Mike Jastrzebski's Blog, page 51

Sometimes it’s hard – to write a blog that is

By Mike Jastrzebski

I started this blog in March of 2010, shortly before I published my first book, The Storm Killer. Prior to that I had never written a blog. Since that date I have written one to two posts a week and been the administrator of this site, and for the first time in nearly three years I had no idea what to write for a post this week.

In the past I’ve written about writing when I was working on a book, but as I stated in a recent blog I haven’t worked on a new book this entire year. It’s hard to write a blog about writing when you’re not writing.

The other major subject I’ve written about is boat work, since that’s been an overwhelming part of my life this past year. Now that the work’s nearly completed I don’t really have anything to write about on that subject, and I hope that will remain the case for some time to come.

Finally, I’ve written a little about our travels, but again, we’ve been sitting here for over five months and it will be a few more weeks before we start traveling again.

I hope to be able to turn things around by the first of the year. We’re heading back to the Bahamas and who knows where else, so there should be plenty of interesting places to write about.

I plan to spend a good deal of the time that we’re in the Bahamas writing my next Wes Darling book, so writing will be on my mind a lot and should give me fodder for some fresh blogs.

As I stated above, I hope there will be little maintenance to write about, at least for a few months, but if things go wrong I’ll be sure to let everyone know about it.

So I have a question for those of you out there who blog–where do your blog ideas come from?

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Maybe worth 600 words?

by Christine Kling

–which is the minimum length I try for in my blog posts here. I’m talking about a picture, of course. Or several. You see, tonight, I am in the Hotel Lorita in the town of Teguegarao in the Cagayan Province, Northern Luzon in the Philippines, and I’ve just returned from visiting and climbing through the Callao Caves. It is currently 5:47 p.m. on Friday evening which means it is 5:47 Friday morning in Eastern Standard Time, and I need a blog post ASAP. This being on the other side of the International Dateline is mighty confusing. When I called my son yesterday via FaceTime on my iPad, and I told him it was Thursday morning for me but only Wednesday night for him, he replied calmly, “So, you mean you’re calling me from the future?”

It is going to take a long novel to explain all the who and the what and the where of what I’ve been doing here in the Philippines while running from Typhoon Bopha, and that my friends won’t be done for many more months – and it should be over 120,000 words long. It will be called The Dragon’s Triangle.

You will have to tell me if these pictures are worth 600 words:

This is the ferry boat I took to cross the 24 miles or so from Battangas to Puerto Gallera on the the island of Mindoro. With outriggers on both sides, there is very little movement and nobody got seasick as we moved at 14-16 knots.

My first day in Puerto Gallera I took my first ride in one of the hundreds of motorcycle/tricycles they have here as taxis out to visit the lovely White Beach.

At White Beach, there were loads of Philippino tourists there for the weekend taking advantage of the many shops, restaurants and henna tattoo artists.

Downtown Puerto Gallera Town tricycle traffic.

I took the ferry back from Puerto Gallera to Battangas a day early and took a bus up to Manilla to put some distance between myself and the Super Typhoon Bopha that made landfall far south of me, but still brought us rain and wind.

In Manilla, I decided to take a tour of the city in a horse carriage and when the driver stopped to buy me a cold San Miguel beer, notice the brake he used on the wheel!

Jeepneys are the main local buses and an emerging Filipino art form. Some of them are so insanely cool with their decorations! They evolved from the many Jeeps left behind by Americans after WWII.

It seems every major city has a Chinatown.

and a Starbucks.

I left Manilla on a bus at 8:30 p.m. and arrived 10 hours later in this sleepy town called Tuguegerao. It rained all night as we traveled the mountain roads past washouts and construction and long stretches of gravel only.

Today I traveled another 25 K in a tricycle on less than stellar roads, past the Filippino cousins of water buffalo called Carabao, past rice paddies and corn fields and more horse and Carabao drawn carts to visit the caves.

This is the entrance to the many chambered cave with at least 5 skylights and spectacular stalagmites and stalactites. Photos don’t do it justice. It was worth the ride.

My guide was a young woman who snapped this photo of me and my driver standing beneath one of the skylights.

I have one more week left in the Philippines and tomorrow I’ll board a bus for Apari at the far north end of Luzon. Offshore is the island of Camaguin where I want to have a scene take place, but I’ve heard that it is possibly also the location of meth labs, so I think I’m going to pass on a visit out to the islands. But it does add an interesting detail I could use in my story!

Fair winds!

Christine

p.s. Damn! My captions put me at over 600 words after all!

 

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Due to construction…

This post is going to be exceptionally brief. Every room in my home short of two bedroooms is all but inaccessible, my laptop is giving me critical low battery warnings, I have no idea whatsoever where the power cord is. Normally it would be in a very specific spot, but that spot doesn’t exist at the moment. In fact, I’m not sure where much of anything is these days. It’s good to know it won’t be long before my house is once again whole, and I’ll be so happy when it’s all back to normal. But for now, I’m going to post this, before my computer goes into hibernation! Best to all!

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Music and Writing

I found a way to procrastinate this past week and decided, to lessen my Irish-Catholic guilt, I would write about it.

This is a question for writers reading this blog, published, struggling, or wannbe writers. Do you listen to music while writing?

I do. I discovered, a form of procrastination, that when I have to begin a chapter, looking at the blank screen, I write listening to classical music. I should point out, that I have Sirius satellite radio and it offers many musical choices.

Back to the subject.

For whatever reason, I am more relaxed while trying to create when listening to classical music. It might have to do with no vocals to clutter my mind. I don’t know anything about the music other than I like some classical music. Not sure why. My usual music tastes go back to the country music of the 70s forward to the early 90s. Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Jeff, Waylon, Johnny Cash, Jerry Reed. I put on classical music stations (there are two of them on Sirius) when writing and my mind seems to relax, allowing me to begin my story.

When I self-edit, I listen to the oldies station. I wonder why editing and oldies go hand-in-hand? Maybe I’m sub-conscientiously remembering that during my youth I dreamed of being a published writer and the songs playing kick that memory in.

Sometimes, when the chapter I am rewriting or editing has to do with bar life in Key West, I will listen to Margaritaville Radio and at other times I listen to the Boss’ station. Not too often, but once in a while, I will listen to the folk station, but I like the folk of the ‘60s best and if I really need fold music during my writing I have all Bob Dylan’s old stuff, his real folk music.

Country music, you ask? I listen in my car whenever I’m riding around or on a long trip. Thing is, I can think through chapter problems, or story problems, with the country CDs playing. No problem! Wonder why that is? Any shrinks out there with an answer for me?

If you’ve read my column in the past, you know I feel reading is as much a part of my writing as the time I spend at the computer. When I read, I need total silence! Maybe I was a librarian in another life. But not music, no TV, just quiet. Okay, if I’m my the stilt house reading, I let the birds chirp.

Some writers aren’t as lucky as me, I have my own writing room at home and always my space below the house. I know writers who rent studios in Key West and others that write with the kids running wild in the evening.

I still get up early to write, but since I’m behind deadline, I find myself writing longer and sometimes into the afternoon, with self-editing in the evening.

My Sirius Radio gets a lot of chances these days. Do you listen to music when writing? Need solitude? Need riots erupting next to you? What? Let me know.

www.michaelhaskins.net

 

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You want to put an elephant where?

By Mike Jastrzebski

It’s a rhetorical question of course, but my wife, Mary, frequently says that finding room for six months of provisions on a 36 foot sailboat is like trying to stuff an elephant into a breadbox. The problem is that she’s not kidding.

Right now we have boxes of food items piled on our settees, just barely leaving ourselves room to sit. It’s rather embarassing when someone stops by the boat to chat. We can’t really bring them down below because of the piles waiting to be shoved, pushed and prodded into an already packed locker.

It’s why we don’t keep a lot of clothing on board. We have one 3′x3′x3′ locker devoted to clothing, a few hooks in the head and a few more hooks behind our battery boxes and that’s it.

We don’t have room for many books and that precious space is reserved for boating related books and guides. Fortunately we each have a Kindle. I like to read, always have and always will, so I know we could never carry enough paper books for our planned trip.

Throw in the extra boat parts, charts and tools and I’m sure you get the picture. If you live on a boat now you know what I mean. If you’re thinking of moving aboard, you’ll find out soon enough.

I’m going to ask anyone out there reading this who has a good storage idea to share their thoughts, and I’m going to add two of my own discoveries. Bolster storage and film canister ice cubes. Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think of these ideas on my own. Somewhere along the way over the seventeen years we’ve owned Rough Draft I either read about these ideas or someone told me about them. But I’ve adopted them, and they help make our cruising a little more bearable.

We made the bolsters out of the same material as our settee cushions, added a zipper, and fill them with whatever soft and malleable items we can’t find a place for. Jackets, gloves, t-shirts, whatever.

As for the film canisters, they’re getting harder to find, but they are still out there. We have about fifty of them and we fill them with water and stick them into the freezer as room permits. If we use a pound of burger, five or six canisters take it’s place offering perfect ice cylinders. Just pop the cap, turn the canister upside down, and rub it between the palms of your hands until the ice slides out.

So now it’s your turn, give us some more ideas we can’t live without.

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Point of view

The skyline of Manilla

by Christine Kling

Yesterday morning I got up at 5:00 a.m. in Bangkok, caught a taxi for the airport at 6:00 and I was airborne by 9:00 winging my way to Manilla. For the first hour, I was tracking our progress with the GPS on my iPad and we were flying over Cambodia and Vietnam. I saw brown rivers, lots of reddish dirt patches and many green forests and fields. There were small towns and few roads. Then we passed over the coast and I took a picture of the beaches of Vietnam. It made me think about the pilots who flew that airspace during the Vietnam war and how different it was for them compared to me sipping orange juice in my window seat listening to music and watching the GPS on my iPad.

Coastline of southern Vietnam

There is lots to consider when writers think about point of view. Usually we just discuss character – but there’s so much else to consider, not the least of which is time. The period or epoch in which we live so distinctly colors what we see and how we behave.

This is something that has been driven home for me in my first 24 hours here in the Philippines, a place that has been under Spanish rule (governed from Mexico), American, Japanese occupation, back to the Americans and now is an independent country. What a melange it has created. And the city of Manilla is a huge, crazy metropolis that puts fear into the heart of even an intrepid traveler like me – yet looks beautiful and serene when you get out on the docks at first light.

So, today I again got up before dawn and headed for docks, and I took a fast boat out to the island of Corregidor which is located about 26 miles from the city out in the mouth into Manilla Bay. The island had been in American hands since the end of the Spanish-American war, and we had turned it into a fortress, so it is where the General MacArthur and the Philippine President Quezon took cover after Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked Manilla. Today, the island is part of a historical preservation foundation and the ruins of the former barracks and tunnels are remarkably well-preserved.

Inside the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor

I’ve been thinking about this because I am writing a sequel to Circle of Bones and like that book, this new one has two stories – one which is more or less set during the present and the other is historical. I’ll be writing about one set of characters seeing the place as it looks today, and another who will see it as it was during the war. As I walked around taking photos today, I tried to see the place as both sets of characters would – how it looks today and what it must have looked like in 1945.

Research isn’t just about traveling to get a your setting accurate. For writers, every bit of everyday life is research, and it doesn’t matter if you are backpacking through Southeast Asia, cleaning up after a monster hurricane and working on your boat, every bit of what we do will change our characters’ points of view because they are a part of us.

Fair winds!

Christine

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What he said…

C.E. Grundler

Mike, I mean, the other day, when he wrote about writing, or the lack thereof, and how life has a way of conflicting with the actual creative process. For me, it’s somewhat of a Catch-22. When I had limitless time to write, the ideas stopped in their tracks. The muses refused to come out and play. I’d outlined a plot revolving a heist that would go down in the midst of a hurricane with a bull’s eye on New Jersey, and a storm surge to match. There was only one problem. Inspiration was in short supply.

Now I’m bombarded by inspiration at every turn. More inspiration than I could have ever imagined. Writing the fictional effects of an unprecedented storm is one thing. Living in the midst of it, however, leaves precious little time to actually park myself at the computer and put my ideas to words. From long before dawn to well into the night, my days are stretched between repairs on the house and exhausting hours down on the water, where so many homes and boats still lay in wreckage. Sleep offers little refuge. Not a night has passed without falling trees and rising waters tormenting my dreams. Somehow, the words I’d been writing before this all began seem trivial compared to the real thing.

The days will come when Mike can relax on those lovely tropical beaches. And I know, for me, eventually things will settle back to some level of normal, perhaps a different normal than it was before. I know from this all I will, in time, return to my happily fictional world, where I determine what my fictional hurricane will destroy and what it will spare.

Oh, do I look forward to those days!

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Can I still do it? Write that is.

Anybody who reads this blog knows that I’ve spent the past year working on getting Rough Draft ready to go cruising. Things are wrapping up on the boat work front, but we’re still going to be a couple of weeks behind schedule getting out of Cape Canaveral. We had hoped to leave the first week of December, stop in Melbourne for the SSCA Gam and continue on to Ft. Lauderdale. Looks like we won’t even be putting the car up for sale until around the fifth so the Gam is off the schedule.

So what does all of this have to do with writing? Well, as I begin to seriously contemplate heading south again, I’m also thinking about my next book. I think most writers suffer doubts about their work from time to time, but this is a little different. This year was a boat work year, and last year I spent the year rewriting Dog River Blues and Mind Demons.

That means it’s been two years since I worked on a new book, and even though I have a basic idea for the new Wes Darling book, I haven’t sat down and even written an outline for the book. In fact, the only writing I’ve done this past year is this blog and some weeks I have to have Mary tie me to the chair just to do that.

Since we’re heading back to the Bahamas I’ve been envisioning anchoring off a deserted island, writing in the mornings and diving for lobster in the afternoons. But you see, that’s part of the problem. I know how distracting fishing and exploring can be and I’m afraid that the siren call of those islands will drag me away from the computer.

I’m going to fight the call of the sirens as sailors have for centuries, and if I can resist temptation, then hopefully I’ll have a new Wes Darling book out sometime next year.

So wish me luck because I’m going to need all the luck I can get to keep my butt planted in my chair and my fingers glued to the keyboard.

 

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Thailand – a land of contrasts

The anchorage at Ao Chalong, Phuket

by Christine Kling

The whole reason I’ve come to Thailand is so that I can write a story that takes place here in the yachting community of Phuket and make it realistic, written with the wealth of details that makes readers believe the writer knows her subject intimately. But one of the problems I’m having with this place is that it’s really difficult to pin it down.

For example, so far I’ve experienced Thailand as both hot and cold. Yeah, my position here is 07°50.17N 098°20.15E so I’m less than 8 degrees off the equator and when walking around outside it is hot, hot, hot. All the deep green vegetation stays that color thanks to the daily drenching downpours. Yet on the 400+ mile long train and bus trip down here to Phuket, I nearly froze. I boarded the air conditioned train at Hua Lamphong station at 8:30 in the morning and it arrived in Surat Thani station at 5:30. I spent the entire trip huddled under my rain jacket and my towel, shivering. Then, after a sweaty 16K tuk-tuk trip across town to the bus station, I boarded an AC bus and froze for the next four hours en route to Phuket.

What I found most surprising as the bus crossed onto the island was how ugly it all looked at 10:30 at night. There were garish billboards, tacky touristy shops, ugly buildings, bright neon lights and throngs of traffic clogging the roads. This was paradise?

But when I got to Shanti Lodge, the guest house where I had booked my stay, I found a lovely, calm oasis in this frenetic city. In the morning, I awoke to birdsong and a view of the Big Buddha on top of the hill. And outside my room, the Thai ladies were scrubbing floors and cleaning the showers and keeping this place immaculate. As is Thai custom, we all take our shoes off before entering, but the floors are always so well scrubbed, I feel guilty about trekking across them with my grubby, sweaty feet.

After spending my first morning catching up on email, in the afternoon, I called my friend Keith McKay who sailed his 35-foot boat here from Fort Lauderdale just over seven years ago. Keith now lives in a house and I’m incredibly grateful to him. He has driven me around showing me the sights for the past four days. I never would have come to know all the gorgeous little corners of this island as well without Keith’s generosity.

So, as we drove around, one of the first things that struck me was how much trash there was everywhere! I have come to see that Thai people keep their homes immaculate inside, but they don’t seem to have the same attitude towards the outsides of their homes, the beaches or the streets. If you were to call this country both dirty and clean, you’d be right.

Patong Beach street

And while my first impression was of the ugly streets, traffic, billboards, tangled power lines, Keith has shown me quiet sandy coves and jungle retreats that could not be more different from the clogged streets of Patong Beach.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and Keith took me along to a party he had been invited to that was in the home of an American couple who live in a small house high up on the mountainside above Patong Beach. Patong is the most touristy place here in Phuket, and it reminded me of a cross between Tiajuana, Las Vegas and Times Square. And we were there just at sunset so we were seeing the rated G version! There, the beautiful buddhist people of the land of smiles turned into hucksters, carnival hawkers and sex workers.

After climbing and climbing up the hill in Keith’s little Mazda, we found his friend’s home. It was an eclectic group at the party – Aussies, Brits, Yanks, Germans, and a trio of soi dogs. But the real star of the party was the spectacular view looking out across the lights of the city and out across the bay to where the brightly lit squid boats were lined up almost like the lights of a bridge. That same lurid city scene when viewed from that altitude was gorgeous.

This morning Keith and I were taking off in his car on a long trip around to Krabi, but his car broke down and we had to abort. He called a friend of his, a Brit yachtie to drive me back here to Shanti Lodge. As we were chatting in the car, he asked me what I thought about Phuket. I told him that I was initially surprised at how ugly the place was from the bus windows. He laughed and said, “Yeah, this is a place that is far better when viewed from the water.”

Keith looking out over the anchorage

And that is how my characters will arrive.  On this day after Thanksgiving, I could not feel more grateful to Keith for all the time he has spent helping me out and for this opportunity to travel here and discover these many faces of Thailand for myself.

Fair winds!

Christine

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Be careful what you wish for…

C.E. Grundler

This year, it would be easy to say I have much to be thankful for. Anyone who has followed my posts over the last few weeks should know that. And while I know it’s not scientifically possible for one lone author’s bout with writer’s block to affect global weather patterns, it’s hard to shake that weird feeling that somehow, in some twisted way, this whole mess is my fault. All because I’d been grumbling that everything had become too sedate, and I needed some inspiration, in a big way. Sitting at home, with all the time I could want to write, just wasn’t working for me. I wanted change, and change I got. And it’s strange, because for all the bad, much good has come out of this.

Back in the days when I began writing my first book, I’d been working in a boatyard. I’d work all day, then go home and write into the late hours of the night. A working boatyard is an endless source of material, and I never lacked for inspiration. Being a customer in the yard is one thing – but working there is an entirely different experience. And it was one I’d come to realize I truly missed.

Then change Sandy hit, dropping a tree in the middle of my house and devastating the waterfront. My insurance company has been fantastic – as I type this there is once again a complete roof over my head, and repairs inside start next week. The boatyards have all sorted out the tangles of piled up boats, and insurance companies are stepping up to set the salvageable ones back to right. And apparently my years of working on boats and my current project earned me some respect among the staff at my yard. These days I’m down there inspecting and assessing damaged boats for fiberglass repair. It’s not the change I had in mind a month ago – but it has put me right where I wanted to be at a time when I needed it most.  It’s good to see the rebuilding, both at home and on the water, and while Sandy might not have been what I’d expected, this year I’ve truly come to appreciate this holiday.

Have a wonderful Thankgiving, everyone!

 

 

 

 

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