think about the future back then, and it still does. So this was certainly part of the allure when I first met Wayne. He worked for the California software company Autodesk for more than 20 years, and his title was “strategic futurist.” His job was to travel all over the world and speak at conferences. Today, I got to see why.

So, yes, the whirlwind world travel tour continues and this time our travels have taken us to Denver, CO so Wayne could present the keynote address at the CAD-1 company’s 25th anniversary customer appreciation day. We flew in the day before, Wayne kicked off the event this morning, and we are on our flight back to Kelowna, BC tonight where our two dogs are enjoying life on a beautiful farm in the Okanagan Valley.

One of the many things I found so fascinating about watching Wayne both at the dinner last night and especially this morning, was the way I kept interpreting what he was talking about and applying the new ideas to my field of publishing. We writers often use the “building a house” metaphor to describe what we do when we write books so listening to his talk (to a room full of architects and contractors) about change increasing at an exponential rate really hit home for me.

Let’s think for a bit about the history of writing as we know it. For thousands of years, people painted on cave walls, carved hieroglyphics on stone, and wrote using sticks and clay tablets. Then, mankind advanced to papyrus and parchment made of animal skins and many more manuscripts could be created because they were easier to make. But duplicating writing really took off when wood pulp paper was created and all those religious guys were put to work in the Middle Ages copying manuscripts. Then along came Gutenberg in1450 with his moveable type printing press and by 1500 Europeans had printed more than 20 million volumes (according to Wikipedia). In the years since we’ve seen lithography, off-set printing, Xerography, laser printing, et al, and the numbers of books produced by all this technology has increased — yes, exponentially.

Today, we no longer need to print our books: we have digital books. We’ve gone from carving in stone to light dancing across a screen and this new technology is being adopted faster any previous method for distributing writing. The number of titles published worldwide (not individual volumes) is now in the millions according to this Worldometers website.

One of the stories that broke this week with headlines I saw on several sites insisted that the growth of ebooks had now flatlined. According to this story at Digital Book World, “The BookStats report, from the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, confirmed earlier reports from the AAP and anecdotal evidence. Ebook revenue in 2012 was about $3 billion as well, up from $2.1 billion in 2011.” So there had been huge growth from 2011 to 2012 and they are taking the stalled growth the following year to mean that this new technology has maxed out the audience. However, the article goes on to say, “Trade publishing revenues overall in the U.S. were also basically flat in 2013 at $14.6 billion, down slightly from nearly $15 billion in 2012.” In other words, the headline that I would have written was that ebooks held their own while sales of print books declined. There are sometimes lulls in the exponential growth (we are in such a lull right now in the growth of computer speeds) but it doesn’t mean that the curve is going to flatten out – only that it will average out soon.

The clear message I got from Wayne’s talk this morning was that businesses need to figure out what it is that they do. He calls this their “value proposition.” So ever since this morning, I’ve been turning that over in my head. What is it I do as a business? That should be an easy one. As an author, I’m in the business of selling books, right? Actually, I don’t think so.

After some thought, I’ve concluded that what writers really do is we communicate ideas. That’s what we’ve been doing whether we were painting on walls, poking sticks into clay or clicking away at the keyboard of a computer. It just so happens that as a novelist, I craft my ideas into story, but non-fiction writers are also in the business of selling ideas, and theirs might take on a different structure. Today, some writers are telling their stories through plays, films and video games, and I think we need to understand that the medium – papyrus, paper or electrons – is not the point. If we allow ourselves to get too bogged down in thinking we’re selling books, we’re likely to follow the trails of Kodak or Blockbuster Video. Perhaps, ten years from now, we will be adding Barnes & Noble and some of the less nimble big publishers to that list.

 Fair winds!

Christine

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