Mike Jastrzebski's Blog, page 48

Freezin’ for a reezin’

C.E. Grundler

There has to a good reason a large crowd of people will be gathering along the shore of the Hudson on a bitter day in February to watch various brave souls strip to their bathing suits and jump into the river. And there is. It’s time for the annual Stony Point Seals Polar Plunge, which takes place on a quiet stretch of road in Stony Point, NY. Each year a huge crowd gathers for the event, which normally benefits a local family or child in need.

In last year’s Plunge, you can see a whole lot of crazy people having a whole lot of fun for a good cause.

Every year, the families that live along this quiet road welcome this invasion of happy insanity. But this year, the neighborhood of Grassy Point looks more like a ghost town, with vacant and boarded up homes. Sadly, the homes lining that road, along with so many others in the area, had been devasted by Sandy. So for 2013, the Stony Point Seals are holding the Plunge to benefit these very people, along with many other North Rockland Hurricane Sandy Victims. And this year, my husband will be among those hardy souls making that fridgid leap.

Below, some of these homes, shortly after Sandy. If you’re in the area on February 3rd, come on down and lend your support. And even if you can’t stop by, you can still donate online and help our local families recover.

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The Literary Swamp

By John Urban

Alligator alley. Eighty-plus miles of highway between Naples and Broward County. I am heading east with the sun setting behind me. In the distance, the sign on the horizon reads, Your Wife Is Hot. I take a hand off the wheel and wipe my eyes. I blink and stare out again.

Five more minutes and the sign is getting larger, the message more pronounced. Now, a half mile from this billboard, I see the entire message: Your Wife Is Hot – Better Get Your A/C Fixed. Only in Florida.

A great deal has been said on this blog about the merits of settling down in Florida if you aspire to be a mystery writer. Granted, the sub-tropic climate keeps writers in the Sunshine State. But it’s more than the weather that influences them. The place is a mecca for story ideas and character development.

Arrive in any one of Florida’s airports, pick up a rental car, and hit the road. Within moments, it starts:

Mile marker 1: 24 Hour Café : We Bare All

Mile marker 2: Vaser not Liposuction

Mile marker 3: Killed or Injured – Over $150M recovered

You keep driving. Up and down the highway: 1-800 Divorce … Lose Weight Through Colon Cleansing … No Needle, No Scalpel Vasectomy….

Then you turn off the highway, onto the side roads where you’re greeted by restaurant signs. No hyperbole here. Get ready. Fu King Chinese. Caribbean takeout at Jerk King. Or perhaps you would like to stop at Thai Tanic, or maybe Pita Pan.

As a writer, how can you not be affected by this cultural backdrop?

If Dave Barry, Carl Hiaasen or Tim Dorsey were up here in Massachusetts, they might be modern-day Hawthornes writing about 21st Century Hester Prynnes. Fortunately, they’re wandering in the land between the Atlantic and the Gulf, turning out words like these:

The key to life is hobbies, otherwise you’re asking for trouble. You know what they always say—if Hitler only had a train set… (Tim Dorsey)

We operate under a jury system in this country, and as much as we complain about it, we have to admit that we know of no better system, except possibly flipping a coin. (Dave Barry)

Hey. Sometimes life is a shit flavored Popsicle. (Carl Hiaasen)

Yes, there are many reasons for writers to head to Florida. Even in addition to the surgical, legal, and culinary bonus points.

Want more? You’re in luck because Dave Barry’s just released Insane City is set in that big literary swamp of a state we call Florida. I’m uploading my copy today.

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Robert Crais

I drove to Murder on the Beach Bookstore in Delray Beach on Saturday for Robert Crais’ book signing. He has always filled the store. I first met Bob back in LA, when we were both members of MWA SoCal chapter. He went on to great things and I went to Key West.

A few years ago, Bob was one of the two guests for SleuthFest, the Florida chapter of MWA and its main event. I emailed him and said he probably didn’t remember me, but I’d see him in Deerfield Beach at SleuthFest.

He wrote back saying he remembered me and added a few comments asking how I was, etc. I thought that was nice of him but figured he had no clue who I really was.

I always went to MWA author book signings in LA and, of course, I went to Bob’s first for The Monkey’s Raincoat, a paperback original and first book of his Elvis Cole series. I moved to Key West and my books came with me. The Hurricane Georges came through Key West and took my books, my floating home. Well, took everything that wasn’t in my car.

During the years, I’ve lived on sailboat, another, smaller houseboat and now in the house. Slower during this time I’ve replaced my library and most of Bob’s books. I brought them to SleuthFest and he laughed and called me by name. Maybe he did remember me. I was last in line, so we got to speak a little before James Born and a few others took him away.

Every time he signs in Deerfield, I email him and show up. We promise to get together sometime in LA when I visit. His book signing tour had him in Houston Friday, Deerfiled Saturday and Vero Beach on Sunday.

His new book, Suspect, is not an Elvis Cole book but listening to him talk about in Saturday night he had the audience laughing when he said the dog  in the book – a German Shepard – said little and scared everyone. Kind of like Joe Pike! This is his 19th book, so I had no need to ask what he’d been up to since I left LA.

I think what impresses me more than his writing, is that he is friendly and takes a minute to say hi to someone that knew him way back when! If anyone deserves a swelled head for his successes, it’s Bob Crais.

Oh yeah, my wife Celine came with me but left with this other guy!

www.michaelhaskins.net

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Quick update

By Mike Jastrzebski

The Internet is down where we’re docked right now so this will be a short post from my iPad. Today is engine test day. The parts for the heat exchanger came in Friday, I’ve changed the impellers even though they were fine as I suspected, and today we run the engine to see if the over heating problem has been solved.

If all goes well then next week we’re going to leave the slip and take Rough Draft to a nearby anchorage. We plan to take several day trips to make sure the problem is fixed before heading across to the Abacos.

Since Christine Kling is planning to head over to the Abacos around the 21st of February we’re going to stick around Ft Lauderdale for a couple of weeks and buddy boat with her across the Gulf Stream.

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Yes, Virginia, there is a real GPS

 

by Christine Kling

Dear Editor–

I am 58 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no real GPS in Apple’s i-devices. Papa says, “If you see it in Write on the Water, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a real GPS in an iPad?

- Virginia

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus real GPS in an iPad. 

with apologies to Francis Pharcellus Church, editor at The Sun, 1897

Okay, really. I am getting tired of this question. These men, and it is always men, come up to me and ask the same question. “Is there really a GPS in my iPhone or iPad?” And when I answer them, when I tell them that I have used my iPad and iPhone on trips from Hampton, Virginia to Bermuda and south to the British Virgins, they look at me with that look like, “Little girl, what are you talking about?” And then they tell me that they have asked so many other guys and done their research online and all of them have said that these iPhones and iPads won’t work once they get outside cellular range.

Then I explain to them that this is true if you purchase a wifi-only iPad. Only the models that have 3G or 4G cellular capability have a real GPS chip in them. You do not even have to use the cellular capability of the iPad. You don’t have to activate your device with a cellular carrier for the GPS to work.

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that Apple used to call this “assisted GPS” because around the streets of a city the devices used cellular towers to get a faster fix. They will still get a fix if the cellular service is turned off, but it might take a few more seconds. However, assuming you already have your charts downloaded onto your iPad, it will work like a chart plotter all the way across the ocean.

And then there are those guys who insist that – since the iPad 2 – all the versions of the iPad have GPS. No, the wifi-only versions still do not have GPS. Check out the specs in the graphic above. I’m not sure why the specs show the iPad 2 cellular versions not having GPS because I know people who own an iPad 2 who have a GPS in their units.  This makes it clear why there is so much confusion because sometimes it does appear that even Apple doesn’t get it right.

It was when I decided to look up and post the specs here once and for all that I learned something very interesting. The cellular versions of the current models of iPad (both the full size and the mini) say GPS and GLONASS. I’d never seen that second term before, so I Googled it and this is what Wikipedia says:

“GLONASS the acronym for Globalnaya Navigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema or Global Navigation Satellite System, is a radio-based satellite navigation system operated for the Russian government by the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces. It both complements and provides an alternative to the United States’ Global Positioning System (GPS) and is the only alternative navigational system in operation with global coverage and of comparable precision.”

So guess what, guys? When the conspiracy theorists turn out to be right and the US government turns off the GPS signals for civilians, all of your fancy chart plotters will be kaput while my Rusky-powered GLONASS iPad will still be giving me my position out there as I sail off into the sunset gazing heavenward at the passing satellites and toasting Steve Jobs

Fair winds!

Christine

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I wish I had the inspiration…

C.E. Grundler

…to post something amazing today, that is. But that isn’t the case. Sadly, an amazing, or even meh post, isn’t on my brain’s agenda. No, these days my brain still seems more focused on managing the day-to-day operations of simply getting by in an existence that has long since bypassed all normal routines. Lately, I’ve begun to forget what normal feels like.

Eventually my home will be back to what it was before the sh*t tree hit the fan. Eventually I’ll be able to walk into a room, and things will be where they are supposed to be. I’ll be able to find paperwork, or a tool, or whatever else I’m looking for. Eventually I’ll be able to drive my regular routes, and not pass rows of collapsing and boarded-up homes. Eventually I’ll pull into the boatyard and not see row upon row of destroyed boats. Eventually, the scenery of my existence will stop resembling the pictures on the news and in Seaworthy.

For now, the only thing to do is keep moving forward. It’s ironic, but at a time when I barely have a minute to spare, opportunities keep finding me, ones I can’t pass by. And despite everything else, or perhaps because of it, I’m jumping at them, even as my time is stretched yet thinner. The work on the boat continues to progress, and come hell or high water, (and I’ve had plenty of both lately,) she will launch this spring. That alone is helping to keep me grounded. I’m immersed in a new writing project, even as I tackle my third in the Last Exit series. Eventually, I’d like to hope, easier days will come. I’ll have more time to write… and maybe even some inspiration to spare.

 

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Old friends, sunshine, boatwork, and book promotion

By Mike Jastrzebski

We spent the first week back in Ft. Lauderdale catching up with friends, basking in the sun, and working on the engine of our boat. Since we lived here for six years there were a lot of friends to see. We were lucky that the week we arrived coincided with the monthly Mystery Writers of America luncheon so we were able to get together with a lot of friends we would not have been able to see otherwise.

As for enjoying the sunshine, it’s not like we didn’t have lots of great weather up in Cape Canaveral the past six months, but you can’t beat Ft. Lauderdale weather in the winter and you can’t beat walking to the beach for coffee every day.

Still, it hasn’t been all fun in the sun and socializing this past week. I pulled the thermostat from the boat engine, gave it a good cleaning and tested it. It’s working fine, so yesterday I reinstalled it and pulled the heat exchanger. For those of you who are not boaters, a heat exchanger is like the radiator in your car. It cools the boat engine with fresh water so that you aren’t running salt water through your engine. I pulled it apart and found some blockage and I suspect that this might be the source of my engine overheating. I’ll finish cleaning it out today and if the gaskets I ordered for it arrive as promised I’ll put it back together and hook it back up Wednesday.

After that I’ll replace the rubber impellers in both of my water pumps. It’s recommended that the fresh water impeller be changed every three years, and the salt water impeller be changed every two years. Since I changed both impellers a year ago they should be all right, but I need to pull the impellers and check them on the chance that one of them is the source of my overheating. I figure that while I’ve got them out I might as well replace them. Then I should be good for a couple more years. Hopefully all of this work should solve my overheating problem.

Finally, there’s the book promotion. This Friday, Saturday, and Sunday the Kindle edition of my historical thriller, The Storm Killer, will be free. Christine Kling has posted on the work involved in getting a free book listed on other blogs and free book sites so that readers will know your book is free. Let’s just say it takes hours and hours of work.

If you haven’t read The Storm Killer, I hope you’ll download it for free and give it a try.

 

 

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Magic? or artificial respiration?

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in the 2011 film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

by Christine Kling

These days you’ll find my boat TALESPINNER docked in a small marina and me down below spending less time enjoying life on the water and more time doing the “butt in chair” work of getting a novel written. Why is it that no matter how many books you’ve written, they never seem to get any easier?

There’s this cliché of a question that always pops up around writers: “Where do you get your ideas?” The funny thing about it is that is makes it sound as though there are only one or two ideas in a book. In fact, books are made up of hundreds of thousands of ideas and decisions that authors must make. In the past few months, I’ve been working at putting together the cast of characters for my new novel and while characters are made up of ideas – for example, one must imagine what they look like, where they live, what their families are like, how old they are, etc. – yet to really breathe that magical life into them, characters must be something more than just a bunch of ideas thrown together.

When deep in the throes of writing a book, everything around you becomes research in one way or another. Nearly every detail of every day is seen through this prism of the story you are imagining 24/7 in the back of your mind. You pluck the ideas and details from the world around you. I went to the movies the other night, and I stole a character’s name from the credits on the screen. I saw a dog at the dog park and decided that was the breed one of my characters should own. These details might stick or they might get jettisoned along the way as each character becomes a person.

This afternoon, I received an email from a reader in Seebring, Florida. She wrote,  “I must tell you, I almost yelled at Seychelle when I knew she would get into trouble.  The woman surely had a hard head.  She should have been a police detective instead of a tug boat captain. Keep writing, I love Seychelle.” What I love about this email is the implied knowledge that Seychelle does things that are reckless, but this reader still loves her. The reader understands and believes that Sey would behave that way. (Believe me, one reason I love that note so much is that not all my readers see it that way!

To me, some of the most amazing characters are those who should not be believable when you try to explain them in your own words. Take for example, Lisbeth Salander from Steig Larssen’s novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Try it. See, she’s this Goth girl who looks like she’s about 14, but is really in her 20’s, is brilliant and has a photographic memory, is a world-class hacker, and she can fight and win against men twice her size. What? you say. Who’s gonna believe that?  Yet I and several million others adore this character. There is a mountain of crazy contradictions packed into that tiny person but she leaps to life on the page and grabs the reader’s emotions. You CARE about what is going to happen to Lisbeth. I am in awe of the incredible talent it took to make that woman who should not be believable – spring to life as a real person.

A couple of days ago, I was in the car driving and I was listening to Terry Gross interview Dustin Hoffman on NPR. Hoffman said something that has been resonating with me for the past few days. He was talking about his early days in acting, before he became famous, and explaining why he didn’t do well at auditions. He had studied acting extensively, so he explained that for him, “… there was a craft and an art to acting, and one of the conditions or the precepts were that when you first start, you don’t do anything. You let – see what happens. And the character takes time to build, just like in painting or in writing. And so at an audition, they want the performance.”

It was that phrase, the character takes time to build, that has been echoing in my mind ever since.

What struck me was that the audition he was talking about is very similar to a first draft of a scene. This is what makes the first third of a book so difficult for me. Every new character who first walks onto the page is auditioning for his part. He or she hasn’t been properly built yet, and what makes you, as the writer, crazy is that as he gets more fully built in future scenes, you might discover he’s acting all wrong in what you wrote three chapters ago.

As writers we want to create amazing, surprising characters like Lisbeth or Hannibal Lechter. We want to write stories where characters discover things that twist the story and surprise the reader in a way that plays fair with the reader and makes perfect sense at the end of the book. I love this statement by the thriller writer, Patricia Highsmith. “It is a cheap trick merely to surprise and shock the reader, especially at the expense of logic. And a lack of invention on the writers’ part cannot be covered up by sensational action and clever prose. It is also a kind of laziness to write the obvious, which does not entertain, really. The idea is an unexpected turn of events, reasonably consistent with the characters of the protagonists. Stretch the reader’s credulity, his sense of logic, to the utmost — it is quite elastic — but don’t break it. In this way, you will write something new, surprising and entertaining both to yourself and the reader.” A character like Salander puts the elasticity to the test  – and she survives – Lisbeth always survives.

Hemingway once said, “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”

I don’t think readers understand how difficult that is to come up with characters (people) who will shock and surprise the reader – yet be absolutely believable in so doing. It’s not always something we writers can just do on cue – or on deadline. If you just throw together a bunch of random quirks and hope that will make your characters interesting, no amount of artificial respiration will bring them to life. There is some indefinable moment when the imagined molecules align just right and the magic occurs.

The question most writers would want answered, is how do you summon up that magic?

 

Fair winds!

Christine

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I know they’re watching me…

C.E. Grundler

And I’m not saying that in the paranoid manner of Otto Hammon, one of my favorite conspiracy bent lead characters. I’m saying it as a fact. After all, I spend my free time figuring out how to kill people in creative ways. Researching how to build a car bomb, different brews for home-made explosives, thermite, and assorted other mayhem. I’ve discussed those topics over the phone, with friends and family, who fortunately understand I’m only seeking to exterminate fictional humans. But every time some news story of true life horror breaks, and authorities investigate the perpetrator, among the details that emerge is a grocery list of red flag terms they’d been searching online, as well as shelves of books and other research materials on the very subjects that fill my computer and library. And last year, the Electronic Privacy Information Center posted online the 2011 Department of Homeland Security manual that includes hundreds of key words and search terms used to detect possible terrorism, unfolding natural disasters and public health threats. Scroll down to the inset, and check out page 20-23. Some words make perfect sense, and some seem just plain funny. But in any case, I use quite a few of those words, quite often.

I suppose, out of context, my conversations and online activities could appear alarming, but I’d also hope any reasonable agency would look at the books I’ve written, and the ones I’m currently writing, and conclude that I’m merely a crazy (but ultimately harmless) mystery writer. All the same, I’ve no doubt my search engine history has long ago flagged me as a ‘person of interest’ and landed me on a list or two. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if every word I post gets at least glancing scrutiny from some government agency somewhere out there. And that includes this very post. And recently, a chain of connections led me to an individual with a fascinating background in areas beyond anything I’ve ever dealt with before, areas that unquestionably have been and continue to be the subject of intent scrutiny by specific agencies. This person confirmed without question that our phone conversations and our emails are under observation, which didn’t shock or surprise me. If there was any chance I wasn’t on the radar before, I certainly am now.

So, to whoever it is that might be reviewing my online and social media activities, good morning, and have a nice day!

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Floridays

by John M. Urban

A few years back I took the opportunity to swim with dolphins at the Miami Seaquarium. I wouldn’t use anything less than superlatives to describe the experience. Yet, I also had reservations about keeping those big mammals in captivity. Last week I had the chance to interact with those magnificent creatures once again, this time in the wild.

If you ever find yourself on the southwest coast of Florida, spend a few hours on the water with the folks at BocaBoat. For more than fifteen years, Craig and Kathleen Wolcott ran their 31 foot Eastern Katara out of Boca Grande, Florida, taking guests on sunset cruises and luncheon trips to Cabbage Key and Useppa Island. Sadly, Craig passed away just over a year ago. Fortunately, Kathleen is keeping the BocaBoat business running, continuing the joyous experience for their customers.

Many readers of this blog have likely spotted dolphins at sea and know the joy of seeing these animals play in a boat’s bow wave or wake. The sight amazes me each and every time. It seems, though, that the Wolcott’s single engine inboard displaces just the right amount of wake to create an unusually spectacular show. It’s an unmatched Floriday experience.

Being that we were on vacation down there, I also did some reading. Thanks to the power of the Kindle I dove into two Florida books. The first, a history of smuggling in Florida – starting with Ponce de Leon, working right through the Civil War, Prohibition, pot and cocaine smuggling, on up to human trafficking. The second book, which I am still taking in is titled The Red Hot Typewriter – the life of John D. MacDonald. If you are a fan of old John MacD, you’ll enjoy The Red Hot Typewriter.

I taught college for a few years just outside Utica, New York. It was back around 1986. I remember picking up a local paper, the headline: “Utica native John D. MacDonald dies.” That John MacDonald? My John MacDonald? That was when I first learned that MacDonald was raised in upstate New York.

In reading The Red Hot Typewriter, I am learning a lot more. The biography is confirming my suspicion that MacDonald had very nice life doing what he enjoyed. I am also learning that John MacD faced many challenges before hitting stride with the Travis McGee books and he worked conscientiously pumping out pages, spending more time at his desk than on the water. I am also getting a better sense of just how intentional the author was in using Travis as his mouthpiece for commentary on the environment and mindless land development. The fact that MacDonald got his messages out without boring or alienating the reader is a testament to his great skill.

The Travis McGee books were recently made available on Kindle. There is also talk of an Oliver Stone/Leonardo Decaprio movie in the making. But if you want to take in observations of John MacDonald, the life of Travis McGee, and experience the beauty of old Florida, look-up BocaBoat and spend a few hours on the water. If you aren’t already a conservationist, you soon will be.

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